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Post by Deleted on May 6, 2011 11:46:22 GMT -5
The word "evidence" is used in a number of widely differing contexts. However, all of them rely, to a considerable extent, upon the notions of causality and interconnectedness.builder
Inference and the principle of what is known as "induction" also play a great part in determining the evidential status of an event.
Facts alone are NOT sufficient to constitute evidence. A number of random facts may strongly SUPPORT a particularl interpretation of events but that is NOT sufficient for them to be regarded as evidentially admissible.
An amusing example occurred when I was speaking to a friend of mine about three years ago. A builder was erecting scaffolding at a shop across the road. The woman who owned the shop came out, demanded that he take it down at once and then picked up one of the metal poles on the pavement. I turned away for a moment as my friend spoke to me and then heard the man across the road shouting in pain and holding his leg. A policeman soon appeared and asked us if we had seen the incident. I replied that I had seen the woman pick up the pole and seen the man holding his leg but that I had NOT seen any actual assault. Even though it was clearly a reasonable INFERENCE to assume that she had hit his leg with the scaffold pole, I was unable to claim that I had WITNESSED any actual assault by her. Two separate facts, both (on any reasonable interpretation) clearly connected, did NOT constitute actual EVIDENCE of an assault. Evidence requires a very high standard of proof and the police officer simply spoke quietly to the woman and told her to calm down.
Now let me turn to another example from personal experience. About five years ago Lin and I were lying in bed together when we both felt a sudden PARTICULAR closeness. We began communicating our thoughts to one another WITHOUT either of us opening our mouths or saying a single physical word. For fifteen minutes this went on, in a darkened bedroom with neither of us speaking. Then the mood lifted. We turned on the light and each of us separately grabbed pen and paper and wrote down the thoughts we had shared with each ohter. Each of us gave the SAME account of our "thought transference," word for word.
I would call that reasonably persuasive evidence for telepathy although of course dogmatic doubters will not. In fact it is difficult to know precisely WHAT the pseudo=sceptics DO regard as evidence.
Now let us turn to the alleged criterion of "repeatability," one of the constant shibboleths of "scientism" as opposed to science. They claim that repeatability is essential in order for a scientific experiment to be considered valid.
How is it, then, that the history of scinece shows that this is NOT the case? Let's take the example of the neutrino. Faced with certain problems of radioactivity, in the 1930s Wolfgang Pauli proposed the existence of the neutrino, a particle that was without mass. In spite of the atomic bomb having been detonated in 1945, it was not until 1957 that "evidence" of this particle WITHOUT mass was found. However, in 1988 it was suddenly discovered that that the neutriono DID apparently possess a tiny but measurable mass. NONE of the previous experiments with the neutrino HAD dcetected ANY mass.
Nor is this all. For almost the whole of the 1980s, ONLY laboratories in the Soviet Union detected neutrinos WITH mass. EVERY attempt by Western scientists to "repeat" the Soviet experiments FAILED. Only in the late 1980s were other laboratories finally able to "replicate" the Soviet discoveries. (Christine Sutton, "The Secret Life of the Neutrino," New Scientist, 17, No 1505, January 14th 1988: Dietrich E Thomson, "Ups and Downs of neutrino oscillation," Science News, 117., No 24, June 14th 1980; "Soviet neutrinos have mass," New Scientist, 185, No 1446, March 7 1985)
Since its non-repeatability did NOT lead scientists to denounce the theory, it is abundantly clear that "repeatability" is neither a NECESSARY nor a SUFFICIENT condition for scientic evidence.
I will write more later but this post is already rather longer than I would have wished!
Does the "non-repeatability" of the experiemtns invalidate the notion of a neutrino possessing mass rather than being massless?
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Post by beth on May 7, 2011 8:26:47 GMT -5
Great post, Mike. I'll come back, read it again and say more later.
It's pretty standard knowledge that eye-witness accounts of crimes are not reliable.
One of my college professors told us that, quite often, two people could look at the same tree and *see* different trees. Of course that all ties back in with perception.
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Post by Erasmus on May 7, 2011 19:03:42 GMT -5
Evidence to some extent depends upon what it is required to prove, inductive or deductive. Often, it is confusing these two that leads to conflict of exactly the same evidence being produced in support of opposing beliefs. Then there is the related problem that evidence against a theory is not evidence for an alternative. Example; I think that observation shows Darwinian random evolution to be at the very most of infinitesimal significance. At the same time, that is no kind of an argument for divine creation - merely for a better evolutionary theory.
