Logical fallacies are viewpoints brought up during arguments which appear logical on the surface, but when you dig a little deeper are in fact mostly unfounded. One common fallacy is the appeal to authority, where you assume that just because someone is an "authority," that they have to be right. For example, "Pope Urban VIII said that Galileo's views were wrong, so since I trust the Pope I'm going to agree with the Pope and say that the universe is actually geocentric." Sometimes the flaw is that the "authority" isn't actually authoritative in the topic in question - the Pope isn't an astronomer, the President of the US isn't a meteorologist, etc. But even if the "authority" is actually an authority, that doesn't make him/her automatically correct. Even authorities make mistakes - look at Tycho Brahe for example. This is also the entire point of peer reviewed journals, to give the authorities the chance to duke it out.
So that said, when the NY Times Magazine devotes a 28-screen-long article to singing Freeman Dyson's laurels as a motivation for us to listen to his arguments about CO_2 levels, I find myself quite disappointed. Dyson is an authority on quantum physics and sci-fi concepts (such as the Dyson sphere, which led to Larry Niven's Ringworld concept/series); he is NOT an authority on environmental science. I don't care how many people think he's a genius, he isn't a genius in this field. And even if he were, even authorities can make mistakes. It is NOT appropriate for the NY Times to promote an individual's ideas based solely upon that individual's reputation. If the article were billing itself as a biography of Dyson's life, it could be an excellent one, but the article is trying to give us a view of Dyson's ideas and as such it is a remarkably poor one.
I guess in the end by expecting the NY Times to live up to its reputation, I too am guilty of putting too much faith in authority.
6 comments:
Oh, appeals to authority aren't as bad as all that. If a genuine authority on the subject says P, that gives me some evidence in favor of P. That evidence can be overriden in all kinds of ways, of course, but an authority is an authority for a reason, and sometimes turning to authorities isn't only reasonable but practically necessary. If I need decent information about some issue, but don't have the time or resources to go for anything conclusive, authority can be a huge help. That's a huge part of why most people can reasonably believe that the cars they drive are probably safe, or that the Wall Street bailout is probably necessary to save the American economy, or that the things their friends say are good for them probably are.
That's why I agree with you that Dyson's lack of a background in environmental science counts against the relevance of his views to the global warming debate, but disagree with everything else you say in the second paragraph. If he were as distinguished an authority on environmental science as he is in physics, it would be deeply relevant if he were strongly at odds with the dominant view in his field on an issue of great public importance. Even though he's not, just being a genius about something else gives him some (albeit significantly weaker) authority on enviromental science--probably enough to make it reasonable to pay attention to him, even if not to trust him.
I'll try to critique your comment. Overall, I think your post is well-stated.
So let's look at Dyson's position on CO2 and climate change. Let's assume that your claim that Dyson not being an expert or genius in the specific field of environmental science reduces his authoritativeness, leaving the question of whether he is actually right or wrong on the issue aside for now.
Then, it is either that his authoritativeness on the issue is reduced relative to actual environmental scientists because he is likely to be less aware of the body of knowledge that experts in environmental science would need to know in order to make an informed decision on the issue than the environmental scientists themselves know, or that even if he was just as well informed as the experts in that field, he would be more likely to make a wrong interpretation of that data, for reasons that are idiosyncratic to the field of environmental science itself.
So it all comes down to whether Dyson knows the facts that he has to know in order to make an equally informed decision as the environmental scientists do themselves, and secondly, whether his inferences based on those facts, independently of whether or not he has those facts and to what degree, can be, and to what degree, regarded as reliable.
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Because the facts, by and of themselves, absent any interpretation or inference, should be the same, as there is a single reality that we exist in, there is no reason to preclude the possibility that Dyson could be aware of the actual data as well as the average expert in the field itself. This, of course, does not consider the precision and accuracy of the data itself, but those in the field are subject to the same data and whatever errors it may contain, so it is not an issue here.
