You look but do not find: why the absence of evidence can be a useful thing
- Written by Deborah Brown, Associate Professor in Philosophy, The University of Queensland
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Imagine you’re looking for your keys and you think you might have left them on the bookshelf. But when you look, you see nothing but books. A natural conclusion to draw is that the keys are not there.
Now imagine you’re an early 20th century astrophysicist seeking to test the hypothesis that there is a planet (Vulcan)...