Burden of proof

I don't normally demand proof, except in some cases of extraordinary claims or for the calling of obvious bullshit - which is usually scant around here, us babblers, i shit you not, are great at hiding our bullshit. I can't and won't speak for the broader community, but I doubt that you could ever say that there is a broadly accepted standard of it for many a-online community

If, as I surmise, you are referring to the WTC attack threads that jas started, then I can see how you might be getting things mixed up. The threads were started specifically to evaluate the NIST claim that the collapse of the towers happened in a certain way, as outlined in their report. The initiator of the thread is sceptical of this explanation and is offering a space for those who support it to defend the premise.

Hence, those who are backing up the report are the ones making the de facto assertion by agreeing with the official explanation and must defend their decision to stand behind the report. At least that's how the thread was set up.

If you're referring to something else, then it might be helpful to quote it for us.

Yiwah wrote:

But in all seriousness, is there some different standard on Babble that is accepted by the wider Babble community? 

In some cases, yes ... there are some "first principles" here, and on many progressive boards, where simple progressive truths will simply not be allowed to be put up for debate.

Women are equal to men; Gays have the right to marriage; and all such questions of equality ... no one coming here posting something suggesting that women should be paid less because they can get pregnant would be tolerated as having a right to debate the issue ... if that kind of debate is wanted they can rent a time machine set for the 1950's, or join a freeper board.

Yiwah wrote:

I find it extremely frustrating, as someone without experience in these matters, to get only one side of the story.  I can tell you as an outsider, that one argument stands out as reasonable, backed up and well supported.  The opposing argument is non-existant.  I don't see the value in setting up a thread that way.  What is the point?

If it were my decision, I'd do what some other boards have done and disallow the 9/11 conspiracy threads for that reason.  I would also take a harder line on any ideas supported by links to whale.to or globalresearch.

There are folks around here who take any disagreement as disrespectful of them as a person.  I have been called a racist and a "rational fundamentalist" for insisting on burden of proof (I'm not complaining; it's just all rather silly and impedes effective discussion when people can't handle the slightest disagreement without making claims that their identity is being threatened.  Totally tedious).

An RSS feed...Basically, you subscribe to a feed from a website that offers it. Whenever something is posted, it will notify you. I know of many people on forums all over the Big Wide Unknown of Internet that have RSS feeds for certain issues and use it to maintain dominance in a thread by simply posting so much information there is no way that you could possibly respond. It is a sea of information that is entirely too intense to properly take in.

remind wrote:

Things that  are or should be  general common knowlege, really require no proof.

 

In the case of the NIST threads, jas has put a hellva lot of proof and facts up in other threads, for her/his position, that do not have to be repeated, if you want to view them go back over  the previous 911 threads.

 

Too many people on other forums play that game where once you have proven it in a thread,  and it is contrary to their position, and the thread moves on to a new one, they pretend they never saw your proof before, and demand you prove it all over again, but that does not happen too much here, it is accepted that we have read it, if we have...

As the one who is asking for evidence from jas, I would be fine with a link to his or her previous posts with evidence. I agree that it would be inconvenient for jas to retype previous work, but it would also be inconvenient for me, or any other person discussing this topic with jas, to have to search through pages and pages of various threads.

Having said that, burden of proof is a delicate matter. Different claims will have diferent burdens of proof. Some like "all swans are white" are incredibly diffcult or impossible to prove, but the negative version (not all swans are white) is very easy to prove. In this conversation, burden of proof should fall on the person making the negative claim, even if the person making the positive claim about white swans initiated the conversation.

Discussion about building collapses are based mostly on the physics of statics and stregth of materials. In this case, most claims can be verified using math and empirical data. This data and the associated math is already available in government reports that are as accessible as this board. Any criticism of these reports should include some discussion of the math and the data. This is so that criticisms can be verified as easily as the report.

More philosophical discussions such as the existence of god often make claims that can not be proven or disproven with any methodology accepted in normal rational discourse. Consequently any demands for proof in these discussions should be made carefully.

My current theory is that there are people on this board who evaluate everything in terms of what is the most left position.  Opposition to the NIST report satisfies that condition.  Therefore they oppose the NIST report.  However, they run into a lack of evidence and logic when espousing that opposition, so false argument structures rule.

Edited, wrong word.

Sorry, Yiwah, I edited my post while you wrote and posted.

