Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?

[bennyboy]

Yes.  All experiences, and nothing provably more than that.  Absolutely.  All that goes with a discovery-- hearing people talk about it, writing numbers on a paper, looking things up on the internet, 100% of it-- it's all experience.  Inferences beyond that may be judged on their pragmatic value, but it must be understand that theories of material are really theories of experience.

While I do not necessarily disagree, does not the "pragmatic" assumption of objectivity allow that impersonal descriptions of the world may be given, and adjudged to be objectively true or false, regardless of any single individual's experience?  Would you consider these to be "theories of experience," though said individual experience need not be included in the description?

Absolutely, they are theories of experience. When I throw two billiard balls together on a table, I experience the feel of my hands on them, their sound, and the sight of their movement in various directions. What I really want to study is why things, whatever-they-really-are-or-aren't, act the whey they do in my experience. Whether the billiard balls are things in a mono-materialism, or composite ideas in the Mind of God, or simulations in the Matrix, doesn't matter. I have my remembered experiences, including those of being informed about things in school, and my newly-perceived experiences, including either the process of doing an experiment or the process of googling a video about it and watching it on Youtube, and I want to see how they are connected.

Whether people are or aren't real outside my experience of them, I can still consider what they say. If they describe a mathematical relationship, say the formula for gravity, I can attempt to validate that relationship. If they say there's a Sky Daddy, then I can attempt to validate that, too. In either case, I am seeing if a proposed relationship (possibly proposed by figments of my imagination, but I don't care) holds true in my experience.