Abstract

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called appeal to ignorance (or ad ignorantiam). A few passages from classical philosophical texts may commit an argumentum ad ignorantiam. Richard Robison develops another way of launching an ad ignorantiam that works by using a rhetorical question to commit the illicit move: Woods and Walton describe the appeal to ignorance as a fallacy “located within confirmation theory as a confusion between the categories of 'lack of confirming evidence' and 'presence of disconfirming evidence'”. Wreen has argued that the ad ignorantiam maneuver is not fallacious, whereas other philosophers accept the general fallacy of an appeal to ignorance but note some instances where lack of evidence does provide good inductive grounds for some statement.