For the record I don’t believe any of it is real although I wish ghosts etc were since I have a major interest in the paranormal

    • TheIvoryTower@lemmy.world
      15·
      1 year ago

      From the article: “Maybe people mean that no inductive argument will conclusively, indubitably prove a negative proposition beyond all shadow of a doubt.”

      While you are correct, its fair to assume that the above is what is meant here.

    • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
      61·
      1 year ago

      That article is straight up delusion that completely ignores the principles of logic it’s falsely built on, asserting assumptions that are not fact or loosely based on fact as “true”. It’s anti-science, anti-logic, and anti-intelligence in all forms.

      Formal logic is entirely unconnected to objective truth. It is a tool to reason that starts with assumptions. You can prove something is logically or mathematically consistent. You cannot prove anything is objectively true or false using formal logic, because it is dependent upon the initial assumptions you used, and his assumptions are nonsense.

      • Kerfuffle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Wow, you’re not joking. That actually was terrible. He does sort of have a point that if you positively prove something that excludes something else, you have essentially proven a negative. It doesn’t work for stuff outside of abstract logical rules though and the way he argued his case is pretty bad.

        you can prove that you aren’t nonexistent. Congratulations, you’ve just proven a negative. The beautiful part is that you can do this trick with absolutely any proposition whatsoever. Prove P is true and you can prove that P is not false. Some people seem to think that you can’t prove a specific sort of negative claim, namely that a thing does not exist. So it is impossible to prove that Santa Claus, unicorns, the Loch Ness Monster, God, pink elephants, WMD in Iraq, and Bigfoot don’t exist. Of course, this rather depends on what one has in mind by ‘prove.’

        "Can you construct a valid deductive argument with all true premises that yields the conclusion that there are no unicorns? Sure. Here’s one, using the valid inference procedure of modus tollens: 1. If unicorns had existed, then there is evidence in the fossil record. 2. There is no evidence of unicorns in the fossil record. 3. Therefore, unicorns never existed."

        I bet if we wait 10 years, we’ll find evidence of a new creature in the the fossil record. Prior to that point, we could “prove” that the creature doesn’t exist?

        “Someone might object that that was a bit too fast—after all, I didn’t prove that the two premises were true. I just asserted that they were true. Well, that’s right. However, it would be a grievous mistake to insist that someone prove all the premises of any argument they might give.”

        Hahaha. In other words, some might object that to prove something we need to prove something. How about we just don’t prove it and say we did?