Arguments from Silence
Table of Contents Jump to a major section: The Puzzle: Why “Argument from Silence” Leads to Apologetics What an Argument from Silence Actually Is When Silence Is Evidence What Counts as Evidence? The Bayesian Formulation Where the Bayesian Treatment Can Go Wrong The Total-Evidence Problem Priors, Auxiliary Assumptions, and Ad Hoc Rescue Why Apologetics Is Especially Interested in the Argument Conclusion The Puzzle: Why “Argument from Silence” Leads to Apologetics The question that motivates this essay is simple: if arguments from silence are a general form of historical and evidential reasoning, why does searching for the term so often lead to apologetics? Answering that requires separating the logic of the argument from the ways people deploy or dismiss it. Different fields tend to rely on different argument forms. Statistical sciences emphasize questions of causality and correlation; legal reasoning frequently appeals to precedent; and analogical arguments allow us to evaluate...