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Friedrich Nietzsche notoriously asserted: "In that location are no facts, only interpretations."  Understood one way — that there are no objective truths — his remark seems quite clearly fake. However, if the statement is understood every bit a descriptive claim about human psychology, information technology'south non articulate to me that it's wrong. That is, if he means that people very oftentimes confuse their interpretations with the facts, then he'due south onto something.

In my concluding post, I argued that an access of ignorance — saying, "I don't know" — is an indication of intellectual honesty. Merely obviously many people do know some things, and a few people know many things.   The challenge here is sorting wheat from crust:  How can you tell when they really practise know something and aren't just making simulated claims?

Philosophers take given a lot of thought to that question and have offered a number of answers. I think folks standing around water coolers and sitting in boardrooms could do good from reflecting on what the philosophers have come up with — and from applying it (more than ofttimes).

Probably the nigh orthodox position in epistemology is that cognition is justified truthful conventionalities. According to this account, ane can only claim that 1's conventionalities counts equally knowledge if the conventionalities is in fact truthful and 1 is justified in believing that it'due south true. Mark can simply claim to know that Steve is manipulating his sales figures if: (1) Steve is actually manipulating his sales figures (truth condition); and (two) Marking has very good reason to believe that Steve is manipulating his sales figures (justification condition).

If Mark's justification for his conventionalities is that Steve is a jerk and he looks strange, then it seems to me that he's not warranted in asserting that he knows that Steve is fudging his numbers — even if Steve is indeed fudging his numbers. Mark is complimentary to speculate, conjecture, hypothesize and and so on that Steve is up to no proficient; but he tin't legitimately claim to know that he is. Similarly, an economist who predicted a downturn for the incorrect reasons cannot claim to have known that a downturn was coming. And an 60 minutes head who predicted that an bidder would exercise well can non merits to accept known that he would practise well, if she believed he was a skilful hire considering he had the aforementioned birthday as her son.

That obvious adjacent question is, "So what counts as justification?" At that place is no unobjectionable answer, and I don't retrieve we demand ane. Instead I believe a kind of epistemic dominion of thumb — a simple heuristic — tin assist u.s. solve the practical problem of judging how to treat an assertion: When someone makes a claim, simply ask whether what's been asserted is a fact or an estimation (i.e., a subjective judgment); and then follow up by request for justification. After that it's upwards to you to decide how much weight to give the claim based on how compelling yous find the justification.

Suppose you lot're out having lunch with colleagues and someone casually says, "Max is arrogant, dishonest, and manipulative." Is that a fact? An estimation? What's the justification for that pretty powerful claim near another colleague? Unless justification is demanded, there's real risk that some people at the tabular array will later confuse a potentially baseless assertion with the truth. Non to pre-empt that potential confabulation is, I think, to practise Max an injustice. And conduct in mind that sometimes you're the Max.

Quite oft, simply asking, "How do you know that?" is not merely a skilful thing to do, it'south also the right thing to do.

That may seem to many of you like a argument of the obvious. But I oft witness instances in which what wait to me like interpretations are presented as facts, and, I worry, heard as facts. And so before dismissing this piece considering yous call up I'm only stating the obvious, please examination the heuristic by asking yourself: "How practise I know that?"

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