> Is it true, what they posted? Or is it "fake news?" You will never know
What nonsense. There are degrees of trust you can put in claims, based on a variety of factors. And you don't really believe it, either, as further on in your comment you say "The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person". If you could know something is true from personally witnessing it you could know that a claim contradicting it is false.
> The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person.
That's not true, either. Just because you "see" something doesn't mean what perceive is an accurate picture of what is actually there. Your brain is doing a huge amount of inference, based on expectations, to build the details you perceive. This goes up from basic things like the shapes and colours there, to what objects you individuate, to recognition of things like the expression someone is making or their body language, or perceiving what activity someone is undertaking. On top of that, when you talk about what you've witnessed, usually this is what you remember that you witnessed, and memory is notoriously unreliable.
I'd put far more trust in an experiemental "fact" that has been tested many times over in the lab, or in a body of knowledge that has been tested many times over in engineering (whose accuracy is "proved" by the fact that the machinery, such as a plane, actually works), than what someone thinks they saw for themselves a week ago.
What nonsense. There are degrees of trust you can put in claims, based on a variety of factors. And you don't really believe it, either, as further on in your comment you say "The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person". If you could know something is true from personally witnessing it you could know that a claim contradicting it is false.
> The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person.
That's not true, either. Just because you "see" something doesn't mean what perceive is an accurate picture of what is actually there. Your brain is doing a huge amount of inference, based on expectations, to build the details you perceive. This goes up from basic things like the shapes and colours there, to what objects you individuate, to recognition of things like the expression someone is making or their body language, or perceiving what activity someone is undertaking. On top of that, when you talk about what you've witnessed, usually this is what you remember that you witnessed, and memory is notoriously unreliable.
I'd put far more trust in an experiemental "fact" that has been tested many times over in the lab, or in a body of knowledge that has been tested many times over in engineering (whose accuracy is "proved" by the fact that the machinery, such as a plane, actually works), than what someone thinks they saw for themselves a week ago.