How do you determine the truth of a statement?

Question

To give some background to this question, I have been spending a lot of time being basically a newsjunkie, sucking up information about all kinds of topics. One thing that is most painful is to find out that something I learned earlier was a deception or misportrayal.Culturally this is becoming a problem for more and more people as the general access to information is causing havoc among people that can't invest the time to properly research topics or that are biased not to do so for any reason imaginable.I notice that even the basics are spotty, the Wikipedia Article for Criteria of Truth[1] is markedly in dire need of editing for the past 5 years and nobody seems to be willing to step up.So what are ways to determine if something is true and what chain of proof/evidence is necessary for you to consider something verifiably true? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criteria_of_truth

tgflynn · Accepted Answer

You can never be certain that any statement is true unless that statement is purely mathematical or logical in nature or the assertion of your own existence.In general the best you can do is to try to assign reasonable probabilities to different possibilities. Unfortunately I think the problem of accurately determining such an assignment exceeds the processing power of the human brain.