For the sake of argument

With all the wrangling about scientific topics in politics and the popular media these days, what I’m about to say may sound slightly crazy, but here it is: one of the things that I like most about science is that it actually can settle arguments.

My own belief is that arguments often devolve into fights about categories, as much as into fights about data and evidence. Broadly, I put arguable topics into four large bins: matters of fact, matters of mere opinion, matters of factual/expert opinion, and matters that are as yet unknowable. Disputes about any individual question, then, can deal with the individual details of the case, or they can deal with disagreements about which category the whole argument belongs in from the start.