The Philosophical Debate Around Facts

Facts exist, but, technically speaking, they are often impossible to prove. Instead, we should focus on using rigorous logic to draw objective conclusions and make decisions.

Yes, facts are a real thing. But it’s not that simple. Although facts do exist, we can’t always say the same about the proof of their existence. Judges know that very well – that’s why they talk about ‘evidence’, and about there being ‘enough evidence to decide’, rather than about factual proof (see five legal principles that judges use to determine ‘the truth‘). It’s even harder to prove things that are unprecedent, or happen only once, and can’t therefore be repeatedly observed. This is usually the case in fields like Economics and Politics. If Putin signs a given piece of paper, for example, Putin himself will know that he signed it, and that will be a fact known to himself. But how will the rest of the world know that? The truth is that it never really will. Not for certain. Bear with us: technically, there may be witnesses, but those witnesses could for example be lying. Or they could’ve been fooled, at least hypothetically, by a hologram. Maybe there are videos, but those videos could have been altered. Or maybe someone filmed an impersonator who looked just like Putin. Maybe his signature was verified by experts, but those experts could have been misled by an extremely talented fraudster.

In the real world, to face that challenge, we need to work with probabilities. If reputable witnesses say that they saw Putin sign the document from up close, and if there are multiple videos of him signing it, which have been confirmed by experts, as well as his verified signature, then it is extremely likely that Putin indeed signed it. Because this means that we get it right at least most of the time, the world has worked fairly well with this probability-driven approach. But, technically speaking, even when the likelihood of being right is extremely high, the chance of being wrong is not zero. Very rarely, we do sometimes send the wrong convict to the death row.

The main problem is that, often, we lack the desirable abundance of solid evidence pointing in one direction, and important evidence might also point to other directions – so the probabilities are not that clear. In those cases, we need to look for cues.

One cue that we often take into account when trying to evidence facts and measure the probability of them being right – perhaps more often than we should – is the sense of majority. But this isn’t a good measure for two reasons: 

The first reason is that, because nobody is really counting, that perception of a majority could be wrong. Sure, we can almost safely say that, if not all, most astronomers today agree that the Earth is round and that it orbits around the Sun. But it’s not always that obvious. If you ask a reputable economist, for example, whether there is consensus that a certain policy promoted by a certain politician caused a certain amount of loss, they might argue favourably simply because that is their honest perception – within their subjective universe. In many cases, however, and specially in a increasingly polarised world, it is not hard to find a different reputable economist, from a different academic circle, who might also believe that there is consensus to the contrary. In reality, true consensus is an almost unreachable ideal. The academic and scientific community can often be more or less divided, and no one is really counting the votes. Sure, we could try to assess who has the most reputation and is therefore most likely to be right, but, as history reminds us, reputation has many times misled us. 

The second reason why the sense of majority is not a good measure is simply because the majority can sometimes be wrong. When Galileo and Copernicus proposed that the Earth orbited the Sun, their views were rejected by most prominent intellectuals of their time, like the astronomer Tycho Brahe, the philosopher Francis Bacon, the physicist William Gilbert and the mathematician Jean-Baptiste Morin. The same happened when Ignaz Semmelweis, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch proposed that diseases could be caused by germs, and when Alfred Wegener proposed that continents drift.