 So the strength of an inductive argument relies primarily on the strength of the evidence. There's a number of ways we could talk about this. We'll talk about the kinds of evidence, which we'll get to a little bit. What kinds of evidence are appropriate or inappropriate, depending on the topic. But there's some more general ways we could talk about evidence. One of the first ways is to contrast available evidence versus absent evidence. Available evidence So available evidence is basically what you have. It's the evidence that you have collected. Now there are certain problems we're trying to figure out, you know, whether you have all the available evidence. Okay, you have very definitely a problems there. We'll have to take those with the case-by-case basis. But I want to contrast available evidence to absent evidence. Absent evidence is when, well, it'd be great to have this evidence. It might lead to a conclusion one way or the other, you know, for an argument, but we simply have a collected it, or it doesn't exist. So a really famous case, right? We're talking about whether there's life in the universe. Well, we have lots of available evidence. We have what constitutes life in our own solar system. We have what our planet looks like versus other planets, and whether those other planets can produce life. We look for the conditions for life. When we have lots of evidence as far as this is concerned, ranging from, you know, the green belt, right, that little relatively narrow range between where a star's radiation or the two hot, right, too much radiation versus too cold, right, is a very narrow belt where planets can exist with these stars where it has just the right temperatures. Okay, so we have what, how many stars out there actually have planets, or at least estimates, the different kinds of planets, right, ranging from gas giants to just, you know, big balls of rock. You know, even what I believe Venus has got a lot of liquid on the surface, it's just not water. So we have lots of available evidence regarding the existence of life. And you know, we start compiling this, right, start putting this together. We, I think I believe it's called the Drake equation, right. So you, we calculated, okay, well, how many stars are out there? Now, we don't have a precise count, of course, but, you know, we have a really good estimate, how many stars are out there? How many, how many of these stars have planets? How many of these planets are in the green zone? How many have water? How many have an atmosphere that's, you know, you need at least some atmosphere, otherwise that water's just going to evaporate away. So, well, under certain conditions, that water's going to evaporate away, like, you know, in our situation, for example, if we didn't have our atmosphere, the water wouldn't have stayed on the surface. It would have been, would have boiled away. There's a number of elements that are present in your own, you know, biological system that are necessary for life, iron being a big one. So then, you know, the Drake equation tries to compile all this information together. And it spits out, you know, an estimate of how many planets out there support life. And, you know, in addition to maybe how many support intelligent life. And when you, you know, put all this evidence together, it's a really great, it's a really great inference, right? That's at least the best available we have so far. Now, it would be wonderful, but that's what's available to us. And it's really cool evidence, and it gives us a probability of, you know, higher than zero, right? It gives us a probability that there's life out there. Okay. But we're missing a lot, right? So that's what's available. It'd be nice if we had some other evidence, right? No, I don't know. Contact. That'd be really great. Or at least being able to see, seeing another planet with life forms on it. Or, you know, evidence of life on other planets in our solar system. Or even better, maybe evidence of civilizations in our, in our own solar system, right? There's all kinds of evidence that would be great to have, but we don't have it. It's either unavailable or it doesn't exist. So, when we're talking about the strength of the, of the argument, we're talking about the strength of the evidence. We can use available evidence, but not absent evidence. You can't use absent evidence for your conclusion. It's contrary to reason. You know, and you might say, well, why can't we use absent evidence? Well, you can draw way too many conclusions with absent evidence. Sure, there's all kinds of absent evidence for the existence of life. There's also all kinds of absent evidence for, you know, the non-existence, right? So, we'll keep looking out there and there's, you know, the Drake equation is a nice estimate, but when we start looking at, you know, if we start looking at planets, we will, I bet we'll find that they're all dead and devoid of life, and that will show that there isn't life out there. Okay, I mean, sure, that would be compelling, but we don't have that evidence either. We've been looking at exoplanets and other star systems, so we're getting various results. But we, you know, what we don't have is, I don't know, here's another piece of absent evidence. We don't have a piece of absent evidence that's some kind of extraterrestrial time capsule buried in the North Pole that explains the entire history of the universe up to this point and how all civilizations died, and there's only, and they all got together and left a nascent life form on this silly little third planet from this. No, we don't have that either. It'd be nice to have it, right? It'd be really decisive, or, you know, a spaceship that crashes to the earth and says, I'm the last surviving member of all the empires that have existed, and, well, I'm here to tell you that you're all alone. You know, okay, that would be decisive, but that's also absent. We don't have it. There's all kinds of absent evidence, I suppose. That's kind of a weird thing to say. There's all kinds of evidence that doesn't exist, right? There's all kinds of possibilities, let's say, for what would count as evidence one way or the other for the conclusion, but since it's absent, we can't use it. You can only use available evidence. You can only use available evidence. So when you're looking at your inductive argument, what's going to strengthen that argument is looking at the available evidence and casting aside the absent evidence. Wash your hands of nothing.