Good post! I think I pretty much agree with the practical implications of what you say. But I'm pedantic enough that I want to object to the idea that proving a negative is particularly problematic in general; if you can't prove a negative, then you also can't prove a positive (generally).
If we hold a very strict standard for what counts as "proof," then the three kinds of negatives that can be proven are plausibly the only ones--but tautologies, perception, and systems of clear answers would then also be the only places where you can reliably prove a positive.
For example, with Napoleons breakfast, what would it look like to prove that he did? Probably some source saying "Truly, Napoleon broke his fast on the 25th anniversary of his birth" or something like that. But if that is enough to prove that he did, a similar source saying that he didn't have breakfast would also do the trick. If you can't prove the one, you can't prove either.
More generally, it seems to me that there isn't any deep difference between "negative" and "positive" statements. You can always make an equivalent of any positive into a negative one and vice versa. The hard-headed version is with the humble double-negation, but that's not particularly interesting.
But consider the Hilary Clinton example. Let's designate the part of the world that is Epstein's island "E" and the rest "W". You can then make the pair "Hillary Clinton was on E," and "Hilary Clinton was not on E". But you could also say "Hilary Clinton was always in W" and "Hilary Clinton was not always in W". Here there is a negative and a positive that say the same thing, meaning the negative and positive are equally hard to prove.
Consider also expanding E (and so shrinking W) making the two propositions closer to equally hard to prove. At that point it starts to make less sense to talk of negative and positive statements.
I think this can be done more generally (for example theism and atheism seem to me symmetric in this sort of respect). What we count as positive and negative is more about pragmatics than any deep fact about the content of the thing uttered, or how easy it is to prove. (I think the stuff we count as "positive" statements is more usually a universal statement, which would require only one or few counterexamples, and vice versa).
Again, I don't think this matters particularly much for the points about dialectics that your post is actually about. I'm just a pedant lol.
So, I have a hard time explaining/expressing this, but I think when it comes to proving positive statements, my use of the word “prove” may be different from some people. Namely, I think I’m trying to say a reasonable inference, given some data.
On a fundamental level, it’s hard to prove negatives because I think our brains observe causal relationships (or as a Humean, I should say they think they do). Like a positive event/inference is pretty easy to understand: You perceive event A, and the conjunctively event B, and you infer the causal relationship. But what does it mean to observe a negative? Because you’re not observing a conjunctive event!
I can think of two kinds of examples of inferring a positive event. One is, say, the Napoleon example, and the other is inferring that a species on a small island evolved from another species, inferring that from evolutionary theory and a fossil record. For neither of these events we have direct observation, a system of clear answers, or a logic of tautology. But what we have is some data (fossils, someone wrote down what was observed about Napoleon) and a plausible framework for understanding it (historiography, evolution)
Now, are these within the trivial purview ala the negation? I don’t think so. Maybe if you consider inference trivial. The main difference I see with proving a negative and proving a positive is that, yes, inferences and induction are always going to be flawed, but we can make minimal pragmatic assumptions about them to wave those away. I don’t think we can do the same thing with proving negatives. And at the end of the day proving positives has the advantage of some kind of tangible data and a discernible causal relationship from that data.
I think my central point is that there isn't really any difference between positive and negative statements as such--at least not in content. Any (or at least most) statements can be formulated in both a positive or negative way. Sometimes choosing one over the other will be quite odd (e.g. it's strange to say "This species on the island was either descended from species A, or B, or C, or..." rather than saying "This species is descended from species Z"), but there in many cases it's also not clear, and there isn't really any deep fact about which propositions count as negative and which count as positive.
If that's right then it doesn't really seem to make sense that there's something especially problematic with proving a negative since, well, any negative statement could also have been a positive statement and vice versa.
Now, you give the example of causation, but it doesn't seem that asymmetric to me. You can infer causation by seeing two things consistently conjoined, but surely you can also infer that there isn't causation if you consistently see no significant correlation between the two, right?
Sorry if this is just restating the same point, lol, but I hope it clarifies.
So, cards on the table: I’m really bad at symbolic logic/propositional logic/whatever you want to call it, and I’m not going to fake it until I make it here, so that’s probably where the communication breakdown probably lies.
