Is Data Real?

"I suggest there can be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.... The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression.

"Apart from any other consideration, we are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don't mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened? If one can speak of the difficulty of knowing what in fact took place yesterday, one can, I think, treat the present in the same way. What's happening now? We won't know until tomorrow, and [then] we'll have forgotten, or our imagination will have attributed quite false characteristics to today. A moment is sucked away and distorted, often even at the time of its birth.

"I think there's a shared common ground all right, but it's more like quicksand. Because `reality' is such a strong word we tend to think, or to hope, that the state to which it refers is equally firm, settled and unequivocal. It doesn't seem to be, and in my opinion, it's no worse or better for that."
Harold Pinter (1962). From a speech at the National Student Drama Festival, Bristol, England

Pinter H. (1962) Is Data Real? Speech at the National Student Drama Festival. Rasch Measurement Transactions 10:3 p.511

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"There are two kinds of truth: ordinary and profound. the opposite of an ordinary truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth is also profound."
Neils Bohr

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"The fundamental nature of reality is not conservation of energy or other quantities but endless creativity. Creativity is what all tiny regions do in expressing their quantum nature. Reality is not a zero-sum game."
Joel R. Primack and Nancy E. Abrams in Tikkun

Quotations. … Rasch Measurement Transactions, 1996, 10:3 passim

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