Appeal to tradition (also known asargumentum ad antiquitatem orargumentum ad antiquitam,[1]appeal to antiquity, orappeal to common practice) is a claim in which a thesis is deemed correct on the basis of correlation with past or presenttradition. The appeal takes the form of "this is right because we've always done it this way", and is alogical fallacy.[2][3] The opposite of an appeal to tradition is anappeal to novelty, in which one claims that an idea is superior just because it is new.
An appeal to tradition essentially makes two assumptions that may not benecessarily true:
Appeal to tradition imports the value of not needing to reinvent ways to do things for which effective ways have already been established. But, "is fallacious when it confuses a long tradition of careful testing with the mere tendency to hold on to ideas because they are old".[2]
An appeal to tradition can be complicated by the possibility that different people might have different views, each with their own tradition to appeal to. For example, "Augustine's appeal to tradition against theDonatists is more complicated because the Donatists had appealed to tradition against the Catholics".[4]
A close relative/variant of the appeal to tradition is theargument from inertia orappeal to inertia (sometimes called "Stay the Course"), which states a mistakenstatus quo, potentially related to existing customs be maintained for its own sake, usually because making a change would require admission of fault in the mistake or because correcting the mistake would require extraordinary effort and resources[5]
Its name derives frominertia, a concept in physics representing the resistance of any physical object to any change in its velocity.
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