The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was Redirect. Any content worth merging can be retrieved from the page history. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:56, 5 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Burden of proof (logical fallacy)[edit]

Burden of proof (logical fallacy) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

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The article includes no references to a logical fallacy called "burden of proof". I have found no evidence that the fallacy discussed has been identified and called by this name in the literature. Consequently, this page appears to be about a peculiar neologism. (If anyone can find evidence of this so-called burden of proof fallacy in a RS, then I will withdraw my nomination. A couple of non-RS sources use "burden of proof" as a synonym for argument from ignorance.)

I considered redirecting the article to argument from ignorance, but it appears as if the current article has a different fallacy in mind. It seems more appropriate to delete this article and add a pointer to argument from ignorance on the Burden of Proof disambig page. Phiwum (talk) 13:47, 28 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per nom; this seems to be OR. It might be attempting a critique of the concept that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, which I don't believe is considered a fallacy. postdlf (talk) 16:16, 28 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. Notwithstanding the formulation in the article that Midgley is exposing a "logical fallacy", the article appears to be more generally about the concept of "burden of proof" in philosophy (as opposed to law) rather than about logical fallacies, and perhaps the solution is simply to move the article to Burden of proof (X), where X is something like philosophy, epistemology, theory of justification, or argumentation theory. I must say, though, that I'm inclined to favour deletion, as I'm not convinced this is a notable topic per se, and that the uses of "burden of proof" in the quotes appeal to anything beyond the everyday meaning found in dictionaries: "the obligation to establish a contention as fact by evoking evidence of its probable truth".[1]  --Lambiam 16:19, 28 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
• I like Lambiam's idea. Rename to Burden of Proof (Philosophy). --Dennis The Tiger (Rawr and stuff) 23:46, 28 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Changing !vote to delete. Fallacy already covers logical fallacy and burden of proof for philosophy. Perhaps a redirect? --Dennis The Tiger (Rawr and stuff) 21:10, 29 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment What could we possibly say in an article about burden of proof in philosophy? If there are any such treatments in the literature, I'm not aware of them (which isn't much evidence of anything), but I'd wager they have little to do with the article as it stands. In any case, what sources could we use for an article on burden of proof from a philosophical standpoint? Phiwum (talk) 02:07, 29 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per nominator. This article doesn't appear to be about a notable topic and a quick search did not yield any reliable sources for it. It is not at all clear what this article is supposed to be about and as Phiwum suggests, I don't think having much from this page in a burden of proof (philosophy) article would be meaningful, so I don't think that renaming at this point will help. Shanata (talk) 16:52, 29 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Reversal of the burden of proof is a common and notable fallacy, issues with the present article are not insurmountable, there are several prior versions which include informaiton which appears to have been lost along the way. I think it needs a cleanup at this point rather than deletion, thogh I'm not opposed to a reasonable merge to a related topic. Guy (Help!) 22:20, 29 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment Could you find a single relevant source (say, in critical thinking or logic texts) which identifies this fallacy? (Note: the article refers to exaggerating one burden of proof, not "reversing" it. I'm not sure what you mean by reversing, but it sounds rather like argument from ignorance to me.) Phiwum (talk) 22:29, 29 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/burden-of-proof.html is where I picked it up. That site has always been my reference for such things. As I say, I'm not opposed to merging. Guy (Help!) 18:33, 5 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.