Claim: Any piece of information referred to as a fact should be mistrusted, since it may well be proven false in the future.
Is everything referred as a “fact” unbelievable since a lot of “facts” are proved to be incorrect as the time moves? As a sceptic, I agree with this point of view under most circumstances. To doubt “facts” is a significant sign of development of intelligence. Education is based on skepticism and we can never say we are well-learnt before doubting and developing what we have learnt. A child educated by authority can only accept knowledge and recite what he has learnt, who turns out to be a body-book without his own intelligence and fail to think once no authority guides him or the authority is proven wrong. Instead, if he is growing up full of questions in mind and show great doubt and curiosity towards every facts, the intelligence of this person is actively developed and will do benefit for his future. Distrusting the so-called facts we learnt is the spirit of education. While we pay attention to the people, we cannot ignore that it is questioning the facts that put science and society forward. Ample of examples certificate that every big breakthrough on science is based on the breaking of old “fact”. In ancient times, Galileo suffered from cruel inflict of the church when he broke the well-known “fact” that all the planets go around the earth. However, this break led to one of the biggest breakthrough in astronomy and the human history. We can conclude that breaking the facts move science and society from pre-history to the modern one we live. Actually, nothing can be exactly factual as those thought to be truth are distorted to some extent during the processing and communication. In the field of journalism, wherever language is used, there is emotion and therefore we can never achieve the ideal state of fair and true. From this perspective, we should never believe in the so-called facts. As the speaker said, any piece of information may be proven false as the time, places and speakers change. Next time, when holding a piece of newspaper, you’d better pay attention that there’s an author standing behind and articulating his or her views instead of the so-called facts. Therefore, no fact ought to be totally trusted. However, if it is like that, why do people still fancy of reading well-articulated articles and why is there news on TV, radio, Internet all covering the sky? It is because we need to know things from others’ mouths and there’s temporarily truth that we choose to believe. But it is noticeable that we need to choose before believing it. As we analyzed above, we can safely draw a conclusion that we should not trust the so-called facts either for our children, science or society. |