Appeal to Belief

Appeal to Belief is a fallacy that has this general pattern:

1. Most people believe that a claim, X, is true.
2. Therefore X is true.

The appeal to belief is an informal fallacy of relevance, where it is asserted that since a great number of people believe a proposition is true, it is true. This is an appeal to an inappropriate justification. If what everyone believes were actually true, then it would be true that the earth is flat, because at one time, most of the people believed it to be true. And then the earth became spherical, because most of the people believed it to be spherical. As you can see, even if it is the case that most people believe in the truth of a proposition, it doesn’t make it true. The number of people believing something to be true doesn’t bear on its truth.