Justified True Belief

(●) An argument from silence concludes that something did not happen because a source does not mention it. + The Latin name is argumentum ex silentio. A writer who might have told us about something said nothing, so we conclude there was nothing to tell. Sometimes that is good reasoning, and often it is not. Telling the two apart is the whole skill. (1) The move steps from "the source is silent" to "it did not happen". - Marco Polo's account of China never mentions the Great Wall, and readers have concluded he never went: anyone crossing northern China would have seen it and written it down. But the wall Polo could have seen in the 1270s was mostly earth and rubble. The brick wall in the photographs is Ming work, two centuries after his death. The silence is real; what it proves is much less. - Two words help. The reasons someone offers are the premises, and what they are meant to support is the conclusion. A silence really does bear on the conclusion, only far more weakly than the speaker assumes. • That is why the move belongs among the fallacies of weak induction: the reason is relevant, but too thin to carry the weight put on it. An ad hominem's reason, by contrast, is not relevant at all. (2) It tempts because silence really is evidence sometimes. - In the Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze", the clue is the dog that did not bark in the night. A watchdog that stays quiet while someone leads the horse away is telling you the visitor was no stranger, and Holmes is right to reason that way, because he knows what the dog would have done otherwise. - The fallacy creeps in when a document gets treated like a watchdog when it is really a letter written for one purpose. Your bank statement does not say what you ate on Tuesday, and nobody concludes that you fasted. (3) The name is Latin, but the rule book was written by historians. - Aristotle never listed it. The rules come from historians, who spend their lives with chronicles that record a fraction of what happened, and come down to three questions about the writer who said nothing: • Did he know of the event? • Did he have occasion to mention it? • Would he have wanted to? - John Lange weighed the three in History and Theory in 1966 and found they can seldom be settled, and Timothy McGrew recast them as probability in Acta Analytica in 2014: a silence counts exactly as much as a mention was to be expected, and no more. - "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is the opposite mistake, and half wrong. Look out at the drive, see no car, and you have excellent evidence the car is gone. The slogan holds only where nobody looked, or where nobody would have written it down. - The nearest cousin is the appeal to ignorance, which reasons from what nobody has proved: "no one has shown God exists, so he does not." An argument from silence is narrower. It reasons from what one particular writer, who might well have spoken, did not say. Therefore, an argument from silence is not a fallacy by its form. It is a weighing, and the fallacy lies in skipping the weighing.

(●) Simple example: "The minutes don't record a vote, so no vote was taken." + A committee is arguing about whether it ever approved the new fence. Someone pulls out last spring's minutes, finds nothing, and treats the matter as closed. (1) What is claimed and what is offered. - The claim is that no vote happened. The support is that a document which might have recorded a vote does not. (2) Why the support does so little work. - Everything turns on who kept the minutes and why. A secretary who records every motion carried would have written the vote down, and her silence is strong. A treasurer scrawling two lines about the budget would not, and his silence is worth almost nothing. Nobody has asked which kind these are. - What would settle it is exactly what the speaker skipped: the rule about what the minutes must record, another member's memory, the fence invoice dated the week after. (3) What the reply was really doing. - It treated a partial record as a complete one, because a complete one would have ended the argument. That is the comfort of the move. A silence, unlike a memory, cannot be cross-examined.

(●) A critic says: "Paul never mentions the empty tomb, so the story was invented later." + None of Paul's letters, the earliest Christian writings we have, contains the words "empty tomb". That is a real silence, and it deserves the three questions rather than a shrug. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that the empty tomb is a legend that grew up after Paul and first appears in Mark, some forty years after the crucifixion. The support is Paul's silence: the man who wrote earliest about the resurrection never mentions a tomb. - The strongest form is real, and Bart Ehrman makes it in How Jesus Became God: the earliest source rests his case on appearances rather than on a grave, so a historian should build from the appearances and test the tomb tradition on its own. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The slide is from "Paul does not mention it" to "it was not there to know". The three questions are what stand between those two sentences. - Did Paul know? He spent fifteen days with Peter in Jerusalem within a few years of the events (Galatians 1:18), and he hands on a creed, a short fixed summary of the faith, which he says he received rather than composed. - Did he have occasion? First Corinthians 15 is written to people who doubted that the dead are raised at all, and his proof is a list of living witnesses they could go and ask. A tomb in Jerusalem was not something a Corinthian reader could check. - Would he have wanted to? Not obviously, since the creed already carries it: "that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day" (1 Corinthians 15:4). To a first-century Jew, William Lane Craig argues in Reasonable Faith, a buried man who was raised is a man whose grave is now empty. • The silence is not nothing. A line from Paul saying the tomb was found empty would have made the case tidier. But the last two answers come back weak, and a weak silence lowers confidence a little without settling anything. - The same family produces "no contemporary historian mentions Jesus, so he never lived". Ehrman answers that one himself in Did Jesus Exist?: no Roman writer would be expected to notice a Galilean preacher, since the record is thin even for governors, and Josephus and Tacitus within a lifetime or two are more than the expectation. (3) The sound version. - The critic's best argument is not the silence but the sources. The empty tomb rests on Mark and the Gospels after him, and the real question is whether Mark's account carries the marks of early Jerusalem tradition or of later legend: whether Rome would have released a crucified man's body for burial at all, and why Mark ends with women who told nobody. That is a question about evidence rather than about absence. (4) How to answer it. - "You're right that Paul never spells it out. Ask why he would have: his readers doubted resurrection itself, and he gave them witnesses they could question. Then ask whether the sequence he does give, buried and then raised, makes sense with a body still in the grave." See also: CE / Resurrection: Contra Legend Hypothesis CE / Resurrection: Minimal Facts Argument (Habermas) CE / New Testament Criticism: External Corroboration – Archaeology and Non-Christian Sources

