Facts, Opinions, and Folklore: A Preliminary Taxonomy

Copyright (c) 2022 Michael Herman (Alberta, Canada) – Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License
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Also checkout: Truth and Marketplace of Ideas

This preliminary taxonomy attempts to characterize the differences between facts, options, folklore, and related terminology. Your feedback is appreciated.

• Facts
  • True Facts – Truths – Hard Facts – 100% true
  • False Beliefs – believed to be true but are, in fact, false
  • Fake Facts – knowingly or purposely 100% false (0% true)

• Perturbations of the Facts
  • Misunderstood Facts
  • Misconceived Facts
  • Misstated or Miscommunicated Facts

• Opinions
  • Feedback that may or may not be true
  • Vague
  • Poor recollected
  • Subjective opinions
  • Humorous/satirical

• Folklore
  • Feedback originating with a fourth party and passed on by a third-party

The driver for the above taxonomy is a new belief in the mind of the author is that only facts or truths should be embedded into verifiable credentials. This gives rise to the concept of the Authentic Conversations Spectrum (illustrated below). The author no longer believes that verifiable credentials can be used or should be used to encode “all data on the planet”.

Reference: Web 7.0 DIDComm Agent Architecture Reference Model (DIDComm-ARM) 0.52 Part 2 of 2