WLC: "You can't prove the negative"

[Belacqua]

A while back we were talking about the word "falsify."

I explained that in Popper's sense of the word, you can falsify the statement "there is no monster in Loch Ness." If you found a monster there, then the statement would be falsified.

However, you can't falsify the statement "there is a monster in Loch Ness." That's because you could get a thousand experts to comb the whole lake, but there is always the chance that you've missed the monster. Just because you haven't found it isn't proof that it doesn't exist.

Obviously, the monster has mind-control powers, like Alec Guinness in the first Star Wars. When the scuba diver finds him, the monster waves his hand and says, "I am not the monster you're looking for." And the scuba diver goes away.

The point is that you can falsify the negative statement, but you can't prove it. You can't prove there is no monster.

When I wrote this before, several of the regular posters here told me I was all wrong, that of course we can prove there's no monster. So apparently it is a strongly-held belief among several posters that negatives can be proven. They think that "there is no monster in Loch Ness" has been proven.

No need to as that's not how the burden of proof works. 

The statement should always be there is a monster - which carries the burden of proof. If there is no monster that is known and/or seen etc; there's no need to claim that there is no monster, no need to prove anything. Otherwise infinite unprovable claims can be made about any random concept of imagination.

We had a recent thread about how the burden of proof works.

Some people seem to think it's a law, as if it was handed down by Moses, or is some kind of law of nature. Others disagree. It may not be as self-evident as it seems.