Jhana4 wrote:morning mist wrote:
Many things are still beyond the scope of 'educated and experienced experts' , so if something is not accepted by them doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have an existence. What they claimed didn't exist 100 years ago can be claimed to exist now.
So what highly educated, trained and experienced experts can not detect by science, experiments and logic based on the evidence other people can *know* for themselves, right now? How does that work?
Morning mist talked about 'educated and experienced experts' in quotes, which I take to mean that not all people accepted as educated and experienced experts are actually as such. Morning mist also did not talk about science, experiments and logic; you can't take something that has not been said and use it to argue against the person. Not all 'educated experts' use science, experiments and logic to find facts.
As for 'how does that work', remember that in the past, 'experts' of the time believed the earth was flat, that the sun revolved around the earth, that making human sacrifices would appease the gods etc. We can now know that those things are not true (admittedly due to the work of real experts).
Edit:
Back to the topic.
The opposite claim ( something didn't exist) is not infallible. But it is a complicated topic. For example, in psychology, if you claim that (a process) doesn't exist in human beings, then your colleagues might want to know for example, what sort of population you used in the experiment (you can't properly claim something as fact without an experiment) and if it was biased. So if you used all young people, then they might ask what about older people? If you used all males then they would ask what about females? And there are other aspects such as geographic location, socioeconomical standards etc. It is probably impossible to draw a 'perfect' sample, so the current practice is to use the concept of confidence, if I remember correctly, which states for example that it is 95% likely that the conclusions are reliable. I'm rusty on the details so someone might want to correct me or elaborate.
So if you talk about how reliable the claim "something does not exist" is, it is not reliable. A factual reliable statement would be "something has not been observed to exist under these conditions" for example.