[Split from INTPf new era] Facts vs. Opinion

[LOGICZOMBIE]

Common divides include evidence vs. reason, objective vs. subjective, good faith vs. bad faith, right wing vernacular vs. left wing, science vs spirituality, judgement vs. perception. The framing is so polarised there's little venn overlap anymore.

fact versus opinion

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

I'm not sure how they'll go in practice.

can you and i agree on the definition of "fact" ?

 

[Hadoblado]

I'm not sure how they'll go in practice.

can you and i agree on the definition of "fact" ?

Maybe? I think "fact" might be the single most loaded word in human history.

I think for internet discussion purposes, a fact is just something all parties agree on. It's just an accepted premise. It's not necessarily true, but it's treated as true and called a fact.


I believe in objective reality, as many people do, but we all have different epistemic outlooks for how we determine what is true. Chances are our frameworks don't overlap perfectly, and therefore while we may agree on a definition of fact, we'll diverge in the practice of sorting fact from fiction. i.e. objective reality is interpreted subjectively.

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

we'll diverge in the practice of sorting fact from fiction.

a FACT must be empirically verifiable and or logically necessary

everything else is OPINION

I think for internet discussion purposes, a fact is just something all parties agree on.

An axiom is a statement or proposition that is accepted as true without proof, serving as a starting point for further reasoning or arguments.

 

[Hadoblado]

I'm happy to accept that as an axiom :P

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

I'm happy to accept that as an axiom :P

that was easy

 

[Hadoblado]

Speed running world peace gogogo

 

[fluffy]

I always thought that true facts were true and false facts were false?

Reality is not constructed by our beliefs about it but by how we interact with the rules reality has. I can make people believe snake oil cures cancer but does it really? The difference between the social and the physical is that you cannot do impossible things by beliefs alone. It must be physically possible and then the societal factors come into play.

Some people will tell you 2 + 2 = 5 but try and build bridges or anything else doing math the wrong way and reality wont allow it. I am not talking about symbols as place holders. If I have one apple and you give me an apple I have two apples not seventeen apples. If I try and sell seventeen when I only have two then people will think I am cheating them or that I am stupid. The rules of reality seem fixed and unchangeable in that way.

 

[dr froyd]

there's no such thing as an empirical fact, only hypotheses that are yet to be falsified

falsifiability is the real demarcation

 

[fluffy]

hypotheses that are yet to be falsified

Black swan hypothesis?

Wisdom and experience increase with age.

THE FACTS OF LIFE - Theme Song​

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

there's no such thing as an empirical fact, only hypotheses that are yet to be falsified

falsifiability is the real demarcation

how do you falsify anything without either empirically verifiable evidence or pure logical necessity ?


is it a "fact" that you and i are both reading and responding to this conversation ?

is there empirically verifiable evidence of this participation ?

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

I always thought that true facts were true and false facts were false?

most claims contain no detectable "truth value"

if there is no empirically verifiable evidence or logical necessity, then the claim is functionally indistinguishable from OPINION

 

[dr froyd]

there's no such thing as an empirical fact, only hypotheses that are yet to be falsified

falsifiability is the real demarcation

how do you falsify anything without either empirically verifiable evidence or pure logical necessity ?


is it a "fact" that you and i are both reading and responding to this conversation ?

is there empirically verifiable evidence of this participation ?

im not sure what "empirically verifiable evidence" means. You can empirically verify almost anything; astrology, existence of God, etc etc. You just need to actively look for evidence (which, incidentally, was the mission of OT, and he never quite understood the flaw in that approach)

the highest-quality empirical statement one can make is a falsifiable statement. But even that is not a fact; all you can say is that this is the best theory at present moment

as far as quality of discussion goes, it can be a very useful demarcation, because anyone who argues in favor of a non-falsfiable statement has to admit that they are ultimately engaging in pure speculation, guesswork, or theorizing about something of little practical consequence

 

[dr froyd]

for example the statement "aliens exist" is a non-falsfiable statement; one cannot prove their non-existence, and no matter how many centuries go by without any evidence of their existence they might nevertheless exist. That doesn't mean one should never discuss the existence of aliens; it's fun and interesting to think about. But if someone boldly asserts that their existence is a fact, and gets into heated debate about it, that's a mistake

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

for example the statement "aliens exist"

this is a positive claim

this claim demands empirically verifiable evidence and or logical necessity

without empirically verifiable evidence and or logical necessity

this claim cannot be considered either "fact" or "truth"

which means

this claim is OPINION

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

im not sure what "empirically verifiable evidence" means.

this conversation is empirically verifiable

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

I always thought that true facts were true and false facts were false?

all facts are by definition true

there is no such thing as a "false fact"

 

[dr froyd]

for example the statement "aliens exist"

this is a positive claim

this claim demands empirically verifiable evidence and or logical necessity

without empirically verifiable evidence and or logical necessity

this claim cannot be considered either "fact" or "truth"

which means

this claim is OPINION

ok how do you verify this statement: "all swans are white"

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

ok how do you verify this statement: "all swans are white"

when you make a positive claim

the BURDEN OF PROOF lies on you

and any claim that does not have empirically verifiable evidence and or is not demonstrated to be logically necessary

has no detectable "truth value"



and is relegated to OPINION

 

[fluffy]

ok how do you verify this statement: "all swans are white"

when you make a positive claim

the BURDEN OF PROOF lies on you

and any claim that does not have empirically verifiable evidence and or is not demonstrated to be logically necessary

has no detectable "truth value"



and is relegated to OPINION

but then black swans were discovered

does that mean the opinion was true or false?

