Fact or Opinion?
Filed Under Big Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Porchy
I remember way back in the 3rd grade being taught the difference between a fact and an opinion. Actually I was taught the difference between a statement of fact vs a statement of opinion. The difference is crucial because it helps to clarify something that people get wrong when discussing politics…a lot.
I won’t be delving at all into the deep philosophical traditions that inform our understanding of knowledge. I’m going to stick right there at the 3rd grade level so bear with me.
Is this a statement of fact of a statement of opinion?
Ice cream is a good dessert.
That’s right, this is an opinion. How do we know that? Well, right off the bat, you will note that this is the kind of statement to which somebody might conceivably disagree and still be allowed to remain a professional lawyer, doctor, or therapist. But it isn’t just that one can disagree with a statement that makes it an opinion. I can disagree with all kinds of verifiable truths; I’d just be wrong. It’s the notion of judgment inherent in the statement that deems it so.
OK, that was easy. Try this one:
Teaching children how to read poems is beneficial to society.
This one is trickier, especially to the general readership of this blog. Why? Because you likely already agree with this statement and therefore believe it must be a fact. But this is an opinion too! How do we know? It’s tucked away inside that word “beneficial.” What things are beneficial, i.e. good, for society? Who judged them so? Do we all agree that what you think is good I also think is good? Certainly students of history know that certain very important people once condemned actors to the seedy side of the Thames even when the plays they performed were written in verse, that Plato once made no room in his Republic for those that would dare tell stories in another’s voice and thereby be lying. And certainly we have all read or written lyrics that would be best off forgotten and certainly not taught to anybody.
I know it gets tricky and I accept that the real world can be even more complex that the caged examples I’ve already provided, but bear with me.
What about this:
LA is 2443.79 southwest of New York.
Now, I’m not going to quibble about a few feet, or whether the measurement here is provided from metropolitan border to metropolitan border or if it was geographic center to geographic center. Let’s say the measurement here is correct. It’s OK, it’s not a trick question, this is a fact.
But what about this:
The closest Earth ever gets to the sun is 221,463 miles.
Actually no, this is the closest Earth gets to the moon. But notice I didn’t ask you if the statement was true or false. I asked you whether it was a statement of fact or a statement of opinion. The answer is that this is a statement of fact. It just turns out that a person uttering this phrase would also be wrong. Certainly we all understand that a statement does not turn from a fact to an opinion on the basis of it being factually wrong at a later date.
Aha! But check out that True or False thing I just mentioned there. You see, basically, opinions are statements of judgment and they indicate that some value is being placed on something or some state of affairs. A fact is a claim made about reality.
Now, we can muddy the waters a little bit. Take this sentence (and now I move a little closer to politics):
Lower speed limits will reduce traffic-related fatalities.
Fact or opinion? Well, there have been a lot of studies done on this. We know for example that the average person hit with a car traveling at < 25mph is likely to live even if injured. And that increasing the speed by X% mph increases fatalities by >X% , such that there is a higher proportion of fatalities above and beyond the actual percentage in speed increase. That makes this statement sort of straightforwardly a statement of fact.
But we also know that the posted speed limit is not necessarily, and is in fact rarely, the highest speed traveled on that road. That is, people speed. In this case the speed limit has no effect on fatalities…unless people obey the speed limit.
And what would cause them to obey the speed limit? Not just higher fines, if that’s what you were thinking, but a higher level of enforcement–or the appearance of a higher level enforcement (such as police cruisers parked on the shoulder). But also psychological factors like painting closer lane dividing lanes such that slower speeds appear dangerously faster etc. But these seem to move us beyond the realm of factors contained in the sentence.
That may seem digressionary but if we know how complicated the scenario really is how strange would this sentence sound?
It is my considered opinion, as a safety consultant and highway engineer with 25 years of experience, that lowering speed limits would significantly lower fatalities on America’s highways.
But certainly this is not a judgment in the sense of saying whether or not lower traffic fatalities is good or bad. It’s a simple claim that is either true or false and therefore, one would assume, provably so. Such is language. People will say things are opinions when they are, in actuality, claims of fact. They will do this even if they are not trying to protect themselves from attack. It’s a means of hedging, of not sounding to pedagogical, too in-your-face.
Just as with the “Earth to the Sun” or the “NY to LA” claims above, rightness or wrongness of a claim does not make it not a statement of fact. The highway engineer in the second sentence is wrong, he is not making an opinion he is making an educated guess as to the results of a policy, results that are demonstrably true or false after the fact. The infinity of variables clouds our notion of causality here. What if the policy in question were adopted at the same time that a smoking ban goes into effect causing 18% of the area’s drunk drivers to start drinking at home? Do we say that the engineer’s policy lowered fatalities or do we credit the smoking ban? Can we effectively isolate the two factors to see how much of the decrease should be apportioned to both laws?
Even if we could never prove the engineer right or wrong, that doesn’t diminish the factual nature of the claim.
