Talk:Scientific evidence

message: :If either of the propositions is not accepted as true, the conclusion will not be deemed to follow from them (it may or may not be true).
The explanation seems unnecessary.
:Evidence is information, such as facts, coupled with principles of inference (the act or process of deriving a conclusion), that make information relevant to the support or negation of a hypothesis .
This is rubbish, I find no evidence that anyone, besides the editor who wrote this, defines evidence in this way. Also, it's obliquely contradicted by the circumstantial evidence article, which —of course— lacks citations. I hope no one misses it. :S (This is the closest thing to verification I could find.)
:Scientific evidence is evidence where the dependence of the evidence on principles of inference is not conceded, enabling others to examine the background beliefs or assumptions employed to determine if facts are relevant to the support of or falsification of a hypothesis.
This is just terrible. Rewording it to:
:Scientific evidence is evidence that does not concede the dependence of the evidence on principles of inference. This allows the relevancy of facts to a hypothesis to be determined by examining the assumptions made.
I think this is clearer. I hope it still means the same thing.PatheticCopyEditor (talk) 21:46, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Various edits 

message: (Under "Principles of inference"): Unless someone can rewrite this paragraph in plain English, I suggest that it be deleted entirely.
--Coconutporkpie (talk) 05:25, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: "Scientific evidence is evidence that does not concede the dependence of the evidence..."

message: Can anyone explain why this article should not be merged into the article Empirical evidence?  That article defines its subject  as "a source of knowledge acquired by means of observation or experimentation".  Presumably that could be used to "either support or counter a scientific theory or hypothesis".  Is there something that makes certain evidence so acquired especially "scientific" and different enough to merit its own page?  It seems to me that this article merely cobbles together various elements (inference, the scientific method, statistical analysis) with no logical cohesion, and that those subjects are adequately treated elsewhere with regard to the scientific disciplines.
--Coconutporkpie (talk) 05:54, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Empiricism is defined as "... a theory which states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience." It has been argued that not all scientific evidence is empirical—that scientific evidence requires deduction, understanding, judgement, and logic (i.e., interpretation) as well as observation and sensory experience. I'm not sure that this question has been resolved by philosophers of science. Thus, I suggest that "Scientific evidence" and "Empirical evidence" should remain separate articles. Sunray (talk) 20:26, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge this article

message: As pointed out in the section Merge this article,  Scientific evidence should not be merged into Empirical evidence, but a merge in the opposite direction makes sense because the sourced content in the article Empirical evidence is not sufficiently elaborated to justify a second article.  In fact, the argument supports a merging, because separating two views on a same subject that are related by a discussion in the literature is against WP:CFORK.  The non sourced content in the article Empirical evidence would not be merged unless sources are provided.  Dominic Mayers (talk) 15:38, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger proposal (in the opposite direction) 

message: Please don't readd the tags, there was consensus to remove them just 2 days ago and not much has changed since then. You started a thread that was mainly of personal interest to you and you even acknowledged that it was pointless. Sources have been presented both that some empirical evidence is not scientific and that some scientific evidence is not empirical. You decided to dismiss these sources and took the unwillingness of other editors to spend their time on a pointless thread as a sign that despite everyone doing their homework, nothing was found. This is just a severe misrepresentation. Phlsph7 (talk) 19:15, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I am not going to readd the tags while there is a discussion going on. However, obviously no consensus can prevent me from adding tags, putting comments in notice boards and use any procedure to attract the attention of other editors, because the purpose of these tools is often to question the validity of a local consensus. Don't accuse me of being a bad editor (that misinterpret others, etc.) as you did above because I don't have consensus while there are only three editors in the discussion. Regarding "pointless", you take me out context. It seems that it is you that misinterpret me. Also please do not start  your own RfC without first presenting the question that will be asked, because it's not efficient. It's way better to know the question among us first, so that we can make sure it is fully discussed, perhaps modified so that it can best play its role of creating a consensus. Dominic Mayers (talk) 19:27, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I didn't accuse you of being a bad editor, I accused you of misrepresentation. The assertion that "We found nothing" is a misrepresentation. It should read: "We found nothing that Dominic Mayers accepts as ultimate evidence for the distinction". Your criteria of what is acceptable evidence seem to be very high for evidence presented by your opponents but not for yourself (see google searches as evidence). Phlsph7 (talk) 20:57, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes, it was my opinion. There was no need for me to say that it was in accordance with my opinion. Let's not judge the attitude of others and try to understand what they say instead by asking pertinent questions. Dominic Mayers (talk) 21:06, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Not adding tags for now

