Telling fact from fiction

[robvalue]

This is mainly aimed at theists, although atheists are welcome to chime in.

Imagine this scenario. You have been brought into a school as a special speaker. You are to run a class about how to tell fact from fiction. These children are approaching this stage in their cognitive development. I'm using fiction to mean "didn't happen as written". This may be due to it being totally made up, or it could be because the account is very inaccurate.

The children will be handed out some random stories/accounts to read. You have to give them a rough guide as to how they should analyze each part of the story. I'm not saying they need to decide if the whole thing is factual or else it's fiction; they will deal with each section of the story in turn. This is meant to be a first pass, a smell test. A way to look for obvious fiction. It's not meant to validate the accounts any further than that. We're just comparing believable to non-believable.

What principles would you teach them?

I'll start off then by giving my principles:

(1) Are the events being described consistent with what we know? Do they contain things we don't even know are possible? If they contain such things, it is probably fiction.

(2) How consistent is it? Does it make sense within itself? If it contains a lot of contradictions, then it is probably at least partly fictional due to inaccuracy.

Do people agree with these principles, and what others would you add?

EDIT: Alternate scenario below, for anyone who doesn't feel the above is a good question.

---

I think some people are making this more complicated than I intended it to be.

Maybe I should simplify the scenario.

It's you giving your own personal advice to your own kid, say. The kid is getting to the stage of reading things, and you're helping it look for indicators that what they are reading is probably fictional. So the question you'd ask them is, "Do you think this story could really happen?". I'm not asking for you to help them fact check and differentiate plausible from factual.

Yes, the answer will probably be quite obvious for most people. But it's your kid. You're helping them. Can you give them any pointers? Just telling them it's obvious isn't going to help. If they asked you for help with this, what would you say? If you'd say nothing, fair enough. You don't have to, it's your kid. If you wouldn't give them any principles, that's up to you. I'm talking about very general rules of thumb here, to aid your kid's development.

I assumed people would talk to their kids about this stuff. Do they not?

---