Is My Hypothesis Valid???

LOL. off base.it was not the point how impaired the witness was. your example would beg for details of how this witness observed the event. probably the prosecution would have to make a demonstration of the technique to verify the reliability of the observation. but that isnt the point. we can have a 20-15 vision, perfect hearing athlete with a law degree summa cum laude from harvard say she witnessed the crime - it's still only subjective evidence. and it has been enough to convict.

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- xongsmith

I think you are missing the point.RAZD believes that there is such a thing as "subjective evidence" that is NOT the same as the "subjective interpretation of objective evidence". He believes that something for which there is potentially no objective evidence whatsoever can still be evidenced subjectively.By eliminating any chance of the "subjective interpretation of objective evidence" in my example I am hoping to be enlightened as to what forms such evidence might take.Do you believe that in the absence of any objective evidence whatsoever something can still be considered to be evidenced?If so how? What forms does this evidence take?

Do you believe that the "conjecture" of a highly evidenced scientific hypothesis is equivalent to the conjecture that is used to conclude that wholly undetectable supernatural entities exist?If not how are they different?
If yes then are they equally valid?
What makes one more valid than the other?

Straggler writes:

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Do you believe that in the absence of any objective evidence whatsoever something can still be considered to be evidenced?

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If so how? What forms does this evidence take?

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If 100 people tell me there is a lion in the forest, I will either accept they're subjectives statements as true or not.Whether or not the subjective evidence can be verified without going into the woods myself does not matter. I can formulate my own "educated guess" based on they're statements, descriptions, whether the statements match up. What is the mental status of the witnesses. How reputable are they etc.Police use subjective evidence all the time.
Doctors use subjective evidence all the time.Even though I do believe empirical evidence is better does not mean it is the only way to postulate, or form a hypothesis. Your thoughts? Edited by 1.61803, : add funny pic.

The assertion that there is a lion in the forest is not solely based on subjective evidence.There is objective evidence that lions exist.There is objective evidence that forests exist.This is inherently different from the assertion, for example, that there is a fairy in a magical flying island. There is no objective evidence that fairies exist, and neither is there objective evidence that flying magical islands exist.A subjective experience still requires objective evidence before it can have any degree of likelihood attached to it.It is highly likely, for example, that a claim of having seen a cat cross a road is true, because previous objective evidence supports the assertions that cats exist, that roads exist, that cats do cross roads occasionally, and that such events have been witnessed before.It is highly unlikely that a claim of having seen a flying lion is true, because previous objective evidence suggests that lions cannot fly.It is even more unlikely that a claim of having seen a flying leprechaun is true, because there is no previous objective evidence suggesting that leprechauns, flying or not, exist at all.Further, by its very nature subjective evidence is open to human interpretation. When a person claims to have seen a UFO, for example, it is highly likely that the person saw something. That the thing seen was actually an alien spacecraft is the witness' own personal interpretation of what he/she saw. This is why human eyewitness testimony is so flimsy - our brains piece together full pictures from barely-glimpsed or poorly-remembered experiences using what we expect to see based on previous experience. Subjective "evidence" can support many different conclusions due to its openness to interpretation, meaning it cannot reliably support any conclusion.This is why we rely on independent, outside verification of personal observations. With the known phenomenon of mass hysteria, even large groups of people who witness the same event cannot completely verify that the event occurred; other evidence (photographs, video, footprints, fingerprints, hair, etc) must independently support such events when they are significantly outside the norm.

Hello Rahvin

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The assertion that there is a lion in the forest is not solely based on subjective evidence.

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Yes it is. If I am sitting at home eating a moon pie and I get a knock on the door and 100 people are standing out in my yard telling me there is a lion in the forest. What objective evidence other than what evidence they are producing could be anything other than subjective.
Take it a step further and suppose I am a hermit who has had no contact with the outside world ever. I am told by these people there is a lion in the forest. What objective evidence would I rely on now?

