We live in an age in which the word "opinion" has become a universal rhetorical shield. Simply saying "that's just my opinion" seems to render any thought immune to criticism, scrutiny, or refutation. The modern media environment deepens this impression: public discourse increasingly rewards messages that are emotionally compelling, easy to grasp, and confirm what we wish to hear — and rewards epistemic care less and less. The phrase "alternative facts" entered public discourse in 2017 not merely as a media slip, but as a symptom of a broader phenomenon well known to psychology: the need to adjust reality to one's wishes, rather than wishes to reality.
From a psychologist's point of view, this situation is both fascinating and unsettling. Fascinating, because it reveals deep mechanisms of human cognition — motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance, defensive processes. Unsettling, because epistemic disorientation has real consequences: clinical, forensic, and societal.
What Is Truth? A Scientific Definition
Philosophers have debated the nature of truth since antiquity. The main theories include the correspondence theory (a statement is true if it corresponds to reality), the coherence theory (truth as the internal consistency of a system of statements), and the pragmatic theory (what is true is what proves functional in practice).
Science works primarily with the correspondence theory, enriched by the criterion of falsifiability (Popper) and by paradigmatic frameworks (Kuhn). Scientific truth is therefore not absolute dogma, but the best available approximation of reality, supported by empirical data, replicability, and critical review by the expert community. It is a provisional truth — but it is not an arbitrary one.
From this follows a fundamental distinction: science does not claim to know the absolute truth. It does claim, however, that not every statement has the same epistemic value. A statement supported by replicated empirical data and a statement resting on personal impression or selectively chosen case material are not epistemically equivalent — even if both were asserted with equal conviction.
Error, Lie, and Delusion: A Brief Taxonomy
We understand truth better when we distinguish it from what it is not.
Error is an untrue statement made in good faith. The speaker is mistaken but wants to speak the truth — they simply lack sufficient information or reason poorly. Error is a cognitive problem, not a moral one. It is correctable.
A lie is a deliberate communication of untruth with the intent to deceive. The liar knows that what they are saying is untrue and wants the other person to believe it. A lie is intentional, and therefore morally relevant. In forensic practice, this distinction acquires fundamental legal and ethical importance — we assess the credibility of testimony, the motivation to lie, and the capacity to distinguish reality from fiction.
A delusion is a special case: a fixed false belief, not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence, and not adequately explained by the person's cultural or religious background. It is not merely a strong opinion, but a disturbance of reality testing arising on a pathological basis. A patient with persecutory delusions who is convinced of being monitored by secret services is neither lying nor mistaken in the ordinary sense — they are sincere in their conviction, but the ordinary mechanisms of reality testing and correction are impaired.
And finally, there is motivated reasoning — a phenomenon that is neither error nor lie, yet one that underlies a great part of everyday epistemic failure. A person unconsciously accepts evidence in favor of what they wish to believe and systematically rejects evidence to the contrary. It is not a lie. It is not a delusion. It is a very human mechanism — but one that produces the impression that "the facts are on my side," even though those facts were selected according to the desired conclusion rather than methodologically.
Why Opinion Alone Is Not Evidence
To voice an opinion is to take a position. That is legitimate and important. The problem arises when "I have a different opinion on that" becomes an argument that ends a discussion — as though the mere fact that someone thinks X were itself a reason why X cannot be questioned.
Scientific discourse operates on a different principle: what is relevant is not who asserts something, or with what conviction, but what evidence exists for it. The authority of the speaker, their self-assurance, the popularity of their view, or their emotional investment in the statement do not change whether the statement corresponds to reality.
This principle has direct clinical consequences. A patient may be deeply convinced that a medication is not helping them, even when clinical indicators and observed functioning suggest meaningful improvement. That conviction must be taken seriously as clinical data — as an experience, as a reflection of the therapeutic relationship, and as an expression of autonomy. But it should not automatically be treated as epistemically equivalent to convergent clinical observation, measurement, and longitudinal evidence. Otherwise we would cease to be physicians and psychologists and become mere mirrors of the patient's wishes.