Proposing the hypothesis is not going to make the hypothesis itself true or false thus we need verification, it is in a grey zone of neither true or false as the null hypothesis means you cannot disprove that black swans as not existing. Proving black swans don't exist is breaking the null hypothesis which cannot be done and that is why the only thing you can do is give evidence that falsify a local proof i.e. in this local area black swans don't exist because we looked everywhere in this one area and found none. Thus the supporting evidence needs to be higher than just saying it is an opinion black swans don't exist. There is no burden of proof to say that the evidence has not supported the conclusion. There was no proof that the evidence excluded the black swan from existing. You cannot say: it is your burden of proof to prove black swans don't exist. You cannot use the burden of proof to prove a negative on the other party. You cannot say it is logic zombies burden of proof to disprove aliens.

Null hypothesis = innocent until proven guilty but not proven guilty doesn't prove innocence

Not: aliens exist until proven not to exist

 

[dr froyd]

ok how do you verify this statement: "all swans are white"

when you make a positive claim

the BURDEN OF PROOF lies on you

and any claim that does not have empirically verifiable evidence and or is not demonstrated to be logically necessary

has no detectable "truth value"



and is relegated to OPINION

i see you had no answer to that, so allow me explain

first of all, it's of no significance whether the claim is "positive" or not. You can convert the statement to a negative one; the contrapositive, logically equivalent "there is no swan that is black"

i would recommend expanding the vocabulary beyond "fact" and "opinion", because these terms are meaningsless from an epistemological point of view

the point that you're missing is that the 2 statements
- "aliens exist"
- "all swans are white"
are epsitemologically different; the first one is verifiable but not falsifiable. As such, as far as arriving at concrete answers is of concern, it's actually somewhat pointless to debate that statement (and which is why it's subject to "belief" and endless discussion, where people talk about "evidence"). The second one is not verifiable but it's falsifiable; observing more white swans corroborates the conjecture, but it doesn't verify it. Whereas if you observe a black swan, you have falsified it and can safely say that the statement is false. Which is why falsifiable statements are those that are scientifically useful

 

[ZenRaiden]

If we agree all facts are true, then we reserve the term "fact" to only things that are supported by information that are undeniably true.
Therefore when we speak it should be implicit we speak of opinions mostly.

But what standard for fact will we have.

For example it was recently discovered that certain brands of chocolate have cadmium and traces of heavy metals in them, which means they are not healthy.

If we accept this as fact, we still need to verify somehow that the chocolate we eat is actually containing heavy metals. But I am not sure how to check for that other than some article on the internet.

And to add what if the article is wrong to begin with. What if the article was misleading and the level of contamination was not really a health risk.
Then a fact becomes instantly a fiction.

TO me the word fact seems something so tangible that we know for fact its true, but I live on the internet, Id hardly have the capacity to verify what is fact in larger conversations.

Mostly then implicitly it should be clear we speak mostly of opinions to be strictly keeping a standard of veracity.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Albeit opinions are not made equal.
Some random mindless opinion vs a well researched opinion based on multiple sources would be probably weighing differently against each other in terms of which is closer to the truth.

 

[fluffy]

Richard Feynman said: "What I cannot create, I do not understand".

I don't think it is so much that people lack facts but that people don't all have the same experiences. If I can make a design and I fully understand it then what is lacking is not my experiences but showing others that what I have is viable.

When you have such phenomena as the cargo cult where people used to make mock airplanes in the pacific islands to conjure up the supplies of the airplane but did not know the airplane mechanics. To these people the gods made them as magic but to the engineer they understand how internal combustion works.

If then you go to people and say: I understand this or that thing. - then they don't have to believe you unless the thing is seen by them and is explained to them in the way they can understand but if they don't have the mindset it could all be just magic and expect things that cannot happen from you or what you understand.

People need to share the same experiences of the world and things in it or they cannot communicate "facts" to each other. Some villages in Africa did not know green existed separate from blue. The ancient Greeks had no word for the color blue. It be hard to conclude we all share the same facts of reality together at the same time and kids need to learn the facts but not all kids have the same schooling. Culture has something to do with the facts we learn.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Some villages in Africa did not know green existed separate from blue. The ancient Greeks had no word for the color blue. It be hard to conclude we all share the same facts of reality together at the same time and kids need to learn the facts but not all kids have the same schooling. Culture has something to do with the facts we learn.

I really really doubt this is true.
Somehow the idea that people did not distinguish blue from green sounds nearly impossible.
Linguistically maybe there was some limitation, but blue is a clearest color there is. Its even more interesting that its quite ordinary color.

 

[fluffy]

If that example is hard to believe then just realize what its like to never be exposed to language in the first place for feral kids. How would you teach them facts when they don't speak or understand speech. Maybe language is the reason some people understand colors better than others.