Let us start by supposing that there are two opposing opinions on some matter. Is there a tried and true universally applicable method of determining for ourselves what's best to believe regarding the subject matter? — creativesoul
Change it to which opinions or parts thereof are true. — creativesoul
Which opinion is best to believe? Bespoke? Likely. "A tried and true universally applicable method"? I think not.Let us start by supposing that there are two opposing opinions on some matter. Is there a tried and true universally applicable method of determining for ourselves what's best to believe regarding the subject matter? — creativesoul
So you are basically asking if there is a universal method of identifying truth? — Pantagruel
Is this matter of any relevance or importance to us? — Outlander
Intellectual hygiene.
The reasons for accepting a specific claim will depend on the claim and the evidence for it. I doubt there is a general recipe that applies to all claims and all evidence that will tell you just when to believe and when not to believe. I believe it is much more productive to think of adjustments that can be made to one's own propensities to believe and personal evaluation of whether a claim is justified. There is a huge asymmetry between how easy it is to show something is flawed or impoverished and how hard it is to show something is a well justified complete picture. It's easier to demonstrate falsehood than truth, and easier to find a flaw than construct a position.
Untrustworthy people or institutions will use that asymmetry, letting you construct their position for them while never spelling out the complete picture, and being unable to say what would make them change their mind about the statements/the defeaters for their justifications of it, or their interpretations of evidence.
So here are some rules of thumb I find helpful:
(1) Sources, is the person's claim backed up by data?
(2) Is it from a person or institution you trust?
(2a) An institution that relies on sourced arguments that terminate in interpretations of data is a more reliable truth teller than otherwise.
(2b) A person who has a habit of backing up their claims with sources or data, or at least tells you where they're getting their information from, is a more reliable truth teller than otherwise.
(2c) When a person or institution uses a sourced argument, can you find other people or institutions which do the same thing? Can you find ones that you cannot establish are politically partisan who do the same thing?
(3) Be on the lookout for question substitution and cognitive shortcuts; are a person or institution's claims regarding a question actually demonstrating a much weaker or different claim? EG: "There are racial differences in intelligence" vs "There are statistically significant differences between the mean scores of race categories in IQ tests that are entirely attributable to biological factors"; the first is a lazy claim that relies on a lot of priming and framing to be interpreted as true, it does not spell out its truth conditions or justifying conditions or potential defeaters, whereas the second spells out its truth conditions, justifying conditions and gives a recipe for constructing defeaters. Find the latter kind of statement more worthy of investigation and plausible entertainment than the former.
(4) The form a question is posed in or a claim is made are not innocuous and innocent; we can be primed to alter our dispositions. If the truth conditions of a claim are only explicable (as in, can be stated), given that you already are predisposed to evaluate it as true, make some extra effort to doubt that claim.
(5) If you're looking to cut through noise, don't use raw Google to check something, use Google scholar. That will give you access to peer reviewed papers, their abstracts will tell you who wrote them and sometimes who funded them, which you can check for conflict of interest if you don't trust them. You also get a sense of how much that work is used by their citation count, though it is not a particularly good measure of inherent truth or usefulness for various reasons like peer review being its own kind of filter bubble.
(6) Consume media that reacts more slowly than Twitter and other social media. It takes longer to read a thinkpiece and follow its sources than to knee jerk True/False assign a soundbite, but over a long time of practicing intellectual hygiene you get a more fruitful knee jerk reaction; True/False/Frame or Priming dependent/Plausible/Well justified.
(7) No one is immune to the effects of ideology or thinking from the wrong perspective about something. Do not let yourself be filterbubbled and confirm all your suspicions through constant saturation in their content. As much as it pains you, if you're on the right read what the left is saying, if you're on the left read what the right is saying. And try your hardest not to dismiss something just because it's from a source you're discinclined to like.
(8) Dismissing a source due to being unreliable should be done on a domain by domain basis: if you trust the UK newspaper the Guardian on one topic (say, to report the effects of healthcare spending cuts), that doesn't mean you should trust it on another (say, to report about security overreach from British institutions - their team of journalists that dealt with Snowden got dissolved and their head was replaced with someone very sympathetic to GCHQ).
(9) The more domains a source relies on bullshit to justify its claims in, the less trustworthy it is (like the UK's Sun).
We are always in error, the goal is to learn to be less wrong. — fdrake
Had you asked if there were any "tried and true universally applicable method" to determine fact or truth, then you've got a discussion, but one needing preliminary remarks on the terms used. — tim wood
That's no discussion I want to get involved in. It devolves into arguing about which definition is best when faced with competing opinions about the meaning of the same word. — creativesoul
Let's see: you want a recipe, or an algorithm. But no particulars. No ingredients, No measurements. — tim wood
Logic.Let us start by supposing that there are two opposing opinions on some matter. Is there a tried and true universally applicable method of determining for ourselves what's best to believe regarding the subject matter? — creativesoul
Is there a tried and true universally applicable method of determining for ourselves what's best to believe regarding the subject matter? — creativesoul
The difference between them, ergo, is not logic in the sense one side has used it well and the other side has not; rather the actual source of disputes is the assumptions each side has made in their arguments and assumptions are not a matter of logic. Assumptions are made in the low visibility fog of ignorance — TheMadFool
Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.
~Descartes — Pantagruel
Clearly, he was wrong. Some of us think they have more common sense than others. — TheMadFool
Common sense is over rated. — fdrake
Conflict Resolution
Let us start by supposing that there are two opposing opinions on some matter. Is there a tried and true universally applicable method of determining for ourselves what's best to believe regarding the subject matter? — creativesoul
Let us start by supposing that there are two opposing opinions on some matter. Is there a tried and true universally applicable method of determining for ourselves what's best to believe regarding the subject matter?
— creativesoul
Logic. — Harry Hindu
However, if we look at it closely, opposing positions are already reasoned to by their respective proponents. In other words both have a rightful claim to logic and rationality. — TheMadFool
I think that that's exactly wrong.
Either can say what they want about whether or not they are thinking logically and rationally. Saying that and being that are two completely different things. Being that is not solely up to the speaker. Saying that is. — creativesoul
Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.
~Descartes — Pantagruel
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