Epistemic Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism is the epistemic position that knowledge derives from appeals to relevant authorities. A typical authoritarian would not forward his viewpoint by demonstrating its correspondence to reality, or providing arguments as to its validity, but rather by saying something like “Plato agreed with this,” or “these Church fathers agreed with this.”

This represents a form of mysticism and is invalid on on the same grounds—that some priest or sage or scientist advanced a given viewpoint does not demonstrate the viewpoint to be correct. “Plato said so” simply is not an argument—it is to be discarded as irrelevant for the evaluation of the truth value of the proposition in question.