Seriously, I am not sure what the source is, whether it came from literary criticism, or philosophy or certain schools of thought in feminism (Skdadl, help me here) that rejects what I think you, and I know what I, would consider rational thinking, or sceptical analysis, or the scientific method.  I call it "post modernism" but that's not really the proper term for it.  (post modernism, by deffinition, is not the proper term for anything, I surmise).

But, it's deffinately a force on the left, which I find regretable.  Playing loosey goosey with reality displays an underlying, in a Fruedian Slip way, lack of confidence in one's position.

At least, according to my narrative.

Then you'll do fine and have a good time.

Me, I'm waiting to get torn a new corn shute for my comments above.

eh, that can be fun sometimes too.

Yiwah wrote:

I've been browsing some recent discussions in this forum, and I've come across some strange views on 'burden of proof'.  Seems my default assumption on the issue isn't necessarily shared by others.

My default assumption is that...if you make a claim, you back it up.  That's how it works in pretty much any field.  "I think this is true, and now I will show you why". 

Some people apparently believe that the burden of proof goes the other way.  As in, you make an assertion, and it's true unless someone proves you wrong.  "I think this is true, and now you have to show why it's not."

This seems so fundamentally flawed as a premise that I felt it merits a discussion.  What do you think, Babblers?  What are your understandings of the burden of proof in a debate?

Do you have an example.? It seems you made a claim and the burden would be with you to support it.

[Wild applause for Yiwah]

I believe I know exactly of what you speak. Case in point. Over the past couple of months, ever since the first noises started coming out of TO city council trying to force Toronto Pride to silence Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA), there have been posters here, on Xtra, on 365Gay (well I could type out the names of an entire subfolder of my booksmarks, but you should get the idea) asserting that Israel is the only state in the Middle East that offers the LGBT communites full and equal protection under the law - Marcus Gee from the Globe and Mail even has a full length diatribe on the matter. In each forum where I have encountered this assertion, I have challenged it - asking those making the claim to provide some link, to document their assertion that Israel has some legislation (and not stand-alone court decisions) that grants rights, any rights for that matter, to the LGBT communities. I have yet to get a single even generalized response (and I have checked back frequently on most of the sites) much less a response that addresses the question, the challenge to link to the relevant legislation. I am pretty much willing to go out on a limb here now and make an assertion of my own (that Israel has no such legislation) and dare anyone to refute me (and the burden of proof isn't particularly onerous, link to the legislation and you will have refuted me). Of course the specific challenge may have been drowned out by the indignant chest beating of both camps in that particular little donnybrook.

There are, of course, times when the meeting the burden of proof is much higher than providing a link to some verifiable fact, and I am pretty sure you had something more challenging in mind when you made your OP... but I believe the same principle applies and I share your interpretation of where the burden lies.

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[moving along]

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Tommy_Paine: re post 27. Let's go whole-hog and refer to it by the old name, solipsism. For all the interesting word play that surrounds such a theory of epistomology (and I have a wee suspicion that you are right in suggesting its origin may have something to do with literary criticism) it tends to be almost uniquely pointless when brought into a debate - two subjective realities cancel each other out, the proponents of each doing very little other than indicating their emotional state (usually intepretable as outrage) that anyone dare contradict their privileged, private and totally unverifiable subjective knowledge. Or as the bard put it, "sound and fury, signifying nothing".

Personally, I find such exchanges to be occasionally amusing, and sometimes I find they are of "psychological" interest, but usually I find they are best just scrolled past.

remind wrote:

"loosey goosey with reality"?

How can that be, when reality is subjective to personal experience, and awareness?

 

 

No it isn't.

jas wrote:

Tommy's belief in an absolute, ultimate, objective reality is a belief. Would we deny him his reality?

Everyone subconsciously and intuitively accepts the existence of the objective universe every time they avoid traffic, eat food, talk to others, or in any way interact with the physical universe.

Tommy_Paine wrote:

Seriously, I am not sure what the source is, whether it came from literary criticism, or philosophy or certain schools of thought in feminism (Skdadl, help me here) that rejects what I think you, and I know what I, would consider rational thinking, or sceptical analysis, or the scientific method.  I call it "post modernism" but that's not really the proper term for it.  (post modernism, by deffinition, is not the proper term for anything, I surmise).

But, it's deffinately a force on the left, which I find regretable.  Playing loosey goosey with reality displays an underlying, in a Fruedian Slip way, lack of confidence in one's position.

I don't suppose it's curious to you why both "sides" of the 9/11 debate are appealing to scientific evidence and rational thinking and none to scepticism of master narratives?

