Shifting the Burden of Proof
Also known as: burden-of-proof, bop, burden
Demanding your opponent disprove your claim instead of supporting it yourself.
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In plain terms
The person who makes a claim is the one who has to support it. Shifting the burden of proof flips that: instead of giving evidence for an assertion, the speaker demands that everyone else prove it false. "Prove I'm wrong" replaces "here's why I'm right."
It can feel reasonable in the moment, because disproving something is often harder than asserting it. That difficulty is exactly what the move exploits.
Why it's fallacious
In any honest argument, the burden sits with whoever is making the positive claim. If you say a thing exists, or happened, or is true, it's on you to show it. Demanding that others disprove it reverses the natural direction of evidence and lets an unsupported claim masquerade as a default that stands until defeated.
Taken to its end, the move would validate anything that can't be conclusively disproven, which is most things. That's why it pairs so often with the appeal to ignorance: "you can't prove it didn't happen, so it did."
Canonical example
A: "The company is obviously hiding a second set of books."
B: "What's your evidence for that?"
A: "Well, can you prove they aren't? They haven't shown me everything."
A made the claim, so the burden is A's. Rather than meet it, A hands it to B and treats the absence of a disproof as support. But B can't be expected to prove a negative about records B has never seen, and A's inability to be refuted isn't evidence of anything except that the claim was unfalsifiable to begin with.
Counter-example (not a fallacy)
A: "These figures don't add up; the totals don't match the line items."
B: "They do, actually, once you include the footnoted adjustments. Here they are."
This isn't burden-shifting. A made a specific, supported claim (the numbers don't match), and B answered it with evidence rather than demanding A prove a negative. Asking someone to back up a positive claim they made is not shifting the burden; it's where the burden always belonged. Pointing out that a claim lacks support is also fair, not a dodge.
The line: is the speaker meeting the burden for their own claim, or trying to hand it to someone else?
How to fix it
If you've been linked here, the fix is to support your own claim rather than asking others to dismantle it. If you assert something, lead with the reason you believe it: the evidence, the source, the argument. "Prove me wrong" isn't a case; it's a refusal to make one. If you find you can't support the claim, that's worth knowing, and the honest move is to hold it more loosely rather than daring others to disprove it.
If you're on the receiving end, name where the burden sits, calmly. "You made the claim, so the evidence is yours to provide. I don't have to disprove it for it to be unsupported." Then let the silence do its work.