Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

I don't think his point there depends on any view about the scientific method. Maybe it's a bad example (the flat earth thing is definitely a bad example), but the basic idea is clear: it doesn't make much sense to have fact-status depend on whether the truth in question can be proven.

what we can determine to be fact is limited by our perceptions - he seems to get tripped up by this. But facts that we can't prove aren't facts, we have no way of verifying them. They're speculation until they can be proven. We discover new facts when we can prove something we haven't been able to prove before.

There is an ocean of difference between "can be proven" and "I could personally write the proof"

He's being lazy about the scope of "can be proven," as though defining facts in terms of possibility of proof means possibility of proof for particular people, so that facts are relative to who can prove them. Maybe a decent definition of a fact is that proving it is logically possible.

I feel like if you don't have this down, you shouldn't really get to call yourself a "philosopher"

The general thrust of his argument hinges on accepting that facts exist independently of humans and our perceptions, intellectual constructs, limits, etc. But they literally don't. Facts are social, human constructs - they are a term describing phenomenon that we perceive. They are not objects in some kind of absolute reality that exists independent of human perceptions.

I don't know. It seems like the universe was obeying certain laws long before any humans were around to notice it

that's what our observations tell us.

but no us = no observations = no facts

our understanding of phenomena is certainly a human construct, but we are not creating cosmic events from a few billion years ago by finding out about them now with our instruments

calling something a fact is a way to describe something we observe, including something that we can determine as having happened in the past. But prior to our observation, whatever happened a billion years ago was not a "fact" - it was something that existed outside of human perception.

an unknown unknown

haha yes

so what's a better word for such a thing than "fact", an "actuality"?

an actually

fucks sake

I think it's enough to be clear that calling something a fact is not a way to describe some kind of ultimate reality that exists beyond human perceptions. Once you get into things we can't observe you're getting into the territory of mysticism, speculation, hypotheses etc. Facts describe what we know, and they change over time as our base of knowledge, our catalog of observations expands (or, regrettably, contracts).

xp

i don't have the patience to read that stupid article but this seems like a silly conversation, 'fact' and 'opinion' are obviously devices introduced to children as part of their indoctrination into the american system of compromise between living in the reality-based community and respecting the right of other people to believe stupid shit by declaring that all such belief exists in a realm of liberty impenetrable to facts, all they learn is which sorts of things their teachers prod them with are to elicit 'fact' or 'opinion' categorizations, and if things go well over time they learn to replace those with more sophisticated replacements

man this revive is heady, from kantian ethics to phenomenology to cosmology to pedagogy in a couple of posts!

thats a fact

an actually my dear

And then there's quantum mechanics.

Of course, the meaning of the word 'fact' is a social construct, so there's nothing wrong with defining it as describing 'phenomenon that we perceive'. However, it's anthropocentric to define facts only through human perception, and there's also the fact of the matter that we aren't just 'observing' the world, we are in the world, of the world, and as quantum mechanics tells us, our observations impact the world. And we don't simply observe the world, we use the world itself to observe it. 'Facts' are created not just through social relations, but are instead constantly recreated through complex intrarelations of subject, apparatus and object.

The best book I've read on this question is Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway. At the end of that book, she defines 'understanding' as reacting to a difference. In that way, the plants 'understands' the shadows when they refuse to grow in them. Uhm, and so on. I should reread it soon, I think.

The whole thing shows the bankruptcy of cartesian dualism, iirc.

These are all nice points, but "Is it a fact if you can prove it but I can't?" is just like bad high school stoner sophistry AFAICT.

Prove that Tool rocks. Show your work.

i agree
w frederik b
basically

my wittgenstein is from freshman year and probably appropriately shallow, but doesn't he talk in on certainty about people's attitude towards their "bedrock" beliefs, beliefs they cannot sanely doubt (not just moral precepts like no-killing but the kind of empirical observations descartes claims to doubt--there is a floor beneath my feet, there is no demon in my head, my senses are reporting on a real world that also exists for others etc)? says iirc that these beliefs vary from person to person and culture to culture and cannot be meaningfully rated against each other BUT ALSO that it would be absurd to act as if your personal set of them were not reliable--that you should act in accordance with what you perceive to be fundamental truths, while remembering that you have no way of knowing if they are. seems to me that this is the complicated way in which mature 20/21c-ers are obligated to live, and also that lots of people do live this way--they act from conviction without necessarily being sure the universe is with them. (that this is "rationally" "impossible" proves nothing but the limits of rationality in understanding human behavior+ability.) the nyt article seems to think that the only alternative to belief in the objective truth of your moral system is helpless stasis: that if you teach kids they could be wrong about things that seem clear to them, or that circumstances might transform apparent Goodness into Badness, they will be paralyzed for life. those ideas certainly do make moral decision-making trickier and less comfortable! but that's because moral decision-making is tricky and uncomfortable (especially after the scorecard racked up by its most confident practitioners), not because lacan or derrida or the simpsons or your snarky teenage son made it that way. people have been wishing this difficulty away forever and they have always blamed its most recent set of messengers for creating it, and always in the same way: they corrupt the youth. prepare the hemlock.

speaking of the youth tho, i am relieved to read that recent reports about their terrifying dogmatism and militantly illiberal disrespect for white men's opinions have been exaggerated, that the kids are still a bunch of amoral blank-faced slackers with no convictions, and that liberalism is still going Too Far after all. maybe we can bring pogs and tech decks back too.

