Is It Fair To Ask People To Validate Statements They Make?

[sevenOP]

Especially, but not only, when those views/opinions/assertions/allegations are expressed on Public Forums.

[ichkeria]

You can ask someone to back up a statement but you can’t demand they validate a view or opinion. Just get involved in a hopefully lucid debate if need be

[sevenOP]

"Yes, I think it is fair to ask. But you may not insist or insinuate anything from a no reply."

You should not insist but can infer from a no reply.

[Old_Geezer]

But one may infer incorrectly. So the inference should be validated.

[Khandro]

//Not if the elephant ate the pomegranate!//

Then we'd have 1 pomephant

[Khandro]

Okay. okay, I concede that 1 + 1 probably does makes 2, though this might be disproved by another theory, who knows? One consequence of karl Popper's work with 'falsifiability' is the understanding that you never really prove a theory to be 'true'. What scientists do is instead come up with implications of the theory, make hypotheses based on those implications, and then try to prove that specific hypothesis true or false through either experiment or careful observation. If the experiment or observation matches the prediction of the hypothesis, the scientist has gained support for the hypothesis (and therefore the underlying theory), but has not proven it. It's always possible that there's another explanation for the result.

[AuntPollyGrey]

wow all this heavy stuff in reply to a question conceived because one user peed off another one lol!

[sevenOP]

"wow all this heavy stuff in reply to a question conceived because one user peed off another one lol!"

Is that the elephant or the mind reading ?

[ichkeria]

"1 + 1 = 2 or does it etc etc etc"

What unscrupulous news media and their agents sometimes try to do on the other hand is imply there is no such thing as verifiable fact, or that their "truth" (fakery) is as valid as things which are self-evidently true.
Creating self-doubt and worse.
A good example being the mysterious campaign to cause people to doubt the safety of the MMR vaccine, based on no reputable scientific evidence.
That can sometimes be where relativism leads you.

[sevenOP]

Interesting Ichkeria,

Self-evident truths and 100% certainty are much rarer and more directly personal events than many presume i.e we will never be 100% certain who/what caused WW1, WW2 or really any event we did not witness. I can say with 100% certainty that I am writing this now and that I wrote it on Sun 5th Jan 2020, but events outside our direct experience must be weighed and decided on as we are able.
I am not a believer in any religion-advocated God; but it would be an error for me for say I could not be wrong.( i.e I cannot be 100% certain)
I have to weigh things as best I can. Large parts of what many people say 'they know' are judgments (hopefully they thought about) and are informed about by/told by other sources.
As far as I know we all come into this world with very limited knowledge and most of what we learn comes from other people.
I can think of few self-evident truths that apply to external events in the MSM. We read what sources claim and form our view as we will.
Hopefully people will realise there is a difference between opinion and justified belief.
Verifiable fact exists but predominately in the personal domain.

[Theland]

I believe it is a self evident truth that everything in our universe has a pre existing cause.
That said, there must have been in the beginning, a first cause, that is, an uncaused cause.