> I am taking the author at his word that when he reports something as fact, he is not lying They aren't claiming that the author is lying, but that they might

> I am taking the author at his word that when he reports something as fact, he is not lying They aren't claiming that the author is lying, but that they might _still_ have the facts incorrect. For example, as you said, the woman was _not_ permanently disabled (since he could see that from meeting up with her in the present). However, what was the exact extent of her injuries? Maybe he assumed she is 100% fine now but she didn't mention that she actually does have persistent back pain ever since the crash. Maybe they didn't talk about that. In that case, he may tell himself a story that she wasn't permanently hurt at all, and think that is a fact, which it actually isn't. I think everyone is agreeing that there is an objective truth to what happened. It's that we never have perfect information to know the objective truth down to infinite detail. Even your eyes and ears can deceive us - all we can know is what we perceive via electrical signals to our brain sitting in our dark skull. Therefore, our fallible minds will very easily get details wrong for many reasons, and then draw conclusions based on that not realizing that there could be other ways of interpreting the information, or that a minor detail we missed (or have forgotten) changes things immensely. I think the lesson is that we should just be aware of this, and not assume our perception was 100% correct.