On what basis did they conclude this? Did they feel the presence of a lion from a city that is hundreds of mles away with no posible way of empirically experiencing the lion? Did they see the lion?If we are discussing wholly subjective evidence, as opposed to the subjective interpretation of objective evidence (which after all is the aim here) why would anyone need to see anything at all? I think all conclusions (scientific, day to day or anything else) are in reality made up of a number of factors. Something along the lines of:(objective evidence) + (logic) + (subjectivity) = (conclusion)Now here the term "subjectivity" refers to personal preferences, irrational bias, prejudice, wants, desires, wishful thinking, feelings, illogical thoughts, creativity, invention etc. etc. etc. In fact anything that is not already encompassed in any way by the terms "logic" or "objective evidence". It is this that shapes the interpretation of the objective evidence available. It is this that the methods of science seek to eliminate as much as is humanly possible.The question is then whether or not in the absence of ALL possibility of objective evidence, no empirical data whatsoever, when there is in fact no objective evidence available to interpret, whether the term I have called "subjectivity" results in conclusions that are any better than guessing.The interpretation of zero evidence cannot logically be better than randomly guessing.But if there is indeed such a thing as "subjective evidence" (rather than just the subjective inerpretation of objecive evidence) then in the absence of any empirical data at all conclusions that are demonstrably better than guessing should still be possible by means of wholly subjective evidence alone.That is why examples of claimed sightings of empirically evidenced creatures like lions are not very helpful.That is why I gave my, admittedly rather morbid, blind, deaf, quadroplegic example. If you think that in the absence of any ability to interpret objective reality his chances of having anything accurate to say on the case in question are about as high as random guesses then I would suggest that you too are as cynical about the validity of wholly subjective evidence as I am.Edited by Straggler, : Spelling

Does he hermit know what a lion is? If so how does he know what a lion is?If we told him that a spoogletwat was in the forest would his reaction be any different?Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

Hi Straggler,

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(objective evidence) + (logic) + (subjectivity) = (conclusion)

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I think you are getting at the fact that we depend on our objective senses and logic to validate or invalidate data. Yes, this is reasonable and I agree. But my whole point was to try and come up with a instance where subjective evidence in the absence of objective evidence could serve to form a hypothesis. The crux of the whole point depends on whether or not one thinks subjective evidence even exist. You seem to not think those two words belong together. If I remember my philosophy correctly it was the British Empiricist who began this we can never really know anything we can't experience. Is it anywonder you live in London. Hume would be proud.

The Hermit knows what a lion is by subjective statements from the villager who are telling him there is a lion in the forest.The village idiot tells him a spooglewat is in the forest as well but this is not cooberated by the other 99 people.

Oh we can know subjective things from subjective evidence. I know that I love my son without anyone measuring my brainwaves or anything like that.In another philosophical sense we cannot truly know anything. As I could be a brain in a jar subjectively imagining all of this or even worse a random fluctuation of consciousness in some chaotic aether. But lets not go down those philosophical rabbit holes Question: If "subjective evidence" (that is distinct and seperate from the subjective interpretation of objective evidence) is valid can you tell me why my example in which all possibility of empirical data was removed was not appropriate or valid enough for you to comment on?Why is our poor quadroplegic murder witness not a valid example?Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

Again, as I just said, there is objective evidence that lions exist, and objective evidence that forests exist. The claim that there is in actuality a lion in a forest is partially supported by objective evidence. Do you know what a forest is?If you're completely ignorant lions and forests, then no, there would be no objective evidence supporting the assertion of the 100.Unfortunately, that simply reinforces my point. Without the objective evidence supporting what a lion or a forest are and that they exist, the observations of the 100 are open to interpretation. The "lion" could in fact be a jaguar, or a fairy. The "forest" could be a city, or a tent. The observation of the 100 could simply be mass hysteria. Their claim is not evidence that there is a lion in a forest at all if we do not have objective evidence that lions and forests exist.Replace "lion" with "fairy." If 100 people come up to you and claim to have seen a fairy in the forest near your home, is their collective observation evidence that fairies exist?"Evidence" must be a set of objective facts which collectively support a given conclusion above others.Fingerprints, discarded bloody knives, and a corpse with knife wounds are collectively evidence of a murder, because they support that conclusion above other conceivable conclusions.In the case of a claim that there is a lion in teh forest, we have the knowledge that lions and forests exist as facts that collectively support the assertion of the 100, though further verification is required.In the case of a claim that there is a fairy in the forest, the only fact is that 100 people are making a claim that cannot be immediately verified with pre-existing objective evidence. Without any facts to collectively support a conclusion, it is equally probable that the fairy exists, or that this is a case of mass hysteria, or any number of other scenarios. The subjective claim is reason for further inquiry, but is not itself evidence of anything at all.There must be some degree of certitude granted by any proposed proof in order to qualify as evidence.That means that evidence must support a concise position. It cannot support multiple equally likely positions simultaneously, because in such a case there can be no degree of certitude at all (if a large number of disparate positions are all equally supported, no conclusion can be drawn and thus whatever information is under consideration cannot alone qualify as evidence).If I claim to have witnessed a clemthorp, my claim is not evidence of anything. Multiple different conclusions are supported equally - I may have been hallucinating, I could have made it up, I could be delusional, I could have seen a false pattern that I then interpreted as a clemthorp...and what the hell is a clemthorp, anyway? There is no degree of certitude granted by my claim alone; no conclusion can be supported above any number of others. This is analogous to deistic claims that there exists an undefinable "higher power."If 100 people claim to have seen a lion in the forest, the fact that lions and forests exist provide at least some degree of certitude (even if it's extremely low) that those 100 people saw what they identified as a lion in what they perceived to be a forest. As Straggler would say, the objective evidence in this case points to the plausibility, though not the actuality, of a lion actually existing in a forest. Without that objective evidence, the claim of the 100 grants no degree of certitude whatsoever, and alone is not evidence of anything beyond the fact that 100 people have claimed that there is a lion in the forest.Leaving aside the "100 people claim there is a lion in the forest" claim for a moment, it's important to note that, while additional witnesses do increase the likelihood of an event actually having happened, those witnesses must have actually seen the same thing. This is of particular relevance with religion - multiple claims of having witnessed or experienced "the divine" do not cumulatively qualify as evidence because each person's definition and experience of "the divine" is different; one person's vision of Thor and another person's divine revelation from Zeus do not combine to prove that a "higher power" exists.

