There Are No Black Swans, We Have No Weapons

The New York Times has an entertaining piece on the logical flaws in demanding that Iraq disprove a negative in providing evidence of their lack of weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, Enlightenment poster boy David Hume, who noted these problems with induction, came down on the side of common sense, suggesting that if there is no certain knowledge available, one should take an educated guess. (I’m paraphrasing. Obviously.) Therefore, though my observations of US foreign policy decisions are unreliable, and I cannot properly infer any general rules about US foreign policy from those observations, it is nonetheless appropriate to assert with a reasonable degree of certainty that the US will do whatever it damn well pleases.

Posted at 12pm on 16/12/02 by Jack Mottram to the politics category.
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