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Every day, newspapers, magazines, and television fill our eyes and ears with reports about the world. The unemployment is down four-tenths of a percent; another candidate has declared his intention to run; the space shuttle completes a successful mission; guerrillas claim responsibility for an attack on a refugee settlement. We rarely question such information; instead, we accord it the status of fact by making two crucial assumptions: that such stories could be verified if we wanted to check into them and that the sources who deliver them have no intent to deceive us. Yet behind the simplest news stories lie definitions, perceptions, and categories that could become sources of different views by equally competent hearers and observers, that could, in other words, spawn arguments maintaining different views of reality. We can make this point more clearly by looking at our sample news items cited above. The unemployment rate, for example, is an extremely complex indicator; reporting procedures can and do change such a figure. If, for instance, only those actively looking for work are counted among the unemployed, then the figure will not indicate those who have despaired of finding work and those who have never tried. Those who are working part time and wish to be working full time also may not be included. Thus the fact of an increase or decrease in the rate of unemployment may not be such a fact after all; much depends on a definition of the unemployed .