It was a dark, and igno­rant night…

There was some­thing strange in the air that night.  The air was unusu­ally cold, and the doors were swing­ing on their own, and, to the best of my knowl­edge, all the win­dows were closed.  I had no idea what was hap­pen­ing, but I know it wasn’t nat­ural.  It is an old house, and back in the 1950’s a whole fam­ily was mur­dered here.  I think it is pretty obvi­ous that my house is haunted—-

—Wait, wait, wait… I basi­cally just said, “I have no idea what hap­pened, there­fore this happened”.

Fal­la­cious appeals to igno­rance are argu­ments in which the premises describe our igno­rance regard­ing a propo­si­tion, P, and the con­clu­sion makes a sub­stan­tive claim about the truth or fal­sity of P.

- A Prac­ti­cal Study of Argument

Is this the Ghost of Jim Morrison?

No one likes to be igno­rant (except, maybe, this guy).  I think peo­ple only love ghost sto­ries because they need an expla­na­tion to a strange expe­ri­ence.  Scary as they are, they give solace to those who want to believe there is life beyond death.  The human imag­i­na­tion is tire­less–espe­cially when there’s a Ghost Hunter col­lect­ing a hefty fee to pro­vide the fear­ful with an answer.

Oh, the irony!

This may be one of the most ironic fal­lac­ies, as the claimant spends half the time plead­ing igno­rance, then spends the rest explain­ing (with an air of author­ity) some­thing they have just shown to be unknown.

Typ­i­cally, such an argu­ment may be harder to iden­tify because they tend to part­ner with other argu­ments, some­times valid, that sways the lis­tener into accept­ing it.  This is nat­ural, because the claimant must appear to be an expert and will thus but­tress his or her argu­ment up with var­i­ous other claims.  Indeed, the claimant must have a bit of an ego as he or she seems to have solved a great or com­mon unknown.  Who wouldn’t want to have an authen­tic ghost pic­ture?  Some­times the incen­tive of this pride blinds us and we com­mit the argu­ment from igno­rance.  Per­haps inno­cently… per­haps on purpose…

Now, there is noth­ing wrong with ghost claims, as long as they can be tested prop­erly.  The prob­lem is that, until such tests take place, what the claimant bares is merely opinion.

Of course, it wouldn’t be igno­rance if we had data about the situation.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda… but didn’t?  Impossible!

Eight years ago, three build­ings fell approx­i­mately into their own foot­print at what appears to be free-fall speeds.  Many are con­vinced that this should not have been pos­si­ble from fires alone, and thus there must be another agent (such as explo­sives) at work.  They assert, “No build­ing has ever fallen by fire alone!” (which isn’t true) and thus con­sider it impos­si­ble that any build­ing ever would.  Besides, as any stock bro­ker will attest: the past is not the future.  Sin­cere as many of these believ­ers may be, they are guilty of argu­ing from igno­rance on this point.

No one knows the myr­iad ways that build­ings may or may not fall down, and unique cir­cum­stances will cloud any expec­ta­tions of the sit­u­a­tion.  So to say that the build­ings should have acted one way or another is unfair–at least based on these premises.  With exten­sive test­ing and analy­sis we can dust away our igno­rance and learn what tan­gled laws of physics were at work in this unique sit­u­a­tion.  Resist the temp­ta­tion to say, “We’ve never had this hap­pen before, there­fore this should not have happened!”

WTC7 was gouged by WTC1 when it col­lapsed on 9/11/01

Some may point to WTC7 (which fell later that day) and say that it was not hit by a plane and thus should not have col­lapsed in a sim­i­lar fash­ion as the two taller tow­ers.  They are still argu­ing from igno­rance, how­ever, since we have no idea how a build­ing is sup­posed to react to another build­ing falling upon it, lead­ing to com­pletely uncon­trolled fires burn­ing for hours and hours.

To exem­plify the unique­ness of this build­ing, debunking911.com lists 7 qual­i­fi­ca­tions that make WTC7 unique which makes it very hard to com­pare it to other build­ings on fire.  Given the unique struc­ture, it is very hard to know what to expect the build­ing to do in such cir­cum­stances, so to say it should have behaved this way or that is a fallacy.

A chal­lenge to con­spir­acy theorists:

1) Find a steel frame build­ing at least 40 sto­ries high 

2) Which takes up a whole city block

3) And is a “Tube in a tube” design

4) Which came off its core columns at the bot­tom floors (Earth­quake, fire, what­ever — WTC 7)

5) Which was struck by another build­ing or air­liner and had struc­tural dam­age as a result.

6) And weak­ened by fire for over 6 hours 

7) And had trusses that were bolted on with two 5/8″ bolts.

– debunking911.com

Some read­ers may object and point me to a cer­tain sci­en­tific paper that seems to indi­cate that explo­sive mate­ri­als have been found in the dust.

How­ever, even this doc­u­ment states that:

Com­mer­cially avail­able ther­mite behaves as an incen­di­ary when ignited, but when the ingre­di­ents are ultra-fine grain (UFG) and are inti­mately mixed, this “nano-thermite” reacts very rapidly, even explo­sively, and is some­times referred to as “super-thermite”.

We would like to make detailed com­par­isons of the red chips with known super-thermite com­pos­ites, along with com­par­isons of the prod­ucts fol­low­ing igni­tion, but there are many forms of this high-tech ther­mite, and this com­par­i­son must wait for a future study. Mean­while, we com­pare with prod­ucts of com­mer­cially avail­able (macro-) thermite.

- Page 23, Active Ther­mitic Mate­r­ial Found in WTC Dust

This is a more sophis­ti­cated exam­ple of Argu­ing from Igno­rance.  The researchers were not able to test nano-thermite, but are able to express how nano-thermite behaves.  So, until they can actu­ally test this nano-thermite, what they are express­ing is merely opin­ion (albeit a sci­encey opin­ion).

Your turn…

There’s a myr­iad of exam­ples of Argu­ing from Igno­rance out there, please share your own and maybe we can all learn a thing or two!