What is evidence?

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by Ophiolite, May 10, 2016.

  1. cluelusshusbund + Public Dilemma + Valued Senior Member

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    Hmmm... now that you mention it

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    An the crucial suport to my Evidence that the dilated-eyes... pasty-skin image is God/higher-power/Tiassa related is... the night i cooked that tortilla is the night i found Jesus... an then founded my church "NACA".!!!
     
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  3. river

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    Evidence should be taken as police detective does; you gather the evidence; and then you come a reasonable and therefore a logical conclusion.

    Simple as that.
     
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  5. Daecon Kiwi fruit Valued Senior Member

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    You're really not qualified to comment.
     
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  7. river

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    Not much of a thought .
     
  8. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    And then it generally under goes peer review: [jury]
    Obviously you are referring to your favourite past times of the rejection of Paranormal/ Supernatural, Alien UFO's/Bigfoot nonsense that science so correctly and rightly rejects.
    And of course extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which is always absent in those cases.
     
  9. river

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    Investigation
     
  10. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    Albatross.
     
  11. river

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    Investigation
     
  12. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    I was just winging it.
     
  13. river

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    Just winging it . Well isn't that informative.
     
  14. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    More informative than your unitary "Investigation".

    "Albatross", along with "Gannet Ripple" and "Salty Petrel on a stick" is one of the cries made by John Cleese in the classic Monty Python Sea Bird Ice Cream sketch. As such it can serve as an effective nonsense word with which to respond to what is perceived as a nonsense word from another.

    Just winging it, by referencing the wings of the albatross, indicates that the writer is indulging in something between bored humour and gentle ridicule.

    If all this is too much for you consider that I never reply to the same River twice.
     
  15. river

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    What does any detective do ; gathers information ; objectively.

    Which was my point in my post #22.

    There is lots and lots and lots of evidence for UFO's but it seems that ignoring this evidence is on going for the old crocity types; the mind controlled types. Oh well.
     
  16. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    But as yet nothing extraordinary like an Alien artifact or body.....just the usual blurry photos and plain old vanilla style UFO.
     
  17. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I think that's a more difficult and complex issue than many on Sciforums might imagine.

    See the discussion here:

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evidence/

    That article quotes the contemporary philosopher Jaegwon Kim:

    "In any event, the concept of evidence is inseparable from that of justification. When we talk about 'evidence' in an epistemological sense, we are talking about justification: one thing is evidence for another just in case the first tends to enhance the reasonableness or justification of the second."

    Put that way, it should be obvious that the question is more difficult than it might have at first seemed. What kind of 'things' are we talking about? How does one 'thing' make another 'thing' more reasonable?

    I'm not convinced that's true. In normal life and in science as well, 'observations' are often taken to be evidence for the truth of propositions. So what constitutes an observation? Some have suggested raw sense data. But how could that even be described without putting words to it? It might be more plausible to say that observations are our conclusions about the (objective) objects of our subjective sensory experience. That introduces an interpretive step and conceivably a bit of an epistemological leap.

    Deciding what an observation is an observation of and precisely what it tells us is seems to me to involve some judgement steps. Conclusions are being drawn that may or may not be sound. In the sciences, theory and previous training often assume a strong role when scientists try to decide what they are observing.



    Certainly those things make it easier to make observations and to deal with them in familiar scientific ways. But I'm not sure that I'd want to try to cram the entire theory of evidence and empirical justification into those narrow parameters.

    Must observations always be quantifiable? Must they always be repeatable on demand? And mightn't evidence that is inconsistent with a hypothesis be possible?

    Must an observer even possess a hypothesis applicable to the observation before an observation can rise to the status of evidence? (I'm more inclined to agree with you about that one.) If evidence counts for or against the reasonableness of something (a hypothetical proposition most typically), then there will need to be something for it to count for or against. Otherwise it isn't evidence, it's just data.

    I think that I agree with you about that one.

    There are thousands of ufo reports and more ghost sightings than anyone can count, dating back to remote antiquity. There are countless reports of religious miracles, from all different religious traditions. There's religious experience today.

    So the problem with ghosts, ufos and gods isn't that evidence doesn't exist, it's that the evidence isn't considered persuasive, it isn't believed to be good enough, it doesn't rise to some standard.

