Quote:
Originally Posted by regular.joe
Clod,
The smart guy at the University explains it much better then I can, fuck I'm just a Drill Sergeant. I recommend reading the link in my last post.
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From the link;
Quote:
A principle of folk logic is that one can’t prove a negative. Dr. Nelson L. Price, a Georgia minister, writes on his website that ‘one of the laws of logic is that you can’t prove a negative.’
Julian Noble, a physicist at the University of Virginia, agrees, writing in his ‘Electric Blanket of Doom’ talk that ‘we can’t prove a negative proposition.’ University of California at Berkeley Professor of Epidemiology Patricia Buffler asserts that ‘The reality is that we can never prove the negative, we can never prove the lack of effect, we can never prove that something is safe.’ A quick search on Google or Lexis-Nexis will give a mountain of similar examples.
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Seems there is a whole lot of smart guys, that heartily disagree with your smart guy.
After reading that link, I, like Clod, agree that the inductive argument is a practical tool, day to day. I'm no smarter than a drill sergeant, but I don't buy his reasoning that a negative can be proven.
