So Serious Saturday #7

Fiction needs a basis in reality. Exercising non-fiction muscles once in a while benefits an active imagination, channeling creative energies as it focuses on a subject. So Serious Saturdays will be an active place for critical essays or writing about reality in the context of real events - even when it is not written on Saturdays.

Type: Discussion

Fact Versus Opinion?

So what is the difference between fact and opinion?

An blog article from March 2nd of this year brings attention to this often misdirected distinction. Aptly titled "Why Our Children Don't Think There Are Moral Facts", the article discusses the pitfalls of moral relativism.

The first point author Justin P. McBryaer makes involves truth and proof. The terms are not synonymous, because something can be true even if someone cannot prove it. In explaining this type of situation McBryaer says,"if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative. Something may be a fact for me if I can prove it but not a fact for you if you can't."

A calculus professor could prove something that I cannot; does that make that something true for them and not for me?  If someone in the Middle Ages had said, "Hey, guys, I think the earth travels around the sun," but they did not have the technology or mathematical skills to prove it, would that have made that idea any less true or false?

So what if someone does not have proof to prove the truth of what they believe?

In the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four,the Ingsoc workers inside of Minitru -- workers like Winston Smith -- are responsible for making all of the facts of Oceania. They do this by constantly editing historical facts to fit with the Inner Party's current message and destroying all evidence of previous incarnations of the facts. The so-called Ministry of Truth is constantly rewriting the history books.

Spoiler alert:  Winston takes a piece of paper he is meant to destroy after dictating a revision. He keeps the slip of paper on his desk for a while. If he were to keep the paper with the unchanged historical fact, would he then have truth because he has proof? If he then lost the paper, would he have the truth in his mind, although he no longer has proof? What if he never read what was on the paper, but brushed it into the trash chute -- would he have truth? Spoiler over.

Science -- the scientific method -- tells us that we should be able to prove our claims. What if we can't? What if the information, that knowledge, is beyond our grasp or our ability to prove our belief?

The second point that the blog article makes is how fact and opinion are not mutually exclusive. Most of the discussion cites school curriculum asking students to sort statements into the category of fact OR opinion, which I understand because educators want students to understand the difference between what someone only thinks and what can be proven, at least as far as obtaining excellent marks on standardized testing. 

But what students should really be tested on should be the difference between a claim and reality. But even that is too distinctive. Objective vs. Subjective claims, then?

But what about those "facts" that are obvious to some people but not to everyone?  How do we know what we know or what we think we know?

We're heading into a field called epistemology.  If we're going that far, we might as well say that ambition for knowledge is vanity; the more you obtain, the more you don't know.

A discussion about knowing and believing and the differences between them should appear in future incarnations of  "So Serious Saturday."