Anyway, I guess another way of saying what I’m trying to say (in another manner) is that we observe events happening all the time, and it’s easy to translate them into propositions, that we can plug into syllogisms (inductive, deductive, etc) that we can create proofs, etc. And so our human brains can organize those propositions and assertions intuitively (i.e. inferring causation, proof, etc). Meanwhile, we don’t observe things *not* happening. To the extent that we can, it’s with comparing claims with direct observation. Say, we are both looking at a doorway and you say there is a person walking through it (when I don’t see that).
And so, I agree that we linguistically/logically rearrange propositions to mean basically identical things, but I don’t think the “atoms” of our logic/reasoning/philosophy/whatever are propositions, so much as they are observations and sense perception. Propositions are thus a post-hoc way of us organizing those perceptions/cognitions, but what makes them compelling is the relatability via the actual experience of perception.
And so, when it comes to proving negatives, I think they’re inherently less useful and compelling than other forms of roof because of this feature of human cognition.That’s not to say that logical propositions and negative proofs can’t be useful or understood, but the usefulness of compelling nature of positive proof will always overshadow them. And to the extent that negation can be demonstrated, it’s more compelling when the negating proof is a positive proof of a contradiction that we can perceive: Like a murder alibi where we have video footage of a suspect being 30 miles away at the time of murder.
I think my gripe with this whole thing is that proving a positive or a negative is difficult. I don’t think a theist or non-theist needs to prove their position, but if a non-theist says that “until you prove theism, I am completely justified in my non-theism”, not only does that seem wrong it is simply placing too high a bar. Moreover, It comes across as abrasive. Although in some cases I’m sure the non-theist is tired of being pestered by an evangelist. Regardless, the proper view on all of this is to do what you said at the start apportion your belief to the evidence. If the evidence is in better favor of one position than the other, you should hold the better supported position. What neither a theist nor a non-theist should say is “well, you have not proven/disproven my position so I can hold my position despite the evidence.” Anyways there’s my rant. I think I’m basically in agreement with you, though I read that quite quickly.
I defend atheist sloganeering because I was kind of there when it first started and I get the vibe, but I will say I definitely think it’s annoying and pervasive. That’s probably why people feel the need to “debunk” it.
But I still think the sequence of events for people who are not spamming reddits is usually
1) someone is raised religious
2) someone leaves religion for philosophical reasons
3) Former co-religionists try to re-convert him by bringing up philosophy he/she has already read
4) co-religionist doesn’t have good answer to apostate’s objections
5) “You’re an atheist yet you can’t prove a negative. Not very rational to hold a position you can’t prove!”
6) <rage face>
Like, I’m not exaggerating when I say the Atheist Experience and Atheist YouTube would not have any views if that wasn’t the experience for 80% of former Christians.
I don’t think the position is “I’m justified in believing whatever the hell I want so long as you can’t prove your position” as it is “the generic arguments for this position aren’t satisfying, life is short, let’s stop talking about this.” I do think it’s a stop gap of sorts. People want to feel validated and not talked down for not believing certain things (not just in religion, but other subjects as well). I think the nature of religious apologetics is antithetical to that.
Funnily, I grew up in a religious house hold. Was never really Christian but didn’t identify as an atheist until college, and the later in college converted, and then nearly had a crisis after reading Hume in a philosophy of religion class.
I think you are right about what people are experiencing. The struggle is that from an atheists POV it really is “life is short stop annoying me and I’ve made up my mind” (or something to effect). Whereas for the theist, especially for Christians, your told to go make disciples, and if your a hard line infernalist lives are on the line. The atheists incentive is to move on and make the most of the time they have, and the theists incentive is the opposite, which naturally can lead to some frustrations.
I think both parties would do well to understand the other persons perspective. I also think theists would do well to trust God has a good plan, and not try to force people’s hands if you sense what I’m getting at.
"For our purposes, there are two kinds of atheists: Those that believe we can prove negatives about non-trivial matters, and those that believe we cannot.
We’re going to call the first group lacktheists."
I think the lacktheists are in the *second* group, not the first, unless I'm misunderstanding.
