A Brief History of Facts
The rise of ‘the fact’ during the 17th century came at the expense of the power of authority. Could the digital age reverse how we decide what is true and what is not?
David Hume (1711-76) was the first ‘philosopher of the fact’. Hume argued that facts belonged in a separate category from ‘necessary truths’. It is necessarily true, for example, that all the angles of a triangle add up to two right angles. Facts, on the contrary, are contingent rather than necessary: that is, they could be otherwise.
My name is ‘David’. My parents could have called me ‘John’, so it is a fact that I am called David.
.. You can have alternative theories and hypotheses, but not alternative facts. Facts that are successfully disputed cease to be facts, while theories that are successfully disputed continue to be theories.
.. The key point about facts is that they trump authority: President Trump saying that the crowd at as his inauguration was the largest ever, cannot make it true.
.. Indeed, before the invention of the fact, what we would regard as entirely illegitimate arguments regarding contingent true statements were held to have some validity. Thus, under Roman law, rumor and fama might help to prove guilt: gossip, hearsay and reputation could be introduced in court and could determine the outcome. The value of your evidence depended on who you were as well as what you knew
.. The impact of the printing press drove this new scepticism, with vast amounts of information available for the first time. Sources could be accurately cited and new, accurate information could displace old, inaccurate information.
.. Lawyers for the government said it was inappropriate to use newspaper articles to contest an executive order made by the president. The judges asked if the government intended to introduce evidence to show the newspaper articles were false. They did not. They wanted simply to brush them aside. They wanted the court to be confined to the text of the executive order and insisted it should not look beyond that text. They wanted an appeal to the facts to be ‘trumped’ by an appeal to authority.
.. the truth becomes (once again) something you assert, not something you prove. It used to be a peculiar characteristic of totalitarian regimes that they made the facts fit their purposes; now it seems this can happen in a functioning democracy. As the court pointed out in its judgement on February 9th, the government had repeatedly asserted that national security was at stake and that this was why its order should not be stayed, though it had produced no evidence to support this assertion. The courts appear to be trying to preserve standards of reliability and evidence that are being undermined in the digital age.