When should absence of evidence be evidence of absence? A case study from paleogeology
Date
2025
Authors
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
Brewer M. When Should Absence of Evidence Be Evidence of Absence? A Case Study from Paleogeology. Philosophy of Science. Published online 2025:1-10. doi:10.1017/psa.2025.10125
Abstract
According to what I call the Probabilistic View, absence of evidence is evidence of absence when finding evidence is highly expected. However, this view fails to make sense of the practice of using absence of evidence in the paleosciences, where finding evidence is typically not highly expected. Using a case from paleogeology, I offer a novel account of when absence of evidence should be evidence of absence, which I call the Pragmatic View: Appeals to absence of evidence as evidence of absence are warranted because they offer a scaffold to investigate auxiliary hypotheses related to the hypothesis in question.
Description
License
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.