Page 77 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

64 SMART THINKING: SKILLS FOR CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING & WRITING

e. The two main political parties are the Liberal Party of Australia and the
Australian Labor Party.
f. A broken leg requires immediate medical treatment.

Claims supported by authority

Perhaps the most common way of overcoming this 'problem'—the risk that our
claims may not be accepted—is to support them by an appeal to authority. This is
a very special form of reasoning that, to establish the acceptability of a claim, does
not give an argument but makes reference (in one or more ways) to an expert. In
this reference, an appeal to authority indirectly points to arguments or explanations
that would, if checked, support the claim.
There are many conventional forms of reasoning in which we come across
claims supported by authority. Here are some examples (the words that provide the
reference to a particular form of authority are italicised):
a. 'Gender and sexual definitions [have] become the focus of intense
cultural negotiation' (Gledhill 1992, p. 201).
b. Australian history is marked by considerable conflict and tension over
the competing interests of labour and capital (see Rickard 1992).
c. According to Dr Jane Long, who has studied this topic in detail, poor
women in nineteenth-century England were, by and large, worse off
than poor men.
d. In my twenty years' experience as a High Court judge, I have come
across few cases as complex as this one.
e. / look back on my childhood and recall that I was always encouraged
to ask 'why?' by my parents.
f. The experiments I have conducted show that many cleaning products
induce allergic reactions in humans.
You should be reasonably familiar with the type of support offered in claims
a and b. Here the claims are stated and a reference given to the book, chapter,
or article from which they are drawn. In the first, the reference is direct:
Gledhill's actual words are quoted (and the reference would be given in full in
the bibliography). In the second, the reference is indirect: the claim given
summarises a discussion in Rickard's book. References such as these ack-
nowledge the source of ideas and evidence, but also provide support for the
claims. In effect, they say 'This claim I now make is well founded because it has
been previously established by someone else, and here is the reference to that
person's work so you can go and check for yourself. The insistence in academic
work on proper referencing is, therefore, not simply a tedious necessity but a
significant part of the main purpose of writing: the clear expression of good
arguments or explanations.
Claims c and d are slightly different. They are similar in that the accept-
ability of the claim in each case is founded on the authority of an expert, but