Blu

I believe we can make references to books so we can also make references to other thread on this Forum site and other forum on the Internet.

Thanks

Doubting Didymus

I dont see your point. A thing that can remain evidentially hidden at will can never be disproven, yet it can be proven. Are you referring to your points about evidence extrapolation? How can that apply to a thing that is hidden by its own will?

Primal

Nice post Clucth . I agree, some things can be disproven and disocnfirmned,

To me the idea that "one cannot prove a negative" seems silly. If that were the case then creationism, spontanious generation, vitalism, bad air=sickness theory and a load of other superstitions could never be said to be "disproven" in science meaning that claims of their existence were on equal epistemic footing with claims of their nonexistence.

This is not the case, when one is saying something was "proven" in the empirical sense, they mean it has been shown to be probable given our standards of evidence. What then is to say a claim cannot be improbable given our standards of evidence?

One way to show something so be improbable is to show the given claim to be superfluous i.e. unecessary to explain things in light of other explanations.

Another is to show that the claim is unlikely or impossible given our current empirical knowledge is true. Is it possible that saltations are what caused man to develope from his ape-like ancestors? Is it possible that in one big mutation, poodles came from the matings of two wolves? Sure is. But given what we know of genetics, and how there can be far more screw ups then there are sucess stories, almost infinately more screw ups to successes in fact, the notion of saltaion seems unlikely.Can something likewise go faster then light, is it possible? Yes, very possible, Einstein could have been very,very wrong; it is however unlikely though as Einstein;s theory is probably right and IF Einstien's theory is right FTL motion is impossible.

Another way is to see whether things expected to occur given a claim is right are in fact occuring. This leads to the notion of prediction. It is possible that air is a living thing that eats people occasionally, but if that were true we'd expect to see some people get eaten in horrific ways. We do not see this and thus the idea of air being a living thing that eats is disconfirmned/disproven.

One last class is that of coherence, if the claim does not make sense or has major holes in it, then it is likewise improbable. Example is the problem of dualism or the lack of a mechanism for creationism.

In the elephant example we'd be going by the assumption that our background knowledge regarding elephants is probably true. That if there was an elephant in the room it would reflect light and we would see it (a probable assumption), hence not seeing an elephant in the room would disconfirm/disprove the notion of an elephant being present in the room. One can now say "well the elephant was made invisible by a cloaking technology", this would suffer many problems though:

1) It'd be superfluous, not needed to explain anything in light of another other option(one would have to assume there is a cloaking techonlogy,that it was used on this elephant and such): there is no elephant in the room.

2) If true one would expect to notice signs of the elephants presents, noise, one would feel it and such. One would also expect more things to be cloaked.If these signs are not present, then the idea becomes even more improbable.

One could lastly then say that a spirit made the elephant not only invisible but incorporeal.

This is still superfluous 1, and still one would expect to have seen cases of other things becoming transformned or manipulated by spirits or to have experienced such manipulation firsthand. In which case the idea is still improbable.