Liberal Forum

I told him that the burden of proof lies with the person making the claim. His response/ That is my rule. 

That dumb pos. That moron is too stupid to be alive. How has natural selection not done its job by now?






​​​@Blackvegetable  here is a little history lesson:The idea of the burden of proof is extremely old—well over 2,000 years old.The clearest early formulation comes from Roman law. The Roman jurist Julius Paulus (Paul), around the late 2nd/early 3rd century CE, expressed the principle essentially as:

“Proof lies upon the person who asserts, not upon the person who denies.”

The underlying idea is even older. Greek philosophers and rhetoricians—especially in the traditions surrounding Aristotle, dialectic, rhetoric, and formal argumentation in the 4th century BCE—were already concerned with who had to give reasons for a proposition and what counted as adequate demonstration. But they did not package it quite as neatly as the later Roman legal rule.So a rough timeline is:

• 4th century BCE: Greeks develop systematic ideas about argument, demonstration, assertion, and refutation.
• 2nd–3rd century CE: Roman jurists explicitly formulate something recognizably equivalent to the modern burden of proof.
• Medieval period onward: Roman legal principles are incorporated into European law, theology, scholastic disputation, and philosophy.
• Modern logic/law: The idea becomes more carefully divided into concepts such as the burden of production, burden of persuasion, and the more general argumentative burden to provide evidence for one's claims.

And this connects directly to the “shifting the burden of proof” fallacy we were discussing earlier. That fallacy isn't some new internet-debate rule. It violates a principle of argumentation that has been explicitly recognized for roughly 1,800 years.For example:Person A: “There is a secret civilization under Antarctica.”Person B: “What evidence do you have?”Person A: “Prove there isn't one.”Person A has improperly transferred the burden created by their own assertion to Person B.There's also an interesting connection here to Aristotle and logic: burden of proof is not itself a rule of deductive validity. It's a rule governing the dialectical situation—who owes whom a reason at a particular point in an argument. That distinction gets surprisingly deep.