What Are ‘Facts’?

On the trail of the Higgs Boson

Posted by Keith Tidman

What are 'facts'? The ages-long history of deception and sleights of hand and mind — including propaganda and political and psychological legerdemain — demonstrates just one of the many applications of false facts. But similar presentations of falsities meant to deceive, sow discord, or distract have been even more rife today, via the handiness and global ubiquity of the Internet. An enabler is the too-frequent lack of judicious curation and vetting of facts. And, in the process of democratizing access to facts, self-serving individuals may take advantage of those consumers of information who are ill-equipped or disinclined (unmotivated) to discern whether or not content is true. Spurious facts dot the Internet landscape, steering beliefs, driving confirmation bias, and conjuring tangible outcomes such as voting decisions. Interpretations of facts become all the more confounding in political arenas, where interpretations (the understanding) of facts among differently minded politicians becomes muddled, and ‘what’s actually the case’ remains opaque.

And yet surely it is the total anthology of facts — meaning things (their properties), concepts, and their interrelationships — that composes reality. Facts have multiple dimensions, including what one knows (epistemological aspects), how one semantically describes what’s known (linguistic aspects), and what meaning and purpose one attributes to what’s known (metaphysical aspects).

Facts are known on a sliding scale of certainty. An example that seems compelling to me comes from just a few years ago, when scientists announced that they had confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, whose field generates mass through its interaction with other particles. The Higgs’s existence had been postulated earlier in mathematical terms, but empirical evidence was tantalizingly sought over a few decades. The ultimate confirmation was given a certainty of ‘five sigma’: that there was less than 1 chance in 3.5 million that what was detected was instead a random fluctuation. Impressive enough from an empirical standpoint to conclude discovery (a fact), yet still short of absolute certainty. With resort to empiricism, there is no case where some measure of doubt (of a counterfactual), no matter how infinitesimally small, is excluded.

Mathematics, meantime, provides an even higher level of certainty (rigor of method and of results) in applying facts to describe reality: Newtonian, Einsteinian, quantum theoretical, and other models of scientific realism. Indeed, mathematics, in its precise syntax, universal vocabulary, and singular purpose, is sometimes referred to as the language of reality. Indeed, as opposed to the world’s many natural languages (whose known shortcomings limit understanding), mathematics is the best, and sometimes the only, language for describing select facts of science (mathematical Platonism) — whereby mathematics is less invented than it is discovered as a special case of realism.

Facts are also contingent. Consider another example from science: Immediately following the singularity of the Big Bang, an inflationary period occurred (lasting a tiny fraction of a second). During that inflationary period, the universe — that is, the edges of space-time (not the things within space-time) — expanded faster than the speed of light, resulting in the first step toward the cosmos’s eventual lumpiness, in the form of galaxies, stars, planets. The laws — that is, the facts — of physics were different during the inflation than what scientists are familiar with today — today’s laws of physics breaking down as one looks back closer and closer to the singularity. In this cosmological paradigm, facts are contingent on the peculiar circumstances of the inflationary epoch. This realization points broadly to something capable of being a fact even if we don’t fully understand it.

The sliding scale of certainty and facts’ contingency apply all the more acutely when venturing into other fields. Specifically, the recording of historical events, personages, and ideas, no matter the scholarly intent, often contain biases — judgments, symbols, interpretations — brought to the page by those historians whose contemporaneous accounts may be tailored to self-serving purposes, tilting facts and analyses. In natural course, follow-on historians inadvertently adopt those original biases while not uncommonly folding in their own. Add to this mix the dynamic, complex, and unpredictable (chaotic) nature of human affairs, and the result is all the more shambolic. The accretion of biases over the decades, centuries, and millennia doesn’t of course change reality as such— what happened historically has an underlying matter-of-factness, even if it lingers between hard and impossible to tease out. But the accretion does distort (and on occasion even falsify) what’s understood.

