Ok this is weird but basically i am questioning the validity of any evidence. as I see a sort of paradox. For isn’t the case that for any evidence to be valid there must be evidence supporting that, and evidence supporting that, and evidence supporting that evidence and so on. So it being impossible to accumulate an infinite line of evidence. why is it that anything should be believed. One might say one can gather ‘sufficient’ evidence, as in enough evidence for evidence and so forth. but then what is sufficient for a person seems subjective, so no wonder we have so much debate between say republicans and democrats. what defines sufficient? and what evidence do you have to prove that that a sufficient definition of sufficient and what evidence that that evidence is good and so forth? 
I say all our ideas and ideologies are based on faithat some point, though of course physicalists often get angry about this and contest it, but when you get down to it all evidence is based on what we beleive is likely and connecting the dots theirin.
For example an Empiracists puts faith in the correctness of their senses.
I agree, but there are rare cases wherein the evidence is 100%.
“Sufficient evidence” does presume many unseen things such as to cause any claim of higher or lower probability of truth to actually be moot, such as the example I just posted on another thread;
Huh? What does this example demonstrate?
The probability cannot be correctly calculated without knowing Tom and Sue’s other results, sample size and physical configuration of the die (number of faces and markings). As stated, the probability is anything between 50% to 100%.
You might need to think about it a little more.
It is already given that both Sue and Tom get their respective 3 and 2, 50% of the time.
Thus does it matter what they get any other time?
In such a hypothetical case we can creat 100% certainty but in reality there are always other things that can possibly come into play to throw things off.
That is actually my point.
ok
Yes. Knowing how many times Tom got 2 does not tell me how many times he got 3. That’s important when calculation the probability.
Markings: If the die is marked only with 2 and 3, then both Tom and Sue would get a 2 half the time and a 3 half the time. Probability of Sue having thrown the critical 3 is 50%.
Sample size : If Tom threw twice and then reported a 50% result and Sue did the same, then the die may be 20 sided, 6 sided, standard makings, non-standard markings, etc.
Tom got a 2 in 50% of the throws and a 3 in 50% of the throws but James only reports his ‘2’ results.
The probability of Sue having thrown the critical 3 is obviously not 100%.
I didn’t ask if it was 100% probable. I asked what the probability was.
And I explained why the probability was in a range from 50% to 100%. Not a particularly useful range.
Until you know all of the facts, you can’t calculate it, right?
You know that something is up because there has to be a reason why they are both getting one number 50% of the time. Your first guess was that it must be a two sided die of some kind. But you really don’t know that for certain. If it were a two sided die, then you have an equal chance of the 3 being from either Tom or Sue. But that means that the puzzle really doesn’t say anything (as you noted).
If you think about it a little more, you might wonder about why I said “2” and “3” instead of “1” and “2”. Maybe it is a three sided die that isn’t shaped such as to give equal probability for each side. In that case, the probability for Tom is expressed as 50% for a “2” and 50% for not 2. But then you don’t know the chances of him getting the 3 from the other options of 1 and 3. So the result still might have been from Tom, but it seems less likely. Or maybe it has even more sides.
So you figure that the probability is higher for Sue than Tom, but you just can’t tell how much higher, right?
Wrong.
But why is that wrong?
I think the idea behind gathering evidence as a good approach to epistemology is that 1) it is the way the mind works, and 2) it is highly reliable. So 1) essentially means that whether or not you can justify evidence philosophically (i.e. whether we have “sufficient” evidence, and “sufficient” evidence for that evidence, etc., or know what “evidence” even means) is beside the point; the point is that given enough evidence, a typical human mind will be convinced. And 2) means that, as experience shows, trusting in evidence (of the empirical/scientific sort) is usually a good idea because those claims with the most evidence behind them have the best track record for turning out right.
You can calculate it, if you have a representative set of observations. You don’t know the facts so you make a large number of tries and you look at the results. The probability is calculated based on the results. The physical form of the die can remain unknown. In this case, you need to know how often Tom throws a 3.
We are not neutral. We make a leap trust, when we think the reward outweighs the risk.
All one can do, is act to the best of one’s knowledge.
If we take the stance of dialectic, or critical rationalism, evidence is just another way of psycologism, and has nothing to do with logic, and relies on induction. So the “paradox of evidence” would just be another manifestation of the problem of induction.
If we ignore this, then we can go another route. Evidence does not matter, just that the ideas have withstood criticism and has not been found to lead to a contradiction, as of yet. This is all the “evidence” that we need for holding to a proposition. This might lead us to psychologically look upon it as evidence, but that comes after the fact.
The problem with “evidense” in politics, is that things often has subjective and relative values that can have outcomes that can be manipulated, therefore the concept of evidense are but an illusion; specially in the hands of lawyers.
Are you talking about court of law evidence? The court of law evidence has one objective–to try to enable a jury to decide whether or not to find the defendant guilty or not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Until scientific evidence was allowable, this left juries subject to decision-making based on individual prejudices and a lot of people have been found either guilty or not, depending on those prejudices.
Are you talking about scientific ‘evidence?’ I’d say, again, that evidence is used to persuade other scientists to accept or reject a theory. Scientific evidence demands proofs–more often than not, proof that goes beyond observation and that can be shown with the maths used to arrive at the ‘truth.’
If you’re talking about political ‘evidence’ of anything, there is none, because there’s no real ‘proof’ in politics. There’s only rhetoric. It’s left up to you to “believe it or not.”
But isn’t the same true with any sort of marketing?
No, that is purely spekulative and assumptious from your part.
Often there are no scientific evidense in that sense it has to be interpeted and scrutinized. There was a famous case where a govenor pardoned ALL deathrow prisoners because the evidence had been falsifyed, because the lab rat wanted to get huge profits from the cops.
Havn’t you heard of “Spin Doctors” in politics? They will usually spin away undisputeable evidence.