> the majority of people also hold this view
His argument is strengthened by, but doesn’t rely on, that fact.
His argument is strengthened by, but doesn’t rely on, that fact.
At best popularity serves as a useful heuristic for when you don't have the means to carefully confirm the correctness yourself.
(There is a fairly uninteresting special case where the popularity of something comes in to the argument as a factual statement about the world.)
As a concrete example: wikipedia has a long list of common but incorrect beliefs, all of which one should not be surprised to hear being said but will remain incorrect regardless.
Another example of this would be if we were having an argument about what music to play at some event we are hosting. I might well use the popularity of some songs as an argument.