Appeal To Novelty

The appeal to novelty (also called argumentum ad novitatem) is a fallacy in which someone prematurely claims that an idea or proposal is correct or superior, exclusively because it is new and modern. In a controversy between status quo and new inventions, an appeal to novelty argument isn't in itself a valid argument. The fallacy may take two forms: overestimating the new and modern, prematurely and without investigation assuming it to be best-case, or underestimating status quo, prematurely and without investigation assuming it to be worst-case.

Investigation may prove these claims to be true, but it is a fallacy to prematurely conclude this only from the general claim that all novelty is good.

The opposite of an appeal to novelty is an appeal to tradition, in which one argues that the "old ways" are always superior to new ideas.

Appeals to novelty are often successful in a modern world where everyone is eager to be on the "cutting edge" of technology. The so-called "Dot-com bust" of the early 2000s could easily be interpreted as a sign of the dangers of naïvely embracing new ideas without first viewing them with a critical eye. Also, advertisers frequently extoll the newness of their products as a reason to buy. Conversely, this is satirised as bleeding edge technology by skeptics (this may itself be an example of the appeal to tradition fallacy).

The appeal to novelty is based on the reasoning that in general people will tend to try to improve the outputs resulting from their efforts. Thus, for example, a company producing a product might be assumed to know about existing flaws and to be seeking to correct them in a future revision. This line of reasoning is obviously flawed for many reasons, most notably that: it ignores motive (a new product may be released that is functionally identical to previous products but which is cheaper to produce); it ignores cyclicality (the fashion industry continually rediscovers old styles and markets them as the next new thing); and it ignores population dynamics (the previous product may have been created by an expert who has since been replaced by a neophyte).