(December 28, 2018 at 7:29 pm)Amarok Wrote: Yeah they don't require a reason to not accept a claim someone just asserted and nor does it matter .
Suppose someone posted on Twitter: "Donald Trump just said something stupid."
This is an unsupported assertion. It doesn't contain any evidence. But I think you might not reject it out of hand. Given what you know of events, it seems likely. Later on you may have to reject it if you discover that Trump had been uncharacteristically silent, but the simple fact that it is an unsupported assertion doesn't mean you'll reject it.
On the other hand, if someone tweeted: "A snake just told me what tomorrow's lottery numbers are," I suspect you would reject the truth of this out of hand. It is not only unsupported, it also contradicts what you know of the world. Snakes don't talk, and nobody knows the future. Here you are rejecting an assertion not because it is in itself unsupported, but because you have good reasons.
Whether we reject an assertion or not depends on what we believe about the world. In the case of the talking snake, there are good reasons not to believe in it. What we believe about the world constitutes our reasons for rejecting an assertion or not.
