Post by Deleted on Oct 7, 2017 18:24:45 GMT -5
A number of statements have been made recently by several posters - from widely differing viewpoints - but all have raised interesting questions.
I am about to start two new Deep Thought threads to which I very much hope members will wish to contribute.
This is the first one.
It is frequently urged - particularly when religious issues are involved - that you cannot prove a negative.
Actually this statement is false.
I will post a couple of references which some may wish to check out for further enlightenment.
Steven D. Hales, "Thinking Tools: You Can Prove a Negative" (PDF). Bloomsburg University, 2005.
T. Edward Dame (2009). Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments, Cengage Learning, 2009
Now the most obvious area in which negatives can be proved is in the process of induction by simple enumeration.
Until Europeans discovered Australia, the statement 'all swans are white' had no known exceptions. Then black swans were discovered and the statement was shown to be false.
Brouwer and Heyting (among others) have shown that a thing can be both a and not-A.
Electrons as we know are BOTH particles and trains of waves.
So the law of excluded middle is not universally valid any more than induction by simple enumeration is a sufficient proof of anything.
Arrow's impossiblity theorem also demonstrates the fallacy of claiming that it is impossible to prove a negative.
I am about to start two new Deep Thought threads to which I very much hope members will wish to contribute.
This is the first one.
It is frequently urged - particularly when religious issues are involved - that you cannot prove a negative.
Actually this statement is false.
I will post a couple of references which some may wish to check out for further enlightenment.
Steven D. Hales, "Thinking Tools: You Can Prove a Negative" (PDF). Bloomsburg University, 2005.
T. Edward Dame (2009). Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments, Cengage Learning, 2009
Now the most obvious area in which negatives can be proved is in the process of induction by simple enumeration.
Until Europeans discovered Australia, the statement 'all swans are white' had no known exceptions. Then black swans were discovered and the statement was shown to be false.
Brouwer and Heyting (among others) have shown that a thing can be both a and not-A.
Electrons as we know are BOTH particles and trains of waves.
So the law of excluded middle is not universally valid any more than induction by simple enumeration is a sufficient proof of anything.
Arrow's impossiblity theorem also demonstrates the fallacy of claiming that it is impossible to prove a negative.
Alpha 