Stubborn Facts
I wrote this in response to/inspired by a fantastic article here, which I highly recommend to read to get a sense of the context. Though, I decided to expand it as a more complete analysis instead of just a comment on a post.
A note on the terminology: “Right” and “Left” are used to represent the two sides of the political spectrum in the U.S. for simplification. I hope to put aside any issues of political categorization, agenda making, and historical analysis of “liberal, conservative, or libertarian.” My assumption that the Right/Left divide does exist and that they each have a pretty clear and generalized discourse is uncontroversial.
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Starting Point: I agree that we need to take seriously the need for truth in a “post-truth” world. Secondly, we need to trust our scientists and experts in the field in order to make informed decisions about the coronavirus pandemic. Once this kind of trust and understanding in the scientific and political community is built, then we can have a healthy debate about truth and justice within the new pandemic world (more to come on this hopefully soon). As many memes have illustrated, we are all seemingly engaged in a confused Utilitarian Calculus. This calculation is always based on knowing the facts and making predictions on maximizing utility for those who still think utilitarian is a good model for justice and what we should do as a society. However, let’s first get clear on how to establish a baseline of trust in how experts present facts and data, then we can hopefully have a better understanding of how to trust the majority of scientist’s analysis and policy recommendations (which become normative), based on those facts.
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I tend to spend my days pushing the rock up the hill, so to speak— trying to get students to think clearly about how science works—and fighting the problems caused by all those imbedded cognitive biases, easy-out heuristics, and bad mental prototypes that students have, particularly around the concepts of “facts and truth.” So, yes, there are basic problems with “folk epistemology.”
So, as philosophical analysis goes, I thought about “throwing a wrench” into the usual discourse of “trust the scientists,” “science is real,” or “facts and data are objective or truth.” As John Adams said during the Boston trials of 1770:
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence” (McCullough, p.68).
Really, that’s how it works? Seems pretty straight forward. Facts are out there to be found, and you can’t change them—they just are. Though Adams didn’t say that facts are immovable things. “Stubborn” seems to suggest that they are difficult to change or altered to your whims. The ontology of facts is one thing—but, cognitive scientists know all too well how humans process information… with a bias of some kind. I have spent most of my professional life thinking and researching about how to get students to critically think about their own biases in order to improve democratic deliberation and debate in the classroom. However, even if bias can be eliminated in the processing of basic data, evidence, and facts —it still remains a question that the facts “out there” are (should I say?) in fact, really objective or automatically the truth.
Well, then I went down the rabbit hole of the aforementioned idiom about “throwing wrenches”—where did that come from?
Ah, thanks internet, from the late industrial era of the US, it seems (let’s not get into what “facts” make that true). Throwing a wrench into the machine seems like the luddite trying to frustrate the mechanical advances of science. Good Ole radical fun. Ok, let’s frustrate… What about these “stubborn facts?”
(I am not getting too deep into the philosophy of science, and the additional work of analyzing the questions about the objective nature of scientific theories. What I am curious about is the role of establishing facts within political decisions and the body-politic’s acceptance of what is “true”, especially about uncertain issues with medical pandemics). See Lynch for more on this point.
Since science is political, we have to look at the political discourse in the U.S. around the concept of ‘facts’ in order to know what machines we are throwing wrenches into. Keep in mind that the following conceptual analysis and dichotomy remains tentative and only remains that: conceptual “machines” to help us keep our ideas clear. Please respond, clarify, critique, support, debate.
One of these working ideological machines, typically on the Left (not the post-modern left) is that science presents objective facts that have direct connection to the truth out there (probably functioning as classic correspondence theory). The media is out there to present and pass on the facts objectively, particularly to report what the scientists are saying (Yep, reports of science on the news are hilarious, thanks to major confusions of scientific jargon and public translation).
However, the Left, and the common-folk view I think, accepts that: if it was seen—check, true; if scientists report/publish it—check, true; if most of the media reports it— check, true. In short, facts are equated with truth. The relationship with facts and truth is complex, though I think that the direct equivalence of the two is not warranted, and the Left could tighten their machine if the relationship between the two were clarified. But even more dangerous is the Right’s recent rejection of facts—or that there are “alternative facts”, and somehow that there is still something true about the world?…huh?
