WHAT IS A FACT?

One of the statements, among many, for which the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is famous is this one (slightly altered): “You are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” This is so, because opinions do not need to be based on facts. We might like them to be, but they don’t have to be.

An opinion is a view or perspective grounded in feeling or sentiment more than in reason or critical judgment. Since we all have feelings about and reactions to what we see or feel, hear or read, we form opinions about these experiences. If we are satisfied with our opinions, we examine no further. If we are not, if we wish to understand the basis for our opinion, we search out information about or information underlying that opinion that might be based on facts.

Some people hold the opinion, especially among Trump whisperers and apologists, that Moynihan is wrong. These people offer a makeshift reality of “alternative facts.” This reality is, of course, a Peter-Pan reality of make-believe, which makes it a perspective of only belief — something held to be true because we want it to be, hope it is, or accept on faith or the views of others that it is so. In other words, this “reality” is opinion-based and thus without fact or knowledge. It is, therefore, no reality at all.

What, then, is a fact? First, facts aren’t like rocks that you trip over while on a nature walk, though by stumbling over one, you do learn one fact: Rocks are hard. But this insight tells us something about facts: They rest on observable evidence often gleaned from experience.

On the other hand, the Trump whisperers and apologists may actually have stumbled onto one insight about facts: They are made. How they are made, however, separates real facts from Trumpist alternative, make-believe facts.

The word “fact” derives from the Latin facere, “to do or to make.” A fact, then, is a thing made or done. So, why can’t facts be made up?

They are made up, but made up of what? This is what separates alternative facts from actual facts.

Consider science. Science relies upon empirical facts. “Empirical” literally means “something made through trial.” To be established in science as a fact, something must be observable through our five senses or their extensions (telescopes, microscopes, sonar, and the like). Those observations must then be replicated. Scientists repeat experiments, or trials, to determine whether the observations and results hold. When they do, then the community of scientists trained to carry out these trials reach consensus and establish their results as evidence — that which could be seen and demonstrated by anyone adequately trained to conduct the experiments and evaluate the results. This evidence serves as the basis for establishing the results as fact.

Early on during the Covid pandemic, epidemiologists disagreed over the efficacy, for example, of masks, since there was no agreement — because there was inadequate evidence — about how the virus was transmitted. Once it was established through tests and over time that Covid was air-borne, then epidemiologists agreed on the fact that masks worked to help mitigate the spread.

In the political arena, despite repeated state-sanctioned and independent audits of election results showing no widespread fraud, Trumpists continue to claim, now over three years out, that the presidential election was stolen from Trump. All evidence, including multiple court cases, points to a free and fair election. So, too, does the evidence in elections held in 2022 and 2023, which some Trumpists like Kari Lake claim were also stolen. The alternative facts of non-documented migrants voting, of ballot stuffing, of ballots destroyed, and of shenanigans by election officials, both Republican and Democrat, have not a scintilla of evidence supporting the allegations.

In short, these “facts” rest on nothing but wishful thinking, imagination, rumors, and outright deceit. Rudy Giuliani is cited under oath by the former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers as confessing, “We have a lot of theories, but we just don’t have the evidence.”

Notice that even with empirical evidence, there is nothing specified that the trials must relate only to our five senses and their extensions. Such trials are the bedrock in the domain of science. But there can be trials that are mental and conceptual experiments. Facts, then, can be “made” and established in other ways. Could there be interpretive or hermeneutical facts as well?

Let’s take as an example Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. First, we know that the play exists. We can read it for ourselves, even though it was written around 1600. Though widely accepted that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, it is not an established fact. Coming from a humble background with low education, William Shakespeare, it is alleged, lacked the knowledge, especially of the operations and personages of the royal court, central to many of his plays. This has led to speculation that someone high-born and more tied to the court, someone such as Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere (the Earl of Oxford), wrote them. Is this simply a conspiracy theory, like so many in our current age? We lack the evidence to establish definitively whether Shakespeare did or didn’t write his plays.

We can establish, however, facts about Hamlet. It is a set length, with set characters. The play takes place in Elsinore Castle in Denmark. Hamlet is the prince of Denmark, investigating the recent death of his father, the king, and the equally recent marriage of his uncle, Claudius, now ruling Denmark, to Hamlet’s mother.

Did Hamlet actually see the ghost of his father? That view would require investigating the possible existence of ghosts, about which there are few facts. Was Hamlet insane? Answering that question requires interpretation of the text itself. Such an interpretation must rely on examining the actual text for evidence in Hamlet’s actions and statements and then assessing that evidence in the light of what we currently know about insanity and mental instability. The text provides the body of evidence used to reach a conclusion about Hamlet’s mental health.

Not just any interpretation will do. A sound interpretation must rely on the actual text, our body of evidence. To argue, for example, that the play is about the life and times in Elsinore, a hamlet in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and the Yorick family that runs the village, will be met with stares and open mouths, since nothing in the play itself points to anything like this.

Rather than physical evidence, interpretive or hermeneutical facts require reasons. But interpretations aren’t facts, are they? It seems to me that they can be, since they are “made” the same way as scientific facts: A body of observers, adequately trained to read and interpret the data, after replicating the experiments (that is, after many readings and discussions of the text), agrees intersubjectively on the evidence produced by their interpretive experiments and observations. That agreement, made through these essential steps, provides the evidence to conclude that this is a fact.

Facts in the physical world are things; facts in the hermeneutical world are thoughts. Yet to determine conceptual facts requires taking the exact same steps that are required to establish scientific or empirical facts: Persons adequately trained to read a text offer an account of what they have read and how they interpret it. Those assessing these accounts must not only interpret what they have seen, but they must also agree using reasons and textual evidence on that interpretation. Failing all of that, as in science, there is no establishment of facts.

We aren’t after facts simply for the sake of having facts. We pursue facts for the sake of truth, for facts in the form of evidence and reasons are the basis of truth.

Keep in mind that no one has his or her own truth, any more than one has his or her own facts. Truths are constructed as facts are made. “My truth” or “truth for me” is nothing short of an opinion, because the basis of truth rests on reasons and evidence, the same bedrock as facts. To be real, to be true, your insights must be shared with others, analyzed and examined by them, defended by you, and thus validated through the communal interaction of those who can “see” (through observable evidence or interpretive reasons) what you are saying or claiming. Failing that test and that agreement, there is no truth, just as there can be no facts.

But what if we live now on the cusp of a “post-truth world”? In this world AI-faked pictures of a nude Taylor Swift are actually Taylor Swift, no matter what evidence to the contrary exists; all elections are stolen and fraudulent unless won by Republicans; vaccines don’t work or actually do more harm than good; climate change, despite the intensified fires, floods, and storms we see, is a hoax; hordes are streaming across our borders to steal our jobs, commit acts of terror, smuggle in fentanyl, and use our social services while refusing to pay taxes. In this world, people believe whatever they want, act on those beliefs, and persecute those who believe something else.

Can you imagine living in a world where facts don’t matter, education is for suckers, expertise is elitist manipulation, and truth is whatever a person says it is? You should imagine it, because with the level of lies spewing from Republican leaders and officials, the “QAnonification” of the right, and the level of disinformation and misinformation that media platforms are either unwilling or unable to curtail, that world does not seem far off. Indeed, the election this fall, with the already visible use by one party of authoritarian promises, conspiracies, and alternative facts, may push us from the precipice into the abyss.

Is it a fact, then, that we are on the cusp of losing our democracy?