I wasn't talking about refutation. Please don't try to move the goalposts.
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I wasn't talking disputing what the Wikipedia article says. Please don't try to move the goalposts.
You are misusing that term. I did not commit the logical fallacy of moving the goalposts.
You have given no logical reasons why we should conclude anything I did falls under the fallacy of "moving the goalposts".
Which makes you guilty of the fallacy of argument by assertion.
Merely asserting that I committed a fallacy doesn't make it true just because you assert I did.
You need to prove your claim is true by giving logical reasons why anything I said qualifies as a fallacy.
I wasn't talking about refutation.
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I wasn't talking disputing what the Wikipedia article says.
What you were or weren't taking about is not relevant to refuting any of the points I made.
Because I was making reference to what I was talking about.
Ie. I was pointing out why my citation of wikipedia doesn't constitute the definition of an appeal to authority fallacy.
You haven't even attempted to refute the reasons I gave you. So my conclusion stands as logically proven.
Once again, I wasn't disputing your position. @polymath did that quite well.
You have an odd definition of "well", then.
I refuted his attempt to dispute my position.
As of yet he has no response, and you have offered no counter argument against what I said with regards to that.
So you would be engaging in the logical fallacy of argument by assertion.
You don't prove he disputed my position well merely by asserting he did. You need reasons and evidence to show why you think he did.
BTW, you also sneakily only quoted parts of the article that agreed with your position. You omitted those parts that disagreed with your position.
Logical fallacy, argument by assertion.
Merely asserting that the article disagrees with my conclusion doesn't make it so just because you assert it is so.
You would need to prove why you think your claim could be true by quoting anything from the article and then giving logical reasons why you think it disagrees with what I have concluded is true.
Yes, you cited information. Why did you cite information from Wikipedia? Was it because you thought Wikipedia was an authoritative source? Yes, you did. You were making an argumentum ab auctoritate.
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My argument was that you, while arguing that using authoritative sources was fallacious, used a source that you believe to be authoritative.
By your standards, anyone using any authoritative source to support their argument is guilty of argumentum ab auctoritate. That definitely includes you.
I can sum up why you are wrong succinctly like this:
I am making an argument from common use and using wikipedia as merely one piece of evidence for common use.
I am not making an argument from authority and appealing to wikipedia as the authority.
There's a very clear distinction you're not recognizing there.
I am saying that common use of a word is the way in which the definition of words is determined. Wikipedia just becomes one piece of evidence out of many potential pieces of evidence that demonstrate we have reason to believe this represents the common use and understanding of that word. I could just as easily cite any other website that would give a similar answer and my argument is exactly the same. Which disproves your claim that you think I am making wikipedia some kind of authority on the matter.
Citing wikipedia's definition would only become an appeal to authority in this case if I tried to claim that wikipedia's definition must be regarded as the right one just because it's wikipedia. But I don't make that argument nor do I need to in order to prove my conclusion is true about the definition of appeal to authority.
Therefore, if you want to dispute my conclusion about what the common use and meaning of a term is, you are capable of trying to providing counter evidence such as other websites that say something different.
Likewise, I could respond by citing even more websites that agree with wikipedia's definition to establish that my definition has more common acceptance than yours.
So you see there is nothing special about wikipedia to my argument. I am not appealing to them as the final authority on the matter that settles the debate just because wikipedia said it.
You don't think definitions are defined by common use and meaning? I can logically show otherwise:
First off: You can't accuse me of committing a fallacy of appeal to authority unless you can first establish what a fallacy of appeal to authority is.
So first need to establish what the definition is.
How are you going to do that?
Well, how do you establish the definition of any word or concept?
You look at how it is commonly used.
Why do we do that? Because that's the only way any definition for anything is determined: Common agreement amongst the users of a language about what a term means.
There is no other way by which definitions are determined or can be determined.
Because commonly agreed upon use is a required feature of something before it can by definition be a word in a language.
Otherwise it ceases to be language because by definition language must enable the communication of a concept from one person to another by representing a concept with an abstract symbol/sound/etc.
I am going to preempt what you will try to argue here. You may try to argue that this sounds like an appeal to popularity.
But that is a misapplication and fallacious use of the concept. I will explain why:
We can agree that it is wrong to assert it is true that the earth is flat just because the majority of people believe it is. That would be the definition of an appeal to popularity.
But what if I asked you to prove what the majority of people's favorite color is?
You cannot, by definition, establish the truth of this claim without taking a poll of people to determine what the popularity of the colors are.
Are you making an appeal to popularity in this case? No, of course not, because the very question involves asking a question that concerns the issue of what is popular.
It would, therefore, be logically contradictory to claim we can't establish what the popularity of something is because citing what the popularity of something is a fallacious act.
In light of that, how then do we separate the difference between the two scenarios? It's simple.
The former example involves appealing to popularity when popularity is not actually relevant to the issue in question. That is what makes it fallacious - irrelevance. Because the features of the earth can only be established using observation and math, and the logic applied to that. People's opinions about the shape of the earth are not directly relevant to the process of determining what the shape of the earth actually is.
That is not the case with the later example. In fact, not only can we say that finding the popularity of a color is relevant to the issue of establishing which color is most popular but we can say it is vitally necessary to answer the question - because there is, in fact, no other way the answer to the question could be established other than to do that. So it is then logically impossible to even try to accuse the question of being irrelevant to the issue.
What does that have to do with finding the definitions of words in a language you ask?
It is the same principle of necessity. Because language, by definition, only works based on what the collectively agreed upon meanings of words are. If there is no agreement then it's not language because it can't be used to communicate - which is the definition of what makes it a language.
Therefore, the only way you can answer the question of what a definition of a word is is by surveying or studying the users of a language to ascertain what a given word means to them.
So that process cannot be called a fallacy of appeal to popularity because it is not only relevant to the question being asked but it's actually intrinsically necessary to do in order to answer the question of what the definition of a word is. So you could never be accused of appealing to an irrelevant fact by engaging in that process of trying to survey what people think the definition of a word is in order to figure out what the common agreed upon definition must be - because that is by definition the only way you could answer the question of what the meaning of a word is.
Having established that, how would one logically go about gathering evidence of what the common meaning of a word is?
There may be many ways, but one easy way would be by surveying a collection of website articles, dictionaries, and encyclopedias online to see if they all agree on what the definition of the word is.
If they are all in agreement then that is conclusive evidence in favor of that being the commonly used definition of that word. And if there is no evidence to the contrary then we have no reason to believe the contrary is true.
Logically, if there were significant disagreement out there about what the proper definition of a term is then we would expect to see that reflected in the literature people generate about it's definition.
If we don't see evidence of that then we have no reason to conclude the people collectively do have any significant level of disagreement about what a word is suppose to mean.
How does that help? What's wrong with science that does not have to be agreed on?