What is a fact? What is true? It's a Blog Off
Every weeks, the blogosphere comes alive with something known as a Blog Off. A Blog Off is an occasion wherein bloggers of every stripe weigh in on the identical topic on the identical day. The topic for this round of the Blog Off is "What's the distinction between a fact and a fact?"
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When we figured out the topic of this Blog Off remaining week I turned into quite psyched up to have a deep dialogue. I love delving into the deeper meanings of rhetoric and nobody can debate how many angels can dance on the top of a pin higher than me.
But as I concept approximately it and as I discovered what I desired to mention I kept developing brief.
When I become a younger guy I believed with each fiber of my being that the arena became governed by means of a chain of regular truths that could remember on as a way to determine how the arena works. These regularly occurring truths got here from the natural world.
Truths such as the theory of evolution, the theory of gravity, atomic theory and the laws of thermodynamics undergirded everything and could be relied upon as a compass to use to get through anything. I lived for years in this Aristotelian idyll.
But as I grew older and experienced more I started to stumble over truths and events that didn't jibe with my A is A worldview. Why did my friend Woody die so horribly? Why do my fellow Floridians vote into office politicians who will sell out our future? Why do so many of my friends continue to act against their best interests? And most recently, why did my ex-boss do a swan dive off the tallest bridge he could find and why did he blame me? The Universal Truths I hold onto don't apply in these cases.
Now that I'm a middle-aged man I'm coming to see that there is a difference between facts and truths, something I couldn't have seen when I was 25. It's true that Woody died 12 years ago but it doesn't mean anything other than the fact that every life has an expiration date. It's a fact that people will elect politicians who appeal to their baser instincts. It's true that Carl is dead but despite his feeble attempts to drag me down with him, it doesn't mean I did anything wrong.
There's a difference between statistics and truths and the more I reflect onconsideration on it the deeper the divide among the 2 grows. It's simpler to consider in universals but the older I get the much less I agree with in them.
As the day goes on, the rest of the participants in today's Blog Off will appear miraculously at the end of this post. Keep checking back and check out everybody's postss. You can follow along in Twitter as well, just look for the hashtag #LetsBlogOff. If you'd like more information about about the Blog Off or if you'd like to see the results of previous Blog Offs, you can find the main website here .