This is irrelevant towards RAZD's point. He has not made any claims about the characteristics of anything.Nor has he stated that objective evidence exists to support it.Further, to your flying island, not sure why you added magical, we have evidence of flight and we have evidence of islands - we don't have evidence of an island flying, but then again, lions don't live in the forest either - so both require some degree abnormality. Granted a flying island would be a greater abnormality, but that isn't the point. We all experience objective reality subjectively. Perhaps you meant the interpretation, to be considered valid, should have some objective evidence to support it?But, again, that would be irrelevant because RAZD has not denied the fact that there is no objective evidence for it. So is reality - objective reality. Everything is open to human interpretation because we use our senses to experience reality.What seems to be the issue is the lack of collaborating evidence for his subjective interpretaion. But that is only an issue if we have an a priori assumtion that we currently have all of the objective evidence that is to be known.

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According to evidence proportionism, a subject's level of confidence in (H) should vary directly with the strength of his/her evidence in favor of (H's) truth. Likewise, his/her level of confidence in (H) conditional on (E) should vary directly with the strength of his/her evidence for (H's) truth when this evidence is augmented by the supposition of (E). It is a matter of some delicacy to say precisely what constitutes a person's evidence, and to explain how his/her beliefs should be "proportioned" to it. Nevertheless, the idea that incremental evidence is reflected in disparities between conditional and unconditional probabilities only makes sense if differences in subjective probability mirror differences in total evidence.

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SourceYes, but *my* subjective experience supports *my* interpretation, of the exerience itself, which took place in reality. What is the issue is the degree to which my interpretation is probable. But, the degree to which it is probable can only be determined when all objective evidence is known, for a fact, to have been collected.- Oni

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"I smoke pot. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your mouth."--Bill Hicks"I never knew there was another option other than to question everything"--Noam Chomsky

My uderstanding is that RAZD does believe that wholly subjective evidence (i.e. evidence that exists in the total absence of objective evidence and thus for which no interpretation is possible) is indeed valid and can tell us about external reality.He does indeed think that this form of evidence exists as distinct from "the subjective interpretation of objective evidence"His secondary defense of this when any attempt to talk about "wholly subjective evidence" is to state that we cannot actually distinguish between "wholly subjective evidence" and "the subjective interpretation of evidence".I intend to explore this claim through my morbid thought experiment Message 44But hopefully RAZ will clarify his exact position on what is and is not meant by "subjective evidence".

Then I, like you, will wait for his explanation as to what on earth is subjective evidence...? Determined by who...? Him...?My understanding is that the experience itself is the evidence for the subjective interpretation. As a human with a mind to do so you have the right to your subjective interpretation. Here is where "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" can be used as a defense.The only thing subjective experience can be said to be evidence for is the persons own existance.Thanks for the clarification, Starggler.- Oni

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"I smoke pot. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your mouth."--Bill Hicks"I never knew there was another option other than to question everything"--Noam Chomsky