Troythulu’s Top 20 Logical Fallacies #15

This, the fifteenth in my series of top 20 errors in thought and argument, deals with one of the more common intellectual strategies of true believers, the Negative Proof Fallacy, or Burden of Proof Fallacy. The intent is to shift the burden of proof for their claims away from themselves, and onto their critics, arguing to the effect that said critics must prove absolutely that the pet claim in question isn’t true, or prove to an impossible standard of evidence that an accepted theory is true.

This is a fallacy because of a principle in science known as the Null Hypothesis, which demands that the burden of proof falls upon the party making a claim of fact, not the critics. Simply put, it demands that ‘Any new idea is to be considered bulls—t until demonstrated true beyond a reasonable doubt.’ This applies to all new theories, and any theory passing this gauntlet gets accepted by the scientific community at large. Any theory not passing it is relegated to the intellectual garbage heap of failed ideas.

Also, It is simply not possible to prove a universal negative, to prove absolutely that a claim of fact isn’t true with a finite data set. It may be possible to move the probability of something being true ever closer to zero, but you can never actually reach that with a finite amount of evidence. Nor is it possible to prove anything absolutely true, to a probability of exactly one, only beyond a rational doubt, which is really all that is needed in science.

Unfortunately, not everyone’s doubt is rational, thus leading to the commission of this fallacy by proponents of pseudoscience, especially creationists, UFOlogists, and parapsychologists, who insist that critics explain away all of the data, to their satisfaction or demand that the critics explain absolutely any perceived ‘anomaly’ in a standard theory, such as evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics or such, again to a standard of satisfaction that cannot be met, arguing that if it is not, that the standard theory is ‘in crisis’ or ‘on shaky ground.’

It’s effectively just a rhetorical stunt, and any attempt to thus improperly shift the burden of proof in these ways should simply be met with a refusal to comply with this intellectually dishonest tactic, and a firm reminder of on who the burden actually rests. It’s most often used when the proponent of a theory has no real positive evidence in favor of his own idea, which is usually the case in pseudoscience.