- Slippery slope is an argument in which the premises form a chain reaction of assumed causal consequences, beginning with some initial event and culminating with a conclusion. One step onto a slippery slope causes one to slide all the way to an undesirable outcome. The arguer’s purpose is usually to prevent that first step. The slippery-slope fallacy is the invalid assumption that a full chain reaction invariably follows the initial event. Almost all chain reactions are invalid, because each step requires a causality that is both necessary and sufficient; only then are alternative paths precluded. Thus chain-reaction arguments are particularly vulnerable to the fallacy of false cause.
Slippery-slope logic is used with mixed success by many fundamentalist preachers. Seldom is it used in science, but sometimes the link between a hypothesis and a testable prediction can involve several steps. If so, one must evaluate whether each step validly involves either pure deduction or a necessary and sufficient causality.
The most familiar example of a slippery slope, at least to those in my age group, is domino theory. Used successfully in the early justifications of the Vietnam war, domino theory said that if Vietnam were to fall to communism, through chain reaction all of Southeast Asia would eventually become communist. Domino theory was wrong.
In attempting to refute Galileo’s claim that he had discovered satellites of Jupiter, astronomer Francesco Sizi [Holton and Roller, 1958] used a slippery-slope argument:
“The satellites are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can have no influence on the earth and therefore would be useless and therefore do not exist.”
Fallacies Employing Extraneous Other Evidence
When ego is involved, scientific arguments can get personal. This was often the case for Isaac Newton, as the following letter [~1700] illustrates. Note that Newton attempts to demolish an idea without giving a single shred of evidence:
“That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.”
Unlike Newton’s argument, most arguments do involve evidence that can be evaluated in terms of premises and deductive or inductive conclusions. They may also, however, contain a collage of other information that the proponent considers to be relevant but that is extraneous to the core deductive argument. Often this extraneous information is emotionally charged, and the evaluator must cull the deductive argument from among the distractions.
- Appeal to authority is the claim that an argument should be accepted because some expert accepts it. Ideally, scientists do not appeal to authority; they evaluate evidence personally. In practice, however, we limit such analyses primarily to our own field, and we tentatively accept the prevailing wisdom of scientists in other fields. The appeal to authority must be considered pragmatically, based on how much more experience the ‘authority’ has than the arguers have, how mainstream the authority’s view is, and how feasible it is for the arguers to evaluate all of the evidence.
For example, when a biologist considers a physics argument, it is valid to give weight to what physicists believe. Yet when a physicist considers a physics argument, it is a fallacy to accept it merely because some ‘great’ physicist believes it.
