I see it this way. There is an indisputable foundation of facts that are universally accepted because those who don't accept them don't survive, like gravity and needing to eat and things like that, but beyond that foundation far more than we're willing to admit is just evidence-based rationalizations of what we want to believe anyway.
I see it that way, too. If we're talking about a jury trial or an experiment in a lab, evidence is very likely to be persuasive to us. But as far as worldview or philosophy, the very basis of the way we experience and interpret phenomena, there are much more important factors than data.
That's not to say anything goes. Most of us here realize that scientific inquiry has given us reliable models of natural history and phenomena, and we believe our knowledge about species evolution and climate change is based on facts and evidence. We know there are people who deny this evidence, and we consider them wrong.
And maybe this is where we deny the facts too, not about species evolution or climate change in and of themselves, but concerning peoples' motivations for denying these well-established scientific constructs. It's not just about debating and educating the Wrong People, giving them data points and information so they can change their beliefs to what we believe, and then they can be Right People like us. Things like creationism, climate change denial, anti-vax, 9/11 Truth, and Obama birth certificate denial, aren't really about facts but about power. And the more we focus on the facts, the less we recognize the cultural context of these matters and how best to approach them.
™ Version 4.2
(1)
