Appeal to ignorance

[georgemw at speakeasy.net]

On 11 Jan 2002, at 21:26, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

> At 2:10 PM -0800 on 1/11/02, "Eric Cordian" makes an actual appeal to
> ignorance...:
> 
> 
> > I see not a single denial.
> 
> Ah. Prove to you that he didn't say it?
> <http://gncurtis.home.texas.net/ignorant.html>
> 
> 
> :-).
> 

That's not a bad page, but it makes what I consider to be an error
in that it attempts to distinguish between the fallicy of
appeal to ignorance and the more valid line of reasoning
called the auto-epistemic (an example given being  "If there really were a 
large and unusual type of animal in Loch Ness, then we would have 
undeniable evidence of it by now We don't have undeniable evidence of 
a large, unfamiliar animal in Loch Ness. 
Therefore, there is no such animal.".) 

But actually, these lines of reasoning are formally the same.
The difference is whether or not you are willing to accept the
premise "we've looked enough that we'd find it if it were there"
as valid.  My point is that this really isn't a question of good or bad
reasoning, it's a question of disagreement over fact.

We all agree that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary
proof".  But just how extraordinary is the claim that
Sharon said something incredibly stupid?  
	Declan rejects Eric's claim that if the quote were false then
there would have been an official denial,  but it appears that
this is based on the fact that the quote only appeared in a couple
small papers, and that he would accept Eric's reasoning as valid
if the quote had appeared in more, larger papers.  Eric's idea that
the US media is all afraid of the pro-Israel lobby suggests that
we should look for this quote in papers published outside
the US.  I was curious about this alleged quote, and in fact I
was able to find a citation in a large well-known paper published
outside the US.  That publication is known as "Pravda".
	The reader must draw his own conclusions.  Personally, I think
Eric is going way out on a limb for no good reason on this one.
Evidence for the quote appears to me to be shakey at best,
whereas I think there's pretty solid evidence of Saron doing
far worse than making that stupid statement anyway.  
For example, on a lark I typed "crimes ariel sharon" into google
just to see what it would come up with, and by one of life's
little amusing coincidences, among 20,000 other hits was this
one from amnesty international urging Sharon be tried for
war crimes allegedly commited during the occupation of Lebanon
http://www.web.amnesty.org/ai.nsf/recent/MDE150892001?OpenDocu
ment

What's so funny about that, you ask? The date is Oct 3 2001!

George
 
 
.