[lbo-talk] Appeal to Ignorance

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Jun 2 11:07:26 PDT 2005



>>What's an improbable claim? That all depends on the prevailing
>>level of credulity among the given populace. After all, some
>>people buy almost anything -- from penis-enhancing pills, alien
>>abduction stories, Elvis sightings, 9/11 conspiracy theories, to
>>God. :->
>
>oh, come on, yoshie. that's a cop-out in the context of this conversation.
>
><snip>
>>It worked because too many Americans were too credulous to say,
>>"Hey, that's a very improbable claim -- the burden is on _you_ to
>>prove that they still exist in Iraq."
>
>this actually contradicts your point above that im/probability is
>relative to credulity, since here you are saying that credulity is
>relative to probability: people can be considered credulous when
>they don't recognize something as "very improbable". this presumes
>we can say what is im/probable independent of credulity.

There are two kinds of credulity here: credulity concerning (A) a metaphysical entity (such as God), for whose presence there is no empirical evidence but for which it is hard to define what counts as evidence of absence (especially since the entity itself is ill defined); and credulity concerning (B) physical entities (such as "weapons of mass production" in Iraq), for whose presence there is no empirical evidence other than fraudulently produced one, but for whose absence there is a great deal of evidence from credible sources, except that, given the size of the field of investigation (e.g., Iraq), it is hard to inductively rule out the possibility of their existence to zero.

In the case of (B), the non-zero but extremely low possibility fits into a commonly used (probabilistic) sense of the word improbable. In the case of (A), positive evidence for a categorically metaphysical entity, strictly speaking, cannot be provided, and claims for positive evidence for its manifestations in nature are either easily debunked hoaxes (like claims of miracles) or superfluous additions that explain nothing (like claims of Intelligent Design), even though it is not possible to empirically disprove the existence of such a metaphysical entity.

Appeal to ignorance thrives by seizing upon the "non-zero" part of "the non-zero but extremely low possibility" in (B) and the impossibility of empirically disproving a metaphysical entity in (A) and inflates them by undue fear or hope or both, making them seem more important than lack of positive evidence in either case -- at least in the minds of those who are credulous enough to buy such an appeal.

For all other people, there is no compelling reason to keeping on looking for either (A) or (B). That something is impossible to rule out due to the nature of the thing doesn't mean that there is a reason to believe that it will be found one day and is worth looking for it. -- Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list