Talk:Appeal to loyalty/Archives/2015
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Dubious article
(Sorry that this comment is long and rambling. I can't seem to nail down what I'm getting at. Maybe I'll come back in a few weeks or months and try better. If you only want to read one paragraph, skip to the last paragraph.)
I don't have an opinion on whether "Appeal to loyalty" is a valid topic for an article, but I do find the current contents to be weak.
An appeal to loyalty is certainly a technique used in arguments, but it's not, as the example claims, a way to use "Anyone who questions A is disloyal" as a way to get to "Therefore, B is wrong".
It doesn't convince anyone that B is wrong, it just convinces them to ignore whoever B is and stick with A.
If political party B says "I want to increase funding of investigations of corruption", and political party A says "They're just trying to destabalise the government, we're doing great work, give us your support to keep going as we are", there's no attempt to deny there's a problem of corruption, or to say that B is wrong or lying about anything.
The only source cited is an article which is currently inaccessible, but I found a copy on archive.org:
When I read the section on Appeal to Loyalty, and the section on Concept Summary, I concluded the author saw the Appeal to Loyalty to be a fallacy but not a logical fallacy. I thought he made a distinction, but then I read the introduction and it seems he indeed sees an appeal to loyalty as a form of Informal fallacies, and he sees all Informal fallacies as logical fallacies. However, he doesn't spell out the "logical" part as baldly as this article does. He seems to use a very loose definition of "logical fallacy" and when talking specifically about the appeal to loyalty he switches to talking about arguments, distractions, and techniques.
All that to say: I think this article goes further than what's given in the source, and in an effort to be concise the article has removed the distance that the source's author put between "appeal to loyalty" and logic. Maybe this article should be kept, and it should retain a mention that some people categorise it as a logical fallacy, but then the content of the article should focus on what it is (argument technique, or tactic) rather than focussing on trying to prove it's an abuse of logic. It's also interesting that the author of the cited source, before he says that "they do not help us decide which causes are just or wise", he notes that "Appeals to Loyalty remind us that sometimes we need to stick together and cooperate in achieving a common cause". So rather than being a purely bad act which someone "commits", it's also a useless part of discourse or of daily life. Gronky (talk) 01:16, 20 August 2015 (UTC)