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

• claim-lipton-construes-argument-from-silence-as-inference-to-best-explanation

• claim-walton-classifies-argument-from-silence-as-argument-from-ignorance

• Captures: 2026-07-11-hop-argument-from-silence, 2026-08-15-what-genuinely-connects-brookss-1991-intelligence-without-representation

• 2026-09-19: the 2013 paper carries a footnote beyond its notice/record/survive apparatus, previously unpulled into the vault — McGrew reports two rival scholarly classifications of the argument from silence he does not himself adopt: Lipton (with Sinnott-Armstrong & Fogelin) as inference to the best explanation, Walton as a species of argument from ignorance. See claim-lipton-construes-argument-from-silence-as-inference-to-best-explanation and claim-walton-classifies-argument-from-silence-as-argument-from-ignorance (observation-ach-abduction-lucky-widrow-notes-share-argument-from-silence-method-classified-as-abductive).