“You can prove a negative” plus “God works in mysterious ways” is an absolutely impenetrable argument if you grant both premises
I feel like it’s the two buttons meme lol
🤙
Good post! I think I pretty much agree with the practical implications of what you say. But I'm pedantic enough that I want to object to the idea that proving a negative is particularly problematic in general; if you can't prove a negative, then you also can't prove a positive (generally).
If we hold a very strict standard for what counts as "proof," then the three kinds of negatives that can be proven are plausibly the only ones--but tautologies, perception, and systems of clear answers would then also be the only places where you can reliably prove a positive.
For example, with Napoleons breakfast, what would it look like to prove that he did? Probably some source saying "Truly, Napoleon broke his fast on the 25th anniversary of his birth" or something like that. But if that is enough to prove that he did, a similar source saying that he didn't have breakfast would also do the trick. If you can't prove the one, you can't prove either.
More generally, it seems to me that there isn't any deep difference between "negative" and "positive" statements. You can always make an equivalent of any positive into a negative one and vice versa. The hard-headed version is with the humble double-negation, but that's not particularly interesting.
But consider the Hilary Clinton example. Let's designate the part of the world that is Epstein's island "E" and the rest "W". You can then make the pair "Hillary Clinton was on E," and "Hilary Clinton was not on E". But you could also say "Hilary Clinton was always in W" and "Hilary Clinton was not always in W". Here there is a negative and a positive that say the same thing, meaning the negative and positive are equally hard to prove.
Consider also expanding E (and so shrinking W) making the two propositions closer to equally hard to prove. At that point it starts to make less sense to talk of negative and positive statements.
I think this can be done more generally (for example theism and atheism seem to me symmetric in this sort of respect). What we count as positive and negative is more about pragmatics than any deep fact about the content of the thing uttered, or how easy it is to prove. (I think the stuff we count as "positive" statements is more usually a universal statement, which would require only one or few counterexamples, and vice versa).
Again, I don't think this matters particularly much for the points about dialectics that your post is actually about. I'm just a pedant lol.
So, I have a hard time explaining/expressing this, but I think when it comes to proving positive statements, my use of the word “prove” may be different from some people. Namely, I think I’m trying to say a reasonable inference, given some data.
On a fundamental level, it’s hard to prove negatives because I think our brains observe causal relationships (or as a Humean, I should say they think they do). Like a positive event/inference is pretty easy to understand: You perceive event A, and the conjunctively event B, and you infer the causal relationship. But what does it mean to observe a negative? Because you’re not observing a conjunctive event!
I can think of two kinds of examples of inferring a positive event. One is, say, the Napoleon example, and the other is inferring that a species on a small island evolved from another species, inferring that from evolutionary theory and a fossil record. For neither of these events we have direct observation, a system of clear answers, or a logic of tautology. But what we have is some data (fossils, someone wrote down what was observed about Napoleon) and a plausible framework for understanding it (historiography, evolution)
Now, are these within the trivial purview ala the negation? I don’t think so. Maybe if you consider inference trivial. The main difference I see with proving a negative and proving a positive is that, yes, inferences and induction are always going to be flawed, but we can make minimal pragmatic assumptions about them to wave those away. I don’t think we can do the same thing with proving negatives. And at the end of the day proving positives has the advantage of some kind of tangible data and a discernible causal relationship from that data.
Thanks for the reply!
I think my central point is that there isn't really any difference between positive and negative statements as such--at least not in content. Any (or at least most) statements can be formulated in both a positive or negative way. Sometimes choosing one over the other will be quite odd (e.g. it's strange to say "This species on the island was either descended from species A, or B, or C, or..." rather than saying "This species is descended from species Z"), but there in many cases it's also not clear, and there isn't really any deep fact about which propositions count as negative and which count as positive.
If that's right then it doesn't really seem to make sense that there's something especially problematic with proving a negative since, well, any negative statement could also have been a positive statement and vice versa.
Now, you give the example of causation, but it doesn't seem that asymmetric to me. You can infer causation by seeing two things consistently conjoined, but surely you can also infer that there isn't causation if you consistently see no significant correlation between the two, right?
Sorry if this is just restating the same point, lol, but I hope it clarifies.
So, cards on the table: I’m really bad at symbolic logic/propositional logic/whatever you want to call it, and I’m not going to fake it until I make it here, so that’s probably where the communication breakdown probably lies.
