Read this brief description of the "ad ignorantium" (or "appeal to ignorance") fallacy. This common fallacy insists on placing the burden of proof on whatever side opposes it.
Argument from ignorance (argumentum ad ignorantiam), also known as appeal to ignorance (where ignorance represents "a lack of contrary evidence"), is a fallacy in informal logic. An argument from ignorance asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false, or a proposition is false because it has not yet been proven true.
An argument from ignorance represents a type of false dichotomy because it excludes the possibility that there may have been an insufficient investigation to prove the proposition is true or false. It does not allow for the possibility that the answer is unknowable, only knowable in the future, or neither completely true nor completely false.
Debaters sometimes use appeals to ignorance to shift the burden of proof. In research, low-power experiments are subject to false negatives (there would have been an observable effect if there had been a larger sample size or better experimental design) and false positives (there was an observable effect, however this was a coincidence due purely to random chance, or the events correlate, but there is no cause-effect relationship). John Locke, the English philosopher, likely coined the term in the late 17th century.
These examples contain or represent missing information:
These examples have the potential for "false negative" results:
These examples contain definite evidence that can be used to show, indicate, suggest, infer or deduce the non-existence or non-presence of something:
Source: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
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