Evidence

From WikiSynergy

Evidence can be defined very broadly, as anything which supports a given claim. Evidence may be direct evidence in which a person reports an experience they had. Or circumstantial evidence which supports other evidence. For example, in the case of the Missing Chocolate Bar, the circumstantial evidence of the child not being hungry for dinner supports the direct evidence of the child being covered in chocolate. The supported hypothesis is that the child ate the chocolate.

Applying this to frontier subjects and pseudoskepticism, it is almost always the case that there is evidence for any given claim. The evidence may be direct or indirect, and it may be any of the following:

1. Valid evidence for a given hypothesis
2. Invalid evidence for a given hypothesis
3. Sufficient evidence for acceptance of the hypothesis
4. Insufficient evidence for acceptance of the hypothesis.

There is generally no hard rule governing how one should evaluate the probability that a given claim is true, especially when the claim is not about hard sciences such as chemistry and physics. In medical science, psychology, and other "softer" science, it is often difficult to assess when an hypothesis has been proven. There is no hard rule governing when evidence has reached the level of sufficiency. At some point failure to accept evidence becomes pseudoskepticism, but a skeptic has wide latitude.

One thing is certain however: saying that there is "no evidence" for any frontier topic is likely to be a false claim. And it shades over into pseudoskepticism —it becomes a pseudoscientific claim— when the topic requires scholarship. If you meet a black cat and then have a stroke of bad luck, that is circumstantial evidence that black cats cause bad luck. It may not be sufficient evidence, but it is evidence nonetheless.

Often the claim of "no evidence" means that the speaker believes that there is not enough evidence, or that the evidence is not valid— it does not support the hypothesis/claim. If this is the meaning, then it is a scientific claim, and must be supported with scholarship and evidence just like any other scientific claim (see Burden of evidence). However, it is perfectly valid for a skeptic to say that they do not know of any evidence, or that they do not know if the evidence is sufficient for acceptance.

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