Assuming that Dyson does know the data to the same degree that experts in the field do, the question of the reliability of his interpretations comes down to the uniqueness of the field of environmental science itself. But all of the phenomena that climate scientists point to for their position on anthropogenic climate change are phenomena that Dyson, as an experienced and knowledgeable physicist, would almost certainly know, and possibly even know to great detail and subtlety (i.e. the greenhouse effect). Furthermore, since he is a mathematician, he probably knows a good amount of statistics and the art and practice of quantifying uncertainty and probabilities, since he is a specialist in quantum electrodynamics (or was, in his younger days, at least).
So unless there is a particular phenomenon, interaction, or method in the field of environmental science itself that Dyson's lack of comprehensive knowledge on would lead him to an erroneous conclusion in his interpretation of the data (provided he has access to the data itself), we cannot state that he has any less authority in the issue at hand. The reason for this is because the brain's reasoning ability and intellect is one that is general-purpose; this implies that unless there is a specific reason why a person's reasoning ability would lead a person to make the wrong conclusion, given equal raw data, it cannot be assumed that it will do so without at least some information as to why that person would be more prone to make such an error.
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In a case that he is making such an inference/interpretation error that would be expected from someone who isn't trained in the field, those in the field could easily identify and refute Dyson’s erroneous, but understandable misinterpretation. This is especially true because of the public visibility of the climate debate; environmental scientists are quite accustomed to engaging in public debate with a variety of voices, some more reputable than others. Assuming Dyson is a scientist of good faith; namely, that he chooses his position on a scientific question on the basis of sound reasoning and gathering of facts, and most importantly, that when he recognizes either through his own findings or from a fellow scientist in the field in which he is formally untrained points out a fallacious argument, he changes his view in accordance to the new information and understanding, or reverses it altogether.
Since Dyson works at the Advanced Institute of Study at Princeton, he has probably discussed the issue with many fellow scientists. Because he has maintained his view on the issue, it shows that he was not convinced by the arguments that the environmental scientists, at least those with whom he has conversed with on the issue, made. Furthermore, it shows that it wasn’t Dyson’s facts and data that was wrong, because Dyson would, in any conversation, would have supported his claims with whatever factual data, right or wrong and to what degree of correctness, that he had. If it was a factual error alone that caused him to reach the wrong conclusion, then the experts in the field with whom he had discussed the matter with would have pointed that out, and Dyson would have revised his views accordingly. So unless we maintain that Dyson would have stubbornly clung to his viewpoint if his raw data was repudiated, we cannot conclude that Dyson had the wrong facts.
sorry...last one...
We are forced, finally, to conclude that Dyson either is resistant to changing his views in the face of contrary argument and evidence from conversations with formally trained environmental scientists, that he has not had such conversations and has largely or wholly reached his conclusions on his own (which is unlikely for the reason above), that he is a scientist who is blind to new information and doesn’t change his mind when he takes a position, either because of his age, arrogance, political views on the particular issue, is being paid to do so, doesn’t care about the future since he’s not going to be there, or simply because openness to changing views is not a scientific quality he esteems (this is also very unlikely).
Since we have eliminate much of the reasons why Dyson’s specific lack of training and expertise in the field of environmental science would reduce, to an appreciable extent, his credibility on the issue on a scientific level, both at the level of the raw data and his interpretation of it, the only remaining alternative is that Dyson’s claims and those of the majority in the field itself cannot be weighed at the level of who they are, at least not in a statistically significant way. Therefore, in the case of scientists who are at the caliber of Dyson, one cannot invoke the argument of authority to distinguish between the authoritativeness of Dyson and that of the experts in the field of environmental scence, and must refer to what the claims are, and what the science is, and not whether Dyson or an expert in the field is making them.. Of course, this does not hold for someone who is uninformed, has ulterior motives, or is simply against the scientific method politically or epistemologically; in that case, the argument from authority made in favor of experts in the field itself is justifiable, to the degree of the former’s authoritativeness.
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