Facts about Facts
Facts, and in particular “alternative facts”, have been in the news a lot this week, and for good reason (I toyed with calling this post “Facts: talking metaphysics to power”). I’ll have something to say about “alternative facts” later in the post, but first I’m going to talk about facts more generally, as well as another worrying trend I’ve noticed, stemming from the “alternative fact” debacle.
If you know me in a professional capacity, you’re probably aware that I have a longstanding problem with facts. To be clear, I’m not some sort of relativist about truth, nor am I a hard-line skeptic. My problem with facts is ontological – I just can’t figure out what they are. Here is how the SEP article on facts begins:
Facts, philosophers like to say, are opposed to theories and to values, they are the objects of certain mental states and acts, they make truth-bearers true and correspond to truths, they are part of the furniture of the world.
Soon after, in that article, Correia and Mulligan bring up a few options for how to think about facts. They then say this:
In order to understand these claims [about the nature of facts] and the relations between them it is necessary to appeal to some accounts of truth, truth-bearers, states of affairs, obtaining, objects, properties, relations and exemplification.
A thorny metaphysical issue indeed.
I’m not going to take a stand on the metaphysics of facts in this post, other than to assume two points that I take to be (almost) entirely uncontroversial – feel free to disagree in the comments. First, “fact” isn’t just an artifact of language, fact talk is not a ‘useful fiction’, etc, which is to say that facts are real in some, possibly extremely thin sense. I am, however, willing to allow the possibility that “fact” is just a convenient name for something like “proposition true at the actual world”.
The second fact I’ll be assuming about facts is that they have a necessary connection to what’s actually true (using my modal language in a strong sense that I’ll leave unarticulated). Depending on your preferred accounts of truth and truth-bearers, this is something along the lines of facts are true things or facthood is a property of true things. What’s important is that truth is necessary for facthood (factiness implies truthiness?).
True Facts
It’s this second fact about facts that’s gotten me worried recently. There seems to be a lot of talk in the media (social and otherwise) about “my facts and your facts”, “his facts and her facts”, and most worryingly “correct facts”, “true facts” and of course “alternative facts”. All of these sorts things seem to me to imply that that necessary connection between truth and fact is being ignored or or even intentionally questioned in public discourse. There are at least two immediate problems if this usage of “fact” becomes commonplace.
First, if the meaning of “fact” continues to be diluted, fact will just mean “proposition”, “sentence”, “possible state of affairs”, which is to say “fact” will just be a shorter word for “truthbearer”. While saying “truthbearer” all the time gets really annoying, substituting “fact” isn’t the answer. Plus we’ll then need another word for “fact” (unless we’re really in a post-truth era, which I seriously doubt).
The larger, and more immediate problem is that if we’re going break the connection between facts and truth, willfully or otherwise, there’s going to be a transition period where it will be difficult to tell what anyone means when they’re talking about facts. The most serious consequence of this could easily be smart people with insidious intentions trying to convince the unsuspecting public that certain things are true, that aren’t.
Alternative Facts
It looks to me like this last problem is exactly what’s going on with the introduction of alternative facts, although more blunt and poorly considered rather than smart and insidious. Here’s my best attempt at a charitable reading of alternative fact talk:
Alternative facts are essentially possibilities or states of affairs that differ from those that were previously (though maybe temporality isn’t at issue) presented as true. Alternative facts are connected to truth in nearby possible worlds, rather than truth at the actual world. So when the “alt-right” asserts “alt-facts” remember that they’re not talking about the real world anymore.
A Philosopher's Take 
Justin Caouette
January 27, 2017
Nice post, Aaron. And I agree )or at least I want to) with your conclusion about “alt-facts” as you describe them but I am curious about a few different ways we could understand facts and I wonder what that would mean for the conclusion
Let’s say you have a theory, call it theory X, that says B is true, B being any statement about the world given that theory. But, unlike you, I believe theory Y is true.The problem is that theory Y says B is false. When we hit this impasse we could say one of two things:
(1) It seems that it is a fact that falls out of my view that B is false and a fact of your theory that B is true. Notice though that neither of these claims about B, whether coming from theory X or Y, need the theory to be true for these facts to be true, in a sense at least. So on this approach facts would not need truth, so maybe I am asking for some justification for your assumption when you say:
“…I’ll be assuming about facts is that they have a necessary connection to what’s actually true (using my modal language in a strong sense that I’ll leave unarticulated). Depending on your preferred accounts of truth and truth-bearers, this is something along the lines of facts are true things or facthood is a property of true things. What’s important is that truth is necessary for facthood (factiness implies truthiness?).”
As I construed (1) facts wouldn’t need a connection to what’s “actually” true.
One weird thing that struck me about the necessity of truth for a thing to be a fact is that as long as other theories are possibly true, it would follow that as theories change so would our facts and that seems strange. One positive way of looking at facts as not requiring objective truth and only truth within a theory is that facts would not change, only theories would. THis sounds right to me, well, at least it sounds plausible on it’s face. So, yeah, this is just me thinking aloud right now, I’d be curious to hear what you think.
