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There are facts. You said yourself "The fact that two dead bodies discovered may not be under dispute." That's the fact. Everything else you said isn't a fact,

There are facts. You said yourself "The fact that two dead bodies discovered may not be under dispute." That's the fact. Everything else you said isn't a fact, it's a hypothesis. Just because people don't know the difference between a fact and a hypothesis/conclusion doesn't mean there are no facts; unless you want to go full ontological skeptic and dispute that it is possible to ever know anything (never go full sophist!). The real issue is that we have a breakdown of good faith in civil conversation. That makes society impossible. At the point where you argue that there are not two bodies in front of me, even though there are two bodies in front of me, I might as well stop arguing with you and instead start punching you. Then you can argue that your pain is just theoretical.

apocalypstyx 8y ago
What if they were conjoined twins who couldn't have previously been separated without killing both? *edit Or, in less cutesy terms, considering that much of the pro/anti-abortion argument (on both sides) often rests on tacit and irreconcilable definitions of what a person is, the point where the woman's body ends and another begins, when is it appropriate (other than perhaps under the most obvious of circumstances) to charge and assailant that there were two homicides, rather than one? That is, when does the definition become more than personal belief?
coldtea 8y ago
>There are facts. You said yourself "The fact that two dead bodies discovered may not be under dispute." That's the fact. Everything else you said isn't a fact, it's a hypothesis. Just because people don't know the difference between a fact and a hypothesis/conclusion doesn't mean there are no facts; The distinction between fact and hypothesis is a red herring. First, unless one has verified something themselves, with their own eyes or carefully checked primary sources, there are no facts, just reporting of things claimed to be facts. In other words, there are no "two bodies in front of you" and you're not being denied by some fellow you discuss with while you're both looking at them. Just reporting that such two bodies exist somewhere, that one believes and the other doesn't. And more often than not, the reporting is of even more abstract things, like statistics (collected with who knows what methodology, and presented and baked to prove who knows what point, using all the tricks one can use to lie with statistics). Second, supposedly physical-domain facts can be fake as well. "This man was shot by person X" (leaving no room to hypothesis) while X might not have done it, or might have been framed - even if there were witnesses attesting that X did it and even a court found it so (many people have been later found innocent e.g. by DNA or further research decades after the fact, victims of over-jealous prosecutors, false testimony, setups, facial similarities, racist bias, and so on). Despite their guilt being not a hypothesis but a fact with "evidence", it was still bogus. Second, pure hypothesis is often presented as fact, and people are called out for not believing it, all the time.
aikah 8y ago
> Just because people don't know the difference between a fact and a hypothesis/conclusion doesn't mean there are no facts; unless you want to go full ontological skeptic and dispute that it is possible to ever know anything (never go full sophist!). Journalists themselves have been blurring the line between facts and opinion for a long time now. The simple act of omitting an information because the information doesn't fit a specific narrative is already an attempt at building that very narrative. And journalists have become very good at information hiding to shape points of views. First right wing media, then left wing media who broadly adopted that strategy. So it's not simply about facts. You can be factual while not giving the whole picture of an event, you can still deceive people.
charlesism 8y ago
> unless you want to go full ontological skeptic > and dispute that it is possible to ever know > anything The only flaw in claiming that nothing is 100% knowable is that it unsettles people. "Never go full sophist" is just an appeal to "common sense." I don't mean that in a good way, I mean it in a "everyone knows the earth is the center of the universe" way.

apocalypstyx 8y ago

What if they were conjoined twins who couldn't have previously been separated without killing both? *edit Or, in less cutesy terms, considering that much of the pro/anti-abortion argument (on both sides) often rests on tacit and irreconcilable definitions of what a person is, the point where the woman's body ends and another begins, when is it appropriate (other than perhaps under the most obvious of circumstances) to charge and assailant that there were two homicides, rather than one? That is, when does the definition become more than personal belief?

coldtea 8y ago

>There are facts. You said yourself "The fact that two dead bodies discovered may not be under dispute." That's the fact. Everything else you said isn't a fact, it's a hypothesis. Just because people don't know the difference between a fact and a hypothesis/conclusion doesn't mean there are no facts; The distinction between fact and hypothesis is a red herring. First, unless one has verified something themselves, with their own eyes or carefully checked primary sources, there are no facts, just reporting of things claimed to be facts. In other words, there are no "two bodies in front of you" and you're not being denied by some fellow you discuss with while you're both looking at them. Just reporting that such two bodies exist somewhere, that one believes and the other doesn't. And more often than not, the reporting is of even more abstract things, like statistics (collected with who knows what methodology, and presented and baked to prove who knows what point, using all the tricks one can use to lie with statistics). Second, supposedly physical-domain facts can be fake as well. "This man was shot by person X" (leaving no room to hypothesis) while X might not have done it, or might have been framed - even if there were witnesses attesting that X did it and even a court found it so (many people have been later found innocent e.g. by DNA or further research decades after the fact, victims of over-jealous prosecutors, false testimony, setups, facial similarities, racist bias, and so on). Despite their guilt being not a hypothesis but a fact with "evidence", it was still bogus. Second, pure hypothesis is often presented as fact, and people are called out for not believing it, all the time.

aikah 8y ago

> Just because people don't know the difference between a fact and a hypothesis/conclusion doesn't mean there are no facts; unless you want to go full ontological skeptic and dispute that it is possible to ever know anything (never go full sophist!). Journalists themselves have been blurring the line between facts and opinion for a long time now. The simple act of omitting an information because the information doesn't fit a specific narrative is already an attempt at building that very narrative. And journalists have become very good at information hiding to shape points of views. First right wing media, then left wing media who broadly adopted that strategy. So it's not simply about facts. You can be factual while not giving the whole picture of an event, you can still deceive people.

charlesism 8y ago

> unless you want to go full ontological skeptic > and dispute that it is possible to ever know > anything The only flaw in claiming that nothing is 100% knowable is that it unsettles people. "Never go full sophist" is just an appeal to "common sense." I don't mean that in a good way, I mean it in a "everyone knows the earth is the center of the universe" way.