{"id":100,"date":"2016-03-02T15:12:58","date_gmt":"2016-03-02T14:12:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.managementinstitute.nl\/?p=100"},"modified":"2017-01-04T18:58:06","modified_gmt":"2017-01-04T17:58:06","slug":"conjecture-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.issuesmanagement.eu\/en\/conjecture-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Conjecture 6: Facts as building bricks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Doctrine: Facts<\/em><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"605\" height=\"340\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/E15kFf7rb4k?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Question: <\/strong><\/em><em><strong>does everyone attribute your meaning to your facts?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, was the quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). But is it really not possible to fool all the people all of the time, bearing in mind the atrocious reputation of Richard III during five centuries?<\/p>\n<div class=\"show_more\"><p class=\"wpsm-show\" style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: 100%; text-align: left;\"> Fold out<\/p><div class=\"wpsm-content\">\n<p>Since Aristotle&#8217;s Ars Retorica (384-322 BC) we know how people can be persuaded. If one person is to accept an utterance of someone else and takes what he says to be true, then the latter has to convince the first. The reverse is rather obvious. When one is not convinced, one is not likely to accept what the other person says. One simply doesn&#8217;t believe it. That&#8217;s what rhetoric is for, a way of using language to convince the other party. That is: to get convinced in order to accept the truth the way the speaker sees it. Rhetoric in our view is a necessary part of communication. Why then, with so much knowledge available to us, and for such long time as two-and-a-half millennia, is there still so much that goes wrong in communication? Communication is a many headed monster. One such head is our idea on &#8216;facts&#8217;. Let us therefore pick it up right here. And see if we can chop of that head.<\/p>\n<p>Facts seem the raw material, or even the \u2018core business\u2019 of many professionals. Lawyers and policemen, journalists and press officers, academics and insurance agents, judges and G.P.&#8217;s, all think that they are working with (pure) facts. Communication professionals and -academics have not yet settled the question whether facts do indeed form an integral part of communication or not. Still, many opinions and legends about facts and the role they play in communication are circulating. Some people think that facts are the building bricks, others that they form the cement of the building that we call communication. Still others maintain that facts do not exist at all, or are at best ad fundum a construct. Those who appreciate the fundamental discussion about facts and the construction of reality have much interesting reading ahead of him, such as the works of \u00a0Friedrich Nietzsche* and S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard** to name but a few. In the case of communication facts are always coloured and are always accompanied by a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.managementinstitute.nl\/semantiek-van-uw-organisatie\/\">meaning and significance<\/a> of some sort. Question then is which significance, attributed by whom and why, which meaning stays and what the consequences are.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;On 22 June 1941 Hitlers troups invaded the Sovjet-Union completely by surprise. The Red Army was not prepared for this and had to take exceptional losses in men and material against this supremacy. The Germans quickly moved to Moscow, the Wolga and the Caucasus. In 1943 the tide turned in the then city of Stalingrad. The German armies were pushed back. (&#8230;) The history of the war appeared to be yet even more unsavoury as became clear by the end of the Eighties. Hitler and Stalin made common cause and divided huge parts of Eastern Europe among each other. Later it was confirmed that thousands of Poles were shot in 1940 near the town of Katyn by Stalins secret service and not by the Germans. (&#8230;) The majority of the Russian population in 2015 is fascinated by imperialistic chauvinism, says historian Mark Solonin. In such an atmosphere it is impossible to have an academic discussion on what really happened during the Second World War. People have little interest in facts and documents that contradict the chauvinistic myths. (&#8230;) Academic historians in Russia turn their backs on him. &#8220;I have retrieved thousands of documents from the archives and published books and articles on the internet, but nobody shows the slightest attention, nobody acts upon them. Many archives are still closed, but even if they would open, it wouldn&#8217;t change much in the public awareness.&#8221; (Dutch daily newspaper NRC 8 May 2015).<\/p>\n<p>Two things are important from this quote:<\/p>\n<p>1) Historians, like Solonin, claim to own the facts and claim theirs is the only way to interpret the facts. Hence they are the heralds of &#8216;the truth&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>2) All other human beings, whether they be Russian or American or Chinese or Dutch, are hardly interested in &#8216;the facts&#8217;; opinions stem from different sources.<\/p>\n<p>*There are no facts, only interpretations (F. Nietzsche, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)<\/p>\n<p>**Viallaneix, Nelly, 1979, <em>\u00c9coute, Kierkegaard: Essai sur la communication de la parole<\/em>, 2 volumes, Paris: \u00c9ditions du Cerf.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Next time: Are facts a fiction?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p> <p class=\"wpsm-hide\" style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: 100%; text-align: left;\"> Fold in<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Doctrine: Facts Question: does everyone attribute your meaning to your facts? You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.issuesmanagement.eu\/en\/conjecture-6\/\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Conjecture 6: Facts as building bricks<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.issuesmanagement.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.issuesmanagement.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.issuesmanagement.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.issuesmanagement.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.issuesmanagement.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":71,"href":"https:\/\/www.issuesmanagement.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7648,"href":"https:\/\/www.issuesmanagement.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions\/7648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.issuesmanagement.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.issuesmanagement.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.issuesmanagement.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}