Sunday, December 15, 2024

Why Fallacies are False -- 06, Argument from Silence

The issue of hard evidence is important to every argument. When you don’t have any hard evidence, you’re done. You can’t prove anything. Right? Right?

Have you ever heard the phrase “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”?

I’ll give you a concrete example some of you may be too young to know about.

There are currently no Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. Does that mean there never were?

Us old people may remember the Bamian Buddhist statues carved into rock in Afghanistan. The Taliban blew them up. Pictures remain, but if you don’t know about the history or you’ve never seen the pictures, you might claim those statues never existed.

This is a fallacy called “The false argument from silence”. Does that sound familiar?

There is a true argument from silence. You can’t make it unless you have the complete dataset.

So if you claim that HBO is not running a specific film, all you have to do is show the HBO program schedule. If that film isn’t in the schedule, it follows as the night the day that HBO is not running it. HBO has complete control of the dataset and they are not going to list something they are not running.

But when anybody goes on social media and says “I haven’t seen…” they are running into the false argument from silence for several reasons.

First, they are not Gd. They are not omniscient. There can be many things they do not know. I have labeled this The Omniscience Fallacy but it’s a subset of the false argument from silence.

Second, the world churns out 1 terabyte of data daily. It is not possible for a mortal to access every piece of data the world turns out.

“I haven’t seen” is also a bigger issue called making a negative claim, and it’s related to categorical statements, which deserve a post of their own.

But on the subject of the false argument from silence, before there was a terabyte of data in the world, the false argument had concrete examples. If you’re a paleontologist, you know it as natura non facit saltus.

No paleontologist can discover a new fossil without knowing that at least half a billion years of ancestors lie behind it. That’s because the hard evidence for the age of earth says it is 4.5 billion years old, and the hard evidence for the history of life says it goes back 4 billion years. There’s no such thing as finding a fossil, and thinking that it had no parents, grandparents, or other antecedents. You don’t need hard evidence of all the antecedents to know they existed.

And we know of many mechanisms that deprive us of the remains of living things: fires; volcanoes; earthquakes that bury them; tectonic plate shifts; normal decay and weathering; rockslides and cave collapses.

On my blog, I change this for archaeologists: cultura non facit saltus. There are no archaeological remains that arise out of nothing. They all have cultural antecedents. But a 350 century old archaeological site had 1 micrometer per year of remains, in a hunting camp repeatedly occupied across human evolution, by both Neanderthals and Cro Magnon. As time went on and human tools became more durable, remains at the various archaeological sites became deeper; ceramics lasted longer than leather bottles and metal survived longer than ceramics, except for precious metals and iron which were remelted and recast.

And any historian who talks about Dark Ages and pretends that the next stage in a culture arose out of nothing can go pound sand, for the same reason. No historian has a complete dataset even for a single year in time, let alone for the antecedents of whatever they are studying.

So with my Torah example, claim one saying that there is a single source for it, does not need hard evidence for support. Torah definitely exists, and being a cultural artifact, has a history behind it involving that culture. We will never have all the steps in that history. But denying that there is a history is bad logic. I’ll say more about this at the end of this thread.

The same is true for DH. Just because we have no hard evidence for JEDP, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. The problem for DH is that the concept is full of false data and fallacies.

So next time you are tempted to say “there’s no evidence of that”, stop yourself and ask “do I have a complete dataset?” Being that we are not omniscient and can’t cope with all the evidence that might exist, the answer is probably no. Even if you’re a specialist in the field, remember my professor, who wrote the dissertation on Biblical Hebrew and didn’t know that there was external evidence that what he wrote about was a thing.

I’ll say more about incomplete datasets later, but next week I’m going to clean up after myself.

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