So you confirm the point I made that you need to assert the veracity of the assertion The eyewitnesses are wrong 100% of the time..
However you don’t address the issue of whether it is a plausible assertion. In fact it is an impossibility for the assertion to be correct according to your own principles. The most obvious is that if the assertion were true, then there is no such thing as observed reality. Now while this might entertain philospophers in a serious debate about the possibility (brains in vats being fed “experiences” being the exemplar), I don’t think that anyone – least of all the UFO debunkers – would deny objective (observed) reality. Yet denial of objectivbe reality is precisely the implication if you are to uphold the truth of the assertion.
However, it IS interesting in that the way you frame it, because you make it seem like it is ME who makes some kind of “100%” infallibility assertion! All along I have claimed (and repeat again) that the eyewitnesses DO make errors of judgement and it is those very errors that we can use as tools in our determination of the veracity of UFO reports. For example perceptual research tells us that distance estimates in a clear blue sky are error prone. Thus if we have five witnesses (as in Rogue River) reporting the distance similarly, then we would consider we might have a problem, because, according to research, they should not be able to be consistent. If they were, then we would suspect they were not independent and had somehow collaborated and this would throw the story into doubt. However, when the estimates vary – as they DO – then that adds veracity to their descriptions of events. Thus, far from claiming that the witnesses are “100% accurate” I note the research evidence that in fact, under certain conditions and in certain circumstances they most definitely should NOT be accurate (!) and more, we can positively USE that research to determine the veracity of the accounts.
So when you state there are cases of mistaken identity (such as you do) what you leave out of your “account” of those cases are the circumstances and conditions that caused the mistaken identity in the first place - and thus you fail to learn WHAT conditions and circumstances cause such mistakes and thus fail to be able to understand if those conditions might or might not apply in any new case you might examine. That is, you believe the unfounded generalisation The eyewitnesses are wrong 100% of the time. and thus, by ignoring a large body of research evidence, you are never able to determine when witnesses MAY be incorrect and when they MAY be perfectly accurate. Simply, I use perceptual error to inform, you use it to obscure.
