Talk:Russell's teapot

Question about opening sentence

It's been a long time since I read Russell's essay but the opening sentence: "Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, as opposed to shifting the burden of disproof to others." seems wrong to me. I thought the argument applied to ANY claim, not just unfalsifiable claims. In fact if a claim is unfalsifiable then by definition it isn't scientific and what I recall is that the essay was talking about the scientific worldview applied to all beliefs not just natural science. For example, the teapot hypothesis is not unfalsifiable. With powerful enough telescopes or a robot launched to explore the region it would be possible to examine the region in question and determine whether there was a teapot there or not. The point of the essay as I recall was that for ANY hypothesis (for someone with a scientific worldview), the burden of proof is on the person making the hypothesis. In fact, now that I think of it, I think it has to be that way or the argument is incoherent because if something is really unfalsifiable then by definition you can't provide evidence for or against it. I'm going to leave it as is for now but if I have a chance to dig up the essay and double check I may change it, but I would be interested in what others think. MadScientistX11 (talk) 13:52, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

A ref in the article leads to a pdf of the essay: [1]https://web.archive.org/web/20160120125330/http://russell.mcmaster.ca/cpbr11p69.pdf

Right before the part that's quoted in our article, Russell writes (about a specific theistic view): "I do not think this view can be proved to be false. I think all that can be said is that there is no positive reason in its favour."

And within our quote, right after the teapot analogy, he states: "But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense."

Since the essay adresses theological opinions (and only a few other views that are regarded "absurd beliefs" outside the regions where they prevail), I see no reason to believe the analogy to be about more general claims, let alone any that can be considered scientific. Joortje1 (talk) 14:58, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

I'll second Joortje1 in that this article is about Russell's teapot specifically and not the underlying issue "that the burden of proof lies with the one aserting something". To your point, the point of the argument IS that it should apply to any claim. But perhaps that should be added language about the scientific meathod for context, AND within the frame of the article. But I actually think the opening is pretty strong and already address this fact. The quality of this article has greatly improved in the past 15 years. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Grimsooth (talk • contribs) 19:25, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

Other languages and nations

Russell's Teapot is a worthwhile point but not extremely clever. It's very unlikely that similar arguments weren't written about many times before, and in many other countries and other languages, but the article barely touches on this. It probably gives an insular impression of Wikipedia to philosophers, and gives the inexperienced the unfortunate impressions that only philosophers from the UK are important, and also that this teapot was high level philosophy at the time when Russell was writing about it. Rich (talk) 21:18, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 4 November 2025

Change link for Russell, Bertrand (1952). "Is There a God? [1952]". In Slater, John G. (ed.). The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 11: Last Philosophical Testament, 1943–68 (PDF). in the sources for the new link https://russell.humanities.mcmaster.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/11-69.pdf SimplePage (talk) 21:42, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Could you please describe your request in X to Y form? (Perhaps using a template like {{text diff}}.)

Thank you and happy editing, Slomo666 (talk) 22:18, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

@Slomo666 There's not always a need for a text diff, especially if it's just changing the URL on a reference. This is  Done. - Umby 🌕🐶 (talk) 23:11, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

The main reason I asked was that it was unclear to me why the edit was needed and on top of that I did not understand if they wanted the description of the reference to change or just the URL. Slomo666 (talk) 23:23, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

"...but never published"

The § Description section claims something was "never published", and then proceeds to quote it. Obviously, that cannot be true. Presumably, this meant to say something like, "not published at that time by the magazine, only to be published in ____ by ____", but we'd need a citation supporting that. Mathglot (talk) 20:55, 7 December 2025 (UTC)

It looks like diff has fixed that. Johnuniq (talk) 04:17, 8 December 2025 (UTC)

My first reaction was people should realize what it means as written. Well, I say that not wanting underestimate the intelligence of our readers, but . . . Anyways, the citation given at the end of the quote, does in fact make it clear when it was written, why it was written and that it was not published at that time. I started trying to come up with a concise statement to clarify the history of the quote, but then I went with 'In an article titled "Is There a God?", written in 1952, but not published until after his death, Russell wrote:' as I felt the details were not needed. Richard-of-Earth (talk) 04:18, 8 December 2025 (UTC)

Great; both deals with the issue, and informs the reader at the same time. Win–win. Mathglot (talk) 05:07, 8 December 2025 (UTC)