(extremely insecure in this company abt the wittgenstein part of that post but it gets better halfway thru prob)

you should act in accordance with what you perceive to be fundamental truths, while remembering that you have no way of knowing if they are

isn't this Kant's categorical imperative, basically?

Pop culture is getting less and less moral. As it gets more and more self-referential it spends less time commenting on the Real World. Like a copy of a copy, it takes the appearance of something that has genuine value, while being nothing more than a hollow money-making scheme.

Me: “I believe that George Washington was the first president. Is that a fact or an opinion?”

Him: “It’s a fact.”

Me: “But I believe it, and you said that what someone believes is an opinion.”

Him: “Yeah, but it’s true.”

Me: “So it’s both a fact and an opinion?”

The blank stare on his face said it all "I can't believe my dad is this stupid".

fixed

george washington wasnt president until galileo spotted him

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/db4EFh1dQFM/hqdefault.jpg

"Pop culture is getting less and less moral. As it gets more and more self-referential it spends less time commenting on the Real World. Like a copy of a copy, it takes the appearance of something that has genuine value, while being nothing more than a hollow money-making scheme."

I think it's a little dubious to suggest that moral relativism and moral nihilism are popular among American college students in large part because of a half-baked fact/opinion distinction some of them may have been taught in grade school. And other aspects of it are sort of clumsy. But some of the criticisms the piece is getting in this thread seem like they're being leveled with undue emphasis against fairly innocuous claims.

About the fact/opinion thing, I think his main points were just that (a) whether something is a fact does not depend on whether someone has proved it or could prove it, (b) not everything someone believes counts as an opinion, (c) suggesting otherwise invites confusion, and (d) suggesting that something is either a fact or an opinion and never the twain shall meet definitely invites confusion.

If I had to guess what the author thinks a fact is, I'd guess he thinks a fact is just another word for a truth, and things can be true independently of whether anyone believes or knows them. (Which is all consistent with saying that what we can determine to be a fact is constrained by our limitations, that whether something gets called or treated as a fact depends on all kinds of things about society, and that this is a matter of significance because concepts like "fact" and "truth" have rhetorical power.)

There's plenty of room to disagree with all that, of course, but it's not stupid.

Dude explicitly says facts and truth are not the same thing tho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iC9xpDSXyI

Reads like yet another What's Wrong With Kids These Days essay to me. In this case, what's wrong is Those Fuzzy Thinking Public School Teachers, who comprise yet another highly convenient and popular whipping boy for all the Right Thinking Citizens Everywhere.

lol alfred

meme potential, that

He left a note. He left a simple little note that said "I've gone out the window." This is a major intellectual and he leaves a note that says "I've gone out the window." He's a role-model. You'd think he'd leave a decent note.

tragedy plus time

Dude explicitly says facts and truth are not the same thing tho
― Οὖτις, Tuesday, March 3, 2015 8:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I went looking for this and didn't find it

(a) whether something is a fact does not depend on whether someone has proved it or could prove it, (b) not everything someone believes counts as an opinion, (c) suggesting otherwise invites confusion, and (d) suggesting that something is either a fact or an opinion and never the twain shall meet definitely invites confusion.

Point (a) is absurd, though. I expect we would all agree that physical reality exists independent of our perception of it. "Facts", on the other hand, only exist in human minds. While the precise mechanisms of gravitation remain unknown to us, I hope we don't imagine that there are a bunch of uncaught, gravity-related facts floating around like butterflies in the aether waiting for a human mind to snare them. No such things exist. Instead, there is simply the undifferentiated reality of the physical universe, energy and matter, waves and particles. As we figure things out about that reality, we construct "facts" as a means of codifying and communicating what we've learned.

To call a statement a "fact" is to make the claim that it is true in a universal, provable sense that should not be disputed. It is a fact, for instance, that hydrogen and oxygen can combine to form water. The quality of fact-ness is also often granted to other, less clearly provable but still generally accepted propositions: descriptions of shared perception ("the sky is blue"), matters of historical record, "known knowns" of every sort. It's even extended to supposed moral consensus, but that's the point at which the analogy collapses. Absent religion, there is no universal "external reality" to which moral arguments can be compared. We might reasonably say, "it is a fact that theft is a crime," but we'd be on much shakier ground arguing, "it is a fact that theft is wrong."

