tags: Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, UFO, space aliens, argumentum ad ignorantiam, appeal to ignorance, AMNH, streaming video
The argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam ("appeal to ignorance"), argument by lack of imagination, or negative evidence, is a logical fallacy in which it is claimed that a premise is true only because it has not been proven false, or is false only because it has not been proven true.
The argument from personal incredulity, also known as argument from personal belief or argument from personal conviction, refers to an assertion that because one personally finds a premise unlikely or unbelievable, the premise can be assumed to be false, or alternatively that another preferred but unproven premise is true instead.
Both arguments commonly share this structure: a person regards the lack of evidence for one view as constituting proof that another view is true. The types of fallacies discussed in this article should not be confused with the reductio ad absurdum method of argument, in which a valid logical contradiction of the form "A and not A" is used to disprove a premise.
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Oh joy - this is the perfect excuse for me to urge you to investigate these unexplained (well, to me) phenomena, should you happen to be in the neighborhood...
I would go a bit further.
The argument from personal incredulity is, at it's base, a statement of "I can't (or won't) believe X." However, cognitively, it is much more often applied to an active bias for a specific outcome rather than a lack of comprehension - the exact opposite order from which you list them. The difference is that the bias takes the form of X=(my preference being false) where comprehension issues have X=(a premise I don't understand as being false).
An easier way to think about it is Evolution. Most people who deny Evolution do so from a position that their religion must be true and Evolution contradicts it. Only some do so because the evidence is genuinely beyond their ability to grasp.
Starting at that end of the equation also leads them to another fallacy - the false dichotomy. Someone who doesn't *understand* Evolution can posit some third, easier for them to grasp, alternative that doesn't invoke religion (for example, Lysenkoism). Someone who doesn't believe it because they've already decided their alternative can leave no room for other alternatives, and in their mind bashing one is by default evidence for the other.
Of course, the example topic I've chosen also gets into a whole quagmire of other issues cataloged as "denialism," but that's a much longer issue.
He could have just said "no".
He sure is right about humans and their belief in what they see.
I just hear Jane Goodall on radio. She'd gone to Greenland and had seen the glaciers melting and the people with tears in their eyes. She didn't say if they were tears of joy that at long last,now that the effects of the little Ice Age were finally coming to an end, they'd be able to grow a few tomatoes and some grass for their sheep, and their fuel bills would shrink a bit.
Great clip - thanks. Funny, if you substitute "god" for "alien" you'd have a pretty good argument against the existence of an omnipotent being as well.
Oh man, I've never heard of this Tyson guy before, and I swear he's now one of my new favorite people EVAR ;)
(The aliens do indeed always do "the sex experiments", which is kind of strange because it sounds almost exactly like the sort of erotic fantasy that Very Strange People would have... exactly the sort of Very Strange People who tend to report alien abduction)
I did not watch the video, but this post touched a personal note since I used to be a big fan of UFOs and kooky stuff way back when I was a teenager. There was not a lack of evidence for it, but to the contrary there was quite a lot of evidence which was no less strong than what was presented to support ideas taught in the classroom and in the news. Lots of people said they saw UFOs and aliens, including trustworthy people like pilots and police officers! There was physical evidence, including scraps of metal and fields cleared in a circular pattern! I did not know how to weigh this evidence, which was very flimsy in retrospect, until college with a few more years of life behind me. At the time, it seemed to be as well grounded and well argued as anything.
I credit Kenneth Feder's "Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries" with straightening me out. I forget whether it was required or only recommended reading for an introductory anthro course, but apparently the anthro department got so many people like me that they told students to read it. I figure that most people never took that anthro course or any courses in logical reasoning, if they went to college at all, so a lot of people are probably as gullible as I used to be.
It is just such an argument-from-ignorance to make the claim that no one can say UFOs are extra-terrestrial beings. It is impossible to say they are not extra-terrestrial, for there is far, far too much evidence that inexplicable things have been seen by tens of thousands of persons. Even more, what are we to do with the hundreds, if not thousands of accounts of persons who have literally seen, and in some cases come into close physical contact with non-human beings? You cannot in good faith just dismiss all such accounts out of hand.
Bottom line? There is something happening, something being seen, something being actually experienced by countless persons; and it defies belief that all such occurrences have an earthly explanation. I don't claim to know what is happening. But it is dishonest to mock every occurrence.
"I did not watch the video, but this post touched a personal note since I used to be a big fan of UFOs and kooky stuff way back when I was a teenager."
As was I, somewhat. I'm still a big FAN of it... it made for some great episodes of The X-files, not to mention one of Will Smith's better comedies. And it's a lot of fun to learn about people's weird and extreme ideas. I just don't find it credible.
'The argument from ignorance' could also be called the 'argument from arrogance'. "I know what an airplane looks like and that doesn't look like an airplane, so it is a UFO, which is a spaceship......yadda, yadda, yadda."
Same with CR/ID'ers. "I know enough about Evolution to dismiss it"........but usually they know almost nothing.
#8 jum1801 "SIGH" Go back & re-watch the video. Science cannot make any progress at investigating a phenomena until it gets the evidence to work with. Until it does, it is just wild speculation & spinning your wheels.
Whenever someone says that thousands of people claim to see UFO's, I recall that thousands of people also claimed to be or see witches in the Middle Ages. Something was going on then, too, but it wasn't covens popping up in every village like a Middle Age version of Starbucks.
Isn't this the same as the frequent Bush administration claim that because we weren't attacked again after 9/11/01 that they kept us safe. The fact that an attack hasn't happened is not evidence that it would have happened.