YOU DON'T KNOW ME!!!! I DON'T EVEN KNOW ME!!!!!!!!

            Facts are _____ that have occurred and these _____s had to have been witnessed and proven to have occurred.  Okay, so defining what facts are is really difficult.  Instead, here is what facts are not. 

            Motivations, thoughts and reasons are not facts.  Why?  Well, I’m going to have to take a psychological approach to explain this.  For example, I cannot be 100% positive about what PTJ’s motivations or reasons for giving us this question to blog about, or what he thought when he assigned this question.  I can make assumptions based upon what I perceive of his character.  For instance, he could be asking this question so that we say that everything is subjective in order to prove to athkor that what we discuss is relevant.  However, that is not a fact.  Even if we ask him, technically we cannot take whatever he said as fact (I just checked and he actually did state that it was athkor who prompted this, but again, no one can prove that this is a fact).  There are mysteries of the human brain that prevent even ourselves from knowing exactly what we think.  Some examples are:

 

Projection is attributing your own feelings on others

 

Displacement is expressing the emotion you have towards one thing or person at a different thing or person

 

Reaction Formation is presenting the opposite feeling towards someone or something of the actual feeling

 

Regression is acting like you are in an earlier stage of development than the stage you have reached

 

Repression is an unwanted thought or memory is pushed into the unconscious

 

Rationalization is convincing oneself that one has rational reasons for acting a certain way and ignoring the true motivations

 

These are all examples of defense mechanisms, and we are, for the most part, unaware if and when we use them.  Therefore, if we ourselves do not know why we do things, the reasons why anyone does anything cannot be facts. 

In the realm of whether we could know if something is liberal, realist, or constructivist, it is impossible to know what goals motivated by.  As PTJ said on Tuesday, actions are not in these categories, it is the goals to be obtained by these actions that can be categorized.  I disagree with that last part.  Nation-states can state what their motivations are, and we can make our own assumptions, but we cannot know.  What we cannot know is not a fact.  Stating whether someone has realist, liberal, or constructivist goals is an opinion, even if that someone is you.