The Problem of Auxiliary Assumptions

Abstract

Empirical arguments for survival purport to justify the claim that there is evidence that supports the hypothesis of survival. In Chapter 3 through Chapter 5, I surveyed some of the widely discussed forms of such evidence: evidence from out-of-body and near-death experiences (E_OBE), mediumistic communications (E_MED), and cases of the reincarnation type (E_CORT). As explored in Chapter 6 through Chapter 8, the claim that these data (severally or collectively) provide evidence, possibly very strong evidence, for survival is based at least in part on the claim that these data are what we would expect if the survival hypothesis is true, and they are either less expected or not to be expected at all if survival is not true. As explained in Chapter 7 and Chapter 8, the latter clause depends on there not being some rival hypothesis that leads us to expect the data as well as does the survival hypothesis. So “likelihoods” are a crucial feature of empirical survival arguments, and it is essential that likelihoods be well-defined, permitting contrastive judgments such as Pr(e | h₁ & k) > Pr(e | h₂ & k), which formally expresses the more informal idea that evidence e is more to be expected given hypothesis h₁ than given hypothesis h₂.