Appeal to Ignorance: When “We Don’t Know” Goes Wrong

We don't know.

And sometimes, that's all we know.

But does our ignorance give us reason to believe something else?

In this video, I take a look at the logical fallacy known as the appeal to ignorance: the mistake of treating our lack of knowledge about something as evidence for a related conclusion.

We'll look at examples involving reincarnation, evolution, and even AI—and then we'll complicate things. Because while "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is a useful rule of thumb, there really are cases where failing to find evidence does give us reason to believe something is false.

We'll cover:

• What an appeal to ignorance actually is
• Why these arguments are usually bad reasoning
• How to spot them in the wild
• When absence of evidence really is evidence of absence
• Ockham's Razor and other legitimate uses of epistemic defaults
• Why "we don't know" doesn't always mean "anything goes"