Topics Truth

Question How could we distinguish facts and interpretations of facts? Some say that facts are given, others say that they are constructed by theories. Could we still say that facts are independent or previous to theories?

Accepted:
September 7, 2007

Comments

The tricky thing about this issue is to decide what the issue is. Some people seem to want to say that all facts are constructed, but I've never really understood what this is supposed to mean. Let me yank at a few threads and see if any of them are connected to the worry.

Some facts depend on our conventions, institutions and so on. A well-worn example: I have a shiny round bit of metal in front of me. As a matter of fact, it's a quarter; it's worth $.25. That really is a fact, but it wouldn't be a fact if we didn't have certain practices, institutions and so on. In at least some sense of "constructed," it's a constructed fact.

We also classify things in various ways. Some of those classifications grow out of our interests, beliefs and so on. Classifying music according to genre is relatively benign; classifying people according to the racial categories of apartheid-era South Africa or the antebellum American South is anything but benign. Sometimes we take our classifications to mark deep distinctions in nature when all they really reflect our our own shallow points of view. But it may be, all the same, that some ways of classifying things "cut nature at its joints," as they say. Protons and electrons are arguably real kinds, and among the basic things from which nature is built. Charge and mass may be basic, perfectly natural properties.

Some philosophers -- nominalists of various sorts -- reject the very idea that some ways of classifying things are more true to the world than others. Others -- David Lewis is an important recent example -- would say that we can't get around presupposing that there really are natural properties, even though there's room to fight over just what sort of beast a property is. If this sort of view is right, then there are facts independent of any theories.

Interpretation is a slippery concept. Sometimes my interpretation of a situation is just plain wrong. I may have seen you through the window and interpreted the expression on your face as deep sorrow. In fact, you may have been laughing hysterically. My interpretation was wrong. On the other hand, when what we're trying to interpret is an artifact, "better" and "worse" are sometimes more useful ways of judging interpretations than "right" and "wrong." (Is Hamlet a story about a man with an Oedipus complex? That interpretation got a good deal of mileage, but it's not clear whether there's any hard fact of the matter.)

Here's a view. (It's a crude version of what David Lewis believed.) At bottom, there are perfectly natural properties, distributed in space-time in some particular way. There are facts about all that, whether we know them or not. And everything else is fixed by those facts; there couldn't be any differences at the level of ships, shoes, food fights and French literary theory without differences at that basic level. If Lewis was broadly right (and I've never seen any good reason to think that he was wildly wrong), then the idea that it's interpretive mush all the way down is a mistake.

Question How could we distinguish facts and interpretations of facts? Some say that facts are given, others say that they are constructed by theories. Could we still say that facts are independent or previous to theories? Accepted:September 7, 2007

Question How could we distinguish facts and interpretations of facts? Some say that facts are given, others say that they are constructed by theories. Could we still say that facts are independent or previous to theories?

Accepted:
September 7, 2007