1. A Brief History of Facts
By David Wootton
Posted 13th February 2017, 12:22
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?
The concept of ‘the fact’ first appearsinRenaissanceLatin, but the
word only entered commonusage in the1660s. The Royal Society,
founded in November 1660, was dedicated toexperimental
2. knowledge and declared that it would concernitself with ‘factsnot
explanations’. ‘Facts’becamepart ofa modern vocabularyfor
discussing knowledge – also including theories, hypotheses,
evidence and experiments – which emerged inthe 17th century. All
these words existed before, but with different meanings:
‘experiment’, for example, simplymeant ‘experience’.
Alongsidethis new conceptionof facts, a philosophicaldiscussion
developed about what they actuallywere. David Hume (1711-76) was
the first ‘philosopher of the fact’. Hume argued that factsbelonged in
a separatecategoryfrom ‘necessarytruths’. It is necessarilytrue, for
example, that all the angles of a triangleadd up to two right angles.
Facts, on the contrary, arecontingent rather thannecessary: that is,
they could be otherwise. My nameis ‘David’. My parentscould have
called me ‘John’, so it is a fact that I am called David. That factsare
trueis their most peculiar feature. You canhave alternativetheories
and hypotheses, but not alternative facts. Factsthat aresuccessfully
disputed ceaseto be facts, while theoriesthat aresuccessfully
disputed continuetobe theories.
That truestatementsabout thereal world have alwaysexisted is
beyond dispute. But thecategoriesintowhich we placesuch
statementshavenot always existed. People have alwaysbeen
concerned to get what we call ‘the facts’right. The astronomer
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), for example, went to great lengthsto
get precisemeasurementsof the locationof Marsin the sky so he
could calculateitsorbit not approximatelybut exactly. In order to
explainthisobsession he had to use a Greek phrase: he wanted to
find out to hoti – that which is.
But if trueand precisestatementsarenot new, why does theword
‘fact’– and its definitionassomething that is true – matter? One
reason is that beforethere were factstherewere authorities. Ifan
important Greekor Roman author said theBabylonians cooked eggs
by whirling them round in slings; or garlic disempowersmagnets; or
diamondscannot becrushed into powder; or boatsfloat higher in
the water when they are farther from land; or the nerves originatein
the heart, then thiswas considered to be necessarilytrue. In the
course of the 17th centuryclaimslike these were routinely dismissed.
For example, Galileo said: we have eggs, slings and strong young
men. If we cannot cook eggs by whirling them round in slings then
we can be sure the Babylonianscould not. The key point about facts
is that they trump authority: President Trumpsaying that thecrowd
at as his inaugurationwasthelargest ever, cannot makeit true.
3. Indeed, before the inventionof the fact, what we would regard as
entirely illegitimateargumentsregardingcontingent truestatements
were held to have some validity. Thus, under Roman
law, rumor and fama might help to prove guilt: gossip, hearsayand
reputationcould beintroduced incourt and could determinethe
outcome. The value of your evidencedepended on who you were as
well as what you knew: the evidenceof a manwas preferred to that
of a woman, of a gentlemanto that of a labourer. In English law, the
jury in the17th centurywasstill supposed to use itsown local
knowledge to decidethe case.
Why did authoritiesdeclineand becomereplaced by facts? In the
17th centurythe natureof informationchanged: asinformation
becamemorereliable, authoritybecameless so. New rules were
established asto how to judgewhether informationwasaccurate:
eyewitnesses becamecrucial; experimentshad tobe repeated;
reportshad to be cited and compared. Theimpact ofthe printing
press drove this new scepticism, with vast amountsofinformation
availablefor the first time. Sourcescould be accuratelycited and
new, accurateinformationcould displaceold, inaccurate
information. Factsdeveloped with a convictionthat knowledgecould
progress. When Galileo wasa professor in the 17th centuryhe was
required toteach astronomyfrom a 13th-centurytextbook. Even at
the end of the 17th century, professors in Oxford were supposed to
teach naturalphilosophyfrom the textsof Aristotle. These
antiquated authoritiesoriginated ina manuscript culturewhich was
swept away by print.
We now live in a digitalage, inwhich informationbecomesfluid and
variable. All that was solid has melted into air. In the print world,
getting your factsright wasabout competenceand care; now what
the factsaredepends on what dateyou accessa website, or which
websiteyou visit. The natureof informationhaschanged
irreversibly.
On Tuesday February7th I listened to an appealcourt hearing on
President Trump’sexecutiveorder banning traveltothe US by
people from certaincountries. Oneissue was whether the banwas
intended to discriminateagainst Muslims. Opponentsof the ban
cited newspaper articlesquoting Donald Trump (beforehe was
elected), which they claimed proved the trueraciallycharged
motivesunderlying theorder. Lawyers for the government said it
was inappropriatetouse newspaper articlesto contest an executive
order madeby the president. Thejudgesasked if the government
intended to introduceevidenceto show the newspaper articleswere
4. false. They did not. They wanted simply to brush them aside. They
wanted the court to be confined to the text of the executiveorder and
insisted it should not look beyond that text. Theywanted an appeal
to the factsto be ‘trumped’by an appealto authority.
Why is thishappening? Because, it seems, we no longer trust the
facts. The president tells us we cannot trust the mainstreammedia,
while that samemedia says his supporterspeddlefake news. For the
first timethere arefactsand (in Kellyanne Conway’s notorious
phrase) ‘alternativefacts’. As factsbecomefluid they become
contestable; thetruth becomes(once again) something you assert,
not something you prove. It used to be a peculiar characteristicof
totalitarianregimesthat theymadethe factsfit their purposes; now
it seems thiscanhappen in a functioning democracy. Asthecourt
pointed out in itsjudgement on February9th, the government had
repeatedlyasserted that nationalsecuritywasat stake and that this
was why its order should not be stayed, though it had produced no
evidence to support thisassertion. The courtsappear tobe trying to
preserve standardsof reliability and evidencethat arebeing
undermined inthe digitalage. Will they succeed? Only timewill tell.
David Wootton'smost recent book, The Inventionof Science, is
published by Allen Lane.
