I think my chain falls of on the idea that we can assign reliable probabilities to various hypotheses, prior to our own thorough investigation of the available scientific material.
For the case of UFOs, wouldn't we have to have scientific reports explaining all unexplained observations of aerial phenomena that have occured in history, before we could reasonably claim that the probability is very low?
For the case of UFOs, wouldn't we have to have scientific reports explaining all unexplained observations of aerial phenomena that have occured in history, before we could reasonably claim that the probability is very low?
No. There no reason to expect every observation to be explained. Tracking down causes of things is hard work and it's not reasonable that in every case someone did the hard work.
Using the word "scientific" in this context also illustrates a misunderstanding of what it means. You can't run scientific trials to find the meaning of a single event that happened in the past.
After the terrorist attacks at Charlie Hebdo, conspiracy theories quickly arose about who was behind the attacks.
People who are critical to the west easily swallow such theories while pro-vest people just as easily find them ridiculous.
I guess we can agree that the most rational response would be to enter a state of aporia until sufficient evidence is at hand.
Yet very few people do so. People are guided by their previous understanding of the world, when judging new information. It sounds like a fine Bayesian approach for getting through life, but for real scientific knowledge, we can't rely on *prior* reasonings (even though these might involve Bayesian reasoning). Real science works by investigating evidence.
So, how do we characterise the human tendency to jump to conclusions that have simply been supplied by their sense of normativity. Is their a previously described bias that covers this case?