...and, which gains in probability given the new info?
You haven't proven it does. You "compute" your probability based on the prior presumption that four legs means dog and not just quadruped. Then you pretend Bayes lets you conclude this as an objective proposition. This has been explained to you repeatedly, but you obviously don't care how wrong you are.
Having eliminated an unimaginably large number of ~DOGS from the ~DOGS poo
Asked and answered repeatedly. You equivocate your definition of "not dog" as you lay your case out. At the beginning it means one thing, and then you change that definition halfway through.
At the beginning it means "quadrupeds that aren't dogs" because the premise is that the evidence is consistent with all four-legged animals, dogs or otherwise. This is congruent with your premise in the shroud argument that blood (or limestone) is consistent with all bloody or dusty shrouds, authentic or otherwise.
But then when you're trying to foist your claim of differentiation, you say "not dogs" means "all things that aren't quadrupeds" such that you can now use evidence of four legs as a means of pretending you've improved the chances of dog, if only by improving the chances of all quadrupeds over such things as ocean liners. This is congruent with your begged question and circular argument in the shroud case that the shroud is more likely to be authentic (now among
all clothes, not among all bloody clothes) because it has blood or dust on it.
And second, as has been laboriously put to you, we are not dealing with "a hypothesis and its complement." We are dealing with several competing affirmative hypotheses. Again, this is why we use likelihood rather than probability as the prior. You still haven't figured that out.
Seriously, this is basic logic. Put your grandkids on; I'll bet dollars to donuts I can teach this to them in one post.
Say that we then find out that our THING has a tail.
Say you find out out has a long trunk-like nose. This would be akin to the radiocarbon dating in your shroud argument. And let's say it has tusks (e.g., the weave). You simply want to pit all the non-elephant evidence against the elephant evidence as if they were somehow on opposite sides of a case and then preferentially cry dog because you say you have some amount of non-elephant evidence that "tips the scales."
So far you haven't presented
any evidence, so quibbling over what kind it is or what you would do with it if you had any is just wasting time.
More circumstantial evidence for DOG over ~DOG
Yes, if you were to find more uniquely dog-like characteristics you could make a circumstantial case, using all of those traits together, that it is a dog. And yes, it is relatively simple to contrive an analogy where the hypothetical evidence converges because you bespoke it to.
This does not mean your shroud argument converges in like fashion. Convergence is a requirement of a circumstantial case that is to be considered probative. It does not simply arise automatically because you call something circumstantial.
"Tail" is consistent with dog, but does not serve to differentiate it from other quadrupeds. A distinctive name is consistent with dog, but does not serve to differentiate it from other quadrupeds. Fur would eliminate the elephant, but still be consistent only with furry quadrupeds. You must have differentiating evidence that is more than merely consistent, and no single bit of it suffices.
The problem is that your shroud evidence -- blood and limestone -- is not sufficient to differentiate the true burial shroud of Jesus from other bloody medieval clothes. You merely declare that it is, which is why people rightly accuse you of begging the question. And the further problem is that radiocarbon dating is a very distinctive bit of evidence that, even in a circumstantial case, rules out a first-century origin.
You predictably did not read my post on convergence and consilience. The shroud evidence, considered circumstantially, converges toward forgery. Your piddling around with contrived examples of dogs does nothing to fix that. Your dog analogy is nothing like your shroud argument.
