I think ``The absence of evidence is NOT the evidence of absence!``?
What are your thoughts?
Answers:
But just because you say something is so, doesn't make it so -- either. Just because we cannot find weapons of mass destruction doesn't mean that they ARE there . . . and just because President Reagan didn't have visible horns didn't mean THEY weren't there, either.
Assumptions are risky things.
but only in certain situations
?LOL,, Still Smokin the wacky backy I presume, slowww down,
It doesn't make sense.Two very different scenarios
Generally, but I have to agree with ryan that there are exceptions.
For example, a man files an insurance claim for fire damage to his garage. On examination, there is no evidence that there was ever a fire nor discernable damage. In such a case, the absence of evidence IS evidence of absence sufficient to prove there was no fire.
On the other hand, a man claims that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction. Investigators and troops are unable to locate these weapons. Although there is absence of evidence, that is not evidence of absence sufficient to prove there never were any weapons.
The statement means this: Just because there is no reason to think it exists, doesn't mean there is no reason to think it doesn't exist.
But there is no "it" if there is no evidence for it in the first place.
We know things exist because there is evidence to prove it. There is no reason to prove that something is absent, because what would make us think that it existed in the first place? There is no reason to prove that there is not a talking pinecone named Jeff in the core of the earth.
Knowledge has to start by observation. It is irrational to make a hypothesis before an observation. For example, people didn't just magically know that the world was round. They arrived to this conclusion by observing the earth's shadow on the moon. It would have been ridiculous to beleive that the world was round until there was a known reason. Before this it was actually reasonable to think the world was flat because it looked flat and there was no reason to think otherwise.
Proving a negative is always difficult.
The WMD could have been moved across the border to Syria & are now in the hands of Hezbolla.
We need vast improvements in military intelligence, and have it not be politicized by people who have some conclusion & just need some excuse to act on it.
The quality of national intelligence has gone both ways.
Remember Libya deciding they were going to give up their nuke program ... they were really far along, compared to North Korea & Iran, and the USA did not even know they had a nuke program.
Remember the fall of the former Soviet Union ... after the collapse we thouught we found out that their economy was in really bad shape compared to what our intelligence picture had been painted, but they acknowlege they had all those WMD in their inventory that they still cannot find.
It is like the US military giving 200,000 heavy weapons to the Iraqi police, of which 150,000 have been misplaced, and probably now being used against out troops. This did not happen in Bosnia because under Clinton a system was developed that worked, but Bush threw out all of Clinton's systems for political reasons & has not yet developed another system that works as good.
I suspeect both Clinton and Bush leadership has had a hand in the FBI losing track of almost half of their guns and computers, let alone their paperwork.
Businesses are constantly being broken into and stuff getting stolen. Can they prove what they had which was stolen?
We hear that some laptop got stolen & it had social security #s of 200,000 people on there. How can they possibly know before the laptop is recovered?
A scary thing about Reagan is that soon after he left office he was diagnosed with a mental disease that, given how long the symptoms take to be noticed, he must have had while he was still in office.
Some leaders of some nations sound really crazy scary. We now know some of them really have been mentally ill.
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