Extraordinary claims who said that?

[DaveC426913]

"Extraordinary claims..." who said that?

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

Obviously, Carl popularized it, but is he the one who coined it?

I just read in my book "Escape from Hell"*, that it was Descartes who first said this. True?

*(Carl is in Dante's Eighth Circle of Hell (along with Diviners and Fortune Tellers) for being a false prophet. He started teaching science but then it got way from him and he started making predictions about Earth's demise in a Great Ice Age).

 

[D H]

Laplace: “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.”

 

[imiyakawa]

To the best of my knowledge, it was Marcello Truzzi. Founder of CSICOP, left on a bad note and coined the term "pseudo-skepticism". He definitely said it before Sagan.

Truzzi is credited with originating the oft-used phrase "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof," which Carl Sagan then popularized as "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."[15] However, this is a rewording of a quote by Laplace which goes, "The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness."[16] This, in turn, may have been based on the statement "A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence" by David Hume.[15]

So I guess it wasn't Truzzi.

 

[nismaratwork]

Laplace: “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.”

If you consider Dirac's equation of his "sea", his own reluctance to accept the theory until positrons were more than definitely detected would be a fine example of this in real science. In a time when theory is the forerunner of experimentation (often), this is even more critical than at any time in history.

 

[disregardthat]

David Hume at least had a variation of it when he wrote about his skepticism towards the possibility of divine miracles.