December Deductions 2020; Day 1

For December, I'm going to try something a little different. I'm going to share with you some of the tips and tricks I've learned and use regularly to help understand what's going on in the world, to help identify biases and bad faith arguments, and to get to the truth on matters that are otherwise controversial. I won't say any one works amazingly, or even that all together they'll all work perfectly, but they've helped me get past some issues that I've seen far too many people get stuck on in recent years. 

Day 1: 

Today I want to explain what "burden of proof" or "onus of proof" refers to, and a basic explanation of how it works in both philosophy and law. Again, this is very basic, especially when it comes to law, the concept becomes much more complex and has a lot more issues involved. 

The Burden of Proof is a concept of who in a debate or argument should actually provide proof for a particular claim or counterclaim. The most basic working version of this is that the person making the claim that something is, has been, or will be, must provide the proof, and so the burden of proof is on them. For instance, if you allege that someone you know committed a crime, you must provide evidence to support that; you cannot merely assert that they must prove it didn't happen. 

This brings up a very important concept that people really do need to know: you can't prove a negative. That literally means you can't prove something never happened, and in most cases, can't even prove that a particular claimed event didn't happen without really explicit detail on that event. Using the example above, the person you claimed to have committed a crime can't prove they have never done so. They can provide evidence that might call yours into question, but they can't prove they never did anything like that unless they have some irrefutable record of their entire existence, which as of yet is still impossible. Saying they need to prove it didn't happen is saying they need to prove a negative, which is impossible. If you ever see someone respond to another person asking for evidence by saying "well prove it's not true!" you can reasonably assume that they lack the necessary evidence to prove their claim, and are hoping that since the other side literally can't prove their claim can't be true, that the possibility of it's truth is enough to carry their argument. 

Just a quick rule of thumb on that last bit: if something is possible, that doesn't mean it's probable/likely to be true. If something is probable that doesn't mean it necessarily happened. Be aware that claims are not black-and-white in this particular area, something can be possible, and even probable, and still not have happened. Look for evidence about what actually is, rather than what could be. 

Let me know if this kind of thing interests you. I'm going to try to keep this up throughout December, or at least as long as I have tips and tricks to share, but if it's really just not going to help anyone, I might not bother. 

In any case, have a great day, and I'll try to post another one tomorrow.