From: Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com
On Sep 18, 2006, at 10:00 AM, Carl Peterson wrote:
Perhaps the slogan should be "verified truth" or "verifiable truth." This puts them both on an equal plane and requires both.
I was thinking of something like "truth is ensured by verifiability," actually.
-Phil
Verifiable sources do not ensure truth. (It's not clear to me that there's any way to ensure truth... you know, observer A says it's a wave, observer B says it's a particle... blind men... elephant... etc.)
What verifiable sources do is to enable the reader to _make a judgement_ of the probable truth of the fact.
That's why it's much more important to have _a_ source, _any_ source, than to have a reliable source. As long as there's some kind of source _the reader can judge its reliability._ Of course, the better the source, the more readers will judge that the fact is probably accurate, so the more reliable the source, the better.