How to Research: Proving a negative . . . with a mullet
It’s often said that you can’t prove a negative. I suppose that’s technically true, but it seems a cop-out to me. So speaking as a professional researcher, how can we do better than that?
Well, here’s one way that I’d go about proving a negative. Using the mullet.
It’s a popular fact that the term mullet for a particular hairstyle is first recorded in 1994. Whenever this fact is pointed out you get unending people saying ‘umm, it was totally called a mullet in the ‘80s, I was there!’¹
They don’t provide any evidence for this claim, but just because nobody wrote the word down doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. That leaves us with trying to prove a negative — that the term mullet was NOT in circulation pre-1994.
Can we manage such a feat? Yes.
Beyond the hair there’s also a fish called the mullet. It might be important for the etymology of the hairstyle, but that’s irrelevant.
What is relevant is that in Florida you had the Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival. To do with the fish, nothing to do with the hairstyle.
In March 1992, noted mullet wearer and complete unknown Billy Ray Cyrus was booked to perform at said mullet festival later in the year. But in-between booking and performing he released Achy Breaky Heart and the accompanying album and instantly became one of the biggest acts in the world.
Obviously he — or at least his management — was no longer that interested in performing at some random Floridian fish festival and tried to get out of it. Also obviously the fish festival had nabbed one of the hottest artists around for basically free and had no desire to release him from his contract.
This disagreement was reported on across the country, and eventually Billy Ray Cyrus agreed to perform on a Friday rather than a Saturday, but in all the headlines about this disagreement between one of the most noted mullet wearers of the day and a literal mullet festival, there is not a single joke.
They make other jokes, like don’t go breaking their hearts, but in what world does it make sense that if mullet was a known term for the hairstyle Billy Ray Cyrus wore that pun wouldn’t be brought up?
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You could probably mental gymnastics your way out of that, but our earliest direct evidence for the term mullet is from around 1994, and we have evidence that it wasn’t a known term in 1992. What more can you ask? And that’s how you can start proving a negative.
Addendum
Now, to head off a potential criticism — that this is an argument from silence. To recap, an argument from silence (argumentum ex silentio if your fancy, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence if you’re more internet-focused) is when you’re saying nobody mentions something (in this case a mullet pre-1994) therefore it didn’t exist or didn’t happen.
And that’s . . . vexed. On the one hand, it’s a reasonable thing to remember — maybe we’ve not found the evidence, maybe the evidence is lost (most of it is). On the other hand, that can be used to justify any matter of theorizing — the Grand Canyon was carved by a million Tyrannosaurus Rexes with little tiny pickaxes for their little tiny arms. Do I have evidence for this? No, but absence of evidence . . .
Most discussions of mullets fall into this unedifying, unsatisfying, and frankly just boring trap. ‘Oh, there’s no discussion of mullets pre-1994!’ ‘No, you just haven’t found what must be myriad of references because of some reason that I can’t think of right now!’
That’s what makes the Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival unique. Arguments from Silence are, unambiguously, weakest when it’s something common. Sometimes people just don’t say things. I’ve not checked, but I can’t recall the last book I read that mentioned a ceiling fan. They’re not worthy of note so they’re not noted.
Future historians, then, might look to the lack of references to ceiling fans in our literature and conclude they didn’t exist.
Some historians and archaeologists stop there. That arguments from silence are never valid. The conclusion should derive from evidence, not the evidence that doesn’t exist. Otherwise you get pickaxe-wielding T-Rexes.
Not everyone agrees with that point, though, and just think that you need to be careful.
Arguments from Silence are strongest when you’d expect someone to mention something and they don’t. If you’re reading a novel and they don’t mention ceiling fans, that’s much weaker evidence for whether or not the people of that era have ceiling fans than if a book on household cooling solutions doesn’t mention ceiling fans. You might not expect the first to mention fans, you would definitely expect the second to mention them.
In the same way, people pre-1994 not mentioning mullets might just be them not mentioning it. I have no idea if the classic early 2000s emo haircut has a name (I just checked and it seems to be emo hair, though there are more excitingly named variants) because it didn’t particularly matter.
But in 1992, if it was a known term, you’d EXPECT newspapers to mention it because the context of the Mullet Festival means it would make sense to. Their silence is noteworthy. It’s still not proof — it might be too niche, too ‘cool kids’ for newspaper writers to know the term. It might be too Australian — many people claim with little evidence that it’s Australian slang that goes worldwide.
As the University of Massachusetts says, “A single positive may overturn any number of negatives. A single sound refutes all silences.” One strongly attested piece of evidence for pre-1994 mullets blows everything out of the water. But at this precise moment we have positive evidence that it’s known in 1994 and suggestive evidence it’s not known in 1992. Dismiss it as an argument from silence all you want, but at least it’s an evidence-based argument. And until ‘mullet’ is found in some dusty archive somewhere, it’s the best we have.
- Source . . . go to any TIL Reddit thread on this fact?