Likewise, when we say that Obama is a socialist, that is not a statement of opinion. That is a statement of fact–a point on which you can be theoretically right or wrong even if no one can convince you of your wrongness. I pick on that one, but of course there are countless others made about politics all the time. And the reason is more-or-less straightforward.
Political science is a social science. It exists at the intersection of anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics and history. It’s mathematics are probability and statistics. It’s major polling data is self-reported before the fact and a multi-variant after-the-fact econometrics. As such it’s statements of certainty are somewhat soft: “Most of the people, most of the time” “might” do this or that “given the presence of these factors.”
The abundance of soft claims determined by averages and a relatively small set of instances on which to base future predictions makes all statements of fact somewhat wishy-washy. But, like the traffic engineer above, hedging is not the same as opinion-making. A hypothesis is not an opinion. Being wrong doesn’t make a claim an opinion in hindsight. Since anecdotes and marginal cases challenge the authority of every political science claim, everybody thinks they can make statements of fact that are forgivably wrong. And if their belief is questioned, they claim the right to their “opinion” as if having an unsupported opinion is somehow a class of speech protected from attack by virtue of everyone having one.
Sometimes, in political science, as in everything else, we make leaps of faith and wait for the scientific literature to bear us out on our beliefs, but even beliefs are not the same as opinions. If we are to be the type of people who make intelligent choices about who we vote for and who understand the likely effects of those choices, we would be wise to adjust our beliefs to match the facts. And to do that, we must be able to separate fact from “opinion” and, of course, true beliefs from false ones. Again, I recognize the difficulty of weighing competing factual claims where the evidence is a muddle of statistical regressions. But there’s simply no excuse for messing up as an adult what an attentive person learned when they were nine.
Comments
7 Responses to “Fact or Opinion?”
Ah, the Normative vs. Positive debate, you would be amazed how many college students have issues with this. It is also amazing how many people forget that EVERY statistical results has with it a measurement of error of some sort and that the assumptions upon which MOST statistical (or econometric) models are based on (i.e. you speed limit example) are impossible to actually follow. As result ANY statistical result is far from a “fact;” at best it is a fact based on my opinion of how well the assumptions are met.
I had a longer response that I just deleted. Let’s just say I disagree with that final bit. Even if statistical results are not as concrete as “the ball is red” the statements made about them are statements of fact even if they later turn out to be wrong. That is, if you say, “From the data we have determined that lower property taxes doesn’t decrease quality of schools and the causal mechanism for lower quality schools appears to be architecturally-based.” That is still a statement of fact even if a later analysis proves that architecture has a marginal effect on school quality. Nothing can replace a model except a better model. But in any case, correct or incorrect, these are statements of fact.
I agree and after re-reading my comment I see where this came off wrong. My only point is that people too “assume” or argue that a statistical statement of fact (using your terms) is “true” because it is “statistical.” My point was just supporting your idea that a Statement of Fact need not be “true.” In other words, statistical support is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a statement of fact to be true.
Word!
“Lower speed limits will reduce traffic-related fatalities.
… That makes this statement sort of straightforwardly a statement of fact.”
Let’s say the question is whether there are little green men who wear red hats on a small planet four galaxies away.
This too, is a statement of fact, strictly speaking. There either are or their aren’t. But we’re so lacking in factual evidence on the matter, that in practical terms, it makes more sense for someone to say “It’s my opinion that there are” than to speak of the factuality of it.
This is the case with the type of question above too. We could probably do a hundred studies on a hundred cases throughout the world of speed limits high and low relative to accidents, and get an untelligable mess of evidence both for and against. Because while it’s your opinion that compliance, fines, and enforcement are the relevant factors, it’s entirely possible that road repair conditions, range of speed limits considered, degree of speed limit lowering, amount of livestock at large, political rest or unrest in the area, and the color of police cars are the relevant conditions, and that speed limits can affect different areas differently (or not at all) depending upon these other conditions.
So yes, whether or not lower speed limits will reduce traffic-related fatalities, under a given set of deterministic controlled circumstances that can’t be duplicated, is a statement of fact. But it’s a useless point. Opinions on the matter are in fact what is being discussed in these kinds of situations.
“It is my considered opinion, as a safety consultant and highway engineer with 25 years of experience, that lowering speed limits would significantly lower fatalities on America’s highways.”
The speaker here is not confusing fact with opinion, but is saying “It is my considered opinion that were we able to prove the issue factually one way or the other, the facts would come down on the side of lower speed limits lowering fatalities.”
Which is what he means to say, I think.
All you’ve really done here, and I tried to get this point a little bit, is reveal a second usage of the word “opinion” and it’s the one that confuses the issue to start with. “A considered opinion” is bet hedge that soften the actuality that someone is really saying “I believe…” which is a statement of fact about that belief. An “opinion” as such, is a statement of value, which the above is not.