> I don't see how hearsay evidence could ever be debunked.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Hearsay doesn't reach the necessary standard to be considered evidence in the first place in sensible forums, including most courts.
Yes. But the other thing is debunking rumors is the task they set for themselves. And in these cases, they went for the dopamine hit of writing "FALSE" over the eternally annoying "Unconfirmed".
It’s true. There’s no feasible way for me to prove it. Even if she were to record a statement saying that, indeed, she said that…she could be lying for some reason.
Most of what we experience in life every day isn’t provable. That doesn’t make it any less true. It’s just exposes a weakness in what a person is willing to consider as truth, which is that it depends entirely on your willingness to trust the source and very little to do with actual truth.
I mean, if you video of Osama bin Laden telling me the story, or one of his associates were on the record with it, I'd find it plausible. In this case we have absolutely nothing.
This is rather elementary stuff. If you accept your "more expansive" version of the truth then I have to entertain pretty much any fantastical claim because it is impossible to disprove anything definitively.
"False" is clearly shorthand for "there is no evidence that this is true."
If I wrote "brightball beats his wife" and then said you couldn't really say it was false because you couldn't prove it had never happened definitively it would be outrageous, right? Nobody would accept that as a reasonable argument.
Exactly. And it would be the same if you included the word “doesn’t” in that statement. It just means that it’s all hearsay and only the people involved know the real truth.
This is why gossip and rumors are such a powerful thing. We all want to think that what we know or what we heard is true, but very few people are willing to accept that what they heard might not be accurate. Especially once they have repeated it to someone else.
So the existence of fairies and unicorns is merely "unconfirmed"? I would consider that term to mean that there is one reasonably credible report that has not been corroborated.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Hearsay doesn't reach the necessary standard to be considered evidence in the first place in sensible forums, including most courts.