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John Locke (1632–1704), the likely originator of the term.. 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.
It is the opposite of inculpatory evidence, which tends to present guilt. In many countries, including the United States, police and prosecutors are required to disclose to the defendant exculpatory evidence they possess before the defendant enters a plea (guilty or not guilty). [2]
Incontrovertible evidence and conclusive evidence (less formally, concrete evidence and hard evidence) [1] [2] are colloquial terms for evidence introduced to prove a fact that is supposed to be so conclusive that there can be no other truth to the matter; i.e., evidence so strong it overpowers contrary evidence, directing a fact-finder to a ...
Definitional retreat – changing the meaning of a word when an objection is raised. [23] Often paired with moving the goalposts (see below), as when an argument is challenged using a common definition of a term in the argument, and the arguer presents a different definition of the term and thereby demands different evidence to debunk the argument.
The term false discovery rate (FDR) was used by Colquhoun (2014) [4] to mean the probability that a "significant" result was a false positive. Later Colquhoun (2017) [ 2 ] used the term false positive risk (FPR) for the same quantity, to avoid confusion with the term FDR as used by people who work on multiple comparisons .
The term invincible ignorance has its roots in Catholic theology, as the opposite of the term vincible ignorance; it is used to refer to the state of persons (such as pagans and infants) who are ignorant of the Christian message because they have not yet had an opportunity to hear it.
The opposite, slothful induction, is the fallacy of denying the logical conclusion of an inductive argument, dismissing an effect as "just a coincidence" when it is very likely not. The overwhelming exception is related to the hasty generalization but works from the other end. It is a generalization that is accurate, but tags on a qualification ...
More broadly, proof by contradiction is any form of argument that establishes a statement by arriving at a contradiction, even when the initial assumption is not the negation of the statement to be proved. In this general sense, proof by contradiction is also known as indirect proof, proof by assuming the opposite, [2] and reductio ad ...