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The criminal justice system relies on multiple facts to establish proof because an individual piece of evidence can be a fact but may not prove guilt by itself.

The criminal justice system relies on multiple facts to establish proof because an individual piece of evidence can be a fact but may not prove guilt by itself. Also remember that it's a jury's opinion that determines guilt, an opinion based on facts (we hope) I was implying "true fact" because I didn't know that it has a definition "a statement that can be proven true or false". An opinion can't be falsified right? So there's still a clear difference even though I wasn't using "fact" incorrectly.* Let me rewind to the statement I replied to ""promote their own views as the truth (for whatever reason they have for doing that), and suppress all opposing views." What I don't understand and you can help me with (I'm not being sarcastic at all) is that how can you push views (opinions) using truths (proven facts?) over another view without at least one of the following 1. False facts, fake sources, and other out of bounds actions 2. Omission of information Because I think I'm beginning to understand what you might be saying. Is it that someone would want to push a view by only adding facts that could cause someone to come to a conclusion but leaving out other information that might sway them to another conclusion? If that's true wouldn't that occur less often than other sources of information because those other sources of information are created once by a small set of authors? Books, blogs, news articles, etc. If so then isn't Wikipedia the best option? * I think I've gotten so used to saying "fact" to mean "proven fact" obviously if that was the case there would be no way to describe incorrect facts. I'm sorry, I do appreciate your patience. I have a habit of assuming other people know what I mean.

AmericanChopper 3y ago
Aside from the editorial control over which facts are included/omitted, that you rightly mention, the bigger issue with facts is who gets to decide which facts have been proven, and which haven't been. If you accept the premise that there are no universal truths, no facts that have been absolutely proven and can never possibly be falsified (a premise that you're free to reject, though I'm rather certain no proof of fact exists that cannot be invalided by the munchausen trilemma), then you should also accept that the process of validating a fact is naturally subjective. The role of the fact validator is to evaluate the proof, and decide whether it meets a subjective criteria that elevates it to the level of fact. Controlling this process allows the fact validator to decide which information is fact, and which is not. Even when you have a rigid criteria for evaluating facts, the criteria itself is going to be subjective and opinionated, and no matter how much you try to control it, the fact validator will have some leeway in interpreting the criteria and how it applies differently for different facts. This is one of the roles of a jury. When a jury is presented with conflicting accounts of facts (as they often are), one of their jobs is to review the evidence and come to a consensus on which facts (in their opinion) are true. There's also the issue that statements of fact, and statements of opinion are not quite that clear cut. Consider the statement "He attempted to undermine the process", which is the sort of thing I could hypothetically imagine a fact checker attempting to validate. It's a statement of opinion that potentially alludes to statements of fact. If you break it down into how you might reach that conclusion, you'd have: "He did a thing" this is a statement of fact (whether it's "proven" or not). "The thing he did undermined the process" this is more of a statement of opinion, as it presupposes what the process is intended to do, and how the thing he did influenced that. "It was his intention for this thing that he did to undermine the process" and this is unambiguously an opinion as all cases of attributing a motive are naturally opinionated. But keep in mind that this whole argument I'm making is based upon the idea that there are no universal truths (which relates to philosophical ideas like relativism and absurdism). These ideas have their critics (such as Plato who criticised Socrates' interpretation of them), but I've never heard any satisfactory (according to me) explanation of how you might go about proving a universal truth (with universalist ideas typically only being embraced by religion, and perhaps ironically the anti-religion moral universalist camp, people like Richard Dawkins)

AmericanChopper 3y ago

Aside from the editorial control over which facts are included/omitted, that you rightly mention, the bigger issue with facts is who gets to decide which facts have been proven, and which haven't been. If you accept the premise that there are no universal truths, no facts that have been absolutely proven and can never possibly be falsified (a premise that you're free to reject, though I'm rather certain no proof of fact exists that cannot be invalided by the munchausen trilemma), then you should also accept that the process of validating a fact is naturally subjective. The role of the fact validator is to evaluate the proof, and decide whether it meets a subjective criteria that elevates it to the level of fact. Controlling this process allows the fact validator to decide which information is fact, and which is not. Even when you have a rigid criteria for evaluating facts, the criteria itself is going to be subjective and opinionated, and no matter how much you try to control it, the fact validator will have some leeway in interpreting the criteria and how it applies differently for different facts. This is one of the roles of a jury. When a jury is presented with conflicting accounts of facts (as they often are), one of their jobs is to review the evidence and come to a consensus on which facts (in their opinion) are true. There's also the issue that statements of fact, and statements of opinion are not quite that clear cut. Consider the statement "He attempted to undermine the process", which is the sort of thing I could hypothetically imagine a fact checker attempting to validate. It's a statement of opinion that potentially alludes to statements of fact. If you break it down into how you might reach that conclusion, you'd have: "He did a thing" this is a statement of fact (whether it's "proven" or not). "The thing he did undermined the process" this is more of a statement of opinion, as it presupposes what the process is intended to do, and how the thing he did influenced that. "It was his intention for this thing that he did to undermine the process" and this is unambiguously an opinion as all cases of attributing a motive are naturally opinionated. But keep in mind that this whole argument I'm making is based upon the idea that there are no universal truths (which relates to philosophical ideas like relativism and absurdism). These ideas have their critics (such as Plato who criticised Socrates' interpretation of them), but I've never heard any satisfactory (according to me) explanation of how you might go about proving a universal truth (with universalist ideas typically only being embraced by religion, and perhaps ironically the anti-religion moral universalist camp, people like Richard Dawkins)