A Bayesian Approach to Absent Evidence Reasoning

Authors

  • Christopher Lee Stephens University of British Columbia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22329/il.v31i1.2967

Keywords:

absence of evidence, arguments from ignorance, Bayesianism, evidence, evidence of absence

Abstract

  Under what conditions is the failure to have evidence that p evidence that p is false? Absent evidence reasoning is common in many sciences, including astronomy, archeology, biology and medicine. An often-repeated epistemological motto is that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Analysis of absent evidence reasoning usually takes place in a deductive or frequentist hypothesis-testing framework. Instead, I develop a Bayesian analysis of this motto and prove that, under plausible assumptions about the nature of evidence, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Author Biography

Christopher Lee Stephens, University of British Columbia

Philosophy; Assistant Professor

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Published

2011-03-11

Issue

Vol. 31 No. 1 (2011)

Section

Articles

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