Appeal to tradition


Appeal to tradition is an argument in which a thesis is deemed correct on the basis that it is correlated with some past or present tradition. The appeal takes the form of "this is right because we've always done it this way."
An appeal to tradition essentially makes two assumptions that are not necessarily true:
An appeal to tradition is only a fallacious argument in itself if the argument is not developed further, for example by pointing out that the widespread acceptance of the practice means that there would be significant implications/disruption/cost involved in abandoning the tradition. For example, arguing that the QWERTY keyboard layout should be retained "because it is traditional" would be fallacious unless the further argument is made that, being traditional, QWERTY is familiar to most current keyboard users who would need retraining if any change were made.
The opposite of an appeal to tradition is an appeal to novelty, claiming something is good because it is new.