Argument from silence

To make an argument from silence (Latin: argumentum ex silentio) is to express a conclusion that is based on the absence of statements in historical documents, rather than on presence. In the field of classical studies, it often refers to the assertion that an author is ignorant of a subject, based on the lack of references to it in the author's available writings.

Thus in historical analysis with an argument from silence, the absence of a reference to an event or a document is used to cast doubt on the event not mentioned. While most historical approaches rely on what an author's works contain, an argument from silence relies on what the book or document does not contain. This approach thus uses what an author "should have said" rather than what is available in the author's extant writings.

An argument from silence may apply to a document only if the author was expected to have the information, was intending to give a complete account of the situation, and the item was important enough and interesting enough to deserve to be mentioned at the time.

Arguments from silence, based on a writer's failure to mention an event, are distinct from arguments from ignorance which rely on a total "absence of evidence" and are widely considered unreliable; however arguments from silence themselves are also generally viewed as rather weak in many cases; or considered as fallacies.

John Lange provided the basic structure for the analysis of arguments from silence based on three components:

The applicability of these three conditions is decided on a case by case basis, and there are no general dialectical rules for them, except the historian's expertise in evaluating the situation. In Lange's analysis, an argument from silence is only suggestive and never logically conclusive.

Professors of history Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier thus state that an argument from silence can act as presumptive evidence only if the person failing to mention the information was in a position to have the information, and was purporting to be giving a complete account of the story in question. Howell and Prevenier state that arguments from silence face the difficulty that a historian can not just assume that an author would have recorded the fact in question; for if the fact did not seem important enough to an author it would have been excluded.

Professor of English Michael Duncan states that there are very few scholarly analyses of arguments from silence; but these typically view it as fallacious. Duncan adds that arguments from silence are not mentioned in Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations or Hamblin's book Fallacies, but both of these texts discuss the somewhat similar case of argument from ignorance.Errietta Bissa, professor of Classics at University of Wales flatly states that arguments from silence are not valid.David Henige states that, although risky, such arguments can at times shed light on historical events.

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