Appeal to the People

In this video, Jordan MacKenzie discusses a type of informal fallacy known as the argumentum ad populum fallacy, or the appeal to the people fallacy. This fallacy occurs when one attempts to establish the truth of a conclusion by appealing to the fact that the conclusion is widely believed to be true.

Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Tech

I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Tech. Before coming to Virginia Tech, I was an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at the NYU Center for Bioethics.

I completed my Ph.D. in Philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill. I work primarily in normative ethics, bioethics, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology. My current philosophical research centers on the ethics of belief, especially in connection with self-knowledge and self-deception. I am also interested in ‘rationally unjustifiable’ emotions like agent-regret and survivor’s guilt.

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