by skyhook77sfg » Sat Jul 09, 2011 6:21 pm
argumentum ad ignorantiam defined:
""Err, there is no evidence that the Watergate break in was ordered by Nixon."
Argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam or "appeal to ignorance", is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not been proven false (or vice versa). This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is that there is insufficient investigation and therefore insufficient information to satisfactorily prove the proposition to be either true or false. Nor does it allow the admission that the choices may in fact not be two (true or false), but may be as many as four, (1) true, (2) false, (3) unknown between true or false, and (4) being unknowable (among the first three).[1] In debates, appeals to ignorance are sometimes used to shift the burden of proof.
Argument from ignorance may be used as a rationalization by a person who realizes that he has no reason for holding the belief that he does.
there is also no proof der fuehrer ordered the holocaust
or Georgia's Josef Besarionis dze Jughashvili ordered the kulak extinction
or Mighty Mao ordered 20,000,000 deaths.
But objective observers recall Tricky Dick's diktat:
"When the President does it, that means it is not illegal."
Richard M. Nixon
May 20, 1977.