I wrote my reply in a hurry, was much too telegraphic. Didn’t mean to imply that it would follow that one must accept any-and-everything.
The particular condition I wished to address was this:
Keeping in mind that I’m only addressing non-abstract propositions, I do think that this idea can actually be rejected for the purposes stated in the OP.
Correct me if I misunderstand, which I very well may, but it seems that this would imply that I can’t make general conclusions about rodents without examining every rodent.
But let’s also not ignore the other half of your point:
My question would be, do you mean that “rather reasonable assumptions” are as good as it gets in this case?
In sum, it seems like you’re implying that there are no conditions, short of direct proof or brute force, under which it would be safe to reject a claim as false (not just, say, “highly unlikely”).
Sure sounds to me like under these conditions I’d have to accept elephants-in-rodents as not proven false, and its contrary as merely a “reasonable assumption”. Me, I’m willing to reject it as patently false.
So if I’m missing something, please fill me in. Thanks
I would call your proof “direct proof”. So it’s actually outside the scope of the question, which concerns whether there are ever conditions in which propositions can be safely rejected as false (not just extremely unlikely) in the absence of direct proof.
Sorry to be a thread Nazi. Just trying to keep things on topic.
Per the dictates of common sense, why should people ever have to demonstrate the absence of evidence for something when it’s patently absurd, using logic or any other means…
“Hillary’s Chinese, I tell you!”
“Whah? Rodham sounds pretty damn English to me.”
“What about her mother?”
“Well? What about her?”
“She coulda been Chinese, hence you’ve proven nothing!”
“Look, she’s a WASPy blonde, ferchrissakes, where’s the Chinese?”
“Where isn’t it?”
“Oh, come on…fine, get me some genealogical records, and then lets talk.”
“No, you must debate me using LOGIC!”
“Look, I’ll bet you 500 bucks she’s as white as the driven snow.”
“What makes you so sure?!?”
“Oh, please, just look at her.”
“Looks can deceive!”
“Or they may lead one to be exactly right. Now go away.”
“Nonetheless, your argument is logically flawed!”
“Big deal. I’m right anyway.”
“You have not proven that!”
“Nor have you proven otherwise!”
“She could have had surgery, and dyed her hair to look caucasian!”
“So what? I mean, why would she do that?”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“Gahh! Are you gonna back this claim up with any proof or not!?!”
“You have not even begun to engage me in a logical discussion of the merits of my assertion, why should I be burdened with research?”
“FINE! YOU WIN! Your unassailable logic has convinced me! I cannot trust my own eyes, experience, nor one iota of conventional wisdom without first subjecting any and all reasonalbe assumptions to intense logical scrutiny! I shall spend the rest of my life frozen in bemusement as I ponder the very tenability of what I percieve to be reality itself, and perhaps after a lifetime of intense thought I shall be rid of all fallacy or tautology, and have distilled all I apprehend to the finest kernal of TRUTH! You happy now!?!”
“Yes! Another mind crippled by epistomology!”
OK, it’s irrelevnt to the argument at hand, since an even more impossible example could easily be thought of, but in the interests of showing even apparently impossible things can be more plausible than you’d think, consider how differently sized the most closely related species can be. For instance, asaccording to guinness world records, compare the rodent capybara weighing 174lb to the pudu deer, weighing 18lb. I can’t think of a mamailian symbiote or parasite, but based on just how weird things exist, I’m not ruling it out right now.
The standard I used is the one in your title — proof. There are differences among convincing arguments, reasonable premises, and proof. Proof is a metaphysical commitment, not merely an epistemic one. Proof does not mean that something is true for all we know; it means that something cannot be false.
Truth obtains only from truth. Fortunately, philosophers of science and empiricism, like Popper, understand this. There is a difference between epistemic and metaphysical truth. Suppose I said this: “It is possible it is raining outside.” When you look out the window and see no rain, what is your response. Am I right or wrong? Were I you, I would turn to me and say, “What did you mean? Did you mean that it is possible that it is raining outside for all you know? Or did you mean that it is possible for it to rain outside? If you meant the former, I would agree. But if you meant the latter, you have not met the burden of proof.” Note that for the former, there is no burden of proof.
