"Only 13.5% Of U.S. 15-Year-Olds Can Distinguish Between Fact And Opinion..."
Well, first off, the fact/opinion distinction, as it's ordinarily taught, is a goddamn train wreck. It makes virtually no sense. Of course there's a difference between facts and opinions...but it's kind of complicated. To cut to the chase: there's no exclusive distinction between the two. To say "Smith can't distinguish between facts and opinions" is a bit like saying "Smith can't distinguish between trees and pictures of trees." I mean...it could be true...but probably isn't. To cut even more quickly to the chase: some opinions are factual. And pretending that there's an exclusive fact/opinion distinction presupposes that that isn't true. Thus it presupposes that no opinions are true. Which is, to use the technical philosophical terminology, dumb.
I suppose what people really want to get at is whether or not kids can distinguish between (a) something that's so well-supported by evidence that it's rational to categorize it as a fact, as opposed to (b) something that's so speculative or poorly-supported that it's more like a hunch.
Well...not really. Because when kids get taught this stuff, there's a bunch of moral theory, epistemology, and metaphysics crammed into it. All value propositions, for example, are always put on the opinion side of the distinction. And fashionable nonsense is, needless to say, deemed fact. So The Holocaust was bad is mere opinion. But We're all going to die if we don't eliminate carbon emissions in a decade is a fact.
Sometimes learning a mangled, half-assed, bullshit distinction is better than nothing. Having some dipshit version of a fact/opinion distinction at your disposal might be better--for kids, anyway--than having no such distinction at all. But quite possibly not. What kids actually need to be able to do is tell whether someone has given decent reasons in support of their salient claims. But since most adults seem incapable of doing that, I'm not sure how surprising it is that kids can't do it.
I suppose what people really want to get at is whether or not kids can distinguish between (a) something that's so well-supported by evidence that it's rational to categorize it as a fact, as opposed to (b) something that's so speculative or poorly-supported that it's more like a hunch.
Well...not really. Because when kids get taught this stuff, there's a bunch of moral theory, epistemology, and metaphysics crammed into it. All value propositions, for example, are always put on the opinion side of the distinction. And fashionable nonsense is, needless to say, deemed fact. So The Holocaust was bad is mere opinion. But We're all going to die if we don't eliminate carbon emissions in a decade is a fact.
Sometimes learning a mangled, half-assed, bullshit distinction is better than nothing. Having some dipshit version of a fact/opinion distinction at your disposal might be better--for kids, anyway--than having no such distinction at all. But quite possibly not. What kids actually need to be able to do is tell whether someone has given decent reasons in support of their salient claims. But since most adults seem incapable of doing that, I'm not sure how surprising it is that kids can't do it.
posted by Winston Smith at
10:07 PM
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