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 for things that are unprecedent, or happen only once, and can’t therefore be repeatedly observed. This is usually the case with things 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. There may be witnesses, but those witnesses could, technically, be lying. Or they could’ve been fooled, hypothetically, by a hologram like those used in concerts today. Maybe there are videos, but those video could have been altered. Or maybe someone filmed a stunt 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 professionals, as well as his verified signature, then it is extremely likely that Putin indeed signed it. And 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 person to the death row.
The problem is that, very often, we don’t really have an abundance of solid evidence pointing in one direction, and, very often, some important evidence might also point to other directions. So 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 – and perhaps more often than we should – is the sense of majority.
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, he might argue favourably simply because that is his honest perception – within his 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 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 towards the wrong conclusions.
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 many 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.
“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.”
So how was Galileo, then, different from the ‘flat-earthers’ of today? The answer is: objective logic. Through simple observation, Galileo started noting a few things. He noted, for example, that some elements, like Jupiter’s moons, clearly didn’t orbit Earth, challenging the theory that the whole universe orbited around Earth, and that Venus had different phases which would be hard to explain if it did indeed move around the Earth together with the Sun, as it was then believed. Using the telescope to study the Milky Way in detail for the first time, he also noted that the size of the galaxy and its many other stars suggested that Earth perhaps wasn’t so central to the universe as we thought. Copernicus, on his turn, noted the retrograde motion of planets. They connected those observations through objective logic, in what we call a theory. Those observations could all come together and be logically explained if the Earth and other planets in the solar system revolved around the Sun. This created an interesting moment for knowledge. Whilst the theories of the time could not explain the new findings, we also didn’t have the tools to properly conclude that they were wrong. In a way, the intellectuals of the time followed the correct protocol when they dismissed Galileo and Copernicus. But whilst we couldn’t accept their theory as a fact just yet, the new observations also pointed at important logical flaws in the old viewpoint.
It was Johannes Kepler who first proposed detailed mathematical models to confirm the new theory, and it was Isaac Newton who expanded those models and provided the physical and mathematical foundations for what we now accept as true. They used logical models which, in essence, connect facts to each other through mathematical cause and effect (‘if x, then y’, ‘if y, then z’). Just like Earth orbiting the Sun, most of the things we’ve come to consider facts are actually the logical connection of evidence. As we develop more sophisticated tools to observe the world around us, we also refine those theories – and create new facts. Back to our example, it is an apparent fact that Putin signed a document because we can see him signing it on tape only until we develop the technology to prove that the video was edited. That’s why science usually talks of ongoing theories, and very rarely of facts, embracing the evolving nature of knowledge.
If facts as we know them can sometimes change, the process of objective logic can’t. Objective logic means that, with the tools available, we will always observe the same things and get to the same mathematical conclusions. If we erase all knowledge on Earth, it is very likely that we will eventually rebuild it, and that at some point that knowledge will look very similar to what it does today. When we say a scientific paper was ‘peer-reviewed’, for example, it means that other people with the same technological expertise reviewed those observations using the same methodology and came to the same conclusions. Or that those who challenged them couldn’t entirely disprove them through logic.
The difference between what we see as facts and theories is mainly grounded in the distance between the observations that we are trying to connect. Almost everyone can see that the Sun shines, that its light gets to Earth, and so we consider it a ‘fact’ (see the difference between fact and opinion). We can also observe that plants grow, which is another fact. bBut we can’t really observe how the fact that the Sun shines causes plants to grow. That’s why we call the logical causality between those observations a theory – the theory of photosynthesis. We could, in the future, through technological advancements, discover that photosynthesis doesn’t actually work exactly as we thought – and nobody would be too horrified at that. But we are right to defend this theory today, because it follows a rigorous scientific process to explain the things that we can measure and observe with the tools that we have at hand. The bigger the distance between an obersvation and the other, the more casual connections (ie. if‘s and then‘s) we need to propose to explain how one leads to the other, the more space there is for logical flaws. Additionally, in biological, chemical and physical sciences, elements can often be isolated in labs, and tested repeatedly to confirm the results. With news technlogies, this distance can also be shortened – like when, through field ion microscopy, the atom went from a theorem to an observable element. In fields like economy and politics, however, that’s not always the case, because they tend to depend on a chain of human reactions which we can’t (yet) mathematicaly predict, or not without relevant error margins.
That is why Beehive News assesses theories, rather than simply checking facts. Most news articles aren’t made of what we consider facts, but, rather, of seemingly logical theories connecting those facts. Setting ourselves to check facts would necessarily imply in either one of two subpar approaches: verifying only the small portion of the news that can be easily confirmed through observation, or denying the theoretical essence of facts. To fact-check a large portion of news would mean sometimes delivering verdicts despite contradictory evidence, and making arbitrary decisions in the backstage. In the 17th century, for instance, it would mean either entirely rejecting the theory of Galileo and Copernicus, despite its logic foundation, or entirely endorsing it, despite its unresolved pieces. Instead, we believe that, in an ideal world, people should be informed of both theories, their logical gaps and strengths, empowering them to draw their own conclusions. That’s why Beehive News focuses on logic, and on shape more than on content. We dissect theories, assessing whether their connections follow rigorous, objective reasoning, using logic to establish causality – or, instead, whether they contain flaws, considering only a limited selection of evidence and improperly linking causes to outcomes. Whatever the views defended by the news articles we assess are, we check whether they stem from reputable, primary, and peer-reviewed sources, with no conflicting interests on the matter, whether they expose alternative or diverging viewpoints, only if to logically refute them, whether the contextual elements are all present, and the numbers are contextualised, and whether the causal correlations are properly demonstrated. We believe this is the one truly fair and neutral way to expose misinformation, promote rigorously crafted news, and both dignify and empower readers.
Download Beehive News now to get in-depth ratings on thousands of daily news articles.