The question is, in the absence of direct proof when is it safe, as a practical matter, to affirm “that can’t possibly be right”?
You’re going to have to get a lot simpler for my little brain, b/c from your answer above I still can’t tell if you’re saying I can’t say for sure there are no elephants living in rodents somewhere.
Done.
For simplicity’s sake, then, let’s assume that whatever proposition we’re dealing with is clear and understandable. Positing original claims that are vague, contradictory, etc., doesn’t help us answer the question at hand.
However (departing from your post a bit), Zag’s posting has had me thinking that perhaps one condition for rejecting a claim in the absence of direct proof would be that it contains key terms which are so vague as to have no clear reference (hasty and frivolous example, “When you hear the shape of Tuesday, your eyes will become righteous”) or which imply internal inconsistencies or absurdities within the statement.
And again, let’s discard this “burden of proof” angle, since the question concerns only those claims for which the burden of proof has explicitly not been met.
This whole topic is a bit over my head, but from what I’ve read, it seems that:
You can’t state, in such a way that you are implying that it’s impossible, that no elephants live inside rodents.
You can state it if you are only implying that it is incredibly unlikely, improbable, but again, without having examined every rodent, or having defined the terms set out in such a way that it is a physical impossibility, you can’t state it with the force of a true proof.
It seems, from what I’ve read in this thread, that despite how impossible it seems for a rodent to have an elephant inside of it, unless the terms are defined more clearly (thus allowing for a “brute force” (did I use that correctly?) method), or somebody checks the inside of every rodent, you can’t prove the negative.
The examples I used are all false. Not just unlikely, but absolutely utterly false. And no one here really believes that there is even a remote possibility that:
Hillary Clinton is Chinese.
There might be a species of elephant that spends its life cycle in the guts of a rodent (this is the example, but references to it got short-handed, natch, so let’s not quibble about that).
Leprechauns exist (and please, let’s not quibble about mascots or impish people and such… you all know what I’m referring to).
Ergo, arguments which will permit these statements as even remote possibilities just don’t cut it in the real world.
We all know that there are indeed situations when we can safely say that certain ideas are rubbish, even without direct proof against them. (If not, then you have to believe the nonsense posited above about HRC, elephants, and leprechauns just might be possible, which is patently foolish.)
My question is, can we describe these situations?
I’m beginning to think that there are certain conditions which in combination make it safe to in effect prove the negative (speaking metaphorically), but that the combination necessary to reach sufficiency will vary depending on the nature of the claim under consideration (nod to Zagadka, despite my quick dis earlier). More on this in a later post.
PS: Trying to refine ultrafilter’s condition. Sometimes, e.g. modern physics, discoveries which seem to imply logical impossibilities or to violate accepted (proven) theories must be considered as real possibilities.
It depends on how you frame your question. Consider these:
A. It is not possible that elephants are living in rodents
That’s an epistemic commitment. To prove that assertion, what you need to deal with is the extent of your knowledge. For example, if you can show that the notion of an elephant living inside a rodent violates some known fact, then you have proved the assertion true. But
B. It is not possible for elephants to live in rodents
That’s a metaphysical commitment. You’re saying that, even above and beyond whatever you might know, elephants living in rodents is conceptually impossible. To prove that assertion, you must do one of two things: (1) examine every elephant and every rodent for all time and all space and show that, in every case, there was, is, and will be a contradiction or (2) show that it follows from some truth that is already a metaphysical commitment that this is also true. That’s the approach that modal logic would take.
But that’s a different matter. You can’t prove anything with logical and rhetorical fallacies. Amphiboly, equivocation, hypostatization, and reification — which are what you’re describing here — undermine any sort of attempt at proof.
Could you please explain that a little more so that even I can understand.
