Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?

[bennyboy]

As a purely negative or skeptical conclusion, I agree with you.  We cannot know such truths with complete certainty.  But is there a spectrum in which some methods are objectively more likely to be closer to fact in their description of "the reality that underlies" experience?  Absolutely.  Is this a move that can only be made for pragmatic reasons?  I don't think so.  Logic and empirical verification go a long way, or so I think we have most reason to believe.  And either we have reason to be confident in the truths that we establish -- whether these should be conceived as absolute or provisional -- or, au contaire, to be skeptical of them, as you suggest.

This is why I'm so obsessed with the idea of truth-in-context. All the things we know can be called true, even objectively true, in context. In the context of my everyday life, I'm very confident that if I know there's an apple on my desk, and ask my wife to go into my room and tell me what's on the desk, she'll report that fact.

Whether my wife and the apple exist outside my experience of them is a much different context. Whether the Universe and its rules are all that reality consists of is, too. When we start talking about things like that, we have to acknowledge that everything we "know" is limited in context.

To reflect back to the OP, I'd say that evidence can be taken as a brute fact IN CONTEXT: it doesn't need to be validated, and we do not need "evidence for evidence," because we are defining our context BY evidence. Evidence itself is the framework for our mundane world view. In other words, and I suspect Rhythm is getting at this: our world view is as good as our inquiries so far EVEN IF we're in the Matrix or the Mind of God.

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Long story short, we have limitations...and sure, we've come up with systems to help overcome those limitations but they have limitations as well.  If a person answers the question "can we know x" with yes.....no amount of "but can we really know that we know x" will yield a functionally different answer, and for a person that answers any question in that infinite chain of non-objections with "no" - no further comment can be made about anything without the liberal use of contradictory and stolen concepts.  If a person knows that we can't really know x, then they know something - but how?  If a person points to evidence that they can't trust evidence, how can they trust that evidence?

Because evidence isn't a single principle, indivisible. You can refer to my above post to mudhammam. If I'm a detective, and I discover your DNA at a crime scene, that's evidence-in-context: in the context of living out my mundane life, I accept that the DNA demonstrates that you were in that place.

If I want philosophical evidence that you, the crime scene, and the DNA are supported only by a Universe with its properties and rules, and that that universe isn't supported necessarily by something outside it (and which is likely therefore non-physical), then you can't point at the bullet hole in someone's head and take it as evidence in that larger context.

Ultimately, the evidentiary question is axiomatic.  Either you refer to what is evident as the locus of all claims or you do not.  Good luck not referring to it, good luck not accepting the evidentiary axiom.  I doubt that human beings are capable.

You call it axiomatic. I call it brute fact in context. I don't think in the context of daily life that we can even attempt to discard evidence as a useful tool. But daily life is not the only context we attempt to think or communicate about, and we have to be more sensitive to what we take as given when we try to broaden the context of discussion.