The Logical Trickery of the UFO Skeptic

reply to post by Druscilla


It won't matter.

My reasoning is not circular.

Teabag's is.

Teabag injects the explanation then uses the data as a support. He starts of with his conclusion to reach his conclusion.

No arbitrary judge is going to make a difference to Teabag.

In fact one arbitary UFOologist that critiques SR14 stated this:

“If the Battelle group had had a real appreciation for how loose the data were, they never would have bothered with a statistical comparison to begin with”.

Allan Hendy The UFO Handbook: A Guide to Investigating, Evaluating and Reporting UFO Sightings. (p. 266) (Doubleday, 1979)

reply to post by atlasastro


The end result of a logical statement is either true or false. This can be shown mathematically. This is how everything computer related works. Ones and zeros.

We can put each statement made in this thread and reduce them logical equations. We can use a truth table to evaluate the statements. en.wikipedia.org...

Logic seems tricky but its math and math is either correct or incorrect and can be proven. True or false?

No need for someone's opinion.

Originally posted by TeaAndStrumpets

Apparently Brighter and I disagree on this, but I'm not sure. I simply don't see how we apply the principles of science to something "unknown" unless we first assume it's something particular ... or maybe "pretend it's something particular" better describes the idea. Without a working hypothesis -- and yes, of course there must be assumptions within it -- we have no rudder, nothing to suggest which kinds of particulars we want to or should be focusing on.

This working hypothesis -- whatever idea forces the least extension by us -- simply provides a way of organizing our thoughts and approach. There is no need that it be the answer, or one of the answers, or the most likely answer. That doesn't matter. We've gained knowledge either way. And we keep going down the list....

I agree with most of what you've said, except that I'd be somewhat more conservative in terms of what I think the best working hypothesis would be. I'd be more inclined to say that the best working hypothesis is the non-human intelligence hypothesis. If I were being even more conservative, I'd say that the best working hypothesis is the 'these objects are craft that are intelligently controlled' hypothesis, although that's as far as I'd want to 'zoom out'. I think that's the most bare-bones assumption necessary to make sense of many of these sightings.

Originally posted by ZetaRediculian

I have been trying to slow down my posting here since my posts go virtually unchallenged and I'm sure people are sick of seeing them already. But when I see stuff like this, I can't let it go.

Wouldn't ETH be a future explanation and therefore imaginary? Because its not a current explanation. Future explanations are imaginary just the same. Here's the logical equation:

Future Explanation=imaginary
ETH = future explanation
ETH=imaginary

We can give a probability to future explanations being due to a known explanation since we do have known explanations.

We can not give a probability to ETH as being a future explanation since we know of no cases of actual ET.

So future explanations being due to known explanations is not as imaginary as ETH since we know of known explanations.

I agree that some of those unexplained cases look really cool though!

This is pretty much what you guys are arguing about.

Originally posted by ZetaRediculian

Wouldn't ETH be a future explanation and therefore imaginary?

Yes, absolutely. But its being 'future' and 'imaginary' doesn't automatically make it invalid. Science progresses through the use of working hypotheses. And as you know from the history of science, working hypotheses frequently postulate the existence of unobserved hypothetical entities with certain properties that allow us to make sense of anomalous and unusual data.

If I had to choose, I would say the ETH is preferable over the 'future discovery of science' hypothesis for several reasons.

First of all, a good working hypothesis tries to be as specific as possible. The ETH is clearly to be favored here, as the 'future discovery of science' is so incredibly vague as to be laughable. On the other hand, you could offer a more specific 'future discovery of science'. Yet those explanations (e.g., flying wormholes) are to my mind far less plausible than the idea of physical craft.

Second, a good working hypothesis attempts to make as few assumptions as possible while still explaining the data. In this sense, I would be more comfortable with a less specific hypothesis at this point to explain the data, and I would prefer something like a 'non-human hypothesis'. But the 'future discovery of science' still fails in comparison to the ETH with regard to assumptions, as it basically makes an assumption about the existence of an explanation. The very nature of its assumption precludes it from being a working hypothesis. At least the ETH makes assumptions of the right kind.

The problem is that the appeal to a 'future discovery of science' isn't even a candidate working hypothesis. A working hypothesis has to actually explain something, but such an appeal is basically an appeal to a future explanation, and is therefore totally vapid and worthless. It's basically scientism (think of science as a religion).

Third, the ETH - insofar as it involves physical, intelligently controlled craft - is a much better fit for the perceptual data. I can't even conceive of a purely naturalistic explanation (or set thereof) that explains the descriptions of craft of a clearly mechanical / engineered nature. Or to the extent that I can conceive of one, it typically involves such an incredibly serendipitous confluence of unusual naturalistic events as to make it implausible compared to the idea that the witnesses simply did see a physical craft of roughly their description.

Originally posted by ZetaRediculian

We can not give a probability to ETH as being a future explanation since we know of no cases of actual ET.

It doesn't matter that we know of no cases of actual ET. Remember, the ETH is being discussed as a working hypothesis. When electrons were first offered as a working hypothesis for the gross phenomenon of electricity in cathode rays, no one ever saw any electrons either. Yet invisible, microscopic charged particles, as imaginary as they seemed, had just the right properties to explain electricity. Dark matter and dark energy are also prime examples of hypothetical entities, which are often used to explain the effects of the Big Bang theory, which is itself another hypothetical event intended to explain the beginning of our universe.

So my point is that you can't discount the ETH just on account of it's postulating hypothetical or 'unidentified' entities. To do so would demonstrate a lack of understanding of how science actually works, and has worked for hundreds of years. On the other hand, an appeal to a 'future discovery of science', not only is not even a working hypothesis, is actually a thinly veiled appeal to faith and wishful thinking.