The machine on the Right (well…this has grown more complicated in the “post-truth/Trump era, so I don’t really know how to articulate this concisely, but the Right is now the party of Trump) is that truth is known through some kind of personally experiential fashion—you are woke, and the political and elitist world is out there to twist, spin, transform the truth and “enslave” you like in Plato’s Cave. Alternative facts are possible, because the “deep state” and the media is in control of what other facts are exposed. It is you that has some unique and humble connection to reality, because you are a true American (or something privileged; the common man; the heirs of Jefferson and Jackson—oh that white rage is bubbling up now!). Protest signs and social media posts commonly say, “Wake Up America!” (The memetic idiom of “wake up” is fascinating, and I am sure a deeper linguistic analysis would be revealing, since both sides of the political spectrum use it). Though, this meme supports the analysis that “those that are asleep” are not tapping into their “experiential wokeness” according to the Right.
What joins these two machines, though, seems to be the idea that you just need to “open your eyes”—for the Left, just read and watch Trump, and the overall media presentation— it is right in front of your eyes. For the Right, just look behind what the usurping zeitgeist is pushing. “Read the Transcript!”—recalling Trump’s infamous call that spawned the Impeachment process is an interesting case in point. Trump literally said, “I need a favor, though”—the fact is right there. The Trump/Right defense, hinged on a conspiracy by the Democrats to bring down Trump from the beginning, is that you have to “read” the transcript yourself, but without any explicit reference to the text or the literal words. There are no facts to debate, just the experience of “reading the transcript.”
The Right’s historical politicalization process (anti-intellectualism, evangelicalism, anti-statism) and the growing geographical, media, and polarization of the country has been, ironically, hijacked by the weaponization of post-modernism (i.e. by the anti-globalists, Putin’s party, etc.— O No!, the Russian Hoax!) See here. Add to that the "fact" that the right is generally undereducated. This opens another can of worms, but I think it is empirically uncontroversial that education improves that ability to combat implicit and cognitive biases and trains the individual to discern the quality of information as it enters the mind. Moreover, Pinker (2018) is generally right about the influence of post-modernism on the destabilization of reason on both the Left and the Right. Pinker also demonstrates that basic political bias on both sides has been empirically shown to destroy the ability to understand basic data (See Pinker’s references to Kahan, Peters, et al. 2012).
(Is my argument circular? The Left believes in the “Russian conspiracy”—which is a fact, right? And the Right believes in the “deep state”, which is just a conspiracy, right? Ah, now we are getting somewhere with the knowledge coordination problem (see below). Are there scientific experts anywhere that can resolve that?)
A problem to this dichotomy (if it holds up), is the epistemology behind the #MeToo movement. Biden had just made a big statement the morning of this writing, and is changing the Democratic standards for evaluating knowledge claims of sexual harassment. The twist to my analysis is that the #MeToo Movement hinges on the personal experience criteria to establish the facts of the matter. During the Kavanaugh hearing, the Right seemed to maintain that innocence is presumed for the accused —ergo, truth is also presumed. The personal experiences of the women are not privileged by the Right. This presents a major problem, and epistemic privilege needs to be taken seriously. In these cases, however, personal experience, testimony, and corroborating evidence are central to the epistemology of the past and justice, and not clearly the same with science—the process of explaining the physical universe (the social/mental supervenes on the physical, yes) and making predictions. (Even though it is the experiences of scientists in their experiments that confirm shared objective scientific knowledge—but here is where pseudoscience rears its ugly head).
So, how then do we deal with science and facts in the political discourse? Well, in functional ways, science is both the knowing (more precisely, confirmed operationalized concepts and the replicated theories) and the process of knowing those facts that are observed—you can’t separate the two—so throwing a wrench to test the scientific discourse is the scientific way (i.e. falsification).
So maybe the wrench really is a tool to tighten the machines, before we can even get clear on the harder problems of Reason, Truth, Science, and Justice.
