---
title: "Timothy McGrew"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Timothy McGrew"
aliases: ["Tim McGrew"]
first_seen: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["argument from silence","historiography","negative evidence","Bayesian reasoning"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


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: [[entity-peter-lipton|Lipton]] (with Sinnott-Armstrong & Fogelin) as inference to the best explanation, [[entity-douglas-walton|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]]).