Originally Posted by
Mojo
The only actual inference Jabba is making is that the carbon dating must be wrong because the shroud is authentic.
Yes, this is apparent. But his trusted-but-untrustworthy authors Marino and Prior make inferences of their own. That is, in logical function they are inferences. In plain terms, they are also pure conjecture.
In a similar circularity, they note that Raes and others say they found foreign material. From this they infer there "must" have been a patch. This is an attempt at inductive reasoning. As you remember from basic instruction, induction means to reason from specific to general. In practice this means reasoning from bits of information toward an overall conclusion, if possible. In court, a jury is asked to reason from disconnected bits of testimony etc. presented to them to a general determination of guilt. They are asked to infer guilt from a collection of noted items and attestations. Reasonable doubt is the standard for measuring the remaining inductive gap in that context.
But here it's pure speculation, based on very shaky claims and obvious problems with things such as chain of custody and standards of review. And thus is has no probative value.
It has even less value when observation contradicts the general conclusion toward which someone is trying to reason inductively. We infer inductively when we
cannot observe the outcome. It's typically the best we can do under real world circumstances. We cannot rewind the clock and magically observe a crime being re-committed. Hence we do our best to infer fairly and reasonably. However in this case we can observe whether or not there's a relevant patch. And when we can, induction is moot. It simply
doesn't matter what an inductive case concludes when the real conclusion can simply be observed.