Even Facts Need Explaining
From: L. Michael Hall
2021 Neurons #72
November 8, 2021
Facts #3
Once you have a health skepticism about “the facts” that you are regularly fed by the media, you can prepare yourself to think through those facts to determine their validity, truthfulness, and usefulness. That facts are critically important, no one will deny. To think clearly we need facts. And we need them for many reasons.
For one thing, we need facts in order to be sane. As facts ground us to what is real and actual, they save us from living in an imaginary, pretend world. That’s why we scour for facts. We collect them, analyze them, interpret them, and then use them to build knowledge. Learning works best when it is connected to reality. Alfred Korzybski noted this in his classic, Science and Sanity:
“Men do not ‘go crazy’ in response to facts as such. They tend to ‘go crazy’ as they get away from facts, out of touch with reality—when what they say and think no longer stand in an adequate relationship to their world of not-words.” (1933/1994, p. 175).