Burden of Proof: where it lies

[tonyrey]

Being open-minded means that one should suspend

belief. Your dilemma is false!
Actually I proposed a true dichotomy between believing and not believing. Suspending belief means not believing, so I’ll take your answer to be a reluctant no.

Suspending belief doesn’t mean not believing. It means keeping an open mind until you decide whether it is reasonable to believe. Agnosticism is distinct from atheism.

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So would you say that those who do not accept a claim have a burden of proof just as much as those who do accept a claim?

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                             It depends how **reasonable** the acceptance or rejection of the claim is.
                  It is the other way around.  The reasonableness of the acceptance  or rejection of the claim depends on whether or not the claim has met  its burden of proof.  For example, one would reasonably accept that the  Earth revolves around the Sun because it has met its burden of proof.

Initially there were conflicting claims about the nature of reality of which the sole criterion was their relative superiority. There was no mythical state of knowledge which had met its burden of proof…

Not accepting a claim is not necessarily the same as ignoring it, which in turn is not necessarily tantamount to rejecting it. A juror who votes “not guilty” is not ignoring the prosecutor’s assertion that the accused person committed a crime. On the other hand, if people are making extraordinary claims without a shred of evidence, it is probably not worth paying too much attention to them until they are able to provide any evidence at all.

Then you agree that it is not a dilemma! There are three possible viewpoints: “yes”, “no” and “neither yes nor no”.

How do you determine whether there is sufficient evidence? That is the key question…

Actually, the key question of this thread is who ought to provide evidence (i.e., have the burden of proof). I think the answer is whoever makes a truth claim.

Everyone who is concerned is implicitly or explicitly making a truth claim!

We can determine if there is sufficient evidence by reasonably considering the data and the claim it may or may not support.

I agree.

 

[sedonaman]

What about conspiracy theories? Who has the burden of proof? It seems to me that any important event will generate a lot of unanswerable questions, and these questions form the “proof” that there must be more to the explanation than what the official one offers. These questions are nothing more than speculation at worst and circumstantial evidence at best. Those who reject this speculation then run off and write complex responses that amount to explaining “why not?”, like this response popularmechanics.com/technology/military/news/1227842 to 9-11 conspiracy theories. Professor Edward Feser offers a related explanation in “We the Sheeple: Why Conspiracy Theories Persist”:
…A clue to the real attraction of conspiracy theories, I would suggest, lies in the rhetoric of theorists themselves, which is filled with self-congratulatory descriptions of those who accept such theories as “willing to think,” “educated,” “independent-minded,” and so forth, and with invective against the “uninformed” and “unthinking” “sheeple” who “blindly follow authority.” The world of the conspiracy theorist is Manichean: either you are intelligent, well-informed, and honest, and therefore question all authority and received opinion; or you accept what popular opinion or an authority says and therefore must be stupid, dishonest, and ignorant. There is no third option.

…where phenomena remote from everyday human experience are concerned – the large-scale structure of space/time, the microscopic realm of molecules, atoms, and so forth – it is perhaps not surprising that human beings should for long periods of time have gotten things wrong. But where everyday matters are concerned – where opinions touch on our basic understanding of human nature and the facts about ordinary social interaction – it is very likely that they would not, in general, get things wrong.

… For in forming our beliefs we must always start somewhere, and have nowhere else to start except the general picture of the world we have inherited from our parents, society, and people who due to special experience or study have more knowledge of a subject matter than we do. Of course, we can and do often criticize some particular part of this picture, but the very criteria we appeal to in order to do so typically derive from other parts of it. What we cannot coherently do is question the inherited picture as a whole, or regard it as if there were a general presumption against it.
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I would suggest, then, that the post-Enlightenment pretense of hostility to authority, tradition, and common sense as such, and especially the extreme form of it represented by the likes of Marx and Nietzsche, is what really underlies the popularity of conspiracy theories, particularly those involving 9/11. The absurd idea that to be intelligent, scientific, and intellectually honest requires a distrust for all authority per se and a contempt for the opinions of the average person, has so deeply permeated the modern Western consciousness that conspiratorial thinking has for many people come to seem the rational default position.
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tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=092006B

Any thoughts?

 

[antunesaa]

I agree with Tony that the who has the burden of proof depends on the nature of the subject. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and so forth. In some cases Fr of Jazz you are right, but not in all cases.
Especially in more primitive/ancient cultures:
if it is generally accepted by a group of people that rain is caused by the Goddess Hkekewkfi crying, and then someone comes along and says, but wait, what if those rain drops are coming from those clouds bc the cloud couldn’t hold that much water, I’d say that while the guy claiming rain comes from clouds need to have some evidence for this, the rest of the tribe, who believes it is caused by a invisible woman crying has more of the burden of proof. So while you can’t just come up with a contradictory claim and expect everyone to believe it without evidence, it really depends on the nature of the subject to determine who has the greater burden of proof.
A new, innovative idea/explanation presents a good opportunity for the older, accepted claim to be re-evaluated with a critical eye.
It just depends though.

I agree with Fr of Jazz in that your example actually proves his point. But I have a rather famous example (although I have no time to give you specifics about it but I’m sure you’ll be able to find it in the web) where Fr of Jazz’s thesis is uphelp. I think it was during the 17th century (or perhaps the 18th century) that Jesuit priests arrived in China and eventually had access to the Chinese emperor. Impressed by the Jesuits’ knowledge on astronomy, and faced with the reaction of the court’s resident Chinese astronomers, he eventually launched a contest among astronomers to predict the next solar or moon eclipse. Of course, armed with the Western already advanced astronomy the Jesuits won spectacularly. There was a new contest, which the Jesuits won again, thereby settling the dispute and the Chinese ancient methods had to be discarded for this specific purpose.

In this rather materialistic subject, settling the matters can be easy. It’s much more difficult to settle them in more complicated environments, particularly when people are involved. But I think the burden of proof usually lies on those proposing new theories.