This latter point suggests that what’s a fact and what’s true might either intersect or diverge; nothing excludes either possibility. That is, facts may be true (describe reality) or false (don’t describe reality), depending on their content. (Fairies don’t exist in physical form — in that sense, are false — but do exist nonetheless, legendarily woven into elaborate cultural lore — and in that sense, are true.) What’s true or false will always necessitate the presence of facts, to aid determinations about truth-values. Whereas facts simply stand out there: entirely indifferent to what’s true or false, or what’s believed or known, or what’s formally proven, or what’s wanted and sought after, or what’s observable. That is, absent litmus tests of verifiability. In this sense, given that facts don’t necessarily have to be about something that exists, ‘facts’ and ‘statements’ serve interchangeably.

Facts’ contingency also hinges in some measured, relativistic way on culture. Not as a universally  normative standard for all facts or for all that’s true, of course, but in ways that matter and give shared purpose to citizens of a particular society. Acknowledged facts as to core values — good versus evil, spirituality, integrity, humanitarianism, honesty, trustworthiness, love, environmental stewardship, fairness, justice, and so forth — often become rooted in society. Accordingly, not everyone’s facts are everyone else’s: facts are shaped and shaded both by society and by the individual. The result is the culture-specific normalising of values — what one ‘ought’ to do, ideally. As such, there is no fact-value dilemma. In this vein, values don’t have to be objective to be factual — foundational beliefs, for example, suffice. Facts related to moral realism, unlike scientific and mathematical realism, have to be invented; they’re not discoverable as already-existing phenomena.

Facts are indispensable to describing reality, in both its idealistic (abstract) and realistic (physical) forms. There is no single, exclusive way to define facts; rationalism, empiricism, and idealism all pertain. Yet subsets of facts, and their multifaceted relationships that intricately bear on each other’s truth or falsity, enable knowledge and meaning (purpose) to emerge — an understanding, however imperfect, of slices of abstract and physical reality that our minds piece together as a mosaic. 

In short, the complete anthology of facts relates to all possible forms of reality, ranging the breadth of possibilities, from figments to suppositions to the verifiable phenomenal world.

How Shall We Re-establish Ethics in Our Time?

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

We have nothing to show today, writes Simon Blackburn, for ethical foundations. At the beginning of the 21st century, we are ethically adrift. Not reason, not religion, not intuition now seem adequate for grounding our behaviour.

Not only does this present us with a philosophical problem. On a social level, we are conflicted and disorientated with multiple ethics, while on a global level, our ethics increasingly seem to have come apart – with deepening poverty, social disintegration, and environmental destruction being the order of the day.

Philosophically, it was David Hume who first observed that we cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. We cannot, on the basis of a handful of facts, derive any values. Gradually, over the following centuries, this idea took hold – until, with Ludwig Wittgenstein, it achieved a wide acceptance. 'Whereof one cannot speak,' he wrote, 'thereof one must be silent.' He was referring, most importantly, to ethics.

How, then, shall we re-establish ethics in our time?

Many, today, would consider the very question to be foolish. Yet given two simple conceptual prerequisites, I propose that we may indeed re-establish ethics, philosophically:

• Prerequisite 1. The fact-value distinction would have to be set aside. This, I believe, should be possible by ridding ourselves of facts – and with facts, of things (facts are, after all, about things). This may not be as difficult as it seems.

• Prerequisite 2. We would need to reduce our world to relations, and only relations – without the existence of facts or things. Ethics – together with all other fields of inquiry – may then be defined in terms of relations, and relations alone.

With regard to the fact-value distinction then, it is important that we first understand that this rests on Hume's notion that all knowledge is subdivided into relations of ideas on the one hand, and matters of fact (and things) on the other. On closer examination, however, we find that this view cannot be sustained.

