How We Evaluate Claims
I wrote this some time ago and never published it. It's pretty simple but I hope that it helps to get the point across. How We Evaluate Claims When we are presented with a particular claim, regardless of the content, we go through a process to determine whether or not the claim is true. If we can find nothing with which to justify the claim, we can simply stop there. There is no need to accept a claim which has not been positively justified. We certainly can go on to search for disconfirming evidence, something which would show that the claim is not true; however by this point it isn’t necessary to do so in order to reject the claim’s truthfulness. However, time and time again, we see and hear people making the argument that ‘you can’t prove that it’s NOT true’. We don’t have to. It is never reasonable to accept a claim based on the non-existence of disconfirming evidence alone. Bertrand Russell demonstrates why this is so with his teapot analogy. For example, it may be that ‘...