Topic: Lectures On Doubt
Skeptics Boot Camp (II)
Nothing reveals ignorance more readily to the informed than the use of popular slogans which are believed to bear great philosophical significance but in reality, are either quite meaningless, ambiguous, or just don't hold the gravity those to whom the slogan is popular among assume. In this installment we'll go over a few loosely related catch phrases. Unfortunately, I'm afraid these may have been popularized by atheists and skeptics. Though their use is growing uncritically amongst amateur apologists and if I had to keep a tally, probably have been used more often by believers than critics on the message boards I post at. The danger in these is that they are often used in the form: (catch phrase), therefore, whatever I've argued is true.
"You can't prove a negative!" or
"Absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence."
The problem of induction holds that just because the sun rises today, it
doesn't logically follow that it will rise tomorrow. If one were to come up empty handed after searching two thousand years for a Dodo bird, that wouldn't guarantee no Dodo birds exist.
All the experiments in the world seemed to confirm Newtonian mechanics,
nevertheless along came Relativity. Same problem. So here we have three examples, the first is a "positive" that can't escape induction, the second a "negative" and the final, sort of an inversion where "proving a negative" comes with more certainty than proving a positive.
"...burden of proof.."
"Extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence.
"Burden of Proof" may have a place in the rules of a formal debate or in academic convention, but is there really a universal standard for assigning "burden of proof" in any given real-world argument? What criteria is there for determining the most "extraordinary claim?" The problem is, those who assign the burden seem to believe the force of the assignment comes by way of security of their own position. But it's quite obvious that, historically, the burden of proof doesn't necessarily lie with the most "extraordinary" claim with respect to some universal rules of evidence because the "ordinary claim" is often just the popular claim. From what we know today about astronomy, Galileo should have been able to scoff at his peers and demand them to bring the evidence on for the geocentric model, sit back, and wait. Obviously, independent of how wrong the geocentric model was, Galileo clearly had the "burden of proof," and his claim was in fact, the "extraordinary" one.
Skeptics shouldn't merely dismiss the ideas of believers and pretend to wait patiently for the evidence they know will never come. They should be anxiously engaged in demonstrating how wrong the beliefs are.
"Ockham's Razor tells us..."
Ockham was a key figure in philosophy and it's true that simplicity should be a goal of any theory. I'm not knocking Ockham here at all, but rather slogans that substitute appeal to Ockham for argument. It's very difficult to conjure up real-world situations where the deciding factor is Ockham's razor. Assumptions that we make can be big factors in what constitutes "simplicity" in the first place and it's those assumptions which seem to me, tip the balance in the mind of those appealing to Ockham, and not parsimony per se.
To sum up,
any of these catch-phrases could be merely thrown out for rhetorical flair in
context of a very cogent argument. We all use catch phrases out of habit at some
time or another. But more often than not, the slogans above will serve as a warning flag for a problematic argument ahead.