(●) A Christian says: "Jesus never said a word about that, so I don't see why Christians should make a fuss about it." + The word "that" gets filled with whatever the speaker would rather set aside. Critics say the same thing from the other side: "Jesus never mentioned that, so the church made the rule up." The shape is the same both ways, and so is the weighing. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that some question lies outside Christian concern. The support is that the four Gospels record no saying of Jesus about it. - There is real force here. What Jesus is recorded as saying is the best guide we have to what he cared about, and a Christian who spends more energy on a matter he never raised than on the ones he raised constantly has lost a sense of proportion. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The slide runs in two steps, from "the Gospels do not record it" to "Jesus never addressed it", and then on to "it does not matter". The first step already fails the questions. Mark can be read aloud in about ninety minutes and covers a whole public ministry, and the four Gospels together give us a few dozen days of it. John says as much: "Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written." (John 21:25) - Did the writers have occasion? John states his purpose, that readers would believe who Jesus is (John 20:31), not that they would come away with a complete code of conduct. A source written for one purpose is a poor witness to what its author never set out to cover. - There is a third thing silence can mean in a first-century Jewish teacher: agreement. Jesus is not recorded saying a word about the Roman habit of leaving unwanted newborns out to die, and nobody in his audience defended the practice, so he had no occasion to condemn it. • The first Christians forbade it anyway in their earliest teaching manuals (the Didache, from around the end of the first century, is one) and took such children in. Nobody concludes they were fussing over nothing. (3) The sound version. - The Christian's real question is what the whole of Scripture says, read together, with Jesus's recorded teaching setting the weight. Where Scripture as a whole speaks, the matter is settled whether or not there is a verse printed in red (the red letters in some Bibles are the words of Jesus). - Where Scripture as a whole is silent, Paul's own rule applies (Romans 14): hold the matter loosely, and do not pass judgment on the brother who holds it differently. (4) How to answer it, when a fellow Christian says it. - "He never said a word about a great many things, and John tells us we have a fraction of what he did say. Let's ask what the rest of Scripture says first. If it says nothing either, I'll agree with you that we hold it loosely." See also: Philosophical Theology: Sola Scriptura

(●) A charge that misses: "Dating Acts early because it ends with Paul still alive is just an argument from silence, and arguments from silence prove nothing." + The label is right and the verdict is wrong, because "argument from silence" names a form, not a grade. (1) What the charge claims. - Acts ends with Paul under house arrest in Rome for two years, preaching freely (Acts 28:30-31). It says nothing of how his trial came out, nothing of his death under Nero a few years later, nothing of the burning of Rome in 64 or the fall of Jerusalem in 70. Colin Hemer argued from this and a dozen other indicators that Luke finished writing around 62. The charge says that is a silence, and silences settle nothing. (2) Why the charge misses. - Ask the three questions. Did Luke know? He writes as Paul's travelling companion in the "we" passages, the stretches of Acts where the narrator stops saying "they" and says "we", and a companion would have known how the trial ended. - Did he have occasion? His story has followed Paul for sixteen chapters, through hearings before Felix, Festus and Agrippa, toward Caesar's verdict. Would he have wanted to tell it? He was not squeamish about martyrdom, having told of Stephen's stoning and James's execution. All three are met unusually well, and that is what gives a silence weight. - The test to carry away is McGrew's: score all three before weighing any silence. Three strong yeses, as with Luke and Paul's death, and the silence is evidence. Two weak answers, as with Paul and the tomb, and it is close to noise. The fallacy is never in the form; it is in skipping the scoring. - Christians owe the same scoring to their own silence arguments. The earliest Jewish reply to the resurrection claim, that the disciples stole the body, never denies that the tomb was empty, and that is a fair argument from silence. But we know the reply only from Christian reports of it (Matthew 28:13-15), so it is a silence inside a Christian source, to be offered as that and never as an independent admission. - The concession: the date of Acts is still contested. Most scholars place it in the 80s or later on other grounds, and the ending has a rival explanation, that Luke stopped where his story's promise was kept (Acts 1:8), the gospel having reached Rome. That lowers the weight of the silence. It does not zero it. (3) What the charge would need to be true. - It would need a reason Luke would have stopped short whether or not Paul had died, strong enough to outweigh three well-met conditions. The literary-ending theory is exactly that attempt, and it is a real argument. (4) How to answer it. - "It is an argument from silence, and so is the dog that didn't bark. The question is whether Luke would have told us about Paul's death had he known of it. Give me a reason he'd have left it out, and we can weigh it. 'Silence proves nothing' is not a reason." See also: CE / New Testament Criticism: Early Dating and Eyewitness Proximity of the New Testament