Topicalization and objectivity

Sheldon Cooper: Evolution is not opinion. It's a fact.

Mary Cooper: And that's your opinion.

The electric can opener fluctuation

One of the most frustrating obstacles you can encounter in a conversation is the moment in which someone tries to counter a cold fact with an opinion. In the excerpt above, taken from an episode of The Big Bang Theory, we have an exchange between Sheldon Cooper (a scientist) and his mother (a fundamentalist Christian). If no respect is shown for facts then a conversation is quite unlikely to be successful. How can we express a certain degree of objectivity? For starters we can use formulas such as according to a UN report or a recent study conducted by the London School of Economics shows that... Of course sometimes we don't have that kind of reference readily available. No problem. That's when we play it safe, act cautiously and simply go with I may be wrong but I think that... or I am under the impression that...

A little bit of objectivity doesn't hurt anyone and goes a long way.

Another lexical strategy we should also master is the one linguists call topicalization. Whenever we discuss a subject, it is important to set some boundaries and establish the scope of your references. After all, there is precious little one can say about serious issues like unemployment, domestic violence or education without ever mentioning facts. Just imagine you say "according to the IMF, the rate of unemployment in Spain was 17.2 % in October of 2017" and your friend's reply is a terse "I don't agree".

I understand that a friendly chat in a bar may consist in a simple exchange of general opinions but the truth is that a productive conversation might demand a certain degree of "verbal signposting". Let's say we want to talk about life in general: is it better now than it used to be fifty years ago?

Saying something like "In my view life is much worse now" is quite an empty statement, isn't it? Does it refer to life in Spain? In Europe? On the whole planet? And does that opinion consider medical advances and pollution at the same time? It doesn't take an expert to realize that now we can benefit from scientific breakthroughs that just did not exist 50 years ago but, of course, the world was probably a lot less polluted half a century ago. So, how do we talk about it? Well... a safe approach may include a couple of topicalizing phrases like these:

In terms of healthcare...
Regarding civil rights...
If we consider the state of the oceans...
As far as biodiversity goes...
With respect to human rights...