If someone says there is “no evidence” of something then it is because they are trying to pass off “nobody looked for Bigfoot and nobody found him” as “explorers looked for Bigfoot and nobody found him”.
A “no evidence” argument doesn’t have to be made in bad faith. It’s claiming that we’ve looked into the people who said they saw Bigfoot (as opposed to looking for Bigfoot itself), and concluded those claims have no good evidence behind them. And so, without evidence, we should rule out Bigfoot, because the prior for Bigfoot is very low. We would need positive evidence to raise the Bigfoot hypothesis to the level of conscious consideration, and we claim there is no such evidence.
Yes, a claim of “no evidence” is—in this context—a social attack on the people who were talking about the subject (and so implicitly claiming “yes evidence”). In the highly politicized context Zvi is discussing, almost all factual arguments are disguised social attacks; rhetorics, meant to persuade people, with facts and logic being instrumental but not the goal.
And so we can justly ignore the whole discussion because we think it’s not about facts and arguments and real “evidence” and it never was. But if we want to engage with the discussion using our own arguments and evidence (or to pretend to do so for our own social goals), then we should acknowledge that a valid factual claim is being made here, which we can evaluate without dismissing it as purely rhetorical manipulation (“passing off argument A as argument B”).
Zvi wrote,
No evidence should be fully up there with “government denial” or “I didn’t do it, no one saw me do it, there’s no way they can prove anything.” If there was indeed no evidence, there’d be no need to claim there was no evidence, and this is usually a move to categorize the evidence as illegitimate and irrelevant because it doesn’t fit today’s preferred form of scientism.
I disagree with this. If people claim Bigfoot exists, and I think they have no evidence for that claim, then yes I will say there is no evidence. The mere fact that people claim A is not in itself evidence for A, because people are not pure truth-seekers, and if I acknowledge any claim as itself constituting evidence, they will proceed to claim lots of things without evidence behind them. I don’t need to “categorize the evidence as illegitimate and irrelevant”, I should be able to say plainly that there is no evidence to begin with. It’s not because “it doesn’t fit today’s preferred form of scientism”, it’s because seeing a vague outline in a snow-storm really truly isn’t evidence for Bigfoot.
When people we don’t like claim things that are clearly wrong, we may want to dismiss their arguments are rhetorically invalid or malicious or made in bad faith. To claim that the form of such arguments necessarily indicates they are being made in bad faith. But that is engaging on their terms—analyzing why they’re making the arguments, instead of analyzing the arguments themselves (simulacra levels!). These two discussions are both necessary but they should be kept apart. On the object level, we should be able to keep saying—the arguments are not “wrongly shaped”, they are just factually wrong.
The mere fact that people claim A is not in itself evidence for A, because people are not pure truth-seekers, and if I acknowledge any claim as itself constituting evidence, they will proceed to claim lots of things without evidence behind them.
Technically, this would only be true if claims for A were perfectly independent of the truth of A. Your argument, as written, seems to imply radical skepticism, at least for some topics.
And you seem to be falling into the trap of thinking of things as being members of a simple binary set of mutually exclusive categories of ‘evidence’ or ‘not evidence’. The generally held view of the users of this site tho is that it’s better to expand the size of the set of ‘evidence’ categories, e.g. standard probabilities. (I don’t think it’s particularly necessary to use real numbers (versus your implied ‘0’ or ‘1’ binary values), but it sure is useful to use at least more than two categories.)
It’s not true that there’s literally no evidence of Bigfoot, it’s that the evidence is very weak.
As another commenter pointed out, a big part of this ‘disagreement’ is really people ‘talking past each other’ and a big part of that is the ‘evidence’ means different things to different people.
A “no evidence” argument doesn’t have to be made in bad faith. It’s claiming that we’ve looked into the people who said they saw Bigfoot (as opposed to looking for Bigfoot itself), and concluded those claims have no good evidence behind them. And so, without evidence, we should rule out Bigfoot, because the prior for Bigfoot is very low. We would need positive evidence to raise the Bigfoot hypothesis to the level of conscious consideration, and we claim there is no such evidence.
Yes, a claim of “no evidence” is—in this context—a social attack on the people who were talking about the subject (and so implicitly claiming “yes evidence”). In the highly politicized context Zvi is discussing, almost all factual arguments are disguised social attacks; rhetorics, meant to persuade people, with facts and logic being instrumental but not the goal.
And so we can justly ignore the whole discussion because we think it’s not about facts and arguments and real “evidence” and it never was. But if we want to engage with the discussion using our own arguments and evidence (or to pretend to do so for our own social goals), then we should acknowledge that a valid factual claim is being made here, which we can evaluate without dismissing it as purely rhetorical manipulation (“passing off argument A as argument B”).
Zvi wrote,
I disagree with this. If people claim Bigfoot exists, and I think they have no evidence for that claim, then yes I will say there is no evidence. The mere fact that people claim A is not in itself evidence for A, because people are not pure truth-seekers, and if I acknowledge any claim as itself constituting evidence, they will proceed to claim lots of things without evidence behind them. I don’t need to “categorize the evidence as illegitimate and irrelevant”, I should be able to say plainly that there is no evidence to begin with. It’s not because “it doesn’t fit today’s preferred form of scientism”, it’s because seeing a vague outline in a snow-storm really truly isn’t evidence for Bigfoot.
When people we don’t like claim things that are clearly wrong, we may want to dismiss their arguments are rhetorically invalid or malicious or made in bad faith. To claim that the form of such arguments necessarily indicates they are being made in bad faith. But that is engaging on their terms—analyzing why they’re making the arguments, instead of analyzing the arguments themselves (simulacra levels!). These two discussions are both necessary but they should be kept apart. On the object level, we should be able to keep saying—the arguments are not “wrongly shaped”, they are just factually wrong.
Technically, this would only be true if claims for A were perfectly independent of the truth of A. Your argument, as written, seems to imply radical skepticism, at least for some topics.
And you seem to be falling into the trap of thinking of things as being members of a simple binary set of mutually exclusive categories of ‘evidence’ or ‘not evidence’. The generally held view of the users of this site tho is that it’s better to expand the size of the set of ‘evidence’ categories, e.g. standard probabilities. (I don’t think it’s particularly necessary to use real numbers (versus your implied ‘0’ or ‘1’ binary values), but it sure is useful to use at least more than two categories.)
It’s not true that there’s literally no evidence of Bigfoot, it’s that the evidence is very weak.
As another commenter pointed out, a big part of this ‘disagreement’ is really people ‘talking past each other’ and a big part of that is the ‘evidence’ means different things to different people.