Facts, opinions, and everything else

I gave my Technical Writing students an assignment in which they were to read each other's mid-term papers and suggest revisions (to their approach, organization, and formatting) to their classmates.


One student raised the issue, "I don't want to write about my opinions."


This gave me pause. Was I asking them to write an opinion piece? I certainly was not asking them to report on facts, as they were simply responding to a paper, not conducting research. But I was not asking for their opinions. So, what was I asking for?


As I mulled over this, I realized that a dangerously simplified dichotomy has been introduced into our educational system: facts and opinions.


Consider it: In third grade, we are handed a list of statements and told to identify each one as a fact or as an opinion, as if every statement in human linguistics could be classified as one or the other. This student knew that he was not writing about facts, and so concluded that he was being asked to write about his opinion.


There is, instead, a broad spectrum of statements between pure fact and pure opinion, including judgments (which I was asking them for), hopes, desires, conclusions, theories, creeds. (Where do creeds fit into this spectrum? Maybe we shouldn't go there right now...)


Take, for example, a physics experiment that results in the red crosses on the following graph:

(Never mind what it's plotting.) We would look at this data and say, "Ooh! It looks like it forms a line! Let me try to fit it." We then create the green line (which has a slope of 1) as a best possible fit to the data, and calculate it to have something like 95% accuracy.

Now, in the lab report for such an experiment, one would say, "The data is fit by a line of slope 1 to 95% accuracy." That would be a statement of fact.

To go one step further, one would say, "This data demonstrates the linear relationship between variable X and variable Y." Here's the question: Is this second statement a statement of fact? Not exactly, because one can't inexorably connect the graph to that statement. But is this second statement therefore an opinion? Not exactly, either, because there's certainly evidence to support it! The second statement could be considered an evidence-based judgment (or conclusion), which isn't really a fact but also isn't purely opinion.

So, how can we encourage our students to think along a spectrum of certainty, instead of merely in terms of absolute fact and opinion? How does the existence of this spectrum impact the way we teach our subjects? How does it impact the way we communicate our faith?