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Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor that serves as a general rule for rejecting certain knowledge claims. It states: "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence". [1] [2] [3] [a] The razor was created by and later named after author and journalist Christopher Hitchens.
Carl Sagan proposed a related criterion – "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" – which is known as the Sagan standard. [ 2 ] While certain kinds of arguments, such as logical syllogisms , require mathematical or strictly logical proofs , the standard for evidence to meet the burden of proof is usually determined by context ...
Argument from silence (argumentum ex silentio) – assuming that a claim is true based on the absence of textual or spoken evidence from an authoritative source, or vice versa. [ 68 ] Ignoratio elenchi (irrelevant conclusion, missing the point) – an argument that may in itself be valid, but does not address the issue in question.
Argument from ignorance (Latin: argumentum ad ignorantiam), or appeal to ignorance, [a] is an informal fallacy where something is claimed to be true or false because of a lack of evidence to the contrary.
The following example demonstrates why this line of reasoning is a logical fallacy: I've seen a person shoot someone dead. Therefore, all people are murderers. In the common discourse, a proof by example can also be used to describe an attempt to establish a claim using statistically insignificant examples. In which case, the merit of each ...
Slippery slope arguments may be defeated by asking critical questions or giving counterarguments. [32] There are several reasons for a slippery slope to be fallacious: for example, the argument is going too far into the future, it is a too complex argument whose structure is hard to identify, or the argument makes emotional appeals. [33]
Argumentation schemes are stereotypical patterns of inference, combining semantic-ontological relations with types of reasoning and logical axioms and representing the abstract structure of the most common types of natural arguments. [13] A typical example is the argument from expert opinion, shown below, which has two premises and a conclusion ...
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" (sometimes shortened to ECREE), [1] also known as the Sagan standard, is an aphorism popularized by science communicator Carl Sagan. He used the phrase in his 1979 book Broca's Brain and the 1980 television program Cosmos .