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Citation Fallacies

A few under-discussed fallacies and BS tactics related to citations.

The Fake Citation: Claiming that a source had said something without providing any reason for your opponent to believe you. Example: two catholics are having an argument about abortion, and one of them says "Yeah well the church says it's a sin", without saying where or in what document the church has said that. No, the burden is not on your opponent to go digging through source material looking for it, unless it's something that comes up easily in a web search. If you're going to make an argument that depends on external sources, at least give your opponent an easy way to look it up.

This is even worse when it's taken to an extent I call the Vague Fake Citation: doing this with an alleged source so vague that it doesn't even give the opponent a clue where to start even if they wanted to go looking for it. Example: pretty much every sentence starting with "science has proven..." or "it is known..."

Authoritarian Fallacy: A lot of places on the internet actually do discuss this under the name 'appeal to authority'), but they always cherry-pick an example that doesn't actually cast any light on the fallacy. For example in the Your Logical Fallacy Is article Bob is not only giving a fake citation but also pitting his referred authority against a severe majority of other authorities. Those are the real mistakes Bob is making. Of course he shouldn't be expected to himself defend his beliefs about evolution if he isn't a scientist. They're steering far around the problem of overriding clearly sound reasoning with authority. Here's how I would explain the authoritarian fallacy.

Your Logical Fallacy Is: Appeal to Authority

The word of someone with greater expertise in the relevant field than you or your opponent is a great tiebreaker in the absence of compelling evidence either way. But when you take this to the point of using a mere citation to dismiss a totally valid and a priori *proof* and/or to believe something logically impossible, you get the authoritarian fallacy. Even the smartest and best educated humans are not infallible (or unquestionably honest) and should not be followed to absurd or self-contradicting conclusions. Example: the citation to Libet's studies on Wikipedia's article on free will that says it's been proven scientifically that our decisions are made by our brains about ten seconds before we become aware of them. This outright precludes the existence of free will (although Wikipedia claims it doesn't because they have to stick to their token neutrality policy) which is not only directly experienced by all of us but a necessary foundation for all of morality. If you can take this citation seriously then you're an idiot.

Anti-Independence Fallacy: Considering an argument that uses well-cited premises to be more sound than an argument that has no citations because it uses no contingent premises. Example: someone arguing against gun control prefers an argument showing that anti-gun legislation has failed to reduce crime rates to an argument that shows gun control is inherently incompatible with the opponent's own principles, such as that depriving an innocent person of their legitimately owned property is not justified by the possibility of using it for evil, or that those who enforce the law must obey the law. Clearly the second argument if both can be established is better. No matter how reliable your citations are, they can never be more than 100% trustworthy, and if you can make an argument that doesn't depend on any empirical data at all but is still sound, then that one is 100% trustworthy.

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