How do you explain the principal of "you cannot prove a negative" to someone that is very weak at abstractions like this?
How do you explain the principal of "you cannot prove a negative" to someone that is very weak at abstractions like this?
Prove to me you never raped your niece
Be careful with this one though.
By simple analogy. You can prove that there are white crows by finding a single white crow, but to prove that there are no white crows you must conduct an exhaustive search of every corner of the earth and never find a single one and somehow be absolutely certain that you didn't miss one somewhere.
The only way to be absolutely certain that you didn't miss something is to be able to look everywhere all at once, otherwise a white crow might evade your notice, and that's impossible.As such all you can say is there probably aren't any white crows because we have lots of experience seeing crows and there has been no evidence of one yet.
Similar to the argument Intelligent Design (anti evolutionists) use. They always point to fossil gaps and say "Well, what happened there?" You have no control over what gets fossilized and where you can find them and there will always be a gap somewhere. "Well there is a gap on Tuesday, 67,000,000 BC!" There is no possible way to fill in every imaginable gap with physical evidence vs seeing patterns and development across those gaps.
This is a very good analogy!
Although to be pedantic, there are white crows; there was one living in my neighborhood some years back.
The invisible pink unicorn is the traditional atheist approach.
tl;dr for others
A: "I have an Pink Unicorn inside the trunk of my car. It vanishes the moment you try to open the trunk or look at it."
B: "What? That's absurd"
A: "I know it exists. It's up to you to disprove it"
B: "But there is no way one can capture/observe/understand it with any sort of scientific instrument"
A: "Don't care. Skill issue"
Stop talking shit about me.
I'm not.
Oh yeah? prove it.
If you subscribe to classical logic (i.e., propositonal or first order logic) this is not true. Proof by contradiction is one of the more common classical logic inference rules that lets you prove negated statements and more specifically can be used to prove nonexistence statements in the first order case. People go so far as to call the proof by contradiction rule "not-introduction" because it allows you to prove negated things.
Here's a wiki page that also disagrees and talks more specifically about this "principle": source (note the seven separate sources on various logicians/philosophers rejecting this "principle" as well).
If you're talking about some other system of logic or some particular existential claim (e.g. existence of god or something else), then I've got not clue. But this is definitely not a rule of classical logic.
When people colloquially say "you cannot prove a negative" they are usually referring to the fact that absence of evidence can not be used to deduce non-existence of some phenomena ("a negative"), whereas the factual discovery of a phenomena can be used to deduce that the phenomena exists ("a positive").
They are therefore not referring to formal negation but rather making a point about deductive vs. inductive reasoning and the asymmetry of these two related questions (existence vs. nonexistence).
There is a bit of nuance to add here in that practically speaking you can't really "discover a fact" by direct observation. But again this is a colloquialism as most laypeople will accept what is directly observable under their noses as factual rather than a noisy data point of one.
I think you are assuming a level of competence from people that I don't have faith people actually have. People absolutely can and do take "you cannot prove a negative" as a real logical rule in the literal negation sense. This isn't colloquialism. This is people misunderstanding what the phrase means.
I have definitely had conversations with idiots that have taken this phrase to mean that you just literally cannot logically prove negated statements. Whether folks like you get that that is not what the phrase refers to is irrelevant to why I'm pointing out the distinction.
Russels teapod is a good example imho
He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.
I love that one of the arguments against this analogy, shown in the Wikipedia, article is the following:
the only way a teapot could have gotten into orbit around the sun would be if some country with sufficiently developed space-shot capabilities had shot this pot into orbit. No country with such capabilities is sufficiently frivolous to waste its resources by trying to send a teapot into orbit.
... what a time to be alive!
Dude...imagine if we could convince Trump/Musk and Space Force/Space X to do this. It's like philosophy's version of the Torment Nexus!
A teapot, no. A racecar, sure, did it a while back and then basically stopped talking about it.
Are you talking to a conspiracy nut? If so, you can forget about reasoning with them. They don’t play this game by the same rules as you do.
No amount of logic, facts or evidence will ever help. They have emotional issues, so you need to use an emotional solution.
No, not a conspiracy but, it is not actually "emotional issues" either. It is dogma, and an emotional solution will not work directly either.
Emotional solutions may seem to help in some cases but not all. The core underlying issue is the human tribal scope. Dogma exists specifically at the level of tribalism. Tribalism is why logic and reasoning are ineffective. Any information from humans outside of the tribe is invalidated based upon membership alone. No information from outsiders is considered valid.
So if you can reach someone with an emotional connection, you are really convincing them that you are part of their tribe. However, if they accept you while the rest of the tribe has not, or they are of low social hierarchical rank in the tribe, they risk becoming an outcast other too, and preventing propagation of reasoning logic.
This dynamic of tribalism is why religious leaders are so powerful and why secular authorities engage with them. If a leader or high ranking members of a tribe endorse such a secular authority, all of the tribe must follow blindly because there is no logic in dogma, only tribalism. It can sound rather absurd, but the reinforcement mechanism is social network isolation of the tribe. Most people don't actually believe the tribal mythos, but if they leave, they lose access to their social network they were born within because this group is mutually exclusive. This social network isolated reinforcement mechanism is why there are regional faiths, and these do not compete on merit of logic or reasoning. If you were born into a region of Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, or Muslim faith tribes, you will be a part of one of these. The issue is not the validity of the tribe. Battling the mythos or ethos of the tribe is only capable of provoking the most combative and least broad-scope self aware members of the group. The only way to effectively change people is to offer them a better tribe and social network than what they have and all that they have ever known. For most humans, leaving their tribe is a death sentence in the same primitive instincts that are at play with dogma.
So, if you follow this logic, first off, welcome to the tribe, because we are doing it too! Tribalism is inescapable at this point in human evolution. Second, it should be rather obvious that any logic or argument with dogma results in the exact opposite effect of what you are trying to accomplish. If you truly want to change a dogmatic person, you must welcome them into your tribe openly. If this action seems difficult, it is because your own tribal scope is not what you believe it to be, and in a sense you were coming to a battle. Third and finally, a High Machiavellian type person with broad stroke abstractive skills can see this type of dynamic like playing with Lego bricks to make a small box; it is trivial. The skill doesn't have anything to do with sensing or emotions. It is like watching a cutaway of an engine assembly turning and intuitively seeing how all the pieces work together well enough to understand the mechanism. And this is why a person that regularly visited Epstein Island, and solicited a porn star for sex because she looked like his daughter, or an open polygamist oligarch is able to buy the heads of dogmatic tribes and get blindly accepted. These people are high Machs too. We are rare relatively speaking in terms of functional thought. High Machiavellian is not necessarily bad. It can be used for good, or like myself – to be one of the few people dumb enough to abandon their isolated socially exclusive network of dogmatism. It also enables raising awareness of those that are dangerously wielding the skill, though only at smaller scales of within a tribe, unless one makes a goal of broad scope influence but that is a challenge as well. Like, I can understand collective motivations like a machine, but I do not understand emotions of influence and popularity well. The same applies to others like Trump and Musk. If they could understand these elements, they would displace the leaders of the dogmas. Instead they must still work to appease these intermediaries.
Convincing someone to abandon their tribe won’t be easy. No matter how logical your explanation is, they’re going to stick to their tribe regardless.
This is correct. Call them fat. When they argue this accuse them of beating their wife. Now you understand how fox news works.