I have to chime in.

Nearly all of us like to think that we have opinions based on facts. That’s the standard by which opinions are judged in our general worldview. It’s a Western worldview, and perhaps a Modern world view.

I think this is pretty accurate. And while it is not the basis I use for evaluating another’s opinion or judgement, it is the cultural bias of our time.

But try to find the roots of this bias, and I believe you will find this is a fairly recent phenomenon. Call it hyper-factuality. Lazy thinking is age-old. But the favoring of the fact-based argument over some alternatives like common sense or wisdom coincides with the modern American love of technology, and the blind faith we place in science. These have overshadowed the classical liberal arts in our education system. Whereas higher education used to train people, albeit a select few, how to think, it seems that now it trains us how to make argument using facts. Boring, really.

I believe historically this trend is coupled with the industrial revolution and the modern concept of “labor.” It is why I am skeptical of factuality because I believe it is used to obscure more profound forms of human knowing, which are spirit and heart based. Because if we listened to these, we would find much about our modern society that is appalling. Instead, we are trained to emphasize facts, because the technocrat, industrialist, and capitalist can control these.

But without facts in charge of forming opinions, conversations become more shallow. When facts form opinions, they create nuances and ideas.

True, but if you go deeper, perhaps you will agree that it is not the facts that are creating nuance and idea. It is mental discipline and care in observation. Perhaps this is just another way of saying what you are, but I think the distinction is important because of hyper-factuality and its root causes. This goes back to the heart of the liberal arts education, which is to de-emphasize facts and stress reason. The disciplined observer is able to hold a theory in mind while still observing and looking for flaws in theory. This is the sleuthing mind, and while facts are important, they are incidental to this process.

about the worldview that bases opinion on facts.

Check out your Bible. A classic example is in I Corinthians 15. Paul asserts something as fact, cites supporting evidence for that fact which he considers to be conclusive, and then argues an entire point based on that fact. If the fact falls, his entire argument falls.

Many today would dispute the fact, but that is not relevant to my point. My point is that this worldview is nothing new — fact-based argumentation has been around for millenia. You could go back to Moses in Deuteronomy basing his whole challenge to the nation to behave a certain way based on certain facts about what God has done for the nation. Again, some might dispute those facts, or dispute that Deuteronomy goes all the way back to Moses, but it is fact-based argumentation that is more than 2500 years old. And it is an Asian, not a Western, source. You can find many other examples in your Old Testament.

In fact, it wasn’t until men like Kierkegaard and Barth that a contrary view really became popular in Judeo-Christian religion. Before the eighteenth century, really, if someone did not believe that things such as the virgin birth of Christ or His resurrection from the dead were facts, they simply rejected Christianity entirely. It was a question of facts driving opinion — if you reject the facts, you reject the religion.

Barth, especially, changed that with the idea that the facts didn’t actually really matter either way.

I actually think that we all tend to be fact-based in our opinions much more than you are saying. Yet, we do not all come to the same opinions. Why?

1. We don’t all have equal knowledge of all the facts. This may be because of limited access to facts (Nate and KP know things I don’t know), or laziness (I’m too lazy to chart all the times Travis touches the ball and analyze them).
2. We do not weight facts equally. Travis has a personality that is pleasing to many fans. That is a fact which is of great importance to annthefan, of lesser importance to some other fans, and totally irrelevant to AK1984. So who is being fact-based and who isn’t?
3. The facts can be hard to assess, because we paint with a broad brush. Who is a better defender, Martell or Nic? In actuality, Martell might be better for defending certain players like LeBron or Melo, while Nic might be better for defending other players, like Kobe.
4. Logical errors in processing facts. Perhaps you are correct that the biggest one is petitio principii, but there are others.

I think raoulduke’s comment is an important part of the discussion. Our values have a tremendous impact on how much weight we give to different facts. If I value entertainment, I place greater importance on Rudy’s contributions than another person who simply values wins. If I value character, I would rather see Travis on our team than Stephen Jackson — or at least, the value I place on character would be a factor pushing me in that direction.

In general, I think our opinions are a dynamic thing which are formed in part by values and in part by facts. We think certain things are important, the facts support those things, and that drives our opinions. We discard other facts as irrelevant because they don’t matter in our values system.

I doubt there is any society which is not largely fact-driven in their philosophy. It is just that values drive the weighting (and often the interpretation) of facts.

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All of us want to be right. Here are some problems -

Sometimes we want to be popular more than we want to be right. By popular, I mean they want to be seen as prescient or knowledgeable and attract approval. We tend to go with the tide and align ourselves with previous arguments based upon that tide or reject ideas from someone not in the inner circle.

Sometimes we form opinions from events because we have an innate need to understand them and by understanding, control the event from recurring or cause it to occur more frequently. Once we have hit on a probable cause (often based on our biases) we feel ownership in that idea and defend it against the contrary facts.

Since we post anonymously we can allow the parts of our personality which are not often profitable in our physical environment. Some have even used multiple aliases to act different characters for fun. These is not problems until we find ourselves hurt by comments from others or, worse, find we have hurt others by our comments.

In our jobs or professions or school work we are not afforded these opportunities and in writing on a blog we have an opportunity to step out and dance! But it is also an opportunity to learn to form our opinions in such a way that they can be changed by facts or arguments providing additional perspectives. To not have to be right. It is our choice.