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View Poll Results: Do you believe in ghosts?
I believe in ghosts! 16 38.10%
I believe in ghosts!
16 38.10%
I do not believe in ghosts! 12 28.57%
I do not believe in ghosts!
12 28.57%
I am not sure, I don't know what to believe. 14 33.33%
I am not sure, I don't know what to believe.
14 33.33%
Voters: 42. You may not vote on this poll

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Old 11-03-2012, 05:56 PM #10
Jesus.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 08marsh View Post
But there is one big, fat problem with all this. Among profes- sional logicians, guess how many think that you can’t prove a negative? That’s right: zero. Yes, you can prove a negative, and it’s easy, too. For one thing, a real, actual law of logic is a negative, namely the law of non-contradiction. This law states that that a proposition cannot be both true and not true. Nothing is both true and false. Furthermore, you can prove this law. It can be formally derived from the empty set using provably valid rules of inference. (I’ll spare you the boring details). One of the laws of logic is a provable negative. Wait... this means we’ve just proven that it is not the case that one of the laws of logic is that you can’t prove a negative. So we’ve proven yet another negative! In fact, ‘you can’t prove a negative’ is a negative  so if you could prove it true, it wouldn’t be true! Uh-oh.



Thank you for the link. I will have a read of it properly, although after skimming it, I saw some linguistic tricks and at least one fallacy, but I'll read the whole thing before commenting fully.



But just to highlight a glaring hole in his argument:



1. If unicorns had existed, then there is evidence in the fossil record.
2. There is no evidence of unicorns in the fossil record.
3. Therefore, unicorns never existed.



Not every animal that has existed we have evidence for, yet we know about their existence due to the fact that they are intermediary species, and through biology. Also, I'm fairly sure that there are, as of yet undiscovered fossils of animals that have existed in the past. Does the fact we are yet to find them, mean that they didn't exist? Of course not.


Finally, when people say " you can't either prove or disprove....." they are generally about to make a claim that is outrageous, such as heaven/religion/magic etc, so it's one thing attempting to use fossil evidence to disprove unicorns, but it's another thing entirely to make claims that can't be tested, and then say it's a draw.
 
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