It was Francis Bacon who observed that the definitions of words have definitions. Similarly, we know that the features of words have features. Words, I have myself proposed, represent 'relations within relations'. Given that this is true, there can be no self-contained 'things'. Rather, our words (and thoughts) reach into an infinity of relations, and we speak about 'things' only by way of a truncated shorthand.

If, then, there are no self-contained 'things' in this world, and if our words (and thoughts) reach into infinity, then this must mean that we cannot speak truly about our world on the assumption that it is a closed system, in which we begin with axioms, origins, or specific reference points. This flies in the face of what we have before us. Rather, we need to step back from all systems, to view our world as an infinite canvas of relations.

I propose that we shall find, when we do this, that relations as a whole possess certain features – call them meta-features – many of which may only be recognised from a bird's eye view.

These features hold the promise of new ethical foundations:

• Feature 1. As we survey the infinite canvas of relations, we realise that some of the relations which we trace in this world do not in fact exist – and those relations which do not exist cannot form the basis of an acceptable ethics. Falsehood and deceit are, at bottom, attempts to trace non-existent relations.

• Feature 2. Since relations represent an infinite canvas – and any containment of relations detracts from this – the relations which we trace should range through all the world. The more we limit the scope of the relations which we trace, and the more we view things in isolation, the more we are at risk of fault or shipwreck, in any field.

• Feature 3. Since the relations which we trace should range through all the world, our ability to trace relations should not be obstructed or manipulated. This means that secrecy, propaganda, and misrepresentations are ruled out. Above all, an ethics of relations would favour an open society, since openness is a prerequisite for arranging our world.

• Feature 4. Relations are infinite, yet our minds are finite. Since our minds are capable only of encompassing limited regions of relations, this means that there will inevitably be relations which lie beyond our power to explain – and beyond our control. We need therefore to be acutely aware of our limitations of thought. There is no place for hubris.

• Feature 5. Infinite control is required to conquer infinite relations. Therefore our limitations may create within us powerful totalising urges. In view of our limitations therefore – which preclude any final ability to master our world – any ethics should avoid such totalising tendencies.

• Feature 6. When we elevate any given values above others in an infinity of relations, our (justified) fear that such values are empty and illusory grows. This may lead to a dysfunctional ethics, which drives us to fundamentalism – where fundamentalism is resistance to the fear of finding one's foundations to be exposed as baseless.

• Feature 7. We need to consider that we live in a world where new relations are continually emerging, which did not exist before, and in many cases were unimaginable just so many years ago. This means that ethics does not and cannot stand still.

Finally, when we view our world as an infinite canvas of relations, and only relations – having banished both 'facts' and 'things' – we may now define fact as those relations which are as we think they ought to be, and value as those relations which are as we think they ought not to be. In both cases, then – in all cases – we speak, at bottom, of 'ought'.

With careful consideration, we come to see that all of the natural and the human sciences, and all of our common life, represent value, not fact. Thus we escape the albatross of the fact-value distinction, and bring back ethics into the fold of philosophy.
____________________________

For a deeper exploration of these themes, one may refer to the author's Metaphysical Notes.

The Death of Rationalism

By Thomas Scarborough

We shall inhabit, for a moment, the world of the German philosophers Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen.  In 1973, Kamlah and Lorenzen co-authored the 'Logische Propädeutic' – an obscure title, with a dull brown cover, and ragged text hammered out on an electric typewriter. Yet it soon became a best-seller.

At its heart lies the concept of the predicator, which Kamlah and Lorenzen thought (in their definition of it) to be the key to a disciplined scientific and philosophical language. A predicator, to borrow a term from Gottlob Frege, 'saturates' the object. For example, in the sentence 'This is a Persian cat,' 'Persian cat' is the predicator. The technical definition: 'We assert a predicator of an object when we state something about the object.' A predicator, too, properly belongs only to a very limited range of predicators. For instance, one can point to a Cheshire cat and say, 'This is an animal,' although one cannot point to a Cheshire cat and say, 'This is a bicycle.' Predicators which are legitimately available for our use occur in chains, webs, or networks. For example:

