About

About Debunked

The idea is simple: a rolling list of what are now called ‘fact checks’, though we prefer to call them evaluations of claims, assertions, propositions that are widespread, prominent in some way, historically important or influential, or maybe just ‘urban legends’, folklore, old wives’ tales…anything. Or maybe it’s just a claim that caught our eye, advanced by some person – maybe a politician, a celebrity, an academic, a ‘talking head’ – something that, to our mind, might be worth checking out.

The motivation is simple – a love of the truth, or Truth with a capital ‘T’. Truth doesn’t get nearly as much love as it deserves. Socrates says, in Plato’s Euthyphro: ‘I have no particular liking for anything but the truth’. Truth is liberating. Falsehood imprisons us. And if you’re a bit OCD about these things, you will like to get things right, even if you’re not always successful. We have to do our best to believe and act only on what is true, and disbelieve and not act all that is false. As for that huge mass of propositions that are uncertain, hard to get to the truth of, maybe unknowable – well, they are no business of Debunked.

NB: just because we debunk something, this doesn’t mean it hasn’t already been debunked somewhere else. I imagine this will be the case 99% of the time. We make no claim to original discoveries. We just want to present our debunks (is the noun a word? it is now!) in one place, for our own convenience and that of the public.

This is a new and evolving project. We have no idea whether it will get any traction. Hopefully it will, now the site is basically set up, be fun to do, so we hope you learn something from it as much as we will.

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