selderane wrote:ChickenSoup wrote:What if there are dozens - or hundreds - of people who have claimed to have seen the unicorn, and you're the only one who hasn't? Does eyewitness testimony or personal experiences count as evidence?
Well, this is an entirely fictional scenario, so bringing it back to the real world situation: I would not be the only person who hasn't seen it. It is the fallacy of numbers, as well: thousands of people who REALLY REALLY believe in something arguing for it based on the fact that thousands of thrm believe it does not make it true.
He didn't say they believed they saw it. He said they're saying they saw it. What they're expressing isn't an article of faith but a statement of fact. So you're not really addressing his argument, you're changing it then addressing that.
No, you're just arguing semantics. They saw Y, they believe in X because they saw Y, whatever.
ChickenSoup wrote:Also, eyewitness accounts are literally the worst form of evidence (and are regarded as such in courtrooms IIRC) and anecdotal evidence is not the basis for rational debate.
Which is why courts typically get testimony from multiple witnesses. One guy says he saw X, that could be a problem. 12 people say they saw X as well? A hundred? That's a different animal. Making the best the enemy of the good doesn't invalidate the good. Because the simple fact of the matter is witness testimony determines most cases.
It doesn't invalidate it, and I'm not throwing out eyewitness testimony. What I'm arguing is that eyewitness testimony is terrible as a
sole piece of evidence. 12 people say they saw John Doe murdered by Jim Bob? All right, that's a start. Now we investigate Jim Bob--turns out, Jim was recorded by a traffic camera running a red light 200 miles away. Well, I guess 12 people were wrong about Jim Bob. Thank God we didn't convict on eyewitness testimony alone.
(OR, maybe we find out that Jim Bob
was in the area, AND possesses a knife that matches the stab wounds in John. NOW we're getting somewhere!)
Sstavix wrote:selderane wrote:
Which is why courts typically get testimony from multiple witnesses. One guy says he saw X, that could be a problem. 12 people say they saw X as well? A hundred? That's a different animal. Making the best the enemy of the good doesn't invalidate the good. Because the simple fact of the matter is witness testimony determines most cases.
That's a very good point. Suppose we have a murder mystery on our hands. We can learn the identity of the victim, how he was killed (gunshot wound to the chest), determine where the shooter was standing, find the murder weapon that matches the bullet, find the registered owner of the gun (if it was, indeed, registered), and so forth. Lots of evidence to be obtained from the crime scene.
But the police will still question witnesses that were in the area to try and determine what happened. If a couple people actually saw the person who fired the shot, it would go a long way in convicting the killer (e.g. "what was the person doing? Did you recognize him? Did he say anything?")
Ah yes, but that eyewitness testimony is a guide, not the sole determinant of truth. If all 12 witnesses say without a shadow of a doubt that Jim Bob killed John Doe, you investigate Jim Bob. You don't pat yourself on the back and call it a day, you pursue the investigation on a more objective level.
ArcticFox wrote:It's interesting that we are often tempted to dismiss witness testimony because human memory can be an unreliable thing... But what we often see is people who really will dismiss the testimony of hundreds, using the logic that if one of them can be wrong, they all can be.
I'm not dismissing it, though. I'm saying that it is, at best, a guide toward the truth and should never be used
alone as evidence of some claim. It is too easy for the eyewitness testimony to be corrupted.
Taking it a step further, eyewitness testimony of something only a few people have seen and trying to extrapolate a scientific (or religious) explanation is kind of lazy investigation. For example, thousands of sailors were witness to the phenomenon known as St. Elmo's Fire, which is certainly an observable and known phenomenon. Were the eyewitnesses
wrong? No--they really did see an eerie ball of light atop masts of ships! Does that mean something supernatural was at work--that the gods/goddesses of the fire or the sea or that the patron saint of sailors was actually present on their ship? No, it means that coronal discharge on a pointed object in an electric field formed a luminous discharge. It's certainly an amazing phenomenon, but it doesn't mean that it's some supernatural event meant to be interpreted as a good or bad omen. That's just sensationalist.
This isn't an argument for an ad populum fallacy, but rather a point about the reliability of consistent testimony from multiple observers. We all have our biases, and we can see it in action when discussing things like the overwhelming number of people who have had similar paranormal experiences. It's always "well they're just deluded somehow" and the inconvenient witness testimony is cast aside.
"Overwhelming"? I mean, maybe? If there was an overwhelming number of supernatural occurrences, I'd be really surprised to know of so many atheists.
But seriously, I'm not saying they're deluded, and once again, I'm
not casting aside eyewitness testimony. I'm saying that you can use eyewitness testimony alone to draw either scientific or religious conclusions. Like I said before--many, many people over
centuries have witnessed St. Elmo's Fire, and I'm pretty sure you can even find videos of it happening on the wings of planes. That doesn't mean that the conclusions people draw about their observations is accurate or valid. And, like you said, we all have our individual biases, and these get even worse when eyewitnesses talk about their experiences in a group (the reason why police separate them--because emotionally charged events, already prone to corrupted memory, produce even worse validity after a large group of people chat amongst themselves about what just happened). If you want to get into individual vs group bias and how those dynamics influence memory and recall, we can, but I think that point is clear enough.
Frankly, I'm not sure why you guys trust eyewitness testimony so
much. And remember, before you respond--I'm NOT disregarding it entirely. I'm arguing the following points:
1) Memory is pretty dang corruptible--add emotionally charged events, degradation of memory/recall over time, individual bias, confirmation bias in post-event research, group dynamics and the influence of that on recall, and you have a pretty poor source of evidence, regardless of whether 1 person saw something or 1,000 people saw it.
2) Following point 1, eyewitness testimony should never, ever, ever be used as the
sole evidence in determining truth. 1,000 people saw something? 1,000 people can be wrong. Yes, they saw something, but that doesn't mean that it is what they thought it was. You cannot extrapolate further facts and draw conclusions from that alone.
3) HOWEVER, eyewitness testimony can be a good guide toward further investigation. 1,000 people saw a strange flying object in the skies above Chicago? That doesn't mean UFO's not only exist but also frequent crappy American cities--it means that 1,000 people saw a strange flying object in the skies above Chicago. We conduct more thorough research from that point.