    Cheshire cat → cat → animal → living thing
    Mountain bike → bicycle → vehicle → non-living thing

Note that, even at the end of such predicator chains, we may not arrive at anything common. To put this another way, a Cheshire cat and a mountain bike will rarely turn up in the same conversation. Therefore, the words which we speak fit comfortably into certain predicator chains, webs, or networks (we shall simply call them 'networks' here). Whether we speak about chemistry, ecclesiology, or philosophy, or anything else under the sun, our words fit comfortably into the subject under discussion. Yet even at the same time, most predicators will fail to fit into our conversation at any given time. For instance, while we are permitted to say, 'The maid carries the pail,' we cannot say, 'The maid carries the moon,' or anything of that sort.

In fact, our language is tightly constrained – so tightly constrained that when we put pen to paper, in whichever direction we cast our thoughts, we tend to be able only to construct networks of predicators which are agreeble to our starting point. Kamlah and Lorenzen observe, 'Predicators always stand in such a tightly woven nexus that any one tends to appear with others.' And briefly, they suggest a 'thought-provoking example': philosophy from Augustine to Leibniz was 'determined' by philosophers' understanding of predicators.

A philosophy has ambitions to think in every direction. Yet as it does so, it follows predicator rules (which resemble set theory), and is tightly bound by these rules. Thus Kamlah and Lorenzen note that we are 'thoroughly dominated by an unacknowledged metaphysics'. Therefore, as philosophers sat down in the past to write their philosophies, words were attracted to words – much as magnets snap to magnets – and so predicator networks produced philosophies. One merely needs to posit a starting point – the will to power, for instance – and snap-snap-snap, one has a philosophy. In short, philosophies self-assemble.

It happens through the very nature of words and their attractional forces. We all have experience of the same. Drop an origin into the middle of a pool of thought – or a starting point, a kernel, whatever one may call it – and a system grows. We sit down with a group of people in a hotel lobby. Our talk revolves around the tasteful furnishings and elegant décor. Then I drop a comment that I am doing fascinating research into elephants. From this, a string of conversation results which occupies the whole group for some time – until a concierge interrupts us with a message. I wonder then at my powers of influence. Yet it lies in the very nature of language, which click-click-clicks together in keeping with predicator rules.

Therefore, while philosophising may represent a more systematic pursuit than any casual combinations of words, philosophers have represented little more than the inclinations of the philosophers and their culture. All were bound by centuries of 'unacknowledged metaphysics' – namely, predicator rules. In fact, the same must apply to religion, politics, ethics. Predicator networks, even with the passage of time, remain largely intact. Is there an American in the house? The massacres of the Red Indians are in you, and you were in them. Is there a German? Adolf Hitler inhabits your mind, and you inhabited his. Is there a South African? Apartheid is in your heart, and you were in apartheid's heart.

Of course, we need not think so narrowly. There have been many Americans, Germans, and South Africans, as there have been people of many nations and cultures. A changed environment, too, means changed behaviour for the same hapless creatures. Even predicator networks will change. In this, Kamlah and Lorenzen set their hope. If we take a close look at the system and structure of our language over generations, indeed we may discern faint traces of change, if we focus hard enough.

The Death of Rationalism

By Thomas Scarborough

We shall inhabit, for a moment, the world of the German philosophers Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen.  In 1973, Kamlah and Lorenzen co-authored the 'Logische Propädeutic' – an obscure title, with a dull brown cover, and ragged text hammered out on an electric typewriter. Yet it soon became a best-seller.

