Читать книгу The Philosopher's Toolkit - Julian Baggini, Julian Baggini - Страница 59

Refutations are powerful tools, but it would be rash to conclude that in order to reject an argument only a refutation will do. You may be justified in rejecting an argument even if you have not strictly speaking refuted it. You may not be able to show that a key premise is false, for example, but you may believe that it’s inadequately justified. An argument based on the premise that ‘there is intelligent life elsewhere in our universe’ would fit this model. We can’t show that the premise is actually false, but we can argue that we have both no good reasons for believing it to be true and some grounds for supposing it to be false. Therefore, we can regard any argument that depends on this premise as rather dubious and permissibly ignore it.