> Opinions cannot be verified, as they are based on personal experience / feelings / thoughts. Facts can have measurable data that will support / deny them.
You can go down the rabbit hole with logical arguments and fallacies trying to neatly categorize things into "facts" and "opinions", but it's not that easy IMO :)
For example, I could say "The world is flat" and you could provide all the evidence you want and I could simply say I don't trust the evidence, or your data or your measurement devices. After all there certainly have been "facts" with "evidence" that have been disproven over time as new measurable data was uncovered. I could choose to not believe your evidence while I wait for more sufficient evidence in infinitum. Even 99.9999% confidence still leaves room for doubt.
"I think therefor I am" or simply "it thinks" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum), is the closest thing to a "fact" that I've heard. Beyond that statement you have to make a leap of faith somewhere, even to believe the Earth is round.
> A UFO crashed at Roswell.
> This is claiming a fact, but we can't know for sure because we don't have reliable evidence either way.
> He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.
So, wether a UFO crashed at Roswell or not isn't really that interesting unless someone somewhere has evidence.
But practically, I think it's possible to organize content into "productive theories" and "unproductive theories", which is again still subjective. But a "productive theory" would mean that I have enough confidence where I can use the theory to get a useful or expected result.
For example, I don't care if the Earth is "factually" round or not, but I have enough confidence from my interpretation and trust in the collected data about the shape of the Earth that I can build a large-scale reflecting pool that doesn't overflow and program a satellite to not crash back down to the ground. I think a lot of people call these things "facts", but it doesn't mean I have 100% confidence or claim to understand the entire situation, it just means I have enough information to be successful.
You can go down the rabbit hole with logical arguments and fallacies trying to neatly categorize things into "facts" and "opinions", but it's not that easy IMO :)
For example, I could say "The world is flat" and you could provide all the evidence you want and I could simply say I don't trust the evidence, or your data or your measurement devices. After all there certainly have been "facts" with "evidence" that have been disproven over time as new measurable data was uncovered. I could choose to not believe your evidence while I wait for more sufficient evidence in infinitum. Even 99.9999% confidence still leaves room for doubt.
"I think therefor I am" or simply "it thinks" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum), is the closest thing to a "fact" that I've heard. Beyond that statement you have to make a leap of faith somewhere, even to believe the Earth is round.
> A UFO crashed at Roswell.
> This is claiming a fact, but we can't know for sure because we don't have reliable evidence either way.
Russell's teapot is an interesting counter argument to these assertions made without evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
> He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.
So, wether a UFO crashed at Roswell or not isn't really that interesting unless someone somewhere has evidence.
But practically, I think it's possible to organize content into "productive theories" and "unproductive theories", which is again still subjective. But a "productive theory" would mean that I have enough confidence where I can use the theory to get a useful or expected result.
For example, I don't care if the Earth is "factually" round or not, but I have enough confidence from my interpretation and trust in the collected data about the shape of the Earth that I can build a large-scale reflecting pool that doesn't overflow and program a satellite to not crash back down to the ground. I think a lot of people call these things "facts", but it doesn't mean I have 100% confidence or claim to understand the entire situation, it just means I have enough information to be successful.