At its heart lies the concept of the predicator, which Kamlah and Lorenzen thought (in their definition of it) to be the key to a disciplined scientific and philosophical language. A predicator, to borrow a term from Gottlob Frege, 'saturates' the object. For example, in the sentence 'This is a Persian cat,' 'Persian cat' is the predicator. The technical definition: 'We assert a predicator of an object when we state something about the object.' A predicator, too, properly belongs only to a very limited range of predicators. For instance, one can point to a Cheshire cat and say, 'This is an animal,' although one cannot point to a Cheshire cat and say, 'This is a bicycle.' Predicators which are legitimately available for our use occur in chains, webs, or networks. For example:

    Cheshire cat → cat → animal → living thing
    Mountain bike → bicycle → vehicle → non-living thing

Note that, even at the end of such predicator chains, we may not arrive at anything common. To put this another way, a Cheshire cat and a mountain bike will rarely turn up in the same conversation. Therefore, the words which we speak fit comfortably into certain predicator chains, webs, or networks (we shall simply call them 'networks' here). Whether we speak about chemistry, ecclesiology, or philosophy, or anything else under the sun, our words fit comfortably into the subject under discussion. Yet even at the same time, most predicators will fail to fit into our conversation at any given time. For instance, while we are permitted to say, 'The maid carries the pail,' we cannot say, 'The maid carries the moon,' or anything of that sort.

In fact, our language is tightly constrained – so tightly constrained that when we put pen to paper, in whichever direction we cast our thoughts, we tend to be able only to construct networks of predicators which are agreeble to our starting point. Kamlah and Lorenzen observe, 'Predicators always stand in such a tightly woven nexus that any one tends to appear with others.' And briefly, they suggest a 'thought-provoking example': philosophy from Augustine to Leibniz was 'determined' by philosophers' understanding of predicators.

A philosophy has ambitions to think in every direction. Yet as it does so, it follows predicator rules (which resemble set theory), and is tightly bound by these rules. Thus Kamlah and Lorenzen note that we are 'thoroughly dominated by an unacknowledged metaphysics'. Therefore, as philosophers sat down in the past to write their philosophies, words were attracted to words – much as magnets snap to magnets – and so predicator networks produced philosophies. One merely needs to posit a starting point – the will to power, for instance – and snap-snap-snap, one has a philosophy. In short, philosophies self-assemble.

It happens through the very nature of words and their attractional forces. We all have experience of the same. Drop an origin into the middle of a pool of thought – or a starting point, a kernel, whatever one may call it – and a system grows. We sit down with a group of people in a hotel lobby. Our talk revolves around the tasteful furnishings and elegant décor. Then I drop a comment that I am doing fascinating research into elephants. From this, a string of conversation results which occupies the whole group for some time – until a concierge interrupts us with a message. I wonder then at my powers of influence. Yet it lies in the very nature of language, which click-click-clicks together in keeping with predicator rules.

Therefore, while philosophising may represent a more systematic pursuit than any casual combinations of words, philosophers have represented little more than the inclinations of the philosophers and their culture. All were bound by centuries of 'unacknowledged metaphysics' – namely, predicator rules. In fact, the same must apply to religion, politics, ethics. Predicator networks, even with the passage of time, remain largely intact. Is there an American in the house? The massacres of the Red Indians are in you, and you were in them. Is there a German? Adolf Hitler inhabits your mind, and you inhabited his. Is there a South African? Apartheid is in your heart, and you were in apartheid's heart.

Of course, we need not think so narrowly. There have been many Americans, Germans, and South Africans, as there have been people of many nations and cultures. A changed environment, too, means changed behaviour for the same hapless creatures. Even predicator networks will change. In this, Kamlah and Lorenzen set their hope. If we take a close look at the system and structure of our language over generations, indeed we may discern faint traces of change, if we focus hard enough.

Rationalism and Relationality in Roman Catholicism

The Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Thomas Scarborough unravels links between metaphysics and theology in the writings of Fr. Cornelis (Kees) Thönissen.

About the size of a modern A4 sheet of paper, a painting of Benozzo Gozzoli (1471) hangs in the Louvre in Paris. Titled The Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, it depicts St. Thomas, seated with a completed metaphysic on his lap, flanked by Aristotle on the left, and Plato on the right. At his feet lies the Arabic philosopher Averroes.

