Immigration Forum / USA / March 2009

Not at all, the core of the issue, and correct. The idea that a claim
can't be a fact is ludicrous.

In what way? Many things were claimed as fact in the original posting,
and one of them at least is clearly not a fact. There are no silly
semantics involved, just normal English.

It is not necessary to do any research at all about Victoria, Texas, to
look into when the text about Victoria started circulating. The only
thing Snopes discusses with regard to the Victoria text is when it
started circulating.

Silly semantics. A claim is what somebody says to be true. It may or may
not be true. If it is true, then it is a fact.

What do you mean? All Snopes says about the Victoria text is when it
started circulating. That's easily shown to be more or less correct. I
don't know why you keep going on about it.

You seem to be remarkably naive. There have been occasions in the past
when people have not told the truth. It may even happen again.

Just the same as when anyone else says it; and in just the same way,
that claim may or may not be a fact. Most people try to make assessments
of how likely claimants are to be correct. All else being equal, the
closer someone is to the original occurrence, the more useful what that
person has to say is likely to be. If you're talking to the person who
claims to have had the experience, you mainly need to consider the
likelihood of their being mistaken or deliberately lying; if you're
hearing it second hand (or more distantly) you also need to allow for
the story having got garbled along the way, again either accidentally or
deliberately. You can't know it's a fact unless you observed all aspects
of it yourself; you can have varying degrees of confidence in its being
a fact depending on the evidence available.

A few people believe everything they read or hear. A frightening number
of people decide whether or not it fits in with their prejudices,
believe it if it does and don't believe it if it doesn't. Thankfully
many people try to work out whether or not it is likely to be true using
whatever means are at their disposal; that includes assessment of the
reliability of the source, looking for inconsistencies in the story,
checking the citations and references provided (the absence of which is
information in itself); if they care a lot they might spend more time
and effort on more thorough and extensive checks; eventually they get
confident that it's true, confident that it's false, or put it aside as
a claim which they don't care enough about to pursue any further;
depending on their confidence level they then let it influence their
thinking.

You still haven't explained why it is necessary to contact anyone in
Victoria, Texas in order to comment on when a text started circulating.
The one and only thing Snopes discusses about the Victoria text is when
it started circulating.

Exactly what I've been saying all along, and what you've been vehemently
arguing against. According to you, this indicates that you are prone to
accepting unsubstantiated religious belief. What it actually means is
that you do the same as most people; you assess the available evidence,
you assess the trustworthiness of the people presenting the evidence,
you make judgements about the quality of their evidence; if you're
interested in the truth rather than confirming a prejudice, you look
into all other theories, the evidence for them, and the trustworthiness
of that evidence. You compare and contrast the possibilities and the
strength of evidence and you decide which is the most likely; you also
make a judgement about how likely the most promising theory is to be
true (for example, it may appear more likely than all other theories,
but still not explain everything).

I was puzzled why you were proposing a limited and error-prone subset of
the approach I was recommending, which you had condemned as
"unsubstantiated religious belief". It does seem a pointless discussion
now that you've confirmed that that's how you work, like everyone else
with any intelligence.

So what would count as research in this case? You've proposed a limited
subset of the same mechanism. If what we're both proposing is mental
masturbation, what would count as research?

What on earth are you talking about? What are you claiming I disagree
with? What bias? How does the definition of the nature of facts expose
bias? Again, why do you keep bringing Snopes into this? Where does
Snopes try to pretend to have done research into this? All that Snopes
says about the Victoria text is when it started circulating, and they
appear to be correct about that.

What exactly is funny? Why do you keep bringing Snopes into this, when
they have next to nothing to say about this text and what little they
say appears to be correct?

What do you mean?