RE: Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence
November 8, 2015 at 2:22 pm
(This post was last modified: November 8, 2015 at 3:00 pm by SteelCurtain.)
(November 8, 2015 at 12:55 pm)Esquilax Wrote:
Nope. Observation is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for rationally justified belief. Obviously if you can't observe a phenomena in one way or another you have no way to detect it, but what we also need to recognize is that our observational capabilities are notoriously unreliable on their own; there are plenty of things we can observe that either are not true, in that the true scale of the phenomena is beyond our ability to comprehend personally (think of the flat Earth, revealed to be round when we gain the capacity to increase the scale of our observations) or turn out to have a cause that's different from the one we'd previously come to. Observation helps, but does not on its own demonstrate as much as you'd think. It's step one, really.
It seems that you are arguing against the level of knowledge, not observation. How did we determine that the earth was not flat? Did it include further observation?
Quote:I always find it odd that people make this argument. It's like... do you just think there's no answer to it? Because there is: you can test the efficacy of believing extraordinary claims on mundane evidence as an epistemological method, and see whether those beliefs turn out to be rationally justified or true in the end. From there, you'd have a good relief map of whether believing extraordinary claims on mundane evidence leads to true beliefs or false beliefs, on average. In fact, we already have a sample group for that: it's called all of human history. Our past is rife with people believing extraordinary claims based on mundane phenomena, and uniformly those phenomena have turned out to be, indeed, mundane. Thunder comes from the gods! ... Only no it doesn't, the explanation is mundane. That belief is wrong. Natural disasters are signs that the gods are angry! ... Only no, there's natural explanations for that too, that belief is wrong. Witches! ... Oh wait, not real. Miracles! ... Oh, hold on...
Every single time an extraordinary belief has been proposed on the back of ordinary evidence, that belief has turned out to be wrong, and an ordinary cause has been found. Every. Single. Time. Holding extraordinary beliefs based on mundane evidence has a zero percent success rate, and this is evidence, the best evidence, that holding extraordinary beliefs like that inevitably leads to holding untrue beliefs. That proposed system is ineffective, and that's a trend, no anecdotes required.
I like how that in the first part of this reply, you are arguing against observation being sufficient. Then in the second part here, you appeal to observation, to support an outlandish claim and as the answer. Also, we could make similar claims, that every time science has been shown to be incorrect, that it has a 100% tract record of being shown as unreliable. (This is not an argument against science, but the reasoning behind your statement)
Again, I find that your argument and use of the word ordinary to be highly subjective. It is based on understanding, and as understanding increases, what was extraordinary becomes ordinary. Therefore the skeptic has the right to demand extraordinary evidence for whatever they choose.
