Counterclaims and the Theory of Knowledge

Recently, I've had a lot of people asking me whether when propounding an argument, one should create a counterclaim. This, to me, is a rather odd question to ask. When you create an argument, a counterclaim automatically arises. This is because of the asymmetry between positive and negative, in terms of burden of proof and other aspects of knowledge.

But let's look at a concrete example. Let's say that a student argues that there is no such thing as absolute truth. Obviously then, whether this student says it or not, the counterclaim is that there is. How do we evaluate these two statements?

The answer in this case is appallingly simple and comes from the fact that positive assertions and negative assertions are not symmetrical. Let's assume that the student is right. If so, then it is an absolute truth that there is no such thing as absolute truth. The statement is then false, because there is at least (now) one such thing that is absolutely true.

If we assume the student is wrong, there is no contradiction. Therefore it is easier to say that there is such a thing as absolute truth, whether we can prove it or not — after all, we can prove that the counterclaim to the existence of absolute truth must be wrong.

When a student asks me about 'creating' a counterclaim, what they often mean is, "Can we set up a straw man argument so that we can knock it down?" A proper counterclaim doesn't need creation; it is the negation of the original claim. In conventional logic, either the claim or counterclaim is true (in principle or theory) but not both. The problem lies in establishing which one is true.

In some case, it is hard or impossible to do this for either case. Sometimes the key difficulty is definition, and sometimes the key difficulty is replicability. This leads to problems with validity of evidence (are we talking about the right thing?) and reliability of evidence (does the same phenomenon occur under the same circumstances?) — which is why people ought to avoid such arguments.

One such problem is the, "Is there a God?" argument. If you could definitively describe 'God', then you could establish that the points describing 'God' could be said to exist for a particular entity, and thus say that this entity was 'God' or that at least one entity had the properties of 'God'. If you could duplicate a signature 'God phenomenon' exactly, then you'd have reliability too. But you can't do either. In fact, if you could, it would be evidence that a certain kind of God did not exist, since this 'God' you would have found would be subject to (or at least, behaves as if subject to) the logic of natural laws.

That's why I don't believe you can prove (in the modern sense) the existence of God. In the original sense, of course, the sense of the Latin probare, you can (in theory) attempt to test God with your own probing as much as you want. It is unlikely you will get definitive answers, but you may get personally satisfactory answers — which may be unpleasant, but at least sufficient for you.

Again, the asymmetry between positive and negative surfaces. It is possible in most cases to prove that you can't logically be an atheist, although you cannot in most cases prove that you can logically be a theist (except that it can be reasonable to be one because it is not unreasonable).

If all this stuff is something you can easily understand, then it should not be a problem to write a tiny (1200-1600 words, perhaps?) piece on some knowledge claim and its counterclaim. Right?