Fact vs opinion is taught at my kids’ school (age ~7 from memory). The lesson left them with exactly the confusion that you are talking about. Talking to them I got the impression that the teacher didn’t really have this sorted out in their head themself.
My way of explaining it to them was that there are matters of fact and matters of opinion but often we don’t know the truth about matters of fact. We can have opinions about matters of fact but the difference is that there is a true answer to those kinds of questions even when we don’t know. This seemed to help them but I couldn’t help but feel that it is kind of an unhelpful dichotomy.
I think maybe teachers (and parents) teach this because it’s a social tool (we need a category for “hey don’t argue about that, it’s fine” for peacekeeping, and another category for “but take this very seriously”). Probably we can’t get people to stop using these categories without a good replacement social tool.
I think that we’ll need to figure this out at some point to be able to clearly distinguish these things to children. Not being able to distinguish fact from fiction can lead to the propagation of non-factual information that will be then be discerned as fact as dictated by the overall consensus of a said individual’s community. Our present tools on the internet are very good at determining relevancy (which is debatable of course), but they are not the best at determining verity or distinguishing bias.
We’re have to assume that a source of factual information is altruistic and that they actually do the research in order to distinguish one from another. But this in itself is very fragile as if it violates the facts that a community already believes (such as when said altruistic person is in actuality not altruistic), there is no simple way to revert the information that has already propagated throughout said communities. Being able to clearly distinguish facts from opinions, enables one to reinforce the idea of what’s factual...and avoid the potential issue of disputing a fact when comparing it against a differing opinion which is being misinterpreted as a fact.
I think this is critical, because certain structures rely on being able to discern fact from opinion, which has manifested itself in the national policies of some countries, but they of course can be easily misrepresented if an individual only consumes information (factual or otherwise) from a similar source of said information.
Fact vs opinion is taught at my kids’ school (age ~7 from memory). The lesson left them with exactly the confusion that you are talking about. Talking to them I got the impression that the teacher didn’t really have this sorted out in their head themself.
My way of explaining it to them was that there are matters of fact and matters of opinion but often we don’t know the truth about matters of fact. We can have opinions about matters of fact but the difference is that there is a true answer to those kinds of questions even when we don’t know. This seemed to help them but I couldn’t help but feel that it is kind of an unhelpful dichotomy.
I think maybe teachers (and parents) teach this because it’s a social tool (we need a category for “hey don’t argue about that, it’s fine” for peacekeeping, and another category for “but take this very seriously”). Probably we can’t get people to stop using these categories without a good replacement social tool.
I think that we’ll need to figure this out at some point to be able to clearly distinguish these things to children. Not being able to distinguish fact from fiction can lead to the propagation of non-factual information that will be then be discerned as fact as dictated by the overall consensus of a said individual’s community. Our present tools on the internet are very good at determining relevancy (which is debatable of course), but they are not the best at determining verity or distinguishing bias.
We’re have to assume that a source of factual information is altruistic and that they actually do the research in order to distinguish one from another. But this in itself is very fragile as if it violates the facts that a community already believes (such as when said altruistic person is in actuality not altruistic), there is no simple way to revert the information that has already propagated throughout said communities. Being able to clearly distinguish facts from opinions, enables one to reinforce the idea of what’s factual...and avoid the potential issue of disputing a fact when comparing it against a differing opinion which is being misinterpreted as a fact.
I think this is critical, because certain structures rely on being able to discern fact from opinion, which has manifested itself in the national policies of some countries, but they of course can be easily misrepresented if an individual only consumes information (factual or otherwise) from a similar source of said information.