Anyway, go ahead and use the term postmodernism. It's probably the best word for what you mean. Around the 1960s lots of thinking folk--some Germans, a whole bunch of French, and their American fans--began to get sceptical of this whole "enlightenment" project. Was it working? How is it working if it brought us the holocaust, alienation and injustice? If, as Kant says, enlightenment promises "man's release from his self-incurred tutelage," (i.e. from religion and royal diktat) how can we accomplish this when knowledge has become so specialized, its mastery so difficult, that the everyman and everywoman can't hope to understand it. Basically, we might as well be getting our knowledge from the gods because we just don't have the maths.

As you can see, this is emphatically different from your characterization of postmodernism as "rejection of rational thinking," which is often the pejorative reduction used to describe the last four decades of c-20 philosophy and critical theory. What good is rational thinking if it gets us into this mess? Or, more accurately, how do we fix rational thinking so that we can find our way out? It's the answer to this question where thinking begins to differ. The Frankfurt School--Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas--want to see a continuation and reevaluation of the enlightenment project, not a rejection. French theory--Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Baudrillard, Lyotard (all extremely different from each other in their own right)--questioned how "rational" thought was developed as a structure of knowing, as an epistemological model, and highlighted the subjectivity inherent to any such mode. This is probably the bit acolytes of the "scientific" model find so provocative--which is exactly what it was meant to do.

In my view, despite the interesting things it says about how science is constructed as a hegemonic actor, postmodernism is most useful in undermining social narratives--of white, patriarchal, heterosexist and capitalist power. It actually doesn't have much to say about banana peels. Nor, I would say, does science. If you need science to explain what happens when you step on a banana peel, I'm not sure you belong in the conversation. Likewise, I don't really see how postmodernism enters into these discussions about 9/11, though--both the official and sceptical sides are using scientific models and language to make their point: no one is talking in postmodern terms (which, incidentally, is about fifteen years out of date these days). If anything, (and this is my own view, not a moderator's), it demonstrates how susceptible scientific rigour is to travesty, caricature and perversion. And I don't simply mean because one side is loony--they've caused a lot of doubt in the official camp as well.

It almost seems like a parsing of the term "scepticism": this sceptical, no more.

Quote:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, 'I refute it thus.'

Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

Catchfire wrote:

[...]In my view, despite the interesting things it says about how science is constructed as a hegemonic actor, postmodernism is most useful in undermining social narratives--of white, patriarchal, heterosexist and capitalist power. It actually doesn't have much to say about banana peels. Nor, I would say, does science. If you need science to explain what happens when you step on a banana peel, I'm not sure you belong in the conversation. Likewise, I don't really see how postmodernism enters into these discussions about 9/11, though--both the official and sceptical sides are using scientific models and language to make their point: no one is talking in postmodern terms (which, incidentally, is about fifteen years out of date these days). If anything, (and this is my own view, not a moderator's), it demonstrates how susceptible scientific rigour is to travesty, caricature and perversion. And I don't simply mean because one side is loony--they've caused a lot of doubt in the official camp as well.[...]

Thanks for the walking tour of phenomenology's grandchildren Catchfire, I will admit though, when encountering banana peels in my path I would prefer to be guided by analytic schools of thoughts and the logical consequences of treading on one (although I realize this provably makes me even more unfashionable than those who might still employ postmodernist terminology to make their points - of course I long ago stopped being particularly worried that I failed to master the fashionability component of my gay identity).

In a, probably futile. attempt to circle back to the OP, I am going to make a wild assumption and suggest that Yiwah was not necessarily referring to the debate over the physics of the WTC collapse. Instead, she is decrying the tendency of those making assertions on a wide variety of topics to assume the burden is on the rest of the world to refute them -- coupled with the tendency to employ the rhetorical trump card of "my personal experience tells me otherwise" when anyone has the the temerity to disagree with them. I think Yiwah is calling on us to offer common reference points in our discussions and to try to respond to others in relation to those reference points. I think part of that might include us asking questions of each other - in no small part to confirm that we are addressing the same thing.

So Yiwah, I have been making some assumptions about your OP - how about I ask directly. Were you referring to the threads about the WTC collapse, or was it a more generalized comment about how debates unfold in here?

Oh, so it was primarily in reference to those threads. Guess I better reveal my true age and start making comments about the need for an extra large bottle of white-out.... (Damn those wild assumptions, bad kitty, bad bad kitty)

Yiwah, please be more explicit in what you're talking about. The progressive collapse theory is not supported by science. The onus is on the believers of this theory to prove its validity.