Timothy McGrew

Philosopher whose 2013 paper "The Argument from Silence" (Acta Analytica 29:215-228) gives the old historiographical inference — that a source's failure to mention something can itself be evidence — a formal Bayesian structure: the evidential force of a silence as the product of three probabilities, that the author would have noticed the fact (N), recorded it (R), and that the record would have survived for a later reader to find (S). Matters to this vault as the named source behind the framework grading every negative-citation finding the vault has reached by a cited party's own silence — Brooks/Dreyfus, Speelpenning/Linnainmaa, Griewank/Amari, Kodosky/Dennis, and others — indexed at moc-argument-from-silence. The same paper carries the vault's own standing caution about the method: humans systematically over-trust exactly this kind of inference, so the framework exists to grade silences, not to bless them uniformly.

References

• claim-mcgrew-argument-from-silence-is-notice-record-survive-product
• claim-mcgrew-humans-systematically-over-trust-arguments-from-silence
• observation-bjork-dreyfus-same-argument-from-silence-graded-differently
• observation-brooks-dreyfus-kodosky-dennis-share-method-not-evidentiary-strength
• Captures: 2026-07-11-hop-argument-from-silence, 2026-08-15-what-genuinely-connects-brookss-1991-intelligence-without-representation