It is rather funny how people can have confidence in their answer for an indeterminate type problem where the role of facts versus judgement would indicate otherwise. Because people are really good at predicting the future with confidence, right? So who is going to win the next election? Problems come in all different shapes, sizes and varieties. But they can be characterized by the role of facts and judgements in their analysis. Common sense will tell us that there is an inverse relationship between the amounts of facts versus judgements required to arrive at a solution. For simple or deterministic problems facts are going to be required to resolve, little to no judgement is needed. Simple problems only have one answer, just like any trivia quiz question. Who is buried in Grant’s tomb? Deterministic problems have only one answer as well, but need a formula or process to solve. What is the weight of that kumquat?
But when you start getting into random type problems, like which race care will win the Daytona 500 the amount of information available to accurately point to the answer will not exist. Judgements are going to come into the prediction. The only thing we will know for sure is that it will be one of those race teams that are entered into the race. Finally there are the indeterminate problems where we don’t even have a list of possible solutions to choose from and our judgements are needed to actually come up with them as well as trying to decide on the correct answer. The role of judgement in the analysis of the problems will overshadow the importance of facts. The more judgements and assumptions are made, increases the margin for error as well. Rationally, we would recognize that as the facts decrease, our analytic certainty of judgements would be lower. However, does it appear to work that way? Generally our confidence level in the solution to our problems remains about the same whether it is a simple or deterministic issue compared to a complex one that we have spent hours analyzing. The critical thinker needs to be wary of conclusions based mostly on judgements and not facts. When doing so, it is best to try to objectively qualify those conclusions with a degree of likelihood to communicate confidence in the solutions instead of declaring absolute predictions.
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