    Describing and justifying that standard is going to be a problem. Religious people often protest that atheists choose standards that nothing can meet, so as to justify dismissing all the religious evidences and hence justifying their preexisting disbelief.

    As for me, I'm inclined to emphasize objectivity over subjectivity. That's basically what all the stuff about scientific repeatability and verifiability is intended to ensure. It's trying to ensure that X isn't just 'true in my personal experience', but rather that it's 'true for all of us in the reality that we all share'.
     
    Last edited: May 12, 2016
  18. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Agree with most of this, esp. about subjective vs. objective. The purpose of reproducibility, surely, is to try to get observations that are objective as possible. Striving towards objectivity is one of the hallmarks of a scientific approach to anything. Repeatability or reproducibility* are, generally speaking, the standard that you are looking for, which scientific observation (on the whole) meets and which the anecdotal or purely personal experiences that constitute the evidence for UFOs, ghosts, or religious experiences almost invariably do not. I do not actually see that there is much of a difficulty in drawing this distinction.

    On your point about hypothesis, actually I think the requirement to have a hypothesis is correct, if we discuss evidence. To talk at all of "evidence" presupposes evidence of something, since otherwise the word has no meaning - you can't have just "evidence" on its own. You can of course have an observation on its own, and observation may - often does - precede hypothesis. However it seems to me the observation only becomes evidence when considered in relation to some hypothesis.


    (*Strictly speaking, repeatability relates to the variation between duplicate measurements by the same person in the same lab, while reproducibility relates to that between measurement by different people in different labs. The latter normally shows greater differences than the former, obviously.)
     
  19. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I'm not convinced that religious experiences are always unrepeatable and unverifiable. The whole emphasis of Buddhist meditation is that the experiences of relevance to the Buddhist religion are reproducible and verifiable. Hindu and Jain yoga seems to produce arguably repeatable results too (even if we don't always want to agree with the conclusions drawn from them). I'm not familiar enough with Western contemplative disciplines like Hesychasm, but I suspect that there's quite a bit of reproducibility and verifiability there too.

    But like I said, while an emphasis on reproducibility and verifiability certainly helps in enhancing (not necessarily ensuring) objectivity, I don't want to cram the entire theory of knowledge into that little box. I can easily imagine real and objective events in the universe occurring on their own unpredictable schedule. Some astronomical phenomena might approximate that, where all we can do is keep watching the skies in hopes of observing another example of whatever it is. I can even imagine the possibility of totally one-off events occuring in the universe, whether products of unique one-time combinations of general physical laws or totally a-nomic events that conform to no general law of nature. The possibility of one-offs can't just be excluded a-priori. If repeatability and verification become part of how we define evidence, then the implication would be that there can never be any evidence for totally unique events.

    I agree. We were thinking in tandem on that one and I was editing my post as you were writing yours.
     
    Last edited: May 12, 2016
  20. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    I thought this was both implicit and obvious, but as both you and Yazata needed to introduce the point, then it was neither implicit or obvious.

    However, I did make the same point in post #9/. "........I could note that evidence only becomes evidence once we have a hypothesis to attach it to. Up until that point it is simply an observation. A lot of good science consists simply of making accurate observations."
     
  21. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Regarding unique events, I think that is where the distinction between "evidence" and "good evidence" comes into play. The first time any observation is made, it may well not be "good evidence". Consider "cold fusion" for example: there was evidence, but Fleischmann and Pons got a bit overexcited before it had been reproduced, and eventually of course nobody could reproduce it and the hypothesis of cold fusion was discredited. The Higgs boson? Well, while only CERN has found evidence, it has at least been seen and thoroughly documented by a whole team of people and the experiment itself has been pored over by many physicists from around to the world, to check its authenticity.

    I think the idea that anyone would "cram the entire theory of knowledge" into data and theories validated by reproducible observation is one of your Aunt Sallys (straw men). Nothing from the Humanities would qualify on that basis and I cannot think of any scientist, even the most Gradgrindian, that would dismiss everything in the Humanities - it would be striking an absurd pose.
     
  22. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Well you were right, both he and I got it eventually - we're maybe just a bit slow.....
     
  23. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    No, I think I just didn't make it at all clear in my OP.
     

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