How to Deconstruct & Reconstruct a Claim to satiate Your Healthy Skepticism...

Let’s define ‘Healthy Skepticism’ as I added an adjective to remove the unwanted bait & switch ones, conspiracy theories, hatred filled notes and such but keep only the meritorious, qualified claims to process for our general healthy skepticism.

Healthy -

(a) an attribute of picking the right claim to be skeptical about.

(b) qualified ones picking up the claim. (Receiver’s good job of discerning the claim’s relevance to them or to the others around)

(c ) Entrusted ones who need to process a claim by their positional role or authority. A cross-examination types or a lawyer on the claimant’s side reviewing the response claim made etc.

That’s a way to define it with some ideas attaching on the example scenarios.

Next…

What are the elements to extract from a claim?

Let’s use the basics and the fundamental principles of critical objective reasoning.

With scarcity of common sense in social general intelligence, many of the professionals who are entrusted to do a meticulous analysis on a claim, in a necessary setting also, are losing the grip on the clear thinking models. And, hence, the idea of helping such common sense deprived folks and of course, it’s a good refresher for any sound thinker also…

I’m going by my mental models and have not looked into any other well-structured methods on the specifics of the ‘critical thinking’ elements, notes and books to cross-reference. Most generally, I write with free typed thoughts in real-time reflecting on a topic and share a glimpse of my mind’s approach. Not academic but practical wisdom!

A dimension to explore a claim statement, is to identify:

1. Necessary and Sufficient conditions.

   1. Necessary elements

   2. Sufficiency elements.

   3. Objective facts vs. subjective details.

   4. If subjective, believable or not. If so, why or why not?

   5. If objective, how strong is the claim w/ or w/o proof?

   6. Relatable, commonly found or self-sufficiency element in it or need additional information and such..

2. Assumptions made.

   1. Confidence intervals in the assumptions made.

   2. What of those are good vs. bad assumptions extrapolated outside of the claim statement but perhaps, rationalized with other background / historical analysis of it.

   3. If the claim is made by a Person A, do you know the person well enough, in references and topics of the claim made?

   4. If not, did you supplement it with any profile based analysis and apply a K-nearest neighborhood estimators (a Machine Learning algorithm) and if so, on what parameters? What’s your accuracy score confidence?

3. What parts of the claim are unnecessary or TMI (Too Much Information)?

4. What set of information might be missing? (subset of step 1 analysis)

   1. Do you suspend the claim processing when you have missing information or would you like to proceed and still complete it with something or the other outcome?

   2. What’s the rush to tie your claim to an outcome of your choice? (Let’s say, a simple classification outcome of, claim is, right or wrong / True or false / Fact or fiction / Most likely true or somewhat true or unlikely to be true)

5. What parts of the claim are strongly agreeable? And, why?

6. What parts of the claim are strongly disagreeable or in disbelief from your vantage point? And, why?

7. How do you interpret the overall quality of your assessment of a claim in question? (self-assessment score of processing a claim piped through healthy skepticism)

8. Do you abandon your results and interpretation and follow the new set of information, facts, material details presented, if you find your analysis is circumvented due to lack of information. (Sufficiency not met from step 1)

9. Are you open to taking in more relevant information if the Claim processing goes objectively, mutually agreeably or do you want to play rogue and keep pushing your view of the claim to dismiss despite it being a good one? How do you recuse yourself when you as an assessor isn’t doing a good job?

   1. (This is absolutely important and an element of self-awareness, self-discipline with a solid sound mind that’s always in truth-seeking mode and not to prove anything to feed into noise or rhetorics)

10. What’s your final assessment and classification of the Claim? And, what did you learn through the process of it, both as an analyzer and the quality of claim submitted to you?

You can use the above as a framework to explode in full length as you become an entrusted by others or self-entrusted in processing a social behavioral claim. Apply it to any case by using a good judgment.

Let’s look at a overly simplified (vanilla plain w/ no branched out complexity) claim to quickly illustrate and anchor the idea of the framework.

My Claim:

‘I got this fresh red Gala Apple from a nearby store, Meijers. I like them. They are so sweet!’

Alright…

(Assume, I made the claim perfectly well, 100% accurate and is true and the truth from my story)

Assuming, we passed all the health checks of categorizing it as ‘healthy skepticism’ and such as it’s only a benign example….

Ok.. You are an assessor of my claim…And, I will take your role from here..

I can agree, it’s red, it’s an Apple. (Objective part)

I might contest, it’s not fresh (subjective opinion)

I might or might not believe Meijers is a nearby store for me. And, I don’t know how you define ‘nearby’ in your definitions.. (what’s the radius?)

I find your ‘I like them’ TMI / unwanted for me. Or I personally don’t like Gala apples or I don’t like apples at all. (as a critique of it) but I don’t care, if you like Apples. I’m only assessing if your claim is right or not, so I’d give it a pass and nothing to distrust. OR Do you distrust even my personal truth of what I like also? (CHECK!!)

I find ‘they are so sweet’ a bit hyped up.. Do I care or does it trigger me also now because, I don’t like it but you keep on adding more to the parts that I personally don’t like? OR Do you have the sense to redraw to the center and keep it objective only to view purely as an analyzer and take or discard based on what’s needed to classify the claim in question? (CHECK!!!)

There are three parts to this:

1. I told my claim (both of us see and read it)

2. I have a backstory and an emotional value to it (read the line that confirms the strength of it’s truth and parts of it where I’m the ONLY SOURCE OF THE TRUTH and it can’t be classified otherwise..)

3. Your assessment of the claim that now either matches or doesn’t match .. or variants of it that tells me how good you are, as an assessor..

   1. How? Simple. If you trash the elements where you have no business to mess with but overreach to prove, the apple is not what I like, I lose the credibility in you, as an assessor.

   2. If you disagree on the freshness of it, I can give the benefit of the doubt and/or see your idea of ‘fresh’ more/less to mine.

   3. if you disagree it’s not even RED, it’s not even a Gala Apple and it’s not even an Apple…. then, you know how and where I’d place you…

So, now, you get an idea on how to deconstruct the original claim, put the pieces together and reconstruct to come back and meet the claim in the inferential status… And, see what happens next..

For hypothetical scenario and another real-life example:

When my team says self-governance models are the future and autonomy is the future. They have been rigorously practicing self-discipline models, share very many methods how they adopted to a new, healthy lifestyle etc., and if this is a claim, you as an assessor should follow all the above framework to see if you are a valid assessor or a simple, junk one who dismiss their claim outright without recognizing all the aspects of their claim (assume they are making an 100% honest claim and they own portions of it as the ONLY SOURCE OF THE TRUTH due to their personal story)…

Hope this is a good DIY mental workout for healthy skeptical, qualified, relevant, valid, entrusted assessors…

You can use this anywhere in your personal, professional, social lives. And, that’s the beauty of a framework as it gets you into generally good, critical thinking acumen to build.

Hope you enjoyed it and learned something useful!

Thanks for reading…..

Stay tuned for more…