Great piece by my co-blogger Thomas Firey:https://www.econlib.org/facts-opinions-and-the-pew-research-centers-pseudoscience/ …
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1/ I found it disappointing. One could define a fact as something falsifiable and an opinion (as contrasted with a fact) as unfalsifiable. It's a way to rescue the grade-school concept while adding rigor, but the piece doesn't consider it.
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"falsifiable" isn't actually a very useful distinction, so I wouldn't recommend trying to teach it in grade school.
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I wasn't proposing "falsifiable" to make opinion vs. fact more useful. I proposed it because it fixes the vagueness Firey noted in defining a fact as something you could "look up" or something that has objective underpinnings. I meant "rescue" to add rigor, not change curriculum.
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Most of the piece is rooted in a frustration with the lack of rigor in the opinion vs. fact distinction, not its lack of usefulness. For the "deeper problem" (which does confront usefulness), Firey's assertion that opinion/subjectivity precludes rationality is unsupported.
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Consider Peter Singer's work in ethical philosophy. Some of the foundational values are subjective, but that doesn't mean we can't rationally evaluate their implications. It's still meaningful to say, "If you have subjective view X, then you must rationally conclude Y."
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but can we all agree that the Pew “fact vs opinion” test questions are garbage, both for the logical/rhetorical reasons Firey lists AND because people don’t strictly answer surveys like a quiz they want to pass, but also as a chance to send affiliative/values messages?
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1/ I don't think Firey succeeds in discrediting anything other than the ISIS territory item. His disputes with other items rely on the earlier choice to lean on ambiguous definitions. He threw mud in water and then complains that it's murky.
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2/2 As for signalling potential, the statements were designed to require participants to classify both statements they'd likely agree with and disagree with as both "fact" and "opinion." If a participant signalled, they'd perform poorly in an identifiable pattern.
End of conversation
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Humans are prone to mixing ethics into logical arguments without realizing it. That's why teaching fact vs opinion promotes clear thinking, even if normative language dominates real world discussion.
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I'd like to push back against the idea that ethics vs. logical argumentation as a dichotomy. Ethics builds on subjective premises, but the rest of any ethical consideration can involve logic. An ethical statement with qualifiers around what's subjective can be *entirely* logical.
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Agreed! The trouble is for inexperienced thinkers who don't realize which parts are subjective, and run into a roadblock with someone with different subjective premises. Hence the value of practicing distinguishing the objective and subjective.
End of conversation
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That’s just like your opinion, man.
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