Of Course You Can Prove a Negative

Confident pronouncements that "you can't prove a negative" have been all over the internet for as long as I can remember. But there's a reason you'll never find any such claim in a logic textbook.

I’ve been seeing various people with various agendas confidently say that “you can’t prove a negative” for about as long as I’ve been seeing people argue on the internet. Sometimes they’re trying to make reasonable points. Sometimes they’re spouting nonsense. But they always present “you can’t prove a negative” as if it were a universally acknowledged l…