Mere lack of evidence, of course, is no reason to denounce a theory.
Poverty is now described as a "multidimensional" problem that includes powerlessness, voicelessness, vulnerability and fear as well as mere lack of food, shelter and other economic necessities.
When whole stores and specialized Web sites are devoted to containers, every home catalog trumpets "storage ideas," and a cottage industry of professional organizers grows daily, obviously something more complex than a mere lack of space is at work.
The issue isn't a mere lack of formal training -- pop musicians have always been self-taught; neither Elvis nor the Beatles nor Jimi Hendrix could read music -- but a more profound lack of conventional musical skills.
One can certainly take issue with her reasoning (I do myself) without failing to see that there was more in play in her mind than a mere lack of vision or imagination.
It may be, however, that adults who were blind with cataracts at birth suffer more than mere lack of normal visual experience; they are not quite comparable to visually naïve, but otherwise intact, infants.
On the other hand, many items of folk literature, because of historic movements or overwhelming foreign influences or the mere lack of skillful practitioners of the tradition, become less and less important, and occasionally die out from the oral repertory.
And while in some moods Chaos says she would do anything to be free of her eating disorders, in others she has more excuses not to be than the mere lack of health insurance: she has a job, she is in school, she doesn't deserve help.
Vice, for Kant, is not mere lack of virtue (MM 6 384).
The mere lack of a conclusive reason for belief does not itself provide us with a reason for doubt.
This mere lack or absence, as a negation of essence that implies nothing, is the meaning of the ultimate truth in the Geluk tradition.
