[chromalife]

Agree with everything you say and it started a web search on Wikipedia. First off, does he have to provide evidence for his claims? From wikipedia on burden of proof, the burden of proof falls on the challenger of the status quo. Yes, to us the status quo is aliens don't abduct people, but living in Roswell during the 1970s the status quo could of been aliens have abducted everyone. Point is status quo changes depending on social and temporal setting.

So how can we demand evidence on anything other than a consensus of our social setting?

He has the argument of ignorance as we in this discussion do not have the means to proof he wasn't abducted by aliens. Now I accept that the argument of ignorance is a fallacy but I'm new to philosophy and am still working on understanding why it is a fallacy, other than just accepting it as a rule.

[simias]

Well in the end with this type of argument we'll invariably get back to plato's cave. It's hard to argue for an objective reality, it's all about consensus and reproducible experiments.

If I lift a rock and drop it, will it fall on the ground or fly away? The reasonable answer is that it will fall down, obviously. If somebody told you that he dropped a rock and it rocketed into the sky, you probably wouldn't believe them. Because it goes against the way we experience reality, and the way everybody around us seems to experiment it as well. When you swerve on the road to avoid a wall it's because you know that otherwise you'll collide with it instead of magically going through it. Can you prove that you will though? What if I told you that I did go through a wall once, would you believe me?

That's where the scientific evidence is the last bastion of reason. If somebody claims that rocks can fall up, they should be able to come up with hard evidence for it, or even better a way to reproduce it so that it can be investigated. Could the people in Roswell in the 70's provide such evidence?

If somebody in the middle ages had claimed that time ran faster at the top of a mountain than at the bottom of a valley, he'd probably be considered a lunatic. General relativity now tells us that he would've been correct. That doesn't change the fact that claiming that times runs faster at the top of a mountain "randomly" is just a lunatic thing to say. Einstein on the other hand had a well constructed theory, built on top of actual observations of our reality, that was eventually proven right through experimentation.

Maybe it'll turn out that alien abductions are actually a real thing, but even if that's the case I don't think we could be accused of being wrong or narrow minded for not accepting such ridiculous claims without a single strand of evidence. Otherwise we basically give up on any shared perception of reality.

We're now living in a civilization where a good chunk of humanity has a video recorder with them 24/7, and yet no pictures of alien abductions to be found on instagram.

[tdb7893]

If all of those people who got abducted claims were true there should be some evidence somewhere and that lack of evidence, while not actually proving them wrong, definitely shifts the probabilities against them. It's like with Santa Claus, it's very hard to prove that he doesn't exist but the lack of evidence for him at all is very telling.

[Nexxxeh]

Not parent poster, but...

It may be the sleep deprivation and caffeine talking, but I was not expecting today to contain "having my view changed so that self-proclaimed alien abductees are not to be considered lunatics".

I feel you're wrong, but I can't articulate why, and what you are saying has an undeniable logic to it. This is unnerving.

[vorotato]

Most logical fallacies feel that way until you get to the heart of the matter. Explore other examples of other extraordinary claims.