From: L. Michael Hall
2021 Neurons #72
November 8, 2021
Facts #3

Once you have a health skepticism about “the facts” that you are regularly fed by the media, you can prepare yourself to think through those facts to determine their validity, truthfulness, and usefulness.  That facts are critically important, no one will deny.  To think clearly we need facts.  And we need them for many reasons.

For one thing, we need facts in order to be sane.  As facts ground us to what is real and actual, they save us from living in an imaginary, pretend world.  That’s why we scour for facts. We collect them, analyze them, interpret them, and then use them to build knowledge. Learning works best when it is connected to reality.  Alfred Korzybski noted this in his classic, Science and Sanity:

“Men do not ‘go crazy’ in response to facts as such.  They tend to ‘go crazy’ as they get away from facts, out of touch with reality—when what they say and think no longer stand in an adequate relationship to their world of not-words.” (1933/1994, p. 175).

From: L. Michael Hall
2021 Neurons #71
November 1, 2021
Fates #2

“Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.”
Jack Webb’s Joe Friday of Dragnet

I noted in the last Neurons (#70) that we talk about facts as if they were things and objects, as if they were empirical and sensory-based.  We talk about facts as if a fact will bring a controversy to an end..  “Now here are the facts; case closed.”  But unfortunately, things are just not that simple or cut-and-dried.

On first glance, it seems that facts are ... well, factual— real, sensory-based and therefore uncontroversial.  While facts seem like a solid things, they are not.  Can you see a fact?  What does a fact look like?  Things are just not that simple.  What we call “facts” are our concepts about things and not the things themselves.  The word “fact” itself is not empirical.  The word fact is a nominalization and a category.  It refers to a category of things that normally we would consider sensory-based of something actually done.  Yet sensory-based facts are, at best, facts at a macro-level.  At worse, sensory-based facts may be illusions altogether.  When you put a stick in water, you will see it as if it were bent and not straight.  But it is not bent.  It only appears that way to your eyes.

Kinds of facts: One fact about a fact (a meta-fact) is that there are many kinds of facts.

From: L. Michael Hall
2021 Neurons #70
October 25, 2021

After writing about Media Ethics (#69) last week and writing about “facts,” I decided that I would do some critical thinking about facts.  As I got into the process, I discovered that it is a lot harder than I suspected.  Like most people, I start from the false premise that a fact is empirical data.  Even the dictionary makes this confusion: “Fact: Information presented as objectively real; something having real, demonstratable existence; a thing that has been done.”  From Latin facere “to do.”

Now facts are funny things.   Not funny as in “ha ha” or in laughing out-loud, but funny in a strange, weird, and amazing way.  They are funny in that we think of them as so real and solid, yet that is just not the case.  Thinking critically about facts, in fact, takes us into a realm where there is a lot of room for wonderment and curiosity.