The law has a bit of a dichotomy between direct and circumstantial, but "indirect" isn't even a thing.
Because of his ongoing embarrassment in the circumstantial evidence thread he started, he's switched back to calling it "indirect evidence" in this thread.
As you note, circumstantial evidence is indirect in the sense that you don't prove directly the existence of the fact you're trying to establish. You indirectly suggest it by proving the existence of other facts that would arguably follow from the fact in question. Because of the indirection, it takes many such indirect facts in order to convince a reasonable person. That series of indirect facts has to converge. But the important factor is that you're still providing evidence
for the larger question.
Jabba instead believes in a different form of indirection. In his formulation, if you can undermine some other conclusion, "even a little bit," then it indirectly proves your desired conclusion by making one of its competitors seem slightly less likely. It doesn't provide, or require, any evidence whatsoever
for the desired conclusion, which is why that illogical abomination of an argument is so popular with fringe theorists.
But to sum up, there's "indirect meaning I prove X and Y which together strongly imply Z," and "indirect meaning I erode faith in X and something else called Y somehow necessarily becomes more true as a result." Jabba desperately wants the latter to look like the former by means of his standard Equivocation Tap Dance.
Note though that although really the legal system is irrelevant for scientific questions, you're not quite making the cut even by court standards.
Indeed. As I showed in my court example in the other thread, under some circumstances the defense can move to dismiss certain counts in the complaint after the plaintiff rests his case, if plaintiff has provided no affirmative case to establish the allegations upon which they rest.
But you can't go to court with just suppositions, personal beliefs, and steadfast doubt about all objections.
Well, you
can. You just won't last very long. Complaints only have to be based on information and beliefs that are reasonable on their face, and on that basis you can go to court. But at trial you have to prove the information and belief to be more than just that.
[1]
Nothing would prevent Jabba from going to court with a complaint attesting "Plaintiff believes and is informed that if a cloth has blood on it, it is more likely to be the burial shroud of Jesus than it is to be some other kind of cloth."
[2] And even if the other party moved to dismiss prior to trial on the grounds that's not a "thing," a judge, in ruling on it, would have to resolve that inference in Jabba's favor.
However, after he has presented his case in chief, which we've seen consists of nothing but naked assertion and a pseudo-statistical argument begging that same question, I'd venture to guess nothing would really save him from having that premise yanked out from underneath him mid-trial. Statistical tautologies do not establish allegations of facts. As much as he detests direct evidence, having none for "blood preferentially supports authenticity" would be fatal.
That renders moot at the law any argument that the cloth actually has blood.
[3]
Not being lawyer, I can't confirm from expertise or experience that such a case wouldn't be allowed to go to a jury, but if I were the other party I'd certainly look askance at my lawyer if he didn't move to dismiss the "blood preferentially supports authenticity" claim for lack of foundation.
It's not enough to just argue that it COULD possibly be some cloth from that era, and it COULD be blood on it, etc. You have to show that it IS the shroud of that murdered Jesus guy...
This is why science is different than the law. Not only must a circumstantial argument at the law rise to that level of convergence, in science you don't get to make such inferences
at all. If you must work via an indirection such as measuring a physical value from which you plan to infer some overall causation, you have to
prove that no other intervening factor produces the result you're measuring. Scientific conclusions are revised when new factors are discovered. This is what science calls "controlling for" something, and if you don't do it, it's not science. It's not enough in science to show that some bag of otherwise unconnected facts would convince a reasonable person that a single purported cause produced them all. The reproducibility requirement in science explicitly disallows that. You have to show your conclusion as a matter of deduction.
And in neither law nor science do you get to prevail by arguments that simply list the reasons why the other party's evidence
could be wrong. "McCrone was notoriously difficult to work with, therefore he
could have conspired to hide the truth." No! That wouldn't even rise to the standard of relevance to impeach a witness. If you plan to impeach McCrone and say he conspired to hide the facts, or otherwise misbehaved in a way that compromised his results, you have to show he actually
did those things, not that "could" have done them.
And in neither law nor science does a claimant get to rest upon his unevidenced claims and prevail by doing nothing more than impeaching his critics.
Jabba admits he has no evidence
for authenticity. All he's offered for years is different versions of the same song and dance: Vague arguments
against the medieval date, or
against scholars who refute sindonist claims should somehow count as evidence
for authenticity. Jabba whines that his critics "demand direct evidence." They are right to do so, for without it Jabba's argument doesn't even get off the ground. Even what he mischaracterizes as "indirect evidence" is just vague innuendo.
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[1] Technically you will have to provide an "offer of proof" stating what your legal theory is, and listing the facts you'll prove and how you plan to prove them. That also has to be reasonable. You can't say, "I plan to prove this by kneeling down in front of the other party's table and stomping and whining like petulant child until he says uncle."
[2] Jabba habitually equivocates this statement. In stating that a cloth with blood on it is more likely to be the burial shroud of Jesus than not, he does his trusty old "a hypothesis and its complement" switcheroo to equivocate between "bloody cloth that isn't Jesus' burial shroud," and "a cloth with no blood on it."
[3] Conversely not being able to prove the stains are blood would also render moot the other leg of Jabba's argument, that blood is probative of authenticity.
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