John Michael Greer - The UFO Phenomenon_ Fact, Fantasy and Disinformation (2009, Llewellyn Publications) by Unknown Author

Author:Unknown Author
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

Logical Fallacies

The null hypothesis camp has made much of these failures of logic. Their critiques might have carried more force if their own side of the argument had been free from shoddy reasoning, but the reality has been uncomfortably far from this ideal. Just as backers of the extraterrestrial hypothesis fell victim to rampant confirmation bias in their efforts to prove what they believed was true, supporters of the null hypothesis let the search for effective rhetorical weapons against their opponents seduce them into reliance on logical fallacies.

A fallacy, in the language of logic, is a plausible argument that relies on false reasoning. Most of the fallacies known to modern logicians were analyzed centuries ago in the Middle Ages, and are still known by their medieval Latin names. The fallacies of the null hypothesis derive from these classic logical howlers, but combine them in highly imaginative ways to meet the needs of the debunking crusade. The resulting arguments are distinct enough that at least three of them deserve names of their own.

The first of these distinctive fallacies has been neatly defined in the words “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.” There seems to be some question about who first formulated this adage, but it appears frequently in the writings of the late debunker and CSI-COP member Carl Sagan, and so it seems only reasonable to name it “Sagan’s fallacy.”10 Like most fallacies, it seems reasonable at first glance, but behind it lies a drastic distortion of logic. What this adage means is that evidence for one set of claims—“extraordinary claims”—ought to be judged by a different and more restrictive standard of evidence than other claims.

What makes a claim extraordinary, though? Jimmy Carter’s 1969 UFO sighting offers a good example. What we know about the sighting is that a small group of businessmen watched an unusual light in the sky for a few minutes. Robert Sheaffer’s claim that the witnesses saw the planet Venus, and somehow suffered a collective hallucination in which the planet seemed to turn red and approach within a few hundred yards of them, is surely just as extraordinary as the suggestion that the witnesses saw something strange in the sky, and reported it as they saw it. If the same group of men had sighted parhelia or ball lightning, say,11 Sheaffer would likely have accepted their testimony as a matter of course. The only thing that makes Carter’s sighting “extraordinary” is that believers in the null hypothesis want to argue that it did not happen.

This point can be made more generally. The evidence that has been offered to date for the real existence of UFOs—not, please note, of alien spaceships, but simply of things seen in the skies that have not yet been adequately identified by witnesses or investigators, which again is what the term actually means—would have been accepted by most scientists if it involved anything within the currently accepted range of natural phenomena. Sagan’s fallacy attempts to justify this divergence, but in the process it violates several of the most basic rules of logic.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.