Also Evil Bippy assures me that the elephant in Twiggy will indeed live out it’s entire (very short) life within a rodent. (Though he admits this doesn’t constitute a life cycle)
It’s a tangent off a tangent, I’m afraid. Before you get sucked in, here’s the saga:
Libertine proposed an example using the following language…
Suppose I said this: “It is possible it is raining outside.” When you look out the window and see no rain, what is your response. Am I right or wrong? Were I you, I would turn to me and say, “What did you mean? Did you mean that it is possible that it is raining outside for all you know? Or did you mean that it is possible for it to rain outside? If you meant the former, I would agree. But if you meant the latter, you have not met the burden of proof.”
…in order to demonstrate the difference between epistemic and metaphysical truth, which is not directly relevant to the issue imho.
My suggestion was that we not apply such examples to the issue at hand (see OP), because propositions requiring clarification in order to be understood are just not useful for our purposes.
I may have misunderstood L’s intention in using this example, but in any case, it’s still not particularly relevant (see next post), and L’s reply that “logical and rhetorical fallacies… undermine any sort of attempt at proof” is actually what I was trying to get at, and also not pertinent to the OP.
Amphiboly and equivocation are rhetorical tactics intended to obfuscate clarity of expression, typically by use of muddled grammar (dangling modifiers, and so forth) or the use of a word in a chain of deduction that has more than one meaning in noncontiguous inferences. Hypostatization and reification are rhetorical vices that treat abstract entities or Platonic forms as concrete objects, or vice-versa. These and related techniques (like anthropomorphization) are intended to obfuscate the relation between symbological representations (think Hegel, not Nietzsche) and the noumena themselves.
Here are some examples:
*You cannot base a political philosophy on the ethics of force because force is mass times acceleration.
When Bob and George sat on the couch, he put his hand on his knee.
Society has an obligation to provide for the poor.
Oops… I misspoke above. I definitely did misinterpret L’s purpose in using the example when I first replied. On with the show…
L, I think you’ve screwed up and made a relevant point.
What you posit here is that the following condition applies to the OP:
“The claim violates known fact.”
Ka-ching!
Let’s consider (2) first. The condition, then, would go something like this:
“The falsity of the claim is a necessary condition of established fact.”
Ka-ching!
(1) would be equivalent to brute force, which for our purposes is equivalent to direct proof, so it doesn’t apply.
I’d submit that the difference b/t epistemic and metaphysical commitment is essentially trivial for our purposes. As far as the OP is concerned (with the caveat that we are keeping our feet squarely in the real word with no in-theory or on-paper folderol), the important distinction b/t statements A and B is that A follows logically from B but not necessarily vice versa.
Speaking of which, it’s probably a good time for a reminder of the issue yet again:
For non-abstract (i.e., real-world) propositions, under what conditions is it safe to reject as false a claim in the absence of direct evidence to the contrary?
I’m afraid your rather bizarre condescension smacks of disingenuousness. Due to your expository weaknesses, I no longer know whether I agree with you or what point you’re making. I thought I had stumbled upon an interesting topic only to find the rhetorical equivalent of strip dancing on the bar. Somehow, every utterance of every entity — including yourself — is off the OP’s topic. This thread is a Vaudeville act.
A thing has been proved when it has been shown that every alternative is impossible. Thanks for the whiskey. I’ll assume it was on the house.
If I understand the above correctly then it doesn’t work since …
I can safely assume my head won’t explode* in the next few minutes, even though the consequences of me being wrong about rejecting the claim as false would be very non trivial to me.
[sub]* provided I don’t think too deeply on this subject[/sub]
Is it then ever possible to prove something? It seems to me that ‘every alternative’ will allways form an infinite set of alternatives each one of which will have to be proven impossible?
This has become incredibly confusing. The OPer says
If you don’t want to accept so-called theoretical and paper ideas, then I’d say you’re free to assume whatever conditions you want. If you’re not interested in rigorously proving that it’s false, then I’d follow guidelines akin to what Colibri said about science rules.
