Who says the person asserting something has to prove it?!
ShadowNode (doubtless a member of the B/CC, but that's another matter for another node) makes a claim above:
The burden of proof is always on the person asserting something.
Furthermore, s/he
insists that
failure to comply is
grounds for claiming a
logical fallacy!
Do you see a proof of this assertion anywhere? Because I don't see one.
As always, logicians make up "fallacies", but don't bother to prove that they are indeed fallacies.
Food for thought.
Naturally, the Logician's Guild is busily faking a groundswell of popular support for their views. Doubtless we can expect to find many paralogical people among their supporters. I shall endeavour to empty their hollow claims down below.
- Plasma
- Plasma's argument is the typical straw man fallacy, which logicians attack elsewhere when it suits their purposes. Specifically, s/he states that some weird "circular argument" would result if 2 people argued, and each shifted the burden of proof.
First, note that Plasma provides no hard, soft or even squishy evidence that such a situation has ever occurred. "Shifting the burden of proof", indeed! However, I am sure that this is perfectly OK to do when arguing on the side of the Logicians.
But even assuming Plasma's implausible and far-fetched scenario, with such a silly argument taking place, note that by e's own "logic" one of the two people arguing is right! So, accepting the ground rules laid by Plasma, we still see that a person who shifts the burden of proof has better than even odds of being right! Just examine Plasma's scenario (exactly 50% chance of being right while shifting the burden of proof) and my scenario (close to 100% chance of being right while shifting the burden of proof). Assign a probability to each, and compute the average.
You get >50%, no matter which probabilities you pick. By shifting the burden of proof, we have a higher chance of being right than by arguing "logically".
- Tem42
- Tem42 is more insidious. First-off, s/he (rightfully) tries to distance hirself from the Logicians, by claiming to believe hemself a "Philosopher". Immediately after, we are to believe (this time by appeal to authority, i.e. "I'm a philosopher and you're not, so you have to do as I say") that by refusing to prove something we are stating a "belief".
Well, just like the justifications provided by D. Adams for the "42" in Tem's name, Tem42 fails to provide any proof for es assertions! In other words, these so-called "philosophical truths" are (at least in Tem42's method of "logical" reasoning) nothing more than BELIEFS. And we are supposed to believe them by some virtue of their being "self evident". Or maybe because they were uttered by PHILOSOPHERS.
But at least e's not shifting the burden of proof. More like ignoring it.