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Old 04-12-2008, 07:47 PM   #1
Poothevokprot

Join Date
Oct 2005
Posts
601
Senior Member
Default Personal experience as evidence.
I will give two examples of evidence the evidence I accept is the first kind evidence in science. The second kind is what I think JimBob will attempt to argue is valid for proving a claim. Correct me if I am wrong JimBob.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence

In scientific research evidence is accumulated through observations of phenomena that occur in the natural world, or which are created as experiments in a laboratory. Scientific evidence usually goes towards supporting or rejecting a hypothesis.

One must always remember that the burden of proof is on the person making this positive claim. Within science, this translates to the burden resting on presenters of a papers, in which the presenter argues for their specific findings. This paper is placed before a panel of judges where the presenter must defend the thesis against all challenges.

When evidence is contradictory to predicted expectations, the evidence and the ways of making it are often closely scrutinized (see experimenter's regress) and only at the end of this process the hypothesis is rejected: this can be referred to as 'refutation of the hypothesis'. The rules for evidence used by science are collected systematically in an attempt to avoid the bias inherent to anecdotal evidence: nonetheless even anecdotal evidence is enough to reject a theory incompatible with that evidence, if there are sufficient repeated examples.

This is part of the scientific method that says if you make a claim you have to prove this claim with repeatable, controlled tests that anyone can reproduce.

Personal experience:

From - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_experience

The bold is mine.

An early belief of some philosophers of Ancient Greece was that the mind was like a recording device and simply kept somehow-objective records of what the senses experienced. This was believed in the Western world into the 20th century until cognitive psychology experiments decisively proved that it was not true, and that many events were simply filled in by the mind, based on what "should be". This among other things explained why eyewitness accounts of events often were so widely varied.

In Ancient Rome it was believed that personal experience was part of some divine or species-wide collective experience. This gave rise to notions of racial memory, national mission, and such notions as racism and patriotism. It was likely easier to create political movements and military morale with such notions, than a strictly personal idea of experience. Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell were notable investigators of these ideas of collective experience in the 20th century.

During The Enlightenment, there was rigorous investigation of these ideas. Immanuel Kant noted that it was only possible to explain "experience and its objects" as a consequence of each other: either experience makes those objects possible, or those objects make experience possible. This is seen today as dualism, and denying the possibility of a third thing making both experience and whatever reality its objects have, both possible. That thing could be a more universal cognition, as proposed in some versions of Christianity or Gaia philosophy.


Reading the above it is easy to see why personal experience is not considered 'good' evidence by skeptics or science. The abbility of the brain to see patterns in random data is well known just look at the clouds some time. Feelings fall under the same restrants.

Intuition and feelings can lead us to search for the answers but only reproducable facts can show us the truth or show us where we are just imposing our desires.
Poothevokprot is offline


 

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