Comment by bonsai_spool
24 days ago
> Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority
Hmm, I guess I read this as a requirement to find enough supportive evidence to establish your argument as novel (or at least supported in 'established' logic).
An appeal to authority explicitly has no reasoning associated with it; is your argument that one should be able to quote a blog as well as a journal article?
It’s also a way of getting people to read things about the subject that they otherwise wouldn’t. I read a lot of philosophy because it was relevant to a paper I was writing, but wasn’t assigned to the entire class.