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That's not what I'm talking about. You can't prove an arbitrary negative. Or even more rigorously, just because you can't prove a negative doesn't make the posi
by jjk166 5y ago
That's not what I'm talking about. You can't prove an arbitrary negative. Or even more rigorously, just because you can't prove a negative doesn't make the positive true.
You could have programmed a script to make this comment. The elephant might be invisible. That might be your wife's identical twin sister. You can always come up with a more elaborate explanation. You haven't proved your negatives, you've just made it harder to prove the inverse. And while specific examples might be easy, in general this is hard if not impossible to do.
It would be absurd to assume your wife is cheating at every moment where you can't see with your own eyes that she isn't - no the default assumption must be that the claim is false and evidence must be presented to the contrary.
- fatbird 5y agoYou're confusing logic with epistemology in the context of legal proceedings and life in general. Epistemically, I prove there's no elephant in my room now because elephants can't be invisible, because I would feel it or hear it or smell it, etc. You can posit an endless number of additional premises to show that there may still be an elephant in the room, but you end up in logical paradox where any evidence of the elephant being present is inaccessible. At that point, what does it mean to say "there's an elephant in here with me that is completely undetectable, so lack of detection is not evidence of absence?" In terms of epistemology, "proof" means reaching sufficient justification for considering a belief to be true, not validity according to an axiomatic system.