Evidence of absence

This antimetabole is often attributed to Martin Rees or Carl Sagan, but a version appeared as early as 1888 in a writing by William Wright.

[5] The argument from ignorance for "absence of evidence" is not necessarily fallacious, for example, that a potentially life-saving new drug poses no long-term health risk unless proved otherwise.

[6] In carefully designed scientific experiments, null results can be interpreted as evidence of absence.

[9][10] Michael Davis, researcher at Emory University, argues that complete erasure can only be confidently inferred if all of the biological events that occurred when the memory was formed revert to their original status.

[11] Davis contends that because making these measurements in a complex organism is implausible, the concept of complete memory erasure (what he deems "strong form of forgetting") is not useful scientifically.

A jury can be persuaded to convict because of "evidentiary lacunae", or a lack of evidence they expect to hear.

[13][16] Philosopher Steven Hales argues that typically one can logically be as confident with the negation of an affirmation.