“Records can be destroyed or never created.” But if absence is real, how do we prove it, and what would it prove?

This requires an important distinction:

A. Absence of evidence

You search for evidence and do not find it.

For example:

“I searched the university archive and found no record that Professor X received funding.”

That is an absence of evidence.

But it does not necessarily establish:

“Professor X never received funding.”

Why? The record could have:

• been destroyed;
• never been created;
• been misclassified;
• been stored somewhere else;
• not been digitized.

B. Evidence of absence

This is stronger.

You have evidence showing that something was absent.

For example, suppose a university has an official funding database that:

1. records every grant awarded;
2. has existed continuously from 2000–2020;
3. has a documented procedure requiring every grant to be entered;
4. has complete records for the relevant period;
5. contains no grant for Professor X.

Now you have much stronger grounds to say:

“Professor X did not receive a grant from this university during 2000–2020.”

The absence itself becomes evidence because you know the system was designed to record the thing you are looking for.

The logic is:

No record + incomplete recording system = weak evidence of absence

but:

No record + demonstrably complete recording system = strong evidence of absence

Can we prove absolute absence?

Sometimes within a defined domain.

For example:

“There is no entry for Professor X in this complete database.”

That can be established very strongly.

But:

“Professor X never received funding from anyone anywhere in the world.”

is enormously harder because you would need to establish the absence across all relevant sources.

So the methodological principle is:

The stronger your evidence that the relevant record system is complete, the stronger the inference you can make from absence.