Great piece by my co-blogger Thomas Firey:https://www.econlib.org/facts-opinions-and-the-pew-research-centers-pseudoscience/ …
"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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