“Ugh.”
That’s really not the only way but many debates can follow this simple framework. The implication with this triple-syllabled rejoinder is that a failure to produce evidence means the interrogator gets to ascend to the golden heights of online debate glory like the apotheosis of a retarded worm crawling over roadkill suddenly, disgustingly, levitating before the oncoming tire has its way with it. Sounds like a bad deal but I hear people would be into something like that.
This argument happened to me recently on Facebook. Don’t know or care to remember the context or on what page it took place on but the argument went like this. Keep in mind this isn’t the actual conversation nor the subject but instead is a re-imagined exchanged for dramatic effect.
Me: All bachelors are unmarried.
Guy: EVIDENCE???
Assuming this schmoe knows English (he did), the request for EVIDENCE?? is a non sequitur. The proposition is true by deduction if we know the proper definition of bachelor. Which I did. And he did. There’s no examination of EVIDENCE??? required to arrive at a strong inference except a half second of thinky-thinky.
We can extend the EVIDENCE??? situation by looking at example that uses an inductive inference and a little bit of common sense data:
Me: All bachelors have more disposable income than married men with children.
Guy: EVIDENCE???
Deploying what we know about children—that they consume a lot of resources and don’t earn income—this proposition is nigh-undebatable. Sure, there’s induction involved and there is wiggle room to quibble about particular definitions or situations so it’s a few notches less strong than the first category statement above. Even so, the EVIDENCE??? asked for in such a case would come from some basic counter-reasoning, not a damnable graph from some overpriced taxpayer-funded study. If Guy needs someone else to reason for him then he has some bigger problems.
Lastly, here’s one more commonplace but more complex:
Me: God created the universe.
Guy: EVIDENCE???
The statements “God created the universe” and “God didn’t create the universe” and “God created Galactus in Marvel Multiverse instance Earth-552” are difficult to evidence mostly because they are assumptions, not conclusions. We are using a finite set of symbols (language) to describe something wholly abstract and outside of the realm of human intellect. There are perceptual things we can sense that we can use to induce either of those propositions—and propositions like it—but this induction is a rickety tower. It’s based nearly entirely on the agent (person) themselves and in their weighing of the epistemic raw material: what’s considered “viable proof” to you may not be for me, and there’s not a reliable, externalized, objective set of standards for judging strong proof versus weak proof. How could there be?
However, all of this is for naught if Guy is mired in the fever-swamps of the Romantic-influenced scientism fantasy land, where the working assumption is that man will have perfected knowledge of everything eventually, via mass consciousness hegemony, Goliath-sized Kickstarter-funded socio-engineered kajiggery, transhuman mechanical overrides, or reaching the snowcapped mountain-top apex of endless free porn on the Internet. Good luck and Godspeed to anyone who thinks they have the axe to fell he who clings to this idea.