Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?

[bennyboy]

I meant to respond to this, but forgot about it during the holiday rush.

OFC it's a single, indivisible principle.  Evidence is "that which is evident".  

And truth is "that which is true." So is it true that when I play a game, my character can explore a 3D world, interact with other characters and objects, and enjoy gains and suffer losses?

The obvious answer is yes and no-- it's true in the context of that game. For example, if I know there's a statue just around the corner, I can ask other characters if there's a statue there, or I can run around the corner a few thousand times just to reassure myself.

But in the context of human life, that truth isn't so true. We can see that there's no actual physical space in which the characters interact-- there's a virtual space driven by software and expressed through a computer monitor.

So if I ask "Is there really a statue around that corner?" we're in a pickle-- we cannot establish the truth value of that statement unless we give it a context.

Philosophy does not provide evidence, it's incapable.  It provides proof, truth, which is itself built upon that which is evident.  It's nothing more or less than a system of arranging and exploring claims and relationships regarding that which is evident.   GIGO.

If by "G" you mean "awareness of the limitations of context," then okay.

Brute fact in context and axiom are, in the ways that you use the terms, interchangeable.  I allow for what is evident to be something other than a fact.  I have to ask, though, what context is it that we can eschew the evident?  What context can we avoid refering to what is evident, and how might we manage doing that, as creatures who define context....as you say above, -by- what is evident?

I think you're asking the wrong kind of questions. Any experience can be called "evidence" if you think it reveals truth. But you're still stuck with the problem of context-- some things' truth values are dependent on the context in which the truth statements are posed.

The error that we see so much in philosophical discussions is that contextual truths are generalized beyond their scope. Evidence is a good example: is anything we can see evidence for or against any philosophical idea about metaphysical truth? No, it's not.

I get that you're trying to reach for something, but honestly, anytime I see these sorts of comments they strike me as empty deepity.  An attempt to express the in-expressable, for whatever reason, to be generous.

There seems little point to me in attempting to express the easily-expressible. It's the boundaries of understanding and communication at which the interesting stuff happens.

Minds of gods and matrices and even "your experience", for example, are subjects that rely on elaborate evidentiary underpinnings, whether true or false.  Without those evidentiary underpinnings they are non-referent, empty terms, meaningless.

If you want to take truth-in-context which supports other truths in the same context, you can always call that "evidence," because evidence is just a word talking about that. But it is in our nature to expand our understanding, and that process starts by determining which truths can be extended into which contexts. Evidence-in-this-context cannot be reasonably expected to extend into evidence-in-a-metaphysical-context, and appeals to evidence for metaphysical ideas aren't the slam-dunks that the askers really think they are. It's just evidence that people don't understand how evidence works.