[NB: I offer no explanation for my lengthy absence from this space, or for my return.]
I tried, and mostly failed, to exercise my honors class this
spring about the topic: what is a fact? (Every handful of years, a cohort
passes through this class with little enthusiasm for the course. This was the
year.)
There is, of course, a current semi-academic discourse about
the issue. Many critics disparage “alternative facts” as cherry-picked, phony,
or simply lies. More strategic critics counterattack campaigns that enlist
alleged facts in the prosecution of ideological warfare. Still more
sophisticated critics debate the meaning of facts in what some call a possibly
“post-fact” political era.
On the whole, the discussion is premised on the notion that
facts are patent, objective, knowable truths that exist in the world. According
to this notion, facts are discovered, as though they were mineral deposits
simply to be found. They are the antibody of fabrication—any artifice or
production rules out a thing being a fact.
This positivism is found in fringes of the fact discussion,
where it crosses the border into academic discourse, and the demise of facts is
blamed on one or another development of social, literary, and philosophical
thought—“postmodernism” or “deconstruction” or even “feminism” or “gender
studies.” Generally, this charge is made by academics who have not read the
main texts attributed to these developments, but have the vague idea that they
all spell doom for scientific knowledge, truth, and disciplinary method—if not
also for cardinal direction, physical laws, and matter. (I used to try to
educate my colleagues about these “movements,” even going so far as to suggest
that they try reading Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, a report commissioned by the government
of Québec and published in 1977. It would seem odd that it took 40-50 years for
deconstruction and postmodernism to destroy facts, but perhaps the US is just
that much in the intellectual rear-guard.)
The fact is, facts are produced. They are assembled from
observation, hypothesis, theory, and, often enough, “common sense.” They are
debated, using methods of inquiry, by experts in every discipline. They are
never final, even when they are firmly established. Everyone who understands
any form of respectable method of inquiry should know this.
Instead, the discussion of facts usually takes the
treacherous shortcut of assertion: there are facts, there are no “alternative
facts,” there are multiple versions of facts, there are no facts, there is no
difference between facts and opinions, etc. None of these assertions
acknowledges the complexity of facts themselves. That’s too bad, especially for
critics of the current President and the “alt-right,” since it is precisely the
lack of any reasonable methodology for establishing their assertions of fact
that is most vexing. (Hint: someone saying it on Fox News does not count as a
reasonable methodology.) The political left has its (smaller) share of those
who seek to establish facts through bald assertion, too, and these people are
not helping.
I don’t have a lot of confidence that an honest discussion
of the construction of facts would improve the political situation. Too many
people have been trained to react to the dog whistles of demagogues and
advertisers. But the movement of high school students demanding that elected
representatives enact legislation that would make schools safer from gun
violence might make us optimistic. They have realized that thoughts and prayers
are not making them safer, and they seem to want change based on what to many
seems like a clear pattern of facts. They are much smarter than the dominating elite
in the country credit them to be. Perhaps there is a larger interest in
rational discussion of debatable facts, and debatable hypotheses to explain
those facts.
On the other hand, that didn't move my students this term.
x
