I have encountered a number of disputes that revolve around using these two different senses of the word, and am nonetheless blindsided by them consistently.
I try to always specify the strength of evidence in some sense when using the word. I think when I do use it unmodified I tend to use it in the technical sense (including even weak evidence).
It would be odd if ‘evidence’ excluded weak evidence, since then ‘weak evidence’ would be a contradiction in terms, or you could see people arguing things like “When I said ‘weak evidence’ I didn’t mean the 1e-15 bit case, since that’s not evidence at all!”
I’m sympathetic to both views.
I have encountered a number of disputes that revolve around using these two different senses of the word, and am nonetheless blindsided by them consistently.
I try to always specify the strength of evidence in some sense when using the word. I think when I do use it unmodified I tend to use it in the technical sense (including even weak evidence).
It would be odd if ‘evidence’ excluded weak evidence, since then ‘weak evidence’ would be a contradiction in terms, or you could see people arguing things like “When I said ‘weak evidence’ I didn’t mean the 1e-15 bit case, since that’s not evidence at all!”