Anyway, I guess another way of saying what I’m trying to say (in another manner) is that we observe events happening all the time, and it’s easy to translate them into propositions, that we can plug into syllogisms (inductive, deductive, etc) that we can create proofs, etc. And so our human brains can organize those propositions and assertions intuitively (i.e. inferring causation, proof, etc). Meanwhile, we don’t observe things *not* happening. To the extent that we can, it’s with comparing claims with direct observation. Say, we are both looking at a doorway and you say there is a person walking through it (when I don’t see that).
And so, I agree that we linguistically/logically rearrange propositions to mean basically identical things, but I don’t think the “atoms” of our logic/reasoning/philosophy/whatever are propositions, so much as they are observations and sense perception. Propositions are thus a post-hoc way of us organizing those perceptions/cognitions, but what makes them compelling is the relatability via the actual experience of perception.
And so, when it comes to proving negatives, I think they’re inherently less useful and compelling than other forms of roof because of this feature of human cognition.That’s not to say that logical propositions and negative proofs can’t be useful or understood, but the usefulness of compelling nature of positive proof will always overshadow them. And to the extent that negation can be demonstrated, it’s more compelling when the negating proof is a positive proof of a contradiction that we can perceive: Like a murder alibi where we have video footage of a suspect being 30 miles away at the time of murder.
I think my gripe with this whole thing is that proving a positive or a negative is difficult. I don’t think a theist or non-theist needs to prove their position, but if a non-theist says that “until you prove theism, I am completely justified in my non-theism”, not only does that seem wrong it is simply placing too high a bar. Moreover, It comes across as abrasive. Although in some cases I’m sure the non-theist is tired of being pestered by an evangelist. Regardless, the proper view on all of this is to do what you said at the start apportion your belief to the evidence. If the evidence is in better favor of one position than the other, you should hold the better supported position. What neither a theist nor a non-theist should say is “well, you have not proven/disproven my position so I can hold my position despite the evidence.” Anyways there’s my rant. I think I’m basically in agreement with you, though I read that quite quickly.
I defend atheist sloganeering because I was kind of there when it first started and I get the vibe, but I will say I definitely think it’s annoying and pervasive. That’s probably why people feel the need to “debunk” it.
But I still think the sequence of events for people who are not spamming reddits is usually
1) someone is raised religious
2) someone leaves religion for philosophical reasons
3) Former co-religionists try to re-convert him by bringing up philosophy he/she has already read
4) co-religionist doesn’t have good answer to apostate’s objections
5) “You’re an atheist yet you can’t prove a negative. Not very rational to hold a position you can’t prove!”
6) <rage face>
Like, I’m not exaggerating when I say the Atheist Experience and Atheist YouTube would not have any views if that wasn’t the experience for 80% of former Christians.
I don’t think the position is “I’m justified in believing whatever the hell I want so long as you can’t prove your position” as it is “the generic arguments for this position aren’t satisfying, life is short, let’s stop talking about this.” I do think it’s a stop gap of sorts. People want to feel validated and not talked down for not believing certain things (not just in religion, but other subjects as well). I think the nature of religious apologetics is antithetical to that.
Funnily, I grew up in a religious house hold. Was never really Christian but didn’t identify as an atheist until college, and the later in college converted, and then nearly had a crisis after reading Hume in a philosophy of religion class.
I think you are right about what people are experiencing. The struggle is that from an atheists POV it really is “life is short stop annoying me and I’ve made up my mind” (or something to effect). Whereas for the theist, especially for Christians, your told to go make disciples, and if your a hard line infernalist lives are on the line. The atheists incentive is to move on and make the most of the time they have, and the theists incentive is the opposite, which naturally can lead to some frustrations.
I think both parties would do well to understand the other persons perspective. I also think theists would do well to trust God has a good plan, and not try to force people’s hands if you sense what I’m getting at.
Heads up, I think this is a typo:
"For our purposes, there are two kinds of atheists: Those that believe we can prove negatives about non-trivial matters, and those that believe we cannot.
We’re going to call the first group lacktheists."
I think the lacktheists are in the *second* group, not the first, unless I'm misunderstanding.
ahhhhhh thank you
No problem!