why the absence of evidence can be a useful thing
- Written by Deborah Brown, Associate Professor in Philosophy, The University of Queensland
Imagine you’re looking for your keys and you think you might have left them on the bookshelf. But when you look, you see nothing but books. A natural conclusion to draw is that the keys are not there.
Now imagine you’re an early 20th century astrophysicist seeking to test the hypothesis that there is a planet (Vulcan)...