Top 5 Skeptical Fallacies

[Emily's Cat]

Maybe the more examples the better the chance of OntarioSquatch getting the idea. Here is one more:

How do we know that it is not raining in my location? Well, if a (if it were raining outside) then b (there would be clouds, water on the exposed ground, and I would feel and see rain when I went outside). There is no b (no clouds, no water on the exposed ground, no sense or sight of rain). So there is no a (no rain right now)....

Lol, apparently we're both hoping for rain?

 

[Giordano]

Lol, apparently we're both hoping for rain?

I'm in California- (I gather you are in Pacific Northwest too) if there is still no rain in the Fall we will begin to kill and distill people for their bodily fluids.

 

[GT/CS]

First, "tenured professor" tells me nothing about his capacity to make or evaluate casts.

Second, "tenured professor" tells me nothing about the casts themselves--and data about the casts is the critical point here.

Third, I've already answered that question, including specific features of bigfoot casts that cause me to dismiss them.

Are you actually going to read my post? If not, I won't bother responding to you anymore.

I don't know, these seem like excellent credentials when it comes to footprints. Can you match them?

He has a lot of solid footprint evidence of bigfoot.

"Don Jeffrey "Jeff" Meldrum is a Full Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology and a Professor of the Department of Anthropology at Idaho State University. Meldrum is also Adjunct Professor of Occupational and Physical Therapy"

 

[Resume]

I thought that was a given - I have yet to hear of them roaming like bears through suburbs.

Not exactly like bears.
http://bigfootforums.com/index.php/topic/50678-urban-bigfoot-seriously2/page-4

http://www.bfro.net/GDB/show_report.asp?id=45830

I spoke with the witness in phone.

In summary:

• The animal was estimated at 6 feet tall.
• The animal was thinly built.
• The hair was solid dark in coloring.
• The witness was about 200 feet from the animal when it darted across the road.
• The animal was easily seen in the headlights of the vehicle.
• Although the area is heavily wooded the moon was full and had not set yet. The moon set at 4:38 a.m. a little over a half hour after the sighting.

The Forest Preserves of Cook County manages more than 69,000 acres of public land—about 11 percent of Cook County. The ecosystems within the Forest Preserves of Cook County consist of prairies, woodlands and wetlands.

The area of the sighting location is (circled in red).

Willow Springs is a southern suburb of Chicago; the Cook County Forest Preserve district is entirely urban/suburban.

 

[The Atheist]

Not exactly like bears.

Well, there you go.

It's almost like Rule 34 for bigfoot. If you can think it, someone will see it.

I'd be happy with suggesting that anyone seeing one in the suburbs needs to go to the optometrist.

 

[Resume]

I'd be happy with suggesting that anyone seeing one in the suburbs needs to go to the optometrist.

At least.

 

[Dinwar]

But it isn't logic; it's deductive reasoning.

You want to play semantic games, have at it. The fact of the matter is that this is sufficient justification for us to declare organisms that we know existed to not exist--so it's perfectly justifiable to use this line of reasoning (or logic or whatever you want to call it) to declare bigfoot to not exist.

And yet... "Lack of evidence" does not incontrovertibly equate to "evidence of lack".

Repetition doesn't make something true. I have given examples, and others have given others. Please point out where YOU would disagree with, say, my car example. When YOU walk into a garage and see no car, feel no car, and in fact have no evidence that there is a car, is there any doubt in YOUR mind that there is no car? If not, we can dismiss the rest of this argument, because you don't believe it either.

But lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.

Evidence=data supporting a conclusion. The absence of bigfoot remains counts as data. It supports the conclusion that there is no bigfoot. Ergo, absence of bigfoot remains is evidence of no bigfoot. QED.

I don't know, these seem like excellent credentials when it comes to footprints.

Why in the name of all the gods in Hell would I care what HIS credentials are? I'm not studying HIM; I'm looking at the casts. HE is irrelevant for the most part.

That's the part you refuse to address, and I'm getting bored with repeating it: If someone presented a VALID cast of a footprint, absent obvious flaws, yeah, it would count as evidence. INvalid casts, WITH obvious flaws, are not.

 

[OntarioSquatch]

There's no lack of evidence when it comes to Sasquatch. The only thing that's lacking is proof. You're going to need a type specimen to confirm whether or not evidence such as hair and footprints are authentic.

 

[GT/CS]

And since Dinwar is the only person who is capable of properly reviewing the evidence he will need to tell us whether or not it's proof.

 

[Donn]

There's no lack of evidence when it comes to Sasquatch. The only thing that's lacking is proof. You're going to need a type specimen to confirm whether or not evidence such as hair and footprints are authentic.

OS, I value your support for Elven Liberation, but please don't confuse the hair and other evidence - these are Elf sign. Thanks to deep woods pioneers like yourself, we now have evidence; all we lack is proof.

 

[Gilbert Syndrome]

There's no lack of evidence when it comes to Sasquatch. The only thing that's lacking is proof. You're going to need a type specimen to confirm whether or not evidence such as hair and footprints are authentic.

Would you care to take the bet that I offered to NL? If you're so confident of Bigfoot's discovery then let's make a wager. We set a proposed deadline, and if there's no Squatch, you pay me, if there is, or as soon as there is, I pay you. Sound fair?

Anyone on here who believes in Bigfoot can take my bet if they wish, although I think they'd be more inclined to use their wishes more wisely...beginning with wishing up an actual Sasquatch.

There's really no reason why this should be a problem, I mean, you believers are all out there doing excellent "research," afterall, so it shouldn't be long now, eh? If you can see them and interact with them, name them and observe them, then you can bag one and win a simple bet, no? Maybe the Atheist's mate can drum one up.

