Assessing the validity of information
On a philosophical level, on a level of definition, a subject’s objective truth is the consistent sense that the subject has about the totality of its senses upon which all that are inside and outside it, all that it contains and contain it project. The goal of this essay is to discuss a practical way of evaluating whether information is true or false especially concerning information which is on the internet.
By principle, for some information to be characterized as true it has to comply with the rules of logic and be verified in practice. During the coronavirus pandemic we could observe multiple logical fallacies performed by several social groups when voicing their opinion on emerging issues. For example, there were many times that the media referred to the death of young people and there were many people claiming that many young people die. The logical fallacy was that the death of some young people would not mean that many young people were dying. The statistics confirm that death by coronavirus in young people is rare. Similarly some people were hasty to characterize coronavirus vaccines as harmful, because there were some rare adverse effects which in most cases were mild. So the logical fallacy in these cases was the deliberate generalization of a rather special phenomenon.
It is important to stress out that logic by itself is not enough. We could understand since the beginning that the reasoning behind the claim that the deaths of a few young people implied that the virus is lethal to young people was wrong. We could not verify though whether the virus was actually lethal to young people or not. The final verification of a logical statement is derived by the observation of the facts and vice versa. For instance, if we go to a magician’s show and observe an object, which we’ve never seen before, getting out of sight, it would be a logical fallacy to say that the object disappeared, because such a thing would not be consistent with the general truth that objects do not disappear. Thus in order to characterize some information as true, it is required that this information complies with logic and is verifiable and not falsifiable, always based on the available data to date. Of course information continues to exist and to be true or false independently of whether we can characterize it so or not.
However, even when the prerequisite of having verified and logical information is fulfilled there are several times that this is not enough. When we refer to facts it is a relatively easy case. A car either has crashed on a wall or not and some evidence such as some photos by a trustworthy source are enough to characterize this information as true or false. Saying that the driver does not drive well in general is a complex issue on the other hand. We need much more evidence and the definition of good driving is somehow vague. We are maybe getting in a context concerning indications more than proof. And according to the subject who evaluates and defines a behavior as good driving we may have an opinion rather than verification. So in such cases we do not refer as much to the validity of events as to the validity of opinions, whether they are well defined and proven. There are also cases though in which there is conflicting evidence on some facts. For example, in the present war in Ukraine there are some attacks for which the Ukrainian part blames the Russian part and vice versa. In those cases careful examination is required, ambiguity should be noted and truth should be considered as the best possible consensus based on objectivity.
We should not omit the part of subjectivity. In a contemporary western society obligating women to wear a hijab is considered oppressive, rather objectively up to point. However there are for sure some women, both in the western world and even more so in the Arabic world, who would experience not wearing a hijab as oppressive. This is a complex issue to discuss and far from the goals of this essay. Nonetheless, a post on the internet which would inform us that hijab is universally oppressive for women would be for sure categorized as an opinion and actually an up to a point irrational and not well established one.
Two more categories which we should bear in mind are artworks and the purposeful use of lies. Information related to artworks is again quite complicated to be evaluated. There is a clearly objective part as far as the information of an artwork is concerned. If a painting consists of red colour and we have evidence on that, then we are talking about a fact. On the other hand some information concerning what the red colour symbolizes is mostly in the context of an opinion thus we have to judge whether it is well defined and established. Artworks have also often their own internal rules, thus we cannot judge them based on our reality. We would not say that a surrealistic painting which depicts people with the head of a horse lies because in our reality such people do not exist. Similarly, we would not accuse a satirical work of spreading fake news if it incorporated fake information. In satire lies and exaggeration are often used to stress out some truth. If we know that it is satire, we evaluate it as such. By taking into account all the aforementioned cases it becomes clear that the evaluation of information has different qualities and many times it cannot be absolute neither can it be exclusively true or false. This implies that within the context of an electronic platform which evaluates the validity of information, using labels on information – facts, opinions, artworks etc – would most probably be a useful tool.
Finally, let’s bear in mind that when we are in an objective context truth is not a matter of democratic assessment. A painting with a fissure has a fissure even if the whole world says otherwise. If there is such proof, a vehicle has crashed on a wall even if the whole world says otherwise. And so forth. The more the trustworthy sources the better the assessment though. I claim that the general rules of assessing the validity of information are mostly those described in this essay. Which means that all subjects – be it human or algorithmic (media outlets, encyclopedias, scientific journals, well informed friends, etc) – who use this protocol are considered trustworthy sources of evaluation. Of course information requires some degree of knowledge and process capability in order to be assessed. When I wrote above about vaccine safety, I was based on my judgment that I knew how to choose trustworthy sources and that their claims are consistent with what I observe by myself. Being deliberate, subjectivity and uncertainty are integral parts of every judgment. However, if the rules of assessment are clear and accessible along with the data that are being used, then people who see these evaluations have the ability to make a choice on whether they are trustworthy or not for them to use.