Wrench 1: Even though the history and etymology of ‘science’ is related to the concept of “knowing,” I don’t think science is the same thing as reality, or being itself. This is a good rhetorical device to defend the “reality” of science - like the bumper stickers or signs in the yard: “Science is Real,” “I believe in science.” Believing in gravity is different cognitively than believing in the scientific process, or believing an expert, I think. Dan Dennett (2006, p.315) harks on this: Do you believe that E = mc2 the same way you believe that God exists? Why or why not? How are they different?
Either way, I am not sure either belief in a theory, model, or law would be a belief about a fact. What are the facts that make Einstein’s equation true? Do you have to know those facts first? (Dennett’s analysis of belief in belief is interesting, but not important to the point I am making here).
So, can facts be “stubborn?” Yes, but only so long as we understand a fact as a cognitive or artifactual representation about different states of reality: “Lincoln was the 16th president,” “Lincoln engaged in unconstitutional actions,” “There is an image of Lincoln in my textbook,” “There are atoms that currently make up that textbook with Lincoln’s face.” Are these all the same kinds of facts? Would they be the same kind of beliefs about each of those facts? So the non-epidemiologist has to believe in something that is presented by experts regarding Covid-19/virus data that connects to a reality that is inaccessible to them. What they have to believe is not a true reality, but a trust in the scientific process in the collection of observable phenomena by other people. As we are finding out, this collection of data does not in itself give a clear picture, especially when facts, evidence, and data are inconsistent.
Wrench 2: John Searle’s (1995) analysis of facts and the social world concludes that there are really two kinds of facts: Brute facts and Social facts. They are both the “state of affairs” in reality, but the state of affairs can be mind and socially dependent. Searle is a Realist, I think, so he is not trying to post-modernly deconstruct the discourse (or bring back Locke’s Skepticism or Berkeley’s Solipsism), just showing that the social fact of a “stop sign” is supervenient on the atoms-arranged-metalwise ontology of the thing on the side of the road and how society organizes around symbols and rules. “Judge, my good public servant, the stop-sign is only socially constructed, and doesn’t really exist—I can’t be at fault for running it!” Too bad, the sign is still a legal fact of the matter.
So if facts just are, then how can societies create and distinguish between the “objective” and the socially “subjective?” This is where, partially, the post-modernists jumped in: there is no difference between the two, it is the free play of language that constructs which ontology we might accept, and whether or not we should just pretend that societies can construct the objective à la Rorty. I can’t refute post-modern epistemology here, but if we are at least going to be realists about facts, we have to be clear about what facts are and what kind of facts we are referring to; then, we can evaluate how those facts establish truth claims about theories or scientific predictions.
Why does this matter to the “re-opening the country” debate during the coronavirus pandemic? Well, we need to distinguish what data and facts we are referring to. A survey of the public’s feelings about death rates is a very different set of facts than the number of Covid-19 deaths. Even then, remember, the reported death total is not a perfectly accurate representation of reality. Moreover, how should we operationalize death rates within the last month? For example, what is the difference between the death rate by guns in Chicago and COVID-19? Scientifically, they don’t need to be compared in terms of which one is higher to see if Covid-19 is "not really that bad.” Why? Causation. What causes death in these difference cases—freewill, policy, social structure, medical care, evolutionary processes, biological processes? Now we are getting into problems related to the gun debate: free will, policy efficacy, modal analysis of causation. (See my analysis here.)
To summarize wrench: facts are cognitive or artifactual representations of different states of affairs in reality. In the current pandemic, it is easy to confuse which facts scientists and politicians are presenting as unequivocally objective. All facts, then exist within a network of socially constructed discourses. How can one person or group with powerful meme engines verify which are true, accurate, and usable facts? There must be a coordination of experts, institutions, and processes that help establish the best policy decisions based on facts. You would think that just getting the facts straight would be the easy part. However…
Wrench 3: Borges “Library of Babel” is a good illustration of the infinite circularity of expert reliability (Lynch, 2016). A Universal Begging the Question, if you will. Objectivity can’t be a “God’s Eye View of the Matter”—that would be impossible for a human. But, that idea is nothing new. Wikipedia and the internet are new though, and only makes the knowledge and expert coordination problem much harder. “Google knowing” is being added to our lexicon of epistemology. Also see Lynch (2018). What is assumed is that in the past, there were some kind of referees or universal fact checkers to check the fact checkers. There never were. What the Right as done is to question the established fact checkers. What is left is my point about replacing an established media trust with some kind of personal-truth-can’t-be-questioned fact checker. “Wake-up!” Speak “your truth!” Again, I don’t think this works with science and public policy in a clear way, unless your experiences are being put to the test of reasonability within the network of confirmable data, expert review, and the like. But in the world of social media, you can say, write, post whatever you want, and makes it seem like you are contributing to the coordination and verification of facts. Everyone's an expert now?