In science, evidence tends to be deductive in support of the theory, though the theory may be suggested inductively by observation. All observable evidence for centuries supported Ptolemaic astronomy against Copernicus. At the best might be Tycho Brahe's compromize that the moon and sun orbit the Earth while everything else orbits the sun (mathematically the same). Observation supported Ptolemy and always will because his system amounted to performing integral calculus before such a thing was invented. It can always add another term for greater precision. A similar approach could be taken to Copernicus, but then it would lose the appeal it had to make astronomers keep working at it until they derived something from it to fit the facts.
Where Copernicus led was elegance. There is no reason why planets should perform a complicated dance of circles within circles. There is not even a Biblical excuse, since it is more rational that God should ordain a simple orbital system than one of 'halo orbits' about empty points themselves in halo orbits and so on. Then again is the obvious point that the sun is different: it would not be too surprising to imagine it as a focal point. If we had a system where the sun as well as everything else orbited something barely visible like a neutron star or a black hole, I wonder whether Copernicus would have considered that or still gone for the solar-centric option.
It is the elegance of one level of orbit that made Copernicus appeal and when his figures did not work out, to refine the system's precise positionings instead of slinging arbitrary epicycles into it. Having taken the step as revolutionary as placing the sun at the centre despite all experential evidence to the contrary, of declaring that orbits are not perfect circles and speeds variable according to a less than obvious formula linking curved triangular area passed over. Kepler presented the problem of why such a counter-intuitive situation, in its own way as inelegant as Ptolemaic epicycles, should pertain. Newton solved it with gravity. Throughout the whole thing, faith that some single rule underlay planets following one level of orbit instead of arbitrarily many to fit observations led to refining the basic theory, until continuing discrepancies could be used to check (and be explained by) relativity.
The same evidence that led inductively to derive Ptolemy's astronomy led deductively to confirm Kepler's.
In the case of the woman and the builder, inductive reasoning infers that she hit him with the pole, though that might be quite wrong and something had simply fallen on him from a great height. On the other hand, if he bore all the marks of being hit with a pole and nothing else was present to be the likely culprit, deductive reasoning concludes that she was the one that did it. Ultimately these come to the same thing in this case, but there are others where they do not. In the first case, we are inferring what happened, in the second concluding who did it.
There are certain criminal cases where the difference is significant. As far as the police are concerned, if there has been a robbery, they want to deduce the culprit from the evidence. However, before that, an insurance company will be using the same evidence to induce whether there was any robbery at all.
The difference often shows up in criminal offences against the person where trials differ between defence that an offence happened but the accused did not do it, and no offence happened at all. The defence may claim that somebody else committed the crime, or that the alleged assault was in fact the result of self-defence or consensual sex, so there was no crime.
As far as I understand it, Napoleonic or Roman-derived law tends to work the other way, so that the facts of what happened are used less to prove whether a named crime occurred or not and who may have perpetrated it, that to determine from knowing what happened, which particular crime may have been committed, if any. So instead of collecting evidence to support the charge of what crime they believe happened, the police will collect all evidence for a prosecuting magistrate or even the court to decide what crime may have occurred. The nearest to this in the Anglophone world is that an accusation of murder can still lead to conviction for attempted murder or manslaughter, and of rape to attempted rape or sexual assault even though the lesser crimes were never part of the official prosecution.
Personally, I prefer that approach, both because it does not allow the police to be selective in presenting evidence to suit themselves and suppress what does not, which only the most expensive defence will have similar facilities to find for itself, and it makes it harder for a wrong-doer to get off through being over-ambitiously charged with something that did not stick, even though as guilty as Old Nick of something they were not charged with. This is a particular problem with group murder, where it may be impossible to know which of a gang struck the fatal blow and in any case is quite irrelevant since any could have done and it might not have been fatal without those before, or even the last assault may not in fact be the one to cause death. I think there is some way round this in the Anglo-Irish system but it is fairly recent and an improvement on what I think before could only be charged as culpable negligence or accessory to a crime that could not be legally proven to have occurred.