This is why (b) is also absurd. Of course one can "believe" or "feel" that a factual statement is true in just the same sense that one can believe or feel the same about a non-factual statement. It is not a difference in the quality of belief or feeling that causes us to distinguish between facts and opinions, however, but a difference in degree of factuality. I might believe, for instance, that the Illuminati control the media. I might also believe that hydrogen and oxygen can combine to form water. Both of these things could reasonably be described as my opinions, but only one is based in fact. Therefore, it makes practical sense to distinguish between "facts" (where the evidence is clear and opinion is therefore irrelevant) and "opinions" (where facts are unavailable, contradictory or unconvincing).

if it BENDS

I hope we don't imagine that there are a bunch of uncaught, gravity-related facts floating around like butterflies in the aether waiting for a human mind to snare them.

That would be a pretty weird thing to think, which should be a clue that it may not be the best interpretation of the view I was suggesting.

All that (a) in my last post says is that something can be fact even if no one can prove it. That alone doesn't commit you to the view that facts or truths are extra bits of reality over and above true statements or the things referred to in true statements. Later in my last post I suggested the author of that piece might think that something can be a fact which even if no one knows or believes it, which is admittedly stronger than what (a) says. But I don't think that commits you to belief in mind-independent facts either.

Plus I think someone holding the general sort of view I'm talking about could accommodate your observations about how the term "fact" is often used. They could say this: A lot of times when people say something is a fact, as opposed to just asserting that thing (e.g. "vaccines are safe" vs. "it's a fact that vaccines are safe"), they do it for emphasis. So the word "fact" (like the words "truth" and "true") often serves the purpose of communicating extra confidence and authority. People tend to use it this way when they think they can back up what they say. People are less apt to do this about moral claims because they're often less confident about their ability to back up moral claims if challenged. But that just reflects the connotation of the word in some contexts, not its meaning.

I'm confused by your last paragraph. You start by saying it's absurd to suggest that an opinion is not the same thing as a belief. But by the end, you've offered what to me looks like a plausible distinction between factual beliefs and opinions. What's absurd about following through with that distinction and saying beliefs "where facts [in your sense] are unavailable, contradictory or unconvincing" are just what opinions are, and that since not all beliefs fit that description, not all beliefs are opinions?

(Actually, looking back on the article, I think the author might take your side on the question of what opinions are. But I think someone could non-absurdly disagree.)

Just to be clear, I'm not saying your views are the absurd ones. I don't think either of these positions are absurd.

I was offering that third-paragraph equivocation (allowing that beliefs supported by facts are not distinct in the quality of belief itself from beliefs not so supported) as a sop to the author. He treats this point as a major blow to the curriculum's fact/opinion distinction. It's not. It's a pedantic technical quibble that evades the substance of the distinction. We believe that verifiable facts are true just as we believe the same of the unsupported opinions we hold dear. Few would argue there. Again, the difference is that the former are provable while the latter are not.

Of course, in the real world and in adult thinking, the line between the two is often blurry. But this is second grade pedagogy, right? There's every reason to present the distinction as clear and simple, something that can be grasped and applied by young minds. As the student's understanding develops, the gray areas and implications can be explored. And I view the distinction being made here as absolutely essential to the development of critical thinking skills.

I agree with McBrayer that we tend "waffle" on the words and concepts related to this debate: fact, truth, proof, opinion, belief, knowledge, etc. This causes problems and confusion, but I feel that he's being deliberately obtuse in attempting to obscure the useful, grade-school-appropriate distinction between opinion and fact. He's being obtuse, no offense, in the manner of religiously-motivated thinkers who are being evasive about the religious foundations of their thinking. Religion often insists that moral statements have the quality of absolute, objective truth, something very much like scientific factuality (and McBrayer uses this language: "objective moral facts"). Absent religion or quasi-religious ideology, however, it is very hard to support such an idea.

Also, I believe, frankly, that McBrayer's crypto-religious insistence on the existence of "objective moral facts" has absolutely NO place in the public school curriculum at any grade level. It is perfectly appropriate to teach values, but not to pretend that those values have the same quality of objective factuality as the things studied in, say, a science classroom.

Perhaps it does moral values a disservice to treat them simply as "matters of opinion" (I would certainly expect a religiously-motivated philosopher to say so), but again, where a public school curriculum designed for young children is concerned, I would rather the curriculum err on the side of value-neutral discretion. The foundations of a child's moral belief system are better established by parents than schools, imo.

kill u all

dorks r us, what u want?

on a related matter, I've been listening to the new NYT Magazine Ethicist podcast and everyone involved (the letter writers and the ethicicts) are monsters

A lot of the letters to the old Ethicist column struck me as what I'd retroactively term humblebrags.

I went looking for this and didn't find it

sorry JRN, I was thinking of this passage: It’s a mistake to confuse truth (a feature of the world) with proof (a feature of our mental lives). Furthermore, if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative.