“Fact, fact, fact!” said the gentleman. And “Fact, fact, fact!” repeated Thomas Gradgrind.
There’s been a flurry of activity over the meaning of the word ‘fact’, and how this little word should be used in either theological or secular/scientific contexts. It all began with Keith Ward’s Guardian article in which he purported to show how “religion answers the factual questions that science neglects.” I responded to Ward on 1 November 2011 with a post entitled “Imaginary Homelands. Keith Ward Struggles with the Facts.” Jerry Coyne responded on the 6th of November with his post “Guardian writer foolishly claims that religion answers factual questions, in which he makes the following challenge:
I challenge Ward to give me just one reasonably well established fact about the world that comes from “general philosophical views, moral views, personal experience and judgment” without any verifiable empirical input.
This challenge was answered, in turn, by Jim Houston in The Philosophy Magazine blog Talking Philosophy, in which he takes Jerry Coyne to task for not having contacted Ward about his challenge, when, in fact, making the “challenge” was obviously rhetorical. To this Jerry Coyne replied with his post “Can philosophy or religion alone establish facts?” I’m not quite sure why Jerry decided to include philosophy either in his original challenge or in this response to Jim Houston’s Talking Philosophy gig, because yoking philosophy and theology together is really mixing apples with oranges, especially since the kind of thing Jerry is attempting to do here is, quite simply, philosophy, and no doubt he thinks that it has some “factual” content. And, not to leave out another important contribution to the conversation, Ophelia Benson has just posted her take on the issue over at Butterflies and Wheels with the catchy title, “Facts and Beliefs.”
I put ‘factual’ in scare quotes, because it is not at all clear what anyone means by ‘fact’ and ‘factual’ by this stage. A fact, in ordinary parlance, is simply whatever it is that makes a proposition true. So, it is either a fact or not a fact that Jesus rose (or was raised) from the dead, that Hitler did, or did not, precipitate the Second World War, that 2+2 is, without delving more deeply into mathematical theory, equal to 4. These are facts, or, perhaps more cautiously, it is possible that these are facts, just as it is a fact, or at least it is possibly a fact, that Keith Ward was in Oxford on the day and at the time that he says he was. It is also an undoubted fact that the life forms which populate the earth came to be as they are by a process of evolution by natural selection. Whether there are moral facts or not is something that is open to question or dispute, but it would be altogether too extreme to say, as Jerry does, that
A “fact” is not a fact if all the evidence supporting it has vanished or is inaccessible.
The fact that evidence for something has vanished does not turn something into a non-fact, although the absence of evidence for something’s being a fact is usually enough for us to say that, other things being equal, we do not have sufficient grounds on which to base our belief in its being a fact. But it is, arguably, a fact that the lack of evidence for something’s being a fact is a good reason not to attach too much credence in the belief that it is a fact. Take the prime suspect in a murder. The fact that all the evidence was somehow spirited away, or the chief witness disappeared, does not suddenly make the suspect an upstanding member of society. It may just mean that there is insufficient evidence to convict him. O.J. Simpson was acquitted of the murder of his wife, but this does not mean that it is not a fact that he killed her.
In other words, the word ‘fact’ has a greater range of application than just empirically substantiated states of affairs. This is precisely why Keith Ward thinks he is justified in his claim that religion answers the factual questions that science neglects. However, Ward is just wrong about this, though not for the reasons that Coyne suggests. Ward suggests that
The physical sciences do not generally talk about non-physical and non-law-like facts such as creation by God.
But this, as I pointed out earlier, is just silly. If it is a fact — putting all the emphasis on ‘if’ here — that God created the universe, then it is a fact for which we have no evidence, and therefore no reason to believe it. In other words, this is something for which evidence is necessary, and Ward’s claim that religion deals with “facts” is deeply questionable, because we do not know how we could establish the truth of such a non-physical and non-law like fact. Indeed, by saying that it is both non-physical and non-lawlike Ward is actually giving us good reasons to believe that there are no facts of the matter here at all. For what would it be like to establish the truth of a non-physical, non-lawlike fact?
Take answers to prayer, for example. Many religious people pray — and I recall reading a short essay by Marghanita Laski (who was an atheist) in which she acknowledged having prayed during a stay in hospital and finding it calming and reassuring — and yet, if prayers are answered, no reason can be ascribed to the fact, if it be a fact, that some prayers are answered and some are not, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that there is simply no reason to believe in answered prayer. So speaking of a non-lawlike fact is simply speaking of something for which we have no evidence — since evidence is lawlike — and therefore something the truth of which there is no reason to believe.
Ophelia nicely eviscerates Ward’s argument. She points out, for example, that Ward is guilty of smuggling religion into contexts where the language of fact is at home, without issuing a warning that there is some skullduggery going on. As Ophelia says:
The claim that Keith Ward was in Oxford on a particular night is not inherently implausible; it goes against no known public facts about nature or the social world or geography. The same cannot be said of “the miracles of Jesus.”
What makes the miracles of Jesus improbable is complicated, but it includes absence of evidence, the fact that the testimony to the miracles is of little probative value now, centuries after the supposed miracles, as well as the fact that miracles, by definition, are non-lawlike events, and, as Hume says, we have more reason to believe that the witnesses were either duped or lying than that the laws of nature had been broken.
The other point that Ophelia picks out so nicely is the equivocation in Ward’s claim that
Much history, like much religion, is evidence-based, but the evidence is not scientifically tractable.
How did history and religion get yoked together? Ophelia’s “Objection, your Honour,” is more than justified. History is evidence-based. Were there no evidence for past events, history would become impossible, which is why Ranke’s “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” (as it actually was) was such an important maxim for modern history, and sent historians on a hunt for primary sources, back to the things themselves. So we can speak reasonably about the facts of history — which, like the facts of science, are always subject to revision upon the discovery of new evidence — but, while Ward may speak about history and religion as evidence-based, theologians and religious believers have yet to produce any evidence at all, whilst historians can point to undoubted evidence which can make their claim to know what actually happened as well-established as any scientific theory. This is, of course, why Dawkins’ comparison of creationists to Holocaust deniers (in The Greatest Show on Earth) was so effective.
But notice. Saying all that I have just said is neither history, nor theology, nor science, but, effectively, philosophy, which at the very least is an attempt to clarify what it is that we mean when we speak about all these various pursuits. Philosophical theology, for instance, effectively shows, if it shows anything at all, that theology itself, as the rational study of the beliefs of a particular religion and its attendant practices, is essentially empty, while the philosophy of science, even though scientists may sometimes find it unhelpful, is (amongst other things) the endeavour to lay bare the structure of scientific theories and how theory is grounded in empirical reality. In this respect I find many of the things that Susan Haack has to say about the foundations of science most helpful, and her idea of science as being like a giant crossword puzzle, in which new discoveries may cohere or not with what is already thought to be established, and how new discoveries in science, just like a new answer to a crossword puzzle clue, might lead us to correct other entries (discoveries) that were thought to be already answered (firmly grounded in empirical reality). She calls her theory “foundherentism” to distinguish it from foundationalist and coherence theories of truth and to combine them.
To make what could be an even longer story short, what is factual cannot be restricted to empirical facts. This is one reason that Ward thinks he can get away with smuggling religious “facts” into a claim about history. It is also why Jerry can speak intelligibly about things which are not related to science, and make truth claims about such things. It is also why philosophy is so important. Of course, lots of philosophy, undoubtedly like some science is just junk science, is just junk philosophy. But philosophy allows us to talk about the differences between science and theology, for instance, without saying anything that is empirically verifiable yet is at the same time true. If it is true, it is simply a fact that religion, for all its claims, makes no legitimate claim to answer factual questions that science neglects.
Posted on 19 November 2011, in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. 29 Comments.
Jim Houston and Jean Kazez and Ben Nelson are discussing these very questions on Jim’s post at Talking Philosophy right now. It’s useful stuff – it would be good if their stuff could be kind of blended with Jerry’s stuff. Well it can, to some extent; all three commented on Jerry’s post; but I suspect most of the people who comment at Jerry’s won’t bother reading the TP comments. There is an awful lot of blanket dismissal of philosophy there, from people who seem to have no idea what it actually is. Sigh.
My idea of what it is is of course rudimentary and that of an outsider, but it has at least taught me to keep some distinctions in mind. How could that not be useful?!
So I see. Thak you Ophelia. Time is finite, I’m afraid, and since you were banned over there I haven’t really paid a lot of attention. But Jean is saying something like I have just said, and that Ben says when he calls facts “truth-makers.” Facts are not just “empirical facts”, but come in all sorts of varieties, and even empirical facts, as history shows, are not exhausted by scientific facts. The problem with Ward is that he tries to sneak fact lanugage in where it doesn’t really have any purchase, especially when theologians say things — as they are wont to do — like:
– which I quote from The New Blackfriars (accessible here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-2005.2010.01375.x/full) from an essay about the new atheists. But even a class or kind with one member is still a class or a kind, and putting God out of the reach of this kind of classificatory language is implicitly to remove him/her/it from the range of facts, and if God is outside the range of factual language, then speaking of God as the creator, or the universe as created, is outside the range of this kind of language too.
While I have not done philosophy professionally for over thirty years, it still seems to me that some people, both scientists and theologians, are too quick to acknowledge the importance of clarity in the use of language — which is not all the philosophy does, but it is an important part of it. The whole religion-science divide is plagued by a careless use of language, and it could do with some conceptual clarity, it seems to me. And Ward, who should know better, since he is a kind of a cross between a theologian and a philosopher, should know better than to play fast and loose with concepts in the way that he does.
As to your comment:
Yes, sigh indeed. If they were to read something like Susan Haack’s Defending Science Within Reason, for example, or Philip Kitcher’s, The Advancement of Science, perhaps they could see the important underlabourer’s task (mirroring Locke) that philosophy undertakes. Indeed, had it not been for philosophers like Locke and Hume, it is doubtful that methodological naturalism would have kicked in when it did and as it did to permit the kind of scientific development that took place during the last few hundred years.
Eric, Addendum to what I said over at TP about your post (which makes many much-needed points). I don’t think I even exactly understand what you mean by facts and evidence having to be “lawlike.” A fact about what my father said 8 months ago is just a particular fact, and my memory of it is just a particular memory. There doesn’t seem to be anything “lawlike” about either, yet the fact’s a fact, and the evidence is evidence. If (if, if, if…) Jesus walked on water just once, it would be a fact, and someone’s memory of it would be evidence…no? What’s all this talk of “lawlikeness” about?
Well, Jean, lawlike in the sense in which Ophelia implies when she calls something plausible. Jesus’ walking on the water is implausible. I breaks all the laws of nature as we know them. To think that someone saw him walking on the water is for that reason immediately doubtful or questionable, and, as Hume says — and I think Hume is right — overcoming that doubtfulness would have to be as much of a miracle as the original miracle of walking on water. In this sense facts and evidence have to be lawlike; there must be some conceivable relation between the one and the other, as, in the memory of what your father said, there is. Of course, we’d like a lot more than just your memory, if we were going to believe that he said it.
Stone the crows – I find I’m not banned over there any more. I really wanted to say something so I plucked up the courage to see if I could and what do you know. So you can pay more attention now Eric, if you want to. :- )
Jean, the question about memory as evidence is what I was keen to say over there (and did).
Memory by its own is at least way down on the list of what counts as evidence, isn’t it? Especially given what we now know about how very fallible it is (cf Elizabeth Loftus). If nothing important is at stake, there’s no reason to mistrust the person reporting the memory, etc, then we’re generally content to treat memory as evidence of a sort, but when any of those variables change, it immediately becomes way more dubious. If I say I put the cheese in the fridge (which is a reported memory) then it makes sense to look for the cheese in the fridge. But that’s a very low standard.
Oh, crap – I take it back. My two comments are gone. Apparently it was a mistake to allow them.
Fucking hell. I wanted to contribute to the discussion. Is that such a crime?
I had the sense to save the first one, so here – (I was replying to something Jean said) -
But is Ward’s claimed memory of what his father said really evidence? This is what I balk at. It’s evidence for him if he’s telling the truth about it, and it might be (weaker) evidence for people who know him and have reasons to believe him, but is it just plain evidence? I don’t think it is.
People at my place yesterday (I think that’s where I saw it) were pointing out that legally it’s hearsay, which is inadmissable.
I think Ward’s goal here (with his deathbed example) is to establish the in principle possibility that a fact can be known by some people, but not accessible to science. Jerry’s ruling that out. Let’s talk about the simpler “what my father said” case, and forget about Jesus for the moment. I remember what he said, so I know what he said. A few people have enough evidence of my veracity that when I tell them, they know it too. So–5 people, maybe, can have this knowledge. This is surely nothing like scientific knowledge, since that’s shareable. It’s got to involve types of evidence and ways of transmitting evidence that give everyone access to the same fact. So up to this point I think Ward’s on solid ground in his debate with Jerry, and I don’t see how your points about “law-likeness” create any problem for him.
Now as to Jesus. Some people saw him walk on water, and told others, who told others, and now I ask myself if I should believe it. OK, now laws do come into it. I have to ask whether I trust this chain of evidence, given that the event in question breaks physical laws… etc. Fine, but that doesn’t stop Ward being the winner in the more general debate about whether some facts are knowable by some people, yet beyond the reach of science.
I don’t care about Jesus, frankly – I don’t take any of that stuff seriously. So it’s not at all out of “belief in belief” (as Jerry suggests) that I’d come to Ward’s defense here. I just think he’s right about a few points of general epistemology.
Ophelia, I came over here partly to avoid that (er) problem …
I thought about what you said about Ward’s example, and that’s why I simplified it using my own. Now the fact is no longer what the father was talking about (his being a double agent, was it?), but simply what the father said–his utterance. It so happens I had some private conversations with my father 8 months ago, and he doesn’t remember them. So I know he uttered “blah blah” (some interesting things, actually). I know the fact that he made that utterance, and just a few people (who have good reason to trust me) can know it when I tell them. But this is not shareable enough to count as scientific knowledge. That’s my thought anyway.
Well, Jean, but I think your memory as to what your father said is much stronger evidence than the claim of someone to have seen Jesus walking on water. Someone’s memory of an event is evidence — sometimes rather weak evidence, however, so we don’t allow too much to hang on it. But, of course, to the extent that I believe in your truthfulness I certainly know one fact, when you tell me that your father said p. I know that you think that that is what he said, and so far as you can tell that is what he said as you remember it. In a court, of course, as Ophelia points out, it’s hearsay, but in the ordinary run of things, we depend on the memory of other people all the time. Sometimes, of course, we get a surprise when we do. In that sense, memory doesn’t constitute very compelling evidence, unless it is corroborated by a number of different people independently. (I am, for example, on outs with one of my brothers over something he said some time ago. He denies that he said it, but others have confirmed it for me, so I am reasonably sure he said it, sure enough that I am still on outs with him about it.)
But, so far as general epistemology goes, there are facts that are not, as such, scientific facts in the strict sense, although for them to be facts about the world (or in it), they have to be in some sense empirical. But then of course there are facts about geometry or arithmetic. It is simply a fact that 2+2=4 (in simple arithmetic, not in the more complex math that Lawrence Krauss talks about). This has led some people to think that numbers exist in some robust, yet non-empirical sense. I can’t understand that, so choose to think that this is a fact about the meaning of the terms and functions involved.
On the other subject… This is a bit hard to believe, Ophelia, that you should still be banned over at TP! No, I shan’t bother with it then. That’s simply too childish for words.
Just to be clear.. My last comment was made before Jean’s last.
Jean, thanks. (Not everyone there will come over here though. It would be nice if I could join in…) That’s how it looks to me too – so you know what you know, and about 5 other people do too, and that’s easy to accept – but as it’s not shareable enough to count as scientific knowledge, it’s not really *evidence* – right? Or not right. Is there an area between what’s acceptable in a lab or in court, and not-evidence-at-all?
I’m thinking there isn’t. There’s a difference between the question “how do you know that?” and “what’s your evidence for that?”, right? Your memory of what your father said is a good enough answer to the first but not really to the second?
(Eric, yes – and removing comments that had already appeared is a twist of the knife. Honestly. How to foster civil discussion. grumble grumble.)
One of the scary things about the legal system is that it still depends heavily on eyewitness testimony despite the fact that an ever-growing mountain of evidence – evidence! – shows it to be desperately unreliable.
Eric,
I didn’t yoke philosophy and theology together: Ward did that in his original post. He’s the one who said that facts about the world could come derive from “general philosophical views, moral views, personal experience and judgment”.
Eric,
Thank you for a very useful contribution that helps move us towards the real debate: how do you get from reasonable beliefs about, your father, to having reasonable beliefs about Jesus walking on water (and just what are the grounds for comparing religion to evidence-led historical studies and contrasting the two with ‘science.)..
“It is simply a fact that 2+2=4 (in simple arithmetic, not in the more complex math that Lawrence Krauss talks about)”
It’s not simply a fact, Whitehead and Russell spent the whole of the first volume (and the first 80 odd pages of volume 2) of Principia Mathematica in proving that 1+1=2. “The above proposition is occasionally useful”.
Ophelia, I do think my memory of what my father said is evidence–but only evidence for me. I have to reflect on lots of things to decide how strong the evidence is, but it may be very strong. When I tell someone else, my statement becomes evidence for them, and then they have to consider a whole bunch of things about me, and other matters, to decide how strong their evidence is. Etc. I think people can know facts in this way, without the knowledge being the sort of widely shareable, rigorous thing we call “science”.
I’m afraid I don’t see much of that ‘solid ground’ on which Keith Ward is said by Jean Kazez to be standing. Yes, there no doubt are ‘facts’ that are or have come to be empirically unverifiable, such as what I said to a friend – or what he said to me – as he lay dying (no-one else being there), but this kind of trivial truth is not what Ward is really interested in asserting. What Ward is interested in asserting is that because there are such ‘facts’ – though the examples he gives are, in all honesty, pitifully weak – therefore ‘we’ are justified in giving credence to the claims as to the ‘certainty of those things’ (the story of Christ) made by those who were ‘from the beginning eyewitnesses’ (Luke). That – this illicit move – is the point that needs to be addressed, and not whether Ward has ‘won’ on some very trivial level.
Incidentally, I wonder if Jean Kazez might say something to those at Talking Philosophy who are responsible for banning Ophelia Benson. It seems a wholly contemptible manner of proceeding for people who claim to be encouraging rational discussion about things.
And, by the way, when I say a ‘trivial truth’, I am not asserting that such truths are necessarily trivial in personal terms.
Jean – right – I said earlier (in the comment I posted at TP and reposted here) that what Ward’s father said is evidence for him if he’s telling the truth about it, so I agree that what your father said is evidence for you…But is “evidence-for” what’s usually meant by evidence?
Lately I’ve found myself quite often making a distinction between reasons to believe, and evidence. Evidence-for seems perhaps closer to a reason to believe than to evidence – if I’m right that evidence is a level or so more rigorous. But maybe I’m not right about that.
Ophelia, We usually talk about public items like footprints and x-rays and such as evidence, but I don’t see any problem with the idea that my own memories and perceptions are evidence for me as well. They then can become evidence for other people too if I talk about them. This is the sort of thing social epistemologists talk about–and I think it makes good sense.
Tim–Right, I’m just endorsing phase 1 of his argument–the part about knowing ordinary facts that elude science in a perfectly unexciting way. Phase 2 is where we say miraculous events from the distant past are known by some people too. It’s obviously going to take a bunch of extremely problematic additional premises to make the case.
p.s. I am no longer a blogger at TP and have nothing to do with any TP policies.
Hmm, hmm, hmm. It seems strange to consider other people’s memories evidence…Or does it; I suppose I consider memoirs and letters and such historical evidence, which is what Ward was talking about. Historical evidence is “softer” than physical, as the social sciences are “softer” than the physical ones; because memory and self-reporting is more fallible.
It’s interesting that literary ability can create a kind of halo for reported memory – if it’s well-written we trust it.
Jerry, I was writing the next post which got away on me. I do apologise if I misunderstood. I certainly did not mean to attribute to you something that Ward said!
Ophelia, I think it makes sense to use people’s memories as evidence. In very important cases it is essential that we have more than that, since memory is so malleable, and so inventive. Eye-witness testimony (notice that word) is treated as evidence, a bit too straightforwardly, as you point out. As to literary ability creating a halo around memory, it is probably important to remember that people who (for example) try to use the gospels as evidence for the resurrection, point to their plain speech,and to the fact that they disagree, as we would expect eye-witnesses to disagree, as evidence that these texts can be taken as evidence!