In fact, were murder to be restricted to the tightest definition, it would be almost impossible to prove without a confession. While the law may specify intent, short of perhaps some kind of regressive hypnosis, there is no knowing what anybody's intent was. In reality, murder more often comes down to the practicality of not giving a damn whether the victim died or not - which is not at all the same thing as setting out with the intention of killing them.
Just in passing, that is not the only definition of murder. In Viking, and perhaps Anglo-Saxon society the difference between murder and manslaughter was concealment. To tell his neighbours that you had killed your enemy was Manslaughter punishable with compensation set by arbitration (though generally formalized) or duel, should his relatives get stroppy about it. Concealed murder, on the other hand, was a very serious business usually resulting in outlawry - a contagious condition that rendered anybody prepared to give sustenance also outlaw, should it come to light. It's easy enough to see why. Only the rich and physically powerful would risk the heavy compensation or fight of honest manslaughter, while sneak murder undermines a society built on mutual agreement between equals.
Njálssaga, however reveals the flaws in this ideal. Since the law applies to landowning men held responsible for everything in their household, they ended up taking responsibility for crimes committed by scoundrels long since departed commissioned by a wife without their knowledge until breaking point is reached and all-out clan war results that was probably the intention all along.
All the same, it is interesting to see how in a primitive violent culture, it was not intent that distinguished murder from manslaughter, but denial of facing responsibility.
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Post by Deleted on May 8, 2011 18:41:10 GMT -5
Of course Copernicus' theory was defective in that it assumed a circular motion for planets whereas (as Kepler showed later) they traverse an elliptical orbit.
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Post by iamjumbo on May 9, 2011 15:55:55 GMT -5
In fact, were murder to be restricted to the tightest definition, it would be almost impossible to prove without a confession. While the law may specify intent, short of perhaps some kind of regressive hypnosis, there is no knowing what anybody's intent was. In reality, murder more often comes down to the practicality of not giving a damn whether the victim died or not - which is not at all the same thing as setting out with the intention of killing them
where you lose here is that you obviously do not know the meaning of intent. intent does NOT mean a conscious thought. action proves intent. that is why we have implied malice. it simply doesn't matter whether or not you consciously intended for anyone to die. if you do something that is likely to cause someone to die, you have demonstrated the intent
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Post by beth on May 17, 2011 21:08:49 GMT -5
It seems to me "evidence" is being presented here in a very broad context. There are enough different uses for the word that we could probably have 3 or more separate topics. 1) evidence in a legal sense 2) evidence in regard to hypothesis and experimentation 3) evidence in day to day events that create our perceptions 4) evidence in extraordinary or paranormal events that give us reason to wonder and take a further look at things beyond our understanding probably more ... so, this time, I'll take door #4 Mike, I don't have a problem you and Lin were able to share non-verbal communication. There have been quite a few recountings of people who are especially close doing this .. sometimes husband and wife, but also parents and children, close friends, etc.. Especially common are instances of a communication from an absent friend or relative just before their death ... to the point it's generally accepted except by determined skeptics. I might be one of those , except that it's happened to me several times in different circumstances. There's nothing like the evidence of direct experience to convert a skeptic.
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Post by Deleted on May 18, 2011 14:42:09 GMT -5
I had hoped that I had made it clear that the word "evidence" bore different meanings in different contexts and I apologise for any lack of clarity on my part if that did not come across.
I am interested in all the varying aspects of the word's meaning but perhaps particularly in terms of its legal and scientific meanings.
I am interested to see that no one has picked up on the fact that scientific knowledge does NOT, as is often presumed (not least by those scientists who challenge parapyschological research) repeatable or replicable.
I have not even mentioned the problem of the "anomalons," for instance!
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Post by beth on May 18, 2011 16:30:26 GMT -5
I had hoped that I had made it clear that the word "evidence" bore different meanings in different contexts and I apologise for any lack of clarity on my part if that did not come across. I am interested in all the varying aspects of the word's meaning but perhaps particularly in terms of its legal and scientific meanings. I am interested to see that no one has picked up on the fact that scientific knowledge does NOT, as is often presumed (not least by those scientists who challenge parapyschological research) repeatable or replicable. I have not even mentioned the problem of the "anomalons," for instance! Ah well ... that cries out for at least a passing interest in physics. I'll be reading along ...