message: The original argument against the merge was something along the line that Scientific evidence is more about the rigorous scientific method whereas Empirical evidence is about empirical evidence in general. In other words, it was the same topic, but approached with two different focuses.  This argument was refuted as being some form of content forking: the high standard methods in one article and the other methods in another article. The counter argument was also made that this global distinction between Scientific evidence and Empirical evidence does not exist in the literature. The idea of this counter argument is that even if we are sympathetic to the idea of a focus on "rigorous", "modern" scientific evidence, versus a more general focus on empirical evidence, we meet the issue that there is no source that discuss that distinction. Even if there was a few sources that discuss it, it would still be a view point and not sufficient to organize the topic accordingly. To base the organization of the topic on this view, it would have to be a well established non controversial view.  It does not seem possible to make this distinction in an encyclopaedic manner.  As a result, the discussion shifted on whether Scientific evidence and Empirical evidence have different scopes, but this is actually a different issue. 
In this other approach against the merge, it was argued that they have different scopes as illustrated in the diagram. In this perspective, the issue is how to cover the common notion of scientific empirical evidence. In the current organization of the topic, this natural subtopic must be split into two articles Empirical evidence and Scientific evidence.  It's impossible without duplicating this subtopic in both articles, because an article named Empirical evidence restricted to Empirical evidence outside science makes no sense and, similarly, an article named Scientific evidence restricted to scientific evidence that is not empirical also makes no sense. Large duplication is some times necessary when the two articles offer two different focuses on a same topic.   An example is Crusades with a focus on the military history versus Crusading movement with a focus on the ideology and institutions. In our case, I see the two different scopes as illustrated in the diagram, but I don't see two different focuses at all. 
A more efficient and natural organization is to have one main article that covers the common notion with sections for the non shared subtopics, which can be small and expanded as needed in their own main article. 
Dominic Mayers (talk) 15:12, 26 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Summary of the issue

message: I wouldn't oppose merging Scientific evidence into Empirical evidence, but I would still oppose merging in the other direction. Dominic's original proposal was to merge in the other direction. "Empirical evidence" is mentioned in more sources (e.g. in Google, Google Scholar, JSTOR, and WorldCat) and is more consulted on Wikipedia: pageviews for "empirical evidence" are much higher (279,702 in the past 6 months, versus 21,097 for "scientific evidence"), but the pageviews may be so much higher in part because it is the target of so many redirects, namely:
* A posteriori (epistemology)
* A posteriori (philosophy)
* A posteriori knowledge
* À posteriori
* A-posteriori
* Aposteriori
* Empirical content
* Empirical data
* Empirical experience
* Empirical knowledge
* Empirical reason
* Empirical validation
* Empirical
* Factual observation
* Observed fact
* Semi-empirical
* Sense experience
* Sense observation
* Sense perception
Two terms redirect to Scientific evidence:
* Scientific proof (redirect to section Concept of "scientific proof")
* Statistical evidence
Biogeographist (talk) 17:18, 26 June 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that if there has to be a merge, this would be the direction. Phlsph7 (talk) 18:27, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

text: I retargeted all the above-listed variants of A posteriori to A priori and a posteriori (but not A posteriori knowledge, which currently has a separate entry at A posteriori (disambiguation)), because it seems clear that they are just variants of A posteriori and should have the same target. If anyone disagrees, we can revert and discuss at Talk:Empirical evidence. Biogeographist (talk) 19:28, 27 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Pageviews and redirects