1. The Art of Creating Controversy Where None Existed

Comment #159901 by The Englishman on April 13, 2008 at 11:22 am

Stick to rhetoric - science isn't democratic, at least discovering the truth isn't. When only one person believed that balls of different weights would fall from the tower at the same rate he was right and the consensus wrong.

As Wikipedia says: An argumentum ad populum (Latin: "appeal to the people"), in logic, is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or all people believe it; it alleges that "If many believe so, it is so." In ethics this argument is stated, "If many find it acceptable, it is acceptable."

This type of argument is known by several names including appeal to the masses, appeal to belief, appeal to the majority, appeal to the people, argument by consensus, authority of the many, and bandwagon fallacy, and in Latin by the names argumentum ad populum ("appeal to the people"), argumentum ad numerum ("appeal to the number"), and consensus gentium ("agreement of the clans"). It is also the basis of a number of social phenomena, including communal reinforcement and the bandwagon effect, and of the Chinese proverb "three men make a tiger".