 

[Gilbert Syndrome]

Duplicate

 

[Cervelo]

I don't know, these seem like excellent credentials when it comes to footprints. Can you match them?

He has a lot of solid footprint evidence of bigfoot.

"Don Jeffrey "Jeff" Meldrum is a Full Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology and a Professor of the Department of Anthropology at Idaho State University. Meldrum is also Adjunct Professor of Occupational and Physical Therapy"

Your talking about this guy.....LMAO!

 

[John Nowak]

When YOU walk into a garage and see no car, feel no car, and in fact have no evidence that there is a car, is there any doubt in YOUR mind that there is no car?

I'd argue that your examples have an implicit boundary that you're leaving off.

I agree that there is evidence there is no car in the garage.

I agree that there is evidence there is no rain visible out my window.

 

[Resume]

There's no lack of evidence when it comes to Sasquatch. The only thing that's lacking is proof. You're going to need a type specimen to confirm whether or not evidence such as hair and footprints are authentic.

None of the purported footie evidence has tested as novel primate; If you're gonna pretend that samples with human contamination are the result of some sort of ET GMO-engineered HSS/hybrid, you're gonna have a hard time with that.

So no, no testable scientific evidence in favor of footie.

 

[Cervelo]

There's no lack of evidence when it comes to Sasquatch. The only thing that's lacking is proof. You're going to need a type specimen to confirm whether or not evidence such as hair and footprints are authentic.

The laughable evidence is all a complete fail, indicating nothing more than a social construct. Worth studying for sure, by psychologist.

 

[Donn]

I'd argue that your examples have an implicit boundary that you're leaving off.

Bigfoot in the garage.
A clear yes or no.

Bigfoot in the house.
He could be hiding, moving out of sight as you seek him. As time passes, he must be leaving traces, vast nasty-smelling ones at that.
Let's exclude mistaken traces where the scat is a racoon's or the hair a chupaburglar's.
No traces means no Bigfoot is in the house.

Bigfoot in the town.
Harder to pin down. It will take more time to find the traces of habitation, but over time it will become irrefutable.
No traces means no Bigfoot in the town.

Bigfoot in the state. Bigfoot in the continent. Same deal.

Expanding the boundary makes time significant, but there's been a lot of time to find the expected traces of Bigfoot.

This car-in-garage-or-not principle is a sort of macro state, I suppose. Above the threadbare quantum blah, or the tiny cracks in philosophy to allow possibles, there's a human-scale answer to human-scale questions.

 

[Giordano]

There's no lack of evidence when it comes to Sasquatch. The only thing that's lacking is proof. You're going to need a type specimen to confirm whether or not evidence such as hair and footprints are authentic.

It looks as you now understand how the 5 skeptical "fallacies" you cited in the OP aren't logical fallacies at all. That's great!

If, as is much more proper, you now want to argument the evidence in favor of Bigfoot, there are a number of preexisting threads devoted to different aspects of that topic, and I think that discussing the evidence here would be off topic to your own OP, which focuses on the 5 "faliacies" you mentioned.

I hope that you intend to provide new evidence that hasn't been discussed before, because I have followed these discussions and remain strongly unconvinced by what poor examples of evidence have been presented before. But certainly if you hope to repeat the old claims once again and yet somehow get a different result, please feel free.

I will point out that a large numbers of hair samples that were claimed to be evidence of Bigfoot were tested, and not one was an unknown hominid. Sure a "type specimen" would be very useful, but if one simply could collect DNA from a true Bigfoot hair, or poop, or spit, or etc., the DNA sequence would be sufficient to identify it as a previously unknown hominid, and this alone would be a seismic shift our view of Bigfoot's existence. It would also lead to a massively funded initiative to locate and study Bigfoot 10 or 15 times larger (at a minimum) than we have now. So an authenticated hair would be enough to "rock the scientific world" and to silence most of the critics.

Um- where you the poster who proposed that the DNA would be mostly human because Bigfoot may be people genetically modified by extraterrestrials? If so, the DNA would still show these changes, and an authentic hair sample would still produce very exciting results.

 

[Dinwar]

I'd argue that your examples have an implicit boundary that you're leaving off.

I agree that there is evidence there is no car in the garage.

I agree that there is evidence there is no rain visible out my window.

And I am arguing that there is no non-human hominin in North America. Not so different.

 

[Dinwar]

There's no lack of evidence when it comes to Sasquatch. The only thing that's lacking is proof. You're going to need a type specimen to confirm whether or not evidence such as hair and footprints are authentic.

it is true that there is data put forward to support the existence of Bigfoot. However, none of it is any good. Discounting the obvious frauds, we are left with hearsay, the lowest form of evidence and the most likely to be wrong. Note that I do not believe folks claiming to have seen Bigfoot are frauds; stories demonstrably change over time. I have heard stories of SCA battles I was in, and the stories did not reflect the fight I saw! No one was lying, they just honestly did not remember it correctly (I did--trips to the ER make certain details stick!).

We do not need a type specimen fo confirm hair or footprints; in fact, either can count as a type specimens (search "ichnospecies" or "ichnotaxa"). The problem is, they have to not be obvious frauds, and the footprints are. They look like FEET, not footprints--and the two are very different. As for hair, if you can prove it came from an ape in North America that is more closely related to humans than chimps (ie, that it didn't come from a zoo or escaped zoo animal or exotic pet) I would at least not dismiss it out of hand. To the best of my knowledge, no such hair sample has been presented.