Why We Want to Replace Truth with Untruth: The Psychology of Epistemic Escape
This is where psychology enters the picture. Why do people in fact prefer more comfortable versions of reality? Why are delusions resistant to correction? Why does motivated reasoning function so reliably?
The theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) tells us that the simultaneous existence of two incompatible convictions creates an unpleasant psychological state that motivates the reduction of tension. The easiest path is not to change one's conviction — that requires cognitive effort and tends to be emotionally painful — but to devalue the inconvenient information: "that research is biased," "those scientists are paid by industry," "those are just numbers that conceal another truth."
Tolerance of uncertainty (or tolerance of ambiguity) — the capacity to bear ambiguity and the absence of clear answers — is in this context a key psychological variable. People with low tolerance of uncertainty are often more vulnerable to rigid convictions and closed interpretive systems that leave no room for doubt. All of these phenomena share a common denominator in the need for cognitive closure (Kruglanski). Truth, after all, is often uncomfortable and ambiguous, and does not lead to simple conclusions. A conviction that is internally coherent, intelligible, and offers a simple causal chain is psychologically very comfortable — regardless of whether it corresponds to reality.
Viewed through the framework of defense mechanisms, denial of reality, projection, and rationalization can be understood as strategies for preserving a subjectively acceptable picture of the world in the face of facts that threaten it. Such defense is functional in the short term — it reduces anxiety, preserves self-image, and maintains relationships within a coherent narrative group. In the long term, however, it leads to growing disconnection from reality and to a loss of the capacity to respond effectively to actual challenges.
Perspective and Relational Framework: Why Nothing Is Simple
And yet — after all that has been said above — we must add a crucial epistemological caveat that complicates the matter without relativizing it.
Facts and their interpretation are different things. It is a fact that a given patient obtained a T-score of 72 on the MMPI-2 Pd scale. The interpretation of this fact — what it means for the patient's functioning, for the risk of recidivism, for the capacity to care for a child — depends on the clinical context, the reference norm, the concurrent profile, and other variables. Two serious interpretations of the same fact may differ without either of them necessarily lying or being mistaken. Much depends on the relational framework.
The same holds more broadly. Historical facts exist — we know what happened, when, and where. Their historical meaning and interpretive implications, however, differ according to the narrative framework through which they are read. This is not relativism — this is hermeneutics. The recognition that no observer stands outside their relation to the observed does not entail the conclusion that all readings are equally correct. It entails the demand for reflexivity: knowing the place from which we look, naming our assumptions, being open to correction.
In many areas of clinical and social-scientific research, this is discussed as positionality. Properly understood, it belongs to methodological integrity, not to weakness. A therapist who acknowledges that they enter the clinical situation with their personal history, cultural background, and theoretical preferences is a more accurate observer than one who never thinks about their perspective at all — because they take it to be "neutral" and "objective."
The paradox is that it is precisely the awareness of perspective that protects against relativism. The one who knows where they are looking from can calibrate their view, compare it with other vantage points, and come closer to what reality actually is — unlike the one who does not see their perspective and therefore takes it for reality itself.
Epistemic Honesty as Clinical Competence
Psychologists hold a professionally privileged position: their work demands continuous practice in distinguishing what the client says, what the client thinks, what the client feels, and what — according to the available evidence — is true about the client's functioning. This practice naturally leads us to epistemic honesty: to respect for facts, awareness of our own perspective, and the capacity to bear uncertainty without retreating into dogma.
Truth, then, is not a matter of democratic vote, nor is it the outcome of the loudest persuasion. At the same time, it is neither the property of any authority nor immune to revision. It is a process: a careful, provisional, correctable — but never arbitrary — approach to what actually is.
Alternative facts do not exist. What does exist are mistaken interpretations, unconscious biases, conscious lies — and above all the very human longing for a world that makes sense without unnecessary pain. To understand this longing is psychological. To yield to it without reflection, however, is dangerous — in clinical, forensic, and everyday practice alike.
