So is there ever a time where you can use absence of evidence alone to disprove a theory, or do you always need other evidence as well? Because is some cases absence of evidence clearly does not disprove a theory, such as when quantum physics was first being discovered, there was not a lot of evidence for it, but can the inverse ever be true will lack of evidence aloneproves the theory is false?
The absence of an observation may be strong evidence of absence or very weak evidence of absence, depending on how likely the cause is to produce the observation.
So, yes, absence of evidence can convincingly disprove a theory in some cases (although, as ChristianKI points out, Bayesians typically do not assign probabilities of 0 or 1 to any theory).
So is there ever a time where you can use absence of evidence alone to disprove a theory, or do you always need other evidence as well? Because is some cases absence of evidence clearly does not disprove a theory, such as when quantum physics was first being discovered, there was not a lot of evidence for it, but can the inverse ever be true will lack of evidence alone proves the theory is false?
The idea of Bayesianism is that you think in terms of probability instead of true and false.
From the OP:
So, yes, absence of evidence can convincingly disprove a theory in some cases (although, as ChristianKI points out, Bayesians typically do not assign probabilities of 0 or 1 to any theory).