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Post by Erasmus on May 19, 2011 16:44:13 GMT -5
In fact, were murder to be restricted to the tightest definition, it would be almost impossible to prove without a confession. While the law may specify intent, short of perhaps some kind of regressive hypnosis, there is no knowing what anybody's intent was. In reality, murder more often comes down to the practicality of not giving a damn whether the victim died or not - which is not at all the same thing as setting out with the intention of killing them where you lose here is that you obviously do not know the meaning of intent. intent does NOT mean a conscious thought. action proves intent. that is why we have implied malice. it simply doesn't matter whether or not you consciously intended for anyone to die. if you do something that is likely to cause someone to die, you have demonstrated the intent Even a confession is not necessarily reliable. Hence the seemingly paradoxical situation of some traditional jurisprudence, like Jewish, where the accused is forbidden to speak Lest he condemn himself out of his own mouth. You cannot strictly prove that even a paid hit-man did not intend to stun the victim and then scarper with the loot before the deception was discovered. It's all a result of laws becoming more humane over centuries. Intent to kill had little to do with it a few centuries ago. Even a completely random accident might still find you guilty of murder through witchcraft. At the same time, you have people who actually are setting out to kill each other in a duel. Possibly swords allowed more discretion than pistols. The idea of intent probably was aimed at the time at duellists and gangland enforcers and it wasn't much of a problem when so many other crimes carried the death penalty (or join the Navy or possibly spend 20 years as a colonial slave and don't return). There should really be a distinction between a very rare form of intentional murder (such as a hitman) where it's up to the defence to prove otherwise, and the more usual murder governed by criminal negligence, that the perpetrator just did not care about the outcome. I'm not even sure whether it is necessary in that case to distinguish whether death resulted or not. It could have done, so might as well have done and offences like Grievous Bodily Harm should be treated the same whether death results or not. That would close the loopholes surrounding group culpability. these loopholes differ between Irish, UK and US law (where I don't think it applies - if you were there you were guilty). We have a crazy situation where a group of 'kids' kick another to death but nobody knows who struck the fatal blow. Even the last may not have been the killer strike. So perhaps only one can be charged who cannot be proven to be the ultimate killer, or perhaps none at all so that although somebody was killed, legally there was no murder. So forget whether there was an actual death or not and charge these spoilt brats (the real hoo-har about this was that they were all top private school 'graduates' celebrating at an expensive night-club, not corpo flat yobs) the same because it could have been any of them
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Post by Deleted on May 21, 2014 16:30:01 GMT -5
I've noticed in the exchanges between Men an tol and my wife the word 'evidence' being mentioned.
So I suppose I might as well try and revive the discussion on the subject.
Evidence in a scientific context is far more rigorous than it is in a legal context where one can make inferences that have not in fact been 'proved' but are the most reasonable interpretation of a given event or phenomenon.
In quantum physics for instance tachyons violate many aspects of the 'laws' of physics and yet they are postulated as the most plausible explanation (at least currently).
The strange story of neutrinos is also instructive, particularly for those who still cling to the illusory belief that a valid scientific experiment relies upon replicability.
Essentially the neutrino was originally believed to be a 'massless' particle but then Russian scientists conducted experiments that showed it had a small mass.
US and other Western scientists were completely unable to derive the same results when they conducted identical experiments.
It was some years before the Americans finally succeeded in observing a neutrino with mass.
Since then all American experiments have shown the same result.
A curious sidelight on the extent to which Kuhn's phenomenon of the 'paradigm shift' applies in science.
Because it was desired that neutrinos SHOULD have a mass eventually the observations reported that desired result.
One could hardly have clearer 'evidence' in favour of the Berkeleyan interpretation of Bell's Theorem - that the universe we believe we perceive is observer-created not simply at the sub-atomic level but even at the level of 'ordinary' perception.
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Post by beth on May 21, 2014 16:43:30 GMT -5
What immediately occurs to me is what evidence is not.
Evidence is not the same thing as proof. Evidence is usually plentiful, but proof is very difficult to find.