Wrench 4: So what about these experts we want to trust? Even if we assume that the referees and the gatekeepers are possible, what about the overconfidence paradox? Holt (2018) cites a classic 1977 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: People commonly pronounce themselves 100% certain of things that turn out to be verifiably false. In a 1999 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: The incompetent people have the most inflated notion of their abilities. But also—the increase in expertise can also create confidence. In short, experts should find an equilibrium between confidence in the knowing skills and uncertainty. Cognitive research shows that people with high levels of confidence are almost alway wrong...oh my! Who are we suppose to trust then?!!
But what this reaffirms is the need of a network of falsification, confirmation, peer-review, replication, and scientific training. The reliance of some sort of personal-fact-truth detector does not hold up to the empirical analysis of confidence and cognitive biases.
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A lot of work in current epistemology and cognitive science, then, deals with these “wrenches”, so I hope that this brief analysis can help sharpen the discussion of a seriously pertinent topic: trust and knowing in scientific policy-making.
The larger point is to show how complicated democratic reasoning can be, and that the entire political spectrum needs help with basic cognitive and epistemological tools. In general though, everybody makes the same psychological errors. As Haight (2012) has demonstrated in regards to political moral psychology, there are evolutionary built-in mechanisms that help shape what we think and believe. It just may be that those on the Right are in need of a more immediate tune up based on my analysis. But maybe someone on the Right can wrench up and tune up my cognitive-analytical machine.
P.S. Before I was about to publish this piece, I saw more strange statements from conservatives on social media related to experts over-reporting Covid-19 death numbers, and then Politico reported this.
I will leave you to see if my analysis holds up against this situation (I think it does); but what I want to highlight from the article is this:
P.S. Before I was about to publish this piece, I saw more strange statements from conservatives on social media related to experts over-reporting Covid-19 death numbers, and then Politico reported this.
I will leave you to see if my analysis holds up against this situation (I think it does); but what I want to highlight from the article is this:
Public health veterans and those who study how information is disseminated said shifting predictions are common in emergency situations, which only fuels conspiracy theories.
“Finding anomalous data during extraordinary circumstances is not unsuspected,” said Dr. Jane Donovan, research director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Institute, who studies misinformation. “It's just that right now we have a set of armchair epidemiologists who are looking for discrepancies everywhere and turning them into conspiracies.”
Lobelo said counting the presumptive deaths was scientifically accurate, saying that flu-related deaths were counted the same way, even if the primary cause was different.
“The cause of death could be a heart attack, or cardiac arrest,” he said. “But if you're able to identify Covid-19 in a patient that had heart disease, and that actually died because of a heart attack, you really do know that Covid-19 is the actual cause of death. Otherwise that patient would have not died, despite having that risk factor.”
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Citations and References
Cantrell, Paul (2020). “Beyond the Pillars of Hercules” https://mydarlingatlanta.com/2020/04/29/beyond-the-pillars-of-hercules/
Dennett, D. (2006) Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Naturalized Phenomena.
Haidt, J. (2012) The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics. New York: Pantheon Books.
Holt, Jim (2018). When Einstein Walked with Godel: Excursion to the Edge of Thought. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Lynch, M.P. (2016). The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data. New York: Liverlight Publishing.
Lynch, M. P., & Gunn, H. (2018). Googling. Blackwell Companion to Applied Epistemology. https://www.academia.edu/35360698/Googling
Lynch, M. P. (Forthcoming) Philosophy and Academic Freedom. Jennifer Lackey (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://www.academia.edu/32590722/Academic_Freedom_and_the_Politics_of_Truth
McCullough, David. (2001) John Adams. Simon and Schuster: New York.
Pinker, Steven (2018), Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. Allen Lane: UK.
Searle, John (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. Free Press: New York.
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