From: L. Michael Hall
2021 Neurons #75
November 22, 2021                                              
Facts #5

In this deep dive into facts, what they are, how to identify a true fact from a false one, how to establish factual evidence, there has been playing out on the media in the past couple weeks a real mis-use of “facts” and generation of non-facts.  Some of the media, not all of it, has played really loose and wild with facts, others have offered lies as “facts” with a straight face. In the last administration, the media “fact checked” everything President Trump said.  Today they have given that up and do not even attempt to fact check President Biden.

Here’s a fact to start with.  On Friday, the jury in Kenosha Wisconsin returned a “not guilty” verdict on all five counts against Kyle Rittenhouse.  After 26 hours of deliberating, they decided on the basis of the facts and the evidence presented that Kyle had shot three people in self-defense.  That event occurred in August of 2020 when a young teenager came to Kenosha where his dad lived the day after riots and burnings of buildings to give medical aid and to protect a friends.  Once there, he was asked to help protect a friend’s car dealership from the violence and rioting.

The amazing thing about facts is that they are pretty easily established when you have a video record.  And that’s what the jury had.  So the case for self-defense was pretty easy given that you could see Kyle running away from the mob and being chased and then defending himself. There was also video of him falling to the ground, being beaten on the head with a skateboard.

From: L. Michael Hall
2021 Neurons #73
November 15, 2021
Facts #4

If you have been following these articles on facts you know that not all facts are the same. There are facts at different levels of abstraction and there are meta-facts—facts about facts. While I have mentioned them in passing, let’s now identify and describe this phenomenon of meta-facts. For example, we have already noted these things about facts:

Facts are statements that assert something about reality.
Facts are dependent and fallible in sensing and in thinking (reasoning).
Facts are dependent on context.
Primary facts are empirical and public and can be tested.
Secondary facts are conclusions draw from first level facts.

As we now step back and think about facts, here are some meta-facts:

From: L. Michael Hall
2021 Neurons #72
November 8, 2021
Facts #3

Once you have a health skepticism about “the facts” that you are regularly fed by the media, you can prepare yourself to think through those facts to determine their validity, truthfulness, and usefulness.  That facts are critically important, no one will deny.  To think clearly we need facts.  And we need them for many reasons.

For one thing, we need facts in order to be sane.  As facts ground us to what is real and actual, they save us from living in an imaginary, pretend world.  That’s why we scour for facts. We collect them, analyze them, interpret them, and then use them to build knowledge. Learning works best when it is connected to reality.  Alfred Korzybski noted this in his classic, Science and Sanity:

“Men do not ‘go crazy’ in response to facts as such.  They tend to ‘go crazy’ as they get away from facts, out of touch with reality—when what they say and think no longer stand in an adequate relationship to their world of not-words.” (1933/1994, p. 175).