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Post by men an tol on May 22, 2014 11:35:28 GMT -5
Mike, with your final comment, " . . . One could hardly have clearer 'evidence' in favour of the Berkeleyan interpretation of Bell's Theorem - that the universe we believe we perceive is observer-created not simply at the sub-atomic level but even at the level of 'ordinary' perception. . . " applied to the exchange between Lady Linda and myself it appears that due to the observer one could find evidence of God and another observer find no such evidence, and both observations could reflect reality.
Not my field of knowledge, but somewhat as the mathematics of fermions and the description of the spinning wheel and the vector or spin direction and the observer finding the observed vector in two different directions determined on observer movement and position. The point being that 'evidence' as we typically think of it in our day to day world, may not be as reliable to draw conclusions as we'd like it to be.
Certainly reality is being prodded, pushed, pulled, and stretched, into new concepts as the (at least mathematically) world of string theory is causing debate as to the number of dimensions. Maybe we will find that the need of the reptilian core of our brain to (apparently) have a God focus has been finally outgrown.
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Post by Deleted on May 22, 2014 16:10:55 GMT -5
I may at times express myself with a sense of humour that has been described both as 'waspish' and 'donnish' but I find that it sometimes helps to make a serious point more palatable if it is expressed with a dash of humour.
The nub of my point was in essence that the history of science neither demonstrates the use of the hypothetico-deductive model as standard nor that the replicability of an experiment is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for its being considered a true hypothesis.
I am not quite willing to agree with Feyerabend that in essence scientific theories are fairy stories made up by the scientists as they go along but the history of science shows that Kuhn's model of a paradigm shift almost invariably fits the facts of the case.
But in essence the paradox of Bell's Theorem requires a radical shift in our concepts of 'reality' and one that far too many people appear not to have grasped.
There are only five explanations to account for it:
1 Einstein was wrong 2 Quantum physics is wrong 3 Locality fails 4 We live in an infinite series of parallel universes (the Everett-Wheeler hypothesis) 5 The act of observation changes the thing observed (in essence, a Berkeleyan/Humean/Kantian way of viewing the world)
Now I'm quite prepared to believe that Einstein may be wrong and that quantum physics may ultimately turn out to be as mistaken as the phlogiston theory.
I find the many worlds theory difficult on a number of grounds - the logical impossibility of refuting or falsifying it is a huge inherent problem; Occam's Razor makes it undesirable on general grounds; and in a way it can be used to provide an 'explanation' for anything.
Locality failing may well be the easiest option but that in itself posits huge difficulties that are still not yet being seriously enough considered.
So on balance I find the Berkeleyan/Humean/Kantian explanation the least problematical.
Perhaps I should start a thread on the idealist/materialist debate and another one on belief!
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Post by Deleted on May 22, 2014 16:14:25 GMT -5
What immediately occurs to me is what evidence is not. Evidence is not the same thing as proof. Evidence is usually plentiful, but proof is very difficult to find. You are absolutely correct, Beth. Proof is a concept that can only be demonstrated either logically or through irrefutable empirical evidence. In the first case it is logically true because within the closed systems of, say, mathematics it is necessarily true. In the second it has been established by uniformity. Although (to play devil's advocate) the second type of proof can be, at least in principle, overturned since the fundamental basis on which it rests is the principle of induction that has long been shown to be inadequate in itself as a foundation for scientific theories.
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Post by beth on May 22, 2014 16:26:26 GMT -5
What immediately occurs to me is what evidence is not. Evidence is not the same thing as proof. Evidence is usually plentiful, but proof is very difficult to find. You are absolutely correct, Beth. Proof is a concept that can only be demonstrated either logically or through irrefutable empirical evidence. In the first case it is logically true because within the closed systems of, say, mathematics it is necessarily true. In the second it has been established by uniformity. Although (to play devil's advocate) the second type of proof can be, at least in principle, overturned since the fundamental basis on which it rests is the principle of induction that has long been shown to be inadequate in itself as a foundation for scientific theories. Yes, and the first type (logic) isn't very reliable either because it's so dependent on the person. Different things are logical to different people. A good example would be religion. There may be "a" God, but each religion describes that God differently and ascribes different "powers" to him/her/it. For all we know, there might be a force of some kind ... even an intelligent force. But, odds are that won't turn out to be the Messiah in the sky with diamonds and pearls .. or Yahweh throwing thunderbolts ... or Allah in various forms. I don't think supposed evidence is good enough to change that or even come close to proof.
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