The Proberger Fallacy
After being around here and other subs for a while, I've realized that there's a common phenomenon with interacting with people who believe BK is innocent.
At first, I thought it was simple confirmation bias, but it goes beyond that.
The Proberger Fallacy is the tendency to reject a body of evidence by evaluating each component in isolation, while simultaneously accepting alternative explanations under a dramatically lower, even absent, standard of proof.
It operates through four interconnected failures of reasoning:
- Evidence isolation: Each piece of evidence is challenged independently, without considering its cumulative significance alongside other evidence.
- Asymmetric skepticism: Evidence supporting guilt is held to an extraordinarily high standard ("beyond a reasonable doubt"), while speculation supporting innocence or implicating others is accepted with little or no scrutiny at all.
- Possibility substituted for probability: Demonstrating that an innocent explanation is theoretically possible is treated as though it establishes that explanation as likely.
- Inconsistent demands for coherence: The prosecution's explanation is rejected for unanswered questions or apparent inconsistencies, while alternative theories requiring far more assumptions and unsupported coincidences are readily embraced.
A reasonable person can acknowledge that any individual piece of evidence may have an innocent explanation. But the relevant question is whether those explanations remain credible when all the evidence is considered together.
Ultimately, an alternative explanation should do more than identify what is possible. It must account for the observed evidence with a coherent, supported explanation that can withstand the same scrutiny applied to the original theory. You can't replace something you're calling implausible with something MORE implausible.
The Proberger Fallacy mistakes the ability to challenge every individual piece of evidence for the ability to explain the totality of evidence.
Understanding this when I see it has made it helpful to realize when I can have a rational discussion here and when it's just going to go around in a loop to no end.