After Trumpism: Facts and Tyranny
Part 2: On Diderot Love and Coral Reef Bleaching
Previously — After Trumpism: Facts and Tyranny Part 1 — Do I Love My Cat?
We are deeply troubled by Wednesday’s attack on the US Capitol, which demonstrated clearly the destructive impact of sustained, deliberate distortion of facts, and incitement to violence and hatred by political leaders… We call on leaders from across the political spectrum, including the President of the United States, to disavow false and dangerous narratives, and encourage their supporters to do so as well. - Michelle Bachelet, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights January 7, 2021,
What is a fact? We know that collectively we’ve lost touch with something important about facts to disastrous consequence, but when leaders and pundits talk about them, they assume we all share a common definition for the idea. We do not.
In first installment of this essay, I briefly laid out five arguments about facts and elaborated on the first: “facts are a special kind of knowledge,” related to, but distinct from beliefs, information, opinions, or wisdom. We talked about how my love for my cat, while very real and true to me, is not a matter of fact. We’ll return to Diderot a bit below.
I promised to continue with the other four arguments. In this piece, we’ll talk about two that are interrelated:
- Facts are something we make or, as I prefer to say, something we build.
- Building a modern fact requires a particular procedure. If you don’t follow that protocol, you might have some kind of knowledge, but you won’t have a fact.
Before I said, “If a tree falls in a forest without human observers, it did actually fall, but its fall is not a fact without some human participation.”
Facts are not natural phenomena. A coral reef is not a fact, but we have gathered information about coral reefs and built quite a few facts about them. And that’s the point. We (humans) gathered and built. Facts are human artifacts, so to speak, just as much so as the Rosetta Stone or the results of a Kardashian lip augmentation surgery.
When I talk about my book project with folks (working title: How to Build a Fact: the Wikipedia Paradox and the Perilous Future of Knowledge), a common response is, “Aren’t facts just… facts?
At first I struggled to respond. There is a sense of the word that makes us think that facts are somehow just… there, sitting out there being facts in the world whether we discover them or not.
Merriam-Webster’s first definition of the word is “something that has actual existence, an actual occurrence.”
So, yes we do use the word as if simply existing or occurring makes something a fact. The Oxford Dictionary of Sociology kicks off its definition thus: “any statement which is true can be described as a fact.” The Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy goes so far as to say that facts, “are part of the furniture of the world.”
Seems pretty straightforward, but we should always keep reading dictionary entries for the other definitions.
Here’s Merriam-Webster’s second definition: “a piece of information presented as having objective reality.” Right there you have a human presenting something.
You don’t even want to know what happens next in the Stanford article (if you really do, go check it out yourself). Oxford’s entry ends thus: “Facts are also considered to be provisional–considered true until shown otherwise.”
Wait a minute. I like my truths to be a little more solid, maybe even eternal. Oxford starts with a with a tautology about a tautology (a fact is something true is a fact), but that all falls apart when they admit that facts are provisional.
The idea that facts are just out there in the world existing and occurring–and all we do is go about discovering them–reduces an important human enterprise to the act of merely collecting, as if facts are just seashells we gather during a leisurely stroll on a beach.
So, again, what is a fact? Figuring it out on your own will send you down many rabbit holes, so I’ve narrowed a world of the clearest answers I could find down to a few important elements. The Fact Protocol, if you will. If these seem like gobbledygook, hang in there. I’ll break them down.
- Facts can be verified or validated against experience or evidence.
- Facts are falsifiable (or refutable), “provisional–considered true until shown otherwise.”
- Factual verifications or refutations must meet objective or universal criteria, with the caveat that…
- The criteria against which facts are verified and/or refuted vary by discipline or topic area. Scientists and historians, for instance, have different ways of establishing sufficient evidence (so not so perfectly “universal” after all).
Before we dig in, here’s the thing. That’s a lot of verbs! Actions! A rock can roll down a hill, but it will never verify anything. A coral reef does not refute and has no consideration for truth. A seashell has no criteria in mind, ever. In other words, facts are something we, humans, build through our actions.
Let’s get back to Diderot.
Let’s compare my love for my little wingless fur dragon to coral reefs. Let’s make it even more specific, something we know about coral reefs. From Wikipedia: “In 2016, bleaching of coral on the Great Barrier Reef killed between 29 and 50 percent of the reef’s coral.”
Coral bleaching happens when baby coral–polyps–excrete the algae they feed on and protect in a symbiotic relationship, and then they eventually starve to death. They do this primarily when their home water temperatures rise beyond the point at which they have evolved over millennia to sustain the symbiosis.
I have experienced coral bleaching. Snorkeling is one of my favorite outdoor activities. I haven’t gotten to do it a lot because of where I’ve lived, but as a child I was fortunate to snorkel off Honolulu (my birthplace) and across the Caribbean. Eleven years ago, I attempted to snorkel–alone and after many years without practice– a sharp cliff in the Red Sea. It was beautiful for a moment, but I ripped one of my legs to shreds just before a long flight home.
More recently, a cousin was working in the U.S. Virgin Islands and invited me for a birthday visit. We snorkeled three or four locations, and honestly, I was devastated.
