Talk:Argument from ignorance

Article quality and sources

This is pretty much an "article from ignorance" now, or perhaps "article by diversion" for it zig-zags between various (often less than logical) examples. And of course, it is mostly source free. John Locke who coined the term is mentioned in passing at the end, but the article is in need of serious clean up. A lot of it seems to have been written by user Agenzen who stopped editing 2 years ago. I seem to have left him a message 2 years ago with a pointer to negation as failure, now that I have looked, but that point is not discussed in the article except in see also. In any case, the best way would be to have a shorter, referenced and to the point definition with a couple of well known examples, instead of of the logical jambalaya that exists now. I will do that. History2007 (talk) 10:53, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Anyway, I went ahead and cleaned it up now, added WP:RS sources, etc. History2007 (talk) 22:24, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Expression "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"

Ah, but it is evidence of absence (one knows what evidence is, yes? I hope?...). It is not proof of absence, which may be what people mean, but which is no excuse for mussing with the language. Quite a few references could be given, including this one from the point of view of probability theory which is relevant to the case. Schissel | Sound the Note! 15:51, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

"In law" section

This section seems needlessly wordy. There are two real options: either the jury determines that the evidence of guilt is sufficient (so the person is "judged guilty") or not (so the person is "judged not guilty"). Instead the decision tree multiplies the complexity needlessly, by adding conditions that the person "really" is guilty or not.

I just don't see how this better explains the situation. Phiwum (talk) 16:49, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Suggested Removal of 2nd Paragraph

I suggest killing the paragraph that currently mentions Russell's teapot and raises the idea that there could be good reasons to believe that something doesn't exist.

Here's why.

1. If there are good reasons to believe that something doesn't exist those 'good reasons' (if they are in any way valid) constitute a form of evidence or knowledge. No reason to remind people that the argument from ignorance may not apply where the adversaries are not ignorant. 2. Failure to state the reverse. Why say, "Sometimes where we know very little there's good reason to assume that a proposition is false." If we don't include the opposite possibility "Sometimes... that a proposition is true." 3. Lastly, to come to the point. Get this thing out of here because it belongs the God vs. No God debate and comes in unnecessarily and right up front rather than defining the fallacy itself which has much broader usage, and frankly, is the topic of the article. Worse still, these sentences shamelessly argue to rescue the specific perspective that, in the case of God vs. Atheism, (and I can back this up with Russell's famous teapot!) the atheist has good reason to believe the proposition of God to be false without committing the fallacy of argument from ignorance. Whether such a distinction is justifiably clarified I don't really care either way. That there is a kind of predictive and preemptive strike against the way someone might apply or misapply the argument from ignorance to a specific debate is just a silly joke. Again, get this out! Wikipedia is biased enough!

If this is a real concern, eliminate the possibility of misapplication of the fallacy by clearer definition of the fallacy itself. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 5.67.242.251 (talk) 22:08, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

The null result of the Michelson–Morley experiment

I have removed the Michelson–Morley experiment from the list of examples.

The reason is that the article makes an unsourced claim that its null result is "strong evidence" that there is no luminiferous aether.

I have never seen such a claim, only that the luminiferous aether cannot explain the observed null result, which is not the same (and which is not a logical fallacy).

There are many things I have never seen and a source (notable in the field of physics) making an argument from ignorance regarding this observation would justify reinserting the example. Lklundin (talk) 17:42, 22 January 2015 (UTC)