Why is this the case? Wouldn’t a lack of evidence hint at, but not necessarily prove that this could be the case?
In: Biology
In general, you can’t prove a negative.
You can’t prove I was never in a room. You can scour that room up and down, left and right, swabbing and fingerprinting and blacklighting and all of that, and you may not find a single thing.
But if I opened the door, stuck a toe in there, and closed the door, I was in the room. If the room was still a construction zone and I wore construction booties, stood in there, then left, there’d be no evidence I was ever in there. The lack of evidence doesn’t prove that I was never in that room.
Absence of evidence= “I haven’t found anything that supports my hypothesis”
Evidence of absence= “This evidence I’ve found supports my hypothesis that this thing is gone, or never existed”
People say it not because it is true but because it sounds clever.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence but not proof of absence.
I think of this in a criminal context. The fact that the police can’t prove that you were at the crime scene at the time of the crime (i.e., due to the absence of evidence), doesn’t mean that you weren’t actually there.
There are two animals on Earth: One is Manbearpig, the other is me. We are on opposite ends of the Earth. I search everywhere and the Manbearpig somehow mirrors my exact moves, meaning it stays on the opposite end of where I am. I can search everywhere and never find Manbearpig, but Manbearpig exists. Just because I haven’t found Manbearpig does not mean Manbearpig does not exist.
>Wouldn’t a lack of evidence hint at, but not necessarily prove that this could be the case?
In the right context actually yes. “I think Mike has a dead body in his trunk.” Okay, well let’s go look in the trunk. We open it and find no dead body, that’s pretty strong evidence of its absence.
If instead though it was “I think Mike buried a dead body somewhere in Utah” now we have a much tougher problem. You could spend a year digging holes in random locations in Utah and you’d almost certainly have no sign of a dead body. That in no way comes close to providing any evidence that there *isn’t* a dead body somewhere in Utah.
If Mike was being put on trial, and the jury was filled with perfect logical people, his attorney would be ill advised to bring up the Utah example as any kind of demonstration that there isn’t a body at all. If the prosecution theory somehow hinged on it definitely being in Mike’s trunk on the other hand and the trunk had been checked, then that would be good “evidence of absence”.
This is an example of why the concept of Burden of Proof is important. In court, it’s spelled out in the law: innocent until proven guilty, the burden is on the prosecution. So despite the fact that they weren’t able to find that body in Utah they can’t really argue “Well Mike can’t prove there *isn’t* a body buried in Utah!” It’s true. Mike can’t prove that, but he doesn’t have to. The prosecution has to prove there is.
In the day to day world generally its on the person making the claim “You can’t prove there’s *isn’t* a Bigfoot!” You’re right I can’t, but if you want me to believe it, you need to prove it’s there.
The Romans believed that black swans didn’t exist. There’s a recorded saying in Latin translated as “a bird as rare upon the earth as a black swan” meaning something can’t happen. Then westerners made it to Australia and saw its black swan population in 1672.
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