My expectations from the expeditions of my youth were dashed. Most of the coral was gray. The water was ashy with what I can only assume was dead organic matter. The fish were few and far between, rather than schooling playfully and plentifully like they do in my memories. In one bay, we were delighted by a bale of Hawksbill sea turtles, but otherwise snorkeling was nothing like I remembered.
I knew about coral bleaching, but seeing is believing (Fact Protocol point one). I love reefs, and I hope we find a way to reverse this tide of doom. I may never snorkel again.
And I love Diderot. Let’s use the Fact Protocol to compare the statement “I love Diderot” to “coral bleaching is on the rise and killing the world’s reefs.”
Verifying/validating against experience or evidence:
As I suggested in Part 1, you will find no sufficient evidence for my love for Diderot, nor will you experience it, because it happens inside of me. You may find evidence for loving behavior, but while that behavior may be available to the Fact Protocol, my interior experience is not.
You can experience coral bleaching, as I have. A simple web search will give you a long list of destinations for your own evidence gathering. Since we’re not traveling much these days, you can continue your web search or call a librarian to discover a mountain of documented experience and evidence about the phenomena.
Actually, what you will find is not a mountain, but a dense, fibrous network, a web of measurements and other observations that knit together to form factual statements about coral bleaching.
Remember when I quoted Wikipedia above? Did you call me out in your head for quoting Wikipedia unquestioningly? On the site, that one sentence carries three citation links to articles from The Guardian, The Independent, and the peer-reviewed science journal Nature. Follow those links, and you will find ever more links connecting you to the vast web of experience and evidence, produced by highly trained people, that supports the factual statement.
Falsifying and refuting
Refute my love for Diderot, and I’ll refute you right back. Continue, and we’ll be locked in an endless loop, refuting and refuting again with nothing external to us to settle our conflict.
Refute the trend of coral bleaching, with appropriate and sufficient evidence, and scientific and nature loving communities will rejoice. They will be glad that the trend has reversed, glad the facts have changed, and you will find yourself on the cover of magazines celebrated for changing the facts. And you will have deserved it, because to do so would have required enormous effort, rigor, and resources on your part.
If I were pitching facts to a Silicon Valley VC, I would say the way facts change is a feature, not a bug. Indeed, it may be their primary value proposition.
They don’t change on a whim nor are they torn or tossed in the winds of political change. There is a process, the Fact Protocol, that governs their evolution and keeps them linked to that network of observations.
Objective or universal criteria
My whole argument that “I love my cat is not a factual statement” boils down to this: there are no criteria for establishing my love as factual.
Coral reef scientists have established criteria called measurements. Decades of sampling polyp populations. A universal system for comparing temperature over time. Photography, microscopy, and all the tools biologists and geologists have built over a few hundred years to make apples-to-apples comparisons in the natural world. “Universal” is a tricky idea, but these tools and criteria get pretty close to the ideal.
Different disciplines, different criteria
I don’t know which disciplines would be interested in the question of whether I love my cat, but I do know that different disciplines establish their facts in different ways.
Science has measurement, experiment, and the observational tools that make the other two possible. Historians have documents. They can share tools. Once photography was widely available, it created factual criteria for both disciplines, but they use the tools differently to establish criteria that are relevant inside their own investigations. Any good historian will tell you that historical facts are more provisional than established most of the time, ever more so the farther back in history one goes. There’s a whole field–historiography–in which the criteria for establishing historical fact is debated and refined over time.
Sociologists will tell you that things like laws and institutions (from marriage to your local Elks Lodge) are “social facts” because, “they impose themselves… [and] constrain individual behavior,” (Oxford Dictionary of Sociology again). This is a wildly different criterion than those used to establish facts about coral bleaching, but the point is that it is a useful criterion for sociologists.
Since different disciplines build facts differently, confusion or deliberate manipulation often arises. “Well, those climate scientists may have their facts, but we have ours.” Not so. Belief, political or economic inconvenience, these are not factual criteria because they can’t be tied to anything approaching universal experience, and the ideas they motivate are not usually open to being refuted.
And the point is?
Facts are useful assertions, surprisingly durable units of knowledge, that we build in order to form agreements about the basic status of the world so that we may share and navigate that world together.
Why does it matter that facts are built by us? Why is the Fact Protocol important? It comes down to belief, trust, and respect.
Belief is a powerful force in human life. It motivates our creativity and our destructive instincts. At the end of the day, how you know what you know is a matter of trust, because we’ve built a knowledge world too large for any single human to comprehend.
Facts are also powerful. They are a way to know things that doesn’t require belief. Believing in a god, for example, is categorically distinct from knowing that the coral reefs of the world are dying.
Facts do require some trust, but not in any particular fact itself. Remember, each fact invites refutation, and facts evolve as we investigate them and grow the network of observation. What we can trust in is the Fact Protocol itself. It offers a habit of thought, a North Star against which we can navigate the dark waters of disinformation and an ever expanding, always confusing information landscape.
I’ll give the final word for now to Hannah Arendt, a meaty morsel from her Origins of Totalitarianism you can chew on until I come back with the next installment :
The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience … What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.
Up next: we’ve only been building facts for a short period of human history.
