LogicalMANIPULATIVE

Appeal to Accomplishment

What it is

Treating a person's achievements — or a critic's lack of them — as settling the truth of a claim: “she built a billion-dollar company, so her view on the pandemic is right,” or “you have never run anything, so you cannot criticize.”

How it works

The form is a species of argument from authority with the relevance condition dropped. Walton (1997) lists the critical questions a legitimate appeal to expertise must survive, the first of which is whether the source is an expert in the field of the claim; accomplishment in one field is not expertise in another, and it is often not expertise even in the field where it occurred — a great player is not necessarily a great analyst. The halo effect (Thorndike 1920) supplies the mechanism: success on one salient dimension inflates judgments on all others, so wealth, medals, or a Nobel prize read as general competence. The inverse form — “let us see you do better” — shifts from the claim to the critic and is a circumstantial ad hominem: whether a criticism is correct does not depend on whether the critic could have done the thing. The honest version is the reasonable heuristic that people who achieve things know things, stretched past the domain where it holds. The knowing version deploys accomplishment as a shield (“I have made billions; what have you done?”) or as a credential for hire — celebrity founders opining on medicine, athletes on finance. The tell is a résumé offered where an argument was requested.

Real-world examples

  • •Business success has been offered as a qualification for the presidency by candidates of both parties and neither — Ross Perot in 1992, Donald Trump in 2016, Michael Bloomberg in 2020 — with the inference from running a company to running a government left unargued.
  • •In March 2020 Elon Musk predicted “close to zero new cases” of COVID-19 in the United States by the end of April; the forecast circulated widely on the strength of his engineering achievements, which are not epidemiology.
  • •The “Nobel disease” is the informal name for laureates who champion fringe claims outside their field — Linus Pauling on megadose vitamin C (1970), Kary Mullis on HIV and climate — and are believed because of the prize.
  • •A coach silences criticism from a journalist with “you never played the game,” a standard that would disqualify most film critics, historians, and judges.
  • •A bestselling novelist's dietary advice sells on the strength of the novels; the accomplishment is real and the transfer empty.

Ethical guidelines

  • ●Cite accomplishment only where it is evidence of relevant expertise, and say what the relevance is.
  • ●Do not answer a criticism by asking what the critic has achieved; answer the criticism.
  • ●When your own achievements are being used to lend weight to your views outside your field, say so, and point to the people who actually know.
  • ●Distinguish between “has done it” and “understands it”; practitioners can be wrong about their own field, and outsiders can be right.

How to defend against it

  • ►Ask the field question (Walton): “What has this person done in the area of this claim?” A great record elsewhere answers a different question.
  • ►When “what have you done?” is aimed at you, decline the transfer: “My record is not the claim; here is the claim, and here is why it is true.”
  • ►Ask for the argument the accomplished person gave; if they gave only their opinion, weigh it as an opinion from outside the field.
  • ►Look for domain experts who disagree with the celebrated outsider; if the field's practitioners reject the view, the accomplishment is not evidence.
  • ►Separate the halo: list the dimensions on which the person is known to excel and ask whether this claim lies on any of them.

References

  1. Walton, D. (1997). Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority. Pennsylvania State University Press
    The critical questions for appeals to expertise, including whether the source is expert in the field of the claim.
  2. Thorndike, E. L. (1920). A constant error in psychological ratings. Journal of Applied Psychology, 4(1), 25-29
    The halo effect by which one salient success inflates judgments of unrelated competence.
  3. Pauling, L. (1970). Vitamin C and the Common Cold. W. H. Freeman
    The source of the Pauling example; cited as the claim at issue, not as an authority for it.
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