One of the things that really annoys me about Internet debates is that a person will make an outlandish claim without a shred of evidence to support it, then someone will call them on it. The person who made the claim will then respond with shrieks of, “Do some research! Look it up!”
About 1400 years ago, the Roman jurist Paulus had this to say:
Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat.
Roughly translated, this means, “Proof rests on the person who asserts, not the person who denies.” This is an ancient statement of the principle, and is the very basis of modern legal theory. It’s what prevents someone from accusing another of a crime without evidence. For example: “Donald Trump raped me,” should logically require some sort of evidence, and has instead turned into, “Donald Trump denying that he raped me defames my character. Why, he can’t prove that he didn’t rape me, therefore he is guilty.”
The same is true in most debates. It’s one of the reasons why I ask those who make claims here in comments provide evidence to back up those claims. The practical reasoning is straightforward: making an assertion does not, by itself, give other people a reason to believe it. If merely asserting something obliged everyone else to investigate or disprove it, anyone could impose unlimited work on others by inventing claims.
A corollary to this concept is Hitchens’s razor, associated with Christopher Hitchens:
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
There’s a meaningful difference between someone identifying a particular study or document for you to examine and vaguely saying “do your own research.” The former supplies something assessable; the latter leaves the listener responsible for discovering, or even constructing, the opposing argument.
Two qualifications keep the principle precise:
- Withholding belief is different from proving a claim false. “You haven’t supported that” is a sufficient reason not to accept it, but it also doesn’t establish the claim to be false.
- The burden concerns substantive claims, including negative ones. Someone asserting “Donald Trump never raped that woman,” for example, also owes evidence. Merely expressing doubt does not carry the same obligation, meaning it is more accurate to say, “There is no substantive evidence that Donald Trump raped that woman.”
Carl Sagan said it well,
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
That adds a point about the strength of evidence needed: a claim that overturns well-supported knowledge needs evidence strong enough to justify that revision.
I work with this every day in medicine. When a person comes in with chest pains, we perform a series of tests to determine what the problem is. Is this a heart attack? We then look for evidence of a heart attack:
- Is their ECG normal?
- Do they have any proteins in their blood that would support a diagnosis of heart attack?
- Are there enzymes in their blood that would indicate blood clots?
- Does a perfusion study indicate blood clots in the lungs?
- So on, and so forth, attempting to find evidence to support a potential diagnosis.
Frequently, no evidence of any condition can be found. So now we don’t have any evidence of any health problem. That doesn’t mean the person isn’t having a heart attack or other serious condition. It means there isn’t any evidence supporting that conclusion. Sometimes it goes like that. In every debate, sometimes we just don’t know what we can’t support with evidence.
This blog has rules intended to promote reasonable debate. It also gets around 200 comments a day, the vast majority of them being spam. The spam filter catches many, but sometimes the filter tosses legitimate comments in the trash bucket. I still review every single comment in order to restore legitimate ones. I also read every single comment before I approve them. When I approve a comment, I am not saying I agree with the comment. All I am looking for is adherence to the basic rules of the blog. Save those comments I delete for personal attacks, advertising (SPAM), and repetitive posts (sometimes a person will post the same comment multiple times on the same post), I don’t filter for content.
Why don’t I filter for content? I want debate. I like seeing people hash something out. That doesn’t include making claims before demanding others prove them for you. That is how children debate things.
However, someone making a claim that hasn’t been well established by evidence should provide reasons for it. I will withhold agreement until they do. If you make a claim, then make the demand that another “do some research” when they question that claim, expect that claim to be rejected.
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