(2) The second approach would be to claim that facts need truth (as you suggest) and that we just need more data to figure out which theory is right so we know which theory is giving us facts about the world. This also seems right, in a sense. The “FACT OF THE MATTER” will depend on which theory is best, but these claims about the truth of B will then be settled by which theory is best, so to speak.
The problem with this view is that what about theory Z that gets developed 10 years later? If it’s a fact that B is false because Y is better, then when we learn about Z (and let’s assume that Z says that B is false) and when it happens to fly in the face of Y, it will turn out that facts become non-facts when we learn of a new theory. So given that the nature of your query is about the ontology of facts this would have some interesting results for that ever-changing ontology one would need if one thought facts were theory dependent.
But, if one cares more about epistemic justification (EJ) rather than ontological facts of the matter (OF) when deciding how to think about what a fact is, then one might be in a better position to explain why some things are not facts because for the one who champions EJ rather than OF facts are not necessarily TRUE, they just need be true of a theory and that theory should be the best theory regarding how to account for B.
Anyway, I hope this made sense. This is a first pass and I don’t have the time to write up my own post or edit this response so apologies in advance if my lack of clarity has left you wanting. I do hope that you can at least see my concern and half-way understand the proposals I threw together.
Again, nice post! Thought-provoking!
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Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
January 30, 2017
This is an interesting way of thinking about this. My assumption is what varies is not factiness (which I’ve now decided is a word, if it wasn’t already), but the conditions the level and kind of epistemic justification needed to allowably assert than something is a fact. We rarely have complete certainty of truth, but often it’s fine to assert something is true with a certain level and sort of evidence, and I think that’s what’s going on here (unless you’re a relativist or Jamesian pragmatist or something).
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Joe
January 29, 2017
A couple of quick comments. First, on the ontological concerns about ‘facts’, you might be interested in having a look at Arianna Betti’s (relatively) recent book, _Against Facts_ (MIT 2015), for a view that rejects the robust metaphysical view of facts. It’s quite a good read!
Second, I’m a tad puzzled by the idea of a necessary connection between truth and facts. (The slogan ‘factiness implies truthiness’ wasn’t helpful here, by the way.) So, I’d like to ask for further clarification and here’s why: If we abandon a realist notion of facts but uphold something on the order of an f-schema, i.e., `p’ is a fact iff p, then, following on something of a Tarski-like understanding of facts, all we seem to get from this is a list of facts. How do these facts (if at all) designate the way the world is? There seems to be no necessary connection between the f-schema and the world, and there seems to be no way to generalise a theory of facts.
Perhaps it’s my view that your real concern isn’t truth’s necessary connection with facts but with an account of truthmakers and its connection with facts.
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Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
January 30, 2017
Thanks for the reading suggestion. I would like to have a look at that. I intentionally avoided discussing truth-making for the most part, because I was trying to make as few metaphysical assumptions as I could, and still make my point.
Another way to think about the connection between facts and truth that might be useful would be to argue that it’s part of the meaning of “fact” that facts are true or imply truth. Vixenhood implies foxiness (being a fox) is an imperfect analogy. That said, I’m not going to try to work out exactly how this would work any time soon, as much fun as that might be.
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R.D. Ingthorsson (@RIngthorss)
February 19, 2017
Really interesting read. I particularly appreciated the suggestion that when the alt-right starts to talk about alternative facts they have stopped talking about reality. However, what I wanted to address is the confusion you point out in the philosophical literature. Because there is one, and there is a story behind it.
The simple version of the story is that there are two senses of ‘fact’ in circulation (and some in between). On the one hand philosophers use it as a general term for something that is the case, i.e. some or other existing non-conceptual feature of the world. What these features are believed to be varies on the one hand with the ontology that each philosopher acknowledges, and on the other on what they believe is required to make some given conceptual element true. This use of ‘fact’ is in agreement with what the online Oxforddictionaries say about the first adaptation of the latin word ‘factum’ in English in the late 18th century, when it was taken to mean ‘something done or made’, which would agree with the idea of a real occurrent (but with an antropocentric twist). That is still how it is used in legal jargon. And this seems to be the sense of ‘fact’ used in the SEP article.
On the other hand ‘fact’ is used for the conceptual entities that represent the non-conceptual entities that are also called ‘facts’. But then usually we only use the word ‘fact’ for those conceptual entities that we have good reasons to believe correspond to the other kind of ‘fact¨.So, facts in the latter sense, are facts, only in so far as they correspond to the former kind (or are believed to do so).
It used to be acknowledged that both these senses were in circulation and there was a debate about the right sense (I belive Austin was one of people involved). But that debate is dead. It seems it would have been easy to solve the issue just by stipulating that we use another word for one or the other, but instead people continue to use both without realising that two people may be talking about two different things.
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