It happened chiefly through the influence of St. Thomas Aquinas. Through Aquinas' writing, the thought of the Roman Catholic Church was tainted by barren metaphysics – which further opened the door, in time, to Enlightenment rationalism and scientific-technological reason. Such reason is linear, mathematical, geometric, and finally, analytic. It is epitomised by Newtonian logic, which works on universal laws. This means that everything rests on experiment, and thus the (observing) senses.

Such rationality, while it is rightly a part of the universal structure of what we are and who we are, has limitations of narrowness. Reason in its fulness, wrote Pope Benedict XVI, is far larger than that. It is the all-meaning logos, which is the reason of the mind of God. This includes the reason which asks: What is the meaning of all things? Why do things ‘hold together’ in the way that they do? Why are we here? To what personal purpose, and what end?

We may approach such questions in two ways:

1. By broadening our idea of what reason really is, and
2. By taking into account our human relationality.

THE FIRST APPROACH: Is our reason really capable, through the mind alone, of finding the ‘big’ answers tolife? The Roman Catholic Church has traditionally held: Yes. Yet what kind of ‘reason’ might this be? It cannot be the same as the narrow reason we have just described. Or does the Church's ‘reason’ really include insight as intuition – into and behind reality? Such a human capacity would lie beyond linear reason – beyond physics – a capacity which was partly perceived by Aristotle in his Meta-physics.

What then should we call this capacity or faculty ‘beyond reason’ – this something that we naturally, innately possess – this capacity which is somehow tied back to the ‘Being’ behind the universe: the religious spirit, the Jewish heart, the Greek pneuma, the breath of life, and the Christian soul? Aha, now we have passed further than the ‘mind alone,’ so that we need to rethink how we are constituted by our anthropological capacities, which are more than just a brain and a body.

The Roman Catholic tradition, when it speaks of reason, has failed to adequately distinguish reason in its fulness, as logos, from narrow Enlightenment reason or scientific-technological reason. Yet ‘reason’ clearly includes the insightful, spiritual capacities, or spiritual intuition. And there’s the debate set out for us! If we are content with rationalism coupled to our brains, we fool ourselves into shallowness. And such shallowness, as postmodernism has pointed out, cannot save us, or our planet.

What, then, is ‘the more’ of me and you about?

THE SECOND APPROACH: Most of all, each of us is heavily involved in relationships – or relationality. We find that what is most precious to us is our relations, which is the foci (persons!) that consume our energies. Aristotle and St. Thomas were more involved in things. So was Kant. Thus the category of relation was downgraded. So why has the Church pressed so heavily for thinkingourselves towards God (although this is valuable as far as it goes)?

We can think about relationships, but we do not think them. Those who are ‘in love’ don’t start there. They start with the experience of self-giving. The Judaeo-Christian religion begins with the Revelation of God, set in human history – above all through the Son of God on earth. A fresh, ‘humble’ metaphysics begins, not so much with God in himself as we think about him, but with God who is in relationship with me. It reverses the Church's traditional path. Through reason in its fulness, as logos, we may know God directly. This even a child can do. We’ve only made it hard because we double-think everything.

Relationality holds everything together in meaning. Therefore relationality has to be an essential category of our existence. Relations, then, occur in our experience – which makes experience an essential category, too. And we need to be able to intuit these relations, which requires a spiritual intuition or capacity beyond the brute force of narrow reason. Spiritual intuition, therefore, is as basic to our existence as scientific-technological reason.

---

A seven-hundred page dissertation by Fr. Dr. Cornelis (Kees) Thönissen OFM Cap. may be accessed (free) at:  Thönissen C.J. 2015. Foundations for Spirituality: A 'Hermeneutic of Reform' for a Church Facing Crises Inspired by St. Francis of Assisi. Pretoria: UNISA.