Appeal to tradition

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Appeal to tradition (also known as argumentum ad antiquitatem or argumentum ad antiquitam, [1] appeal to antiquity, or appeal to common practice) is a claim in which a thesis is deemed correct on the basis of correlation with past or present tradition. The appeal takes the form of "this is right because we've always done it this way", and is a logical fallacy. [2] [3] The opposite of an appeal to tradition is an appeal to novelty, in which one claims that an idea is superior just because it is new.

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An appeal to tradition essentially makes two assumptions that may not be necessarily true:

In reality, this may be falsethe tradition might be entirely based on incorrect grounds.
In reality, the circumstances may have changed; this assumption may also therefore have become untrue.

Appeal to tradition imports the value of not needing to reinvent ways to do things for which effective ways have already been established. But, "is fallacious when it confuses a long tradition of careful testing with the mere tendency to hold on to ideas because they are old". [2]

An appeal to tradition can be complicated by the possibility that different people might have different views, each with their own tradition to appeal to. For example, "Augustine's appeal to tradition against the Donatists is more complicated because the Donatists had appealed to tradition against the Catholics". [4]

Argument from inertia

A close relative/variant of the appeal to tradition is the argument from inertia or appeal to inertia (sometimes called "Stay the Course"), which states a mistaken status quo , potentially related to existing customs be maintained for its own sake, usually because making a change would require admission of fault in the mistake or because correcting the mistake would require extraordinary effort and resources [5]

Its name derives from inertia, a concept in physics representing the resistance of any physical object to any change in its velocity.

Contrasting fallacies

See also

Notes

  1. "Logical Fallacies and the Art of Debate". www.csun.edu. Retrieved 29 January 2014.
  2. 1 2 "Appeal to Tradition".{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  3. Trufant, William (1917). Argumentation and Debating. Houghton Mifflin company. ISBN   978-1-4067-5258-8. OCLC   1154091080.{{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
  4. Ronnie J. Rombs, Alexander Y. Hwang (2010), Tradition and the Rule of Faith in the Early Church, Page 159.
  5. Williamson, Owen M. (January 2018). "Master List of Logical Fallacies". The University of Texas at El Paso . Retrieved April 1, 2020.