You look at the little display on the A/C thermostat at your home, which reads 78 degrees, and you think, “what a pleasantly warm day.” Your wife just gets back home from grocery shopping, looks at the thermostat, and says: “Oh my God, it’s 78, don’t you think it’s too hot here? Why didn’t you turn on the A/C?”
So, which one is it? Is it pleasantly warm? or is it too hot? Well, actually it is both. It is pleasantly warm for you, and at the same time it is too hot for your wife. They can coexist, because they are opinions, not facts. Opinions are not universal; they depend on the holder of the opinion. Different people may form different opinions, even based on the same set of facts. But that does not mean that they are entitled to their own sets of facts. Facts are universal. They do not depend on what anybody thinks. In the above example, the statement that “at that particular time and particular location, the temperature is 78 degrees Fahrenheit,” is a fact. It does not depend on what you or your wife think or feel.
Even though the difference between a fact and an opinion seems very obvious in the above example, in many real life cases, it is very easy to confuse the two. You may have experienced situations like this: your wife is upset at you for some reason and is very agitated. In a completely innocent coincidence, your sister calls your wife just to say hello and see how she is doing. Your sister has no idea that you and your wife just had an argument. So, she casually asks how your wife’s day has been going, how the rest of the family are doing, etc. But your wife is ready to “read between the lines.” As soon as she hangs up the phone, she storms to your home office and starts yelling at you and saying “your sister thinks I am stupid, but I know why she called. You asked her to call me to check on me.” At that moment, your wife believes that the statement that “your sister thinks I am stupid” is a fact. And if you are smart enough, you won’t question that, and will simply agree with her and will just try to show respect and compassion so that her mood does not get worse than how it is at that moment. But deep down, you know that it is not a fact. It is just an opinion that she has formed based on the fact that your sister called her at that specific moment.
As you can see in the above example, it is quite possible for two different people to see or hear the same statements, and one believe it to be a fact, while the other knows that it is just an opinion. Unfortunately, this confusion between facts and opinions becomes much more likely in the presence of strong emotions. It some sense, emotions impair one’s judgment in distinguishing opinions from facts. A very common example of this is political opinions, especially during election seasons. We may develop such strong feelings towards our political preferences and feel so passionate about them that the line between facts and opinions becomes very blurry. In fact, most of the times, when we are having a political discussion with a friend, colleague, or family member, we are just stating our opinions and they are stating their opinions, over and over and over. It is obviously going to be a deadlock. There is no way to prove that your opinion is better or more accurate than your friend’s. Opinions are personal. Each person is entitled to have their own opinions. What we should do first, instead, is to see if we have formed our opinions based on the same set of facts. In most cases, it will immediately become clear that either each one of us is not informed of some facts that the other person knows, or there are certain events or statements that are propositional, in the sense that they are either true or false, but that we attribute different truth values to them. Fortunately, both of these problems are relatively easy to address. The first one can be addressed by simply exchanging information that we have about different facts, and possibly fact checking them together to make sure of their truth. The second problem can be addressed by exchanging the references that we have for those factual data that have lead us to attribute two different truth values to them. Again, we can help each other to fact check or assess the credibility of each source, etc. Once we are able to form a set of facts that we both agree upon, then discussing the opinions that we form based on those same set of facts becomes very easy and even pleasant, since they provide different perspectives and viewpoint that can be very interesting to both of us.
As you see, a very contentious political discussion between friends and family members can be very easily converted to a very pleasant conversation, if both parties are willing to first exchange the information about the facts based on which they have formed their opinions, and also help each other to fact check and assess the credibility of the sources of that information. In the very polarized political atmosphere that we currently witness, it is imperative that instead of yelling our opinions at each other at the top of our lungs, we try to start from the basics, which are the facts surrounding the specific topic that we are discussing. In doing so, we might find out that most of us, with seemingly very different political views, think and feel the same way and form similar opinions if we are presented with the same set of facts.
Independence of the facts from people’s opinions cannot be overemphasized. If millions of people, or even if the entire population of the Earth for that matter, believe (have the opinion) that the Earth is flat, it will not change the fact that it is not. Unfortunately, some of today’s politicians are either so ignorant that believe, or have so little respect for their supporters that think they are ignorant enough to assume, that by repeating a falsehood many many times over and having several media outlets constantly echo it, many people will accept it, and that will make it a fact. Some of these falsehoods are spread to benefit them personally, some to benefit their party. In either case, they are very destructive and divisive, and directly affect the health of the society, both in terms of peace and tolerance among people, as well as mental and physical health of the members of the society. It’s upon us to not become prey to these opportunists, and whenever we are told something, the first thing to ask ourselves to be whether it is being presented as a fact or as an opinion. If it is an opinion, we can easily deal with it, because as mentioned above, they are not universal, and different people can have different opinions on the same subject. But if it is being presented as a fact, then we should take it more seriously and fact check it first. For example, if we receive an email claiming that law enforcement personnel were instructed to assassinate someone during executing a search warrant, and asks us to donate money so that they can fight back, it should be easy to determine that this is being presented to us as a fact. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make sense for someone to ask money from others just because of an opinion they have. So, the first thing we should do, is to fact check it by starting from the source they are citing for this information, and then following the lead from there, fact checking the accuracy/truthfulness of the information at every step of the way until we reach a point where we are confident about truth or falsehood of that information.
It is true that fact checking the large volume of data that we receive each day can be very challenging these days. This is especially the case considering that a large majority of the information available on the Internet is either irrelevant and/or advertisements, or simply falsehoods, either in the form of text, or in the form of engineered images and videos (thanks to the Generative AI-based bots that are popping up like mushrooms from every corner of the Internet). But still, if one really wants to get to the bottom of something, and find out whether it is true or false, they should be able to find enough independent sources even on this polluted Internet, and to crosscheck and compare them to find the relevant facts.