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Given is following dialog:

A: So you deny that the sun will rise again tomorrow?

B: No, I just say we do not know for sure. There are other variants.

A: What other variants are there?

B: What do I know, am I a cosmologist?

It's clear that you can't prove the laws of nature from an inductive point of view. But this is about challenging common sense by referring to an anonymous authority. It is also not an argumentum ad verecundiam since nothing is to be proven, but only doubts by person B are to be raised. Person B cannot prove anything, yet his assertion has not been refuted by Person A.

What do you call this kind of inducing doubt? If you were A, how would you show B that his skepticism is unfounded?

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  • "someone says that..." is not a "valid" move in an argument.
    – Mauro ALLEGRANZA
    Commented Feb 21 at 15:42
  • Either the initial question is "do you deny that for sure [so and so]", or the answer should be "no, I just say we do not know for sure". Otherwise that answer just makes no sense... And I think it is important that you fix that dialog, as I think in that lies already the germ of an answer to your question(s).
    – Julio Di Egidio
    Commented Feb 21 at 16:09
  • Now, as I read it, you should also drop that "There are other variants" (which rather is an invalid claim as soon as we discover B knows nothing about that), and then, for an informal notion of "variant" that is more like saying "it might just not: how do you know??" (casting doubt), I do think you have, if not a totally clean (could be simplified further), at least a valid/meaningful question overall... I'd think.
    – Julio Di Egidio
    Commented Feb 21 at 16:22
  • What do you call this kind of inducing doubt? Skepticism. How do you deal with such strategies? Acceptance. In the context of Men's peer counselling my friend began as a peer, then studied psychology, then became a self-appointed authority on reading my mind! In this context my friend says, "One day I am going to die - but not today." My thought: "Here and now I must die!" My other thought: "How do you know that you won't step off a curb in New York City and get hit by a bus today?" The point is I am both skeptic and witness to common sense. I can only think what I think the others think.
    – SystemTheory
    Commented Feb 21 at 16:23
  • @SystemTheory Methodological doubt is already Socratic, but I'd agree that Scepticism in essence can be characterised as casting doubts on, if not altogether denying the possibility itself of reasonable understanding and agreement. But "acceptance" (that we are so "doomed" not to even be able to reason really: otherwise what "acceptance" do you mean?) is the weakest possible answer, not the only answer...
    – Julio Di Egidio
    Commented Feb 21 at 16:35

3 Answers 3

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This is a trickier question than it seems. On the face of it, this is the fallacy called "appeal to ignorance," where we assert something is so just because we don't know. https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions/appeal-to-ignorance.html

However, on the topic of the sun not coming up, your interlocutor is just saying he doesn't know "for sure," which arguably is a true statement. He seems to be coming from a standpoint of radical skepticism. (The standard counterargument would be that he accepts many things that have no more evidence than the sun coming up tomorrow--in other words that this level of skepticism is not consistently sustainable.)

Where he really gets in trouble is with the statement "there are other variants." That's not really a correct usage in standard English, but let's take him as saying, there are other "possibilities." In other words, there are legitimate theories of how the universe works that would preclude the sun from coming up tomorrow. Now he's making a positive claim, which he then refuses to support except to say he doesn't know. So this IS appeal to ignorance, after all, not with direct regard to the sun, but with regard to theories of why the sun wouldn't come up. He doesn't know they don't exist, so he assumes they do.

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There's nothing in principle unreasonable about B's part of the exchange, because it's perfectly possible for a person to have knowledge of generalities without having knowledge of specifics. We can take the same phrasing and make B obviously right:

A: So you think that the bear will attack us?

B: No, I just say we do not know for sure that it won't. Bears sometimes attack people.

A: What bears have attacked people?

B: What do I know, am I a game warden?

If A cares about resolving the difference of beliefs by learning from or teaching B, the necessary follow-up is to find out why B thinks that there are other possibilities, if B thinks that those possibilities are likely enough to be worth mentioning, why, and what can be done to check. (Presumably, given B's reply, one could ask a cosmologist or a game warden.) This may reveal a perfectly reasonable inference, or it may not. A can't know whether B's therefore is unreasonable before A knows B's why, and A hasn't actually asked why yet. A just asked about a potential candidate why and discovered that that particular candidate wasn't B's why.

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If you were A, how would you show B that his skepticism is unfounded?

By providing proof with evidence that the sun will rise tommorow with 100% certainty. Best of luck to A.

If the best A can do is 99.99999999999% B will concede that if he had to bet on whether the sun rises tommorow he would bet on sunrise.

The sun has been rising every day for ~4.5 billion years. A guess at the probability would involve the estimated lifetime of the sun (~ 10 billion years or 1/(365*10^10). The number of 9s after the decimal point is based on this number.

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