Abstract

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called ' appeal to personal incredulity'. The fallacy of appeal to personal incredulity is committed when the arguer presumes that whatever is true must be easy to understand or to imagine. The fallacy seems to be most frequent when the contrasting expert opinions differ from our deeply held beliefs. The fallacy is very commonly found in debates over science. In a variant of the fallacy, a person may to appeal to her lack of understanding on a subject matter in a seemingly more self‐deprecating manner as a backhanded way of undermining expert authority. The steps to avoid committing the appeal to personal incredulity fallacy are rather straightforward.