One helpful thing to keep in mind is that there are different gradations of evidence: prime facie, basic, pro tanto, and ultima facie. Eyewitness testimony or long-term memory might count as prime facie evidence, while other forms of evidence might provide stronger support.
Ben – that’s legal terminology, right? At least, I recognize “prime facie” as such, or think I do. Is it also philosophical terminology? It’s not scientific too, right?
It’s odd. There doesn’t seem to be enough inter-disciplinary discussion of what counts as evidence, so that everyone could be on roughly the same page. The law has needs different from those that science has, but still, it would make sense if the basic terminology could cross boundaries. Not least that would make obfuscation of the kind Ward seems to be doing, more difficult, or at least spottable.
I hesitate to enter this erudite discussion, but I’d like to recount my own experience of testimony. My wife and I were involved in a fatal road traffic accident four years ago, in which another car lost control and slewed across the road into our path. At the subsequent inquiry in court, under oath, both my wife and I testified that the car we had hit was blue in colour. This was our clear recollection, recounted to the court three years after the accident. Photographs of the scene taken by the police quite clearly show that this car was in fact green! No doubt the fact that our testimonies agreed was down to our influencing each other before the actual hearing, but nonetheless my point is that eyewitness testimony can clearly be flawed.
And that’s totally normal. There’s that famous experiment where someone is giving a lecture and something dramatic happens in the background and the audience doesn’t even see it. Between not noticing and confabulation, we come up with what we think we remember but actually don’t.
TV detective shows constantly have these scenes where people stare at a lineup, brows crinkled in thought, and then get an “aha” look and say “it’s number 3, I’m sure of it” – and I cringe.
The general concepts are definitely shared with the law, since most of the above are useful latin phrases. But epistemologists might reformulate the ideas in a technical way that may or may not be familiar to the jurist.
For epistemologists, ‘prime facie’ evidence (how things appear on the face of it) is ‘defeasible’, while by contrast ‘prime ultima’ evidence means ‘indefeasible’. Some ‘prime facie’ evidence is the product of a ‘basic’ evidential source, like memory or perception, which are causally reliable (unlike, say, intuition or revelation). At least some cases of ‘prime facie’ evidence carry normative weight — some philosophers, sp. Owen Flanagan, think that PF evidence has ‘squatter’s rights’, in the sense that you can take PF evidence seriously until something better comes along.
‘Pro tanto’ is used more commonly in the law than in epistemology, but you do find it mentioned every so often in the latter. In the context of philosophy, to have pro tanto evidence for x means that the evidence provides some justification to a claim of x, whether or not the evidence constitutes ‘on-balance’ justification. (My understanding in law is that a pro tanto case is a case that would seem good in retrospect, even when the case turned out badly. Presumably, ‘circumstantial’ evidence would count as less-than pro tanto evidence. But it would be good to hear from a professional jurist — e.g., Helen Dale — to compare notes.)
I don’t know if there is any term of art to describe ‘on-balance’ or full justification. I suppose you’ve found on-balance justification when you’ve reached a responsible state of closure in your deliberation, and any further attempt at justification will seem like beating a dead horse. Keeping with the latin theme, we might say that such cases involve ad abundantiam evidence.
There’s some debate over whether or not testimony taken alone counts as pro tanto evidence — that is, whether it even partially justifies factual claims. If not, then Ward’s father/MI5 example fails to make his own point.
Jean’s example of remembering a thing her father said is somewhat better, because memory/perception is slightly less controversial than testimony. JS’s example of Mary seeing red for the first time is also good, since it appeals to perception, which also is not controversial. But I’m inclined towards doubt because I don’t think any isolated source of evidence qualifies as pro tanto.
As usual, I don’t know if that helps clear things up or just makes things worse. Oh well.
I’m not sure about law, but at least in hypothesis testing and probability theory, evidence is any sort of event E that puts weight (positive or negative) on the probability of some hypothesis H. There has to be some overlap, because the formal name for confusing the probability of some hypothesis given some evidence [ P(H | E) ] with the probability of some evidence given a hypothesis [ P(E | H) ] is called the Prosecutor’s Fallacy.