Did Ukraine start the war with Russia? Is DOGE capable of cutting two trillion dollars from the Federal budget? Did the US send $50 million in condoms to Gaza? Were the January 6 insurrectionists traitors or patriots? The thunderous second Trump administration has introduced as much uncertainty as the last. And that’s on top of the enduring claims and counter-claims about the reality of climate change, the results of the 2020 election, and the matter of gender and sexuality.
In all these cases, the facts will succumb to political agenda. So what’s the point of them? In a world where the fact has been demoted to political point-scoring, the time has come to consider where facts came from in the first place, and what exactly they are. I’m not talking here about the journalistic obsession with verification, nor the relative merits of weighing one source against another — but the fact that there are any facts whatsoever. “There was a time when facts did not exist,” the historian of science, David Wootton, reminds us in his book The Invention of Science. “The story of the fact is a story in which the lowest and most unreliable form of knowledge was magically transformed into the highest and most reliable.”
The problem of the fact had long lingered in the background of politics, philosophy and science until it came roaring forth half a decade ago, blasting through the mediasphere in the now-ancient controversy regarding the size of Trump’s first inauguration crowd, a dispute that inspired the then-presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway to introduce the term “alternative facts”. Legacy media, horrified by this subversive twist on their hitherto unchallenged epistemology, did not know where to start. After a good deal of sputtering, there emerged a solution. What ensued was a golden age of fact-checking the first Trump administration — a parade led by FactCheck.org, Metabunk, PolitiFact, Snopes, RealClearPolitics, to name but a few. The status of the fact has since swallowed enormous portions of resources, money, air time, and attention.
Yet strangely enough, journalism had gotten along for quite a long time without fact-checkers. The first of this exotic new species appeared in the 1890s and early 1900s, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, alongside the birth of the telegraph. It was during this period that the idea that journalists could pinpoint the “objective” truth first caught on, the notion that reporting the news could be closer to science than literature. Unfortunately, as the velocity of news increased, so did the prevalence of what Ralph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, called “honest inaccuracies”. By 1938, a new sub-set of professionals devoted to the cause of accuracy had been officially institutionalised, as Colliers magazine ran its first ad for “researchers and fact-checkers”.
“The facts will always succumb to political agenda. So what’s the point of them?”
Since then, fact-checking has become part and parcel of news-gathering. At the core of this enterprise was a new definition of truth — journalistic truth — which rests not upon the eternal verities of philosophical or religious truth, but upon the idea that if there’s someone else or something else out there to back up your assertion, it’s fair game for publishing.
The problems with this approach to what has come to be called “verifiable truth” became evident by the end of the first Trump presidency. As the Columbia Journalism Review put it, “while facts are sacred to writers, readers, and, above all, editors, they are sometimes more work than they’re worth”. On the other side of the aisle, Mike Howell of the Heritage Foundation noted precisely the same phenomenon in his criticism of the “fact-check industry”: “When you aren’t winning a policy debate, it’s much easier to appeal to a supposedly ‘third party’ judge who is on your team already.”
For both Left and Right, then, the facts became insoluble conundrums. In a stormy sea of blog posts, clickbait, Substacks, and studies in obscure journals, what constitutes a fact? There is in fact — as it were — a small group of academics who study that precise question, and those are the historians of science. They attacked the question with a great deal of optimism. Their assumption was that while one may endlessly debate the political ramifications of, say, the Battle of Culloden, or the economic consequences of FDR’s New Deal, conclusions become a bit more clear-cut when it comes to the discovery of gravity and the moons of Jupiter. At least that was the hope — soon to be dashed. As the late great historian of science, Thomas S. Kuhn, presciently noted in his 1962 landmark study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “Myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods… that now lead to scientific knowledge.”
Kuhn’s intellectual descendants include Steven Shapin, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, and Simon Schaffer, Professor of History of Science at the University of Cambridge. Schaffer’s best-selling iconoclastic tome, Leviathan and the Air Pump, caused nothing less than an academic scandal. For years, the pair have studied what has come to be called the “social construction” of truth, specialising in the origins of modern biology, chemistry, and physics in early- to mid-17th century Europe. They have come to the conclusion that “The history of science occupies the same terrain as the history of politics.”
This is the sort of conclusion that outraged physics professor Alan Sokal, sparking his submission of gibberish to the academic journal, Social Text. It was an attempt to embarrass the academics who might publish “an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions”. He then published a book titled Fashionable Nonsense, aimed at blowing the social construction of truth out of the water.
For all his indignation, the years have not been kind to Sokal. The notion that truth is a social construction has not only been normalised but glorified through social media, where like makes right. And, of course, Donald Trump was one of the first to translate the controversial academic idea into a controversial media company, “Truth Social”.
It might be a stretch to call Trump a master of epistemology, but the arguments that Shapin and Schaffer espouse eerily align with his populist approach. The historians of science argue that unlike ancient scientific “facts” — such as Aristotle’s beliefs that spears fly in horizontal lines, and that women have fewer teeth than men — the modern scientific fact does not rest upon on logical deductions from unexamined givens and axioms, but emerges from educated and social elites gathered in a privileged space to witness the scene of laboratory demonstrations, after which they might use the tools of printing and publishing to disseminate what these scholars call “virtual witnessing”. In short, it is the idea that if enough people believe in Tinker Bell, publicly vouch for Tinker Bell, and distribute learned treatises about Tinker Bell, then Tinker Bell is, for all intents and purposes, true. Such facts become facts because of their omnipresent acceptance among both the brilliant and the ignorant. On the basis of this insight into the birth of the fact in 17th-century Europe, the historians of science have inadvertently helped us understand how reactionary politics and liberal politics not only create wholly different species of fact, but of evidence and reasoning.
The social construction of truth flies in the face of a tradition many of us take for granted — the idea of scientific progress going hand in hand with the progress of rationality, toleration for civil dispute, and liberalism. “Our goal”, Shapin and Schaffer have acknowledged, “is to break down the aura of self-evidence surrounding the experimental way of producing knowledge.” And to be sure, their deconstructions clarify once and for all why it is fruitless to hail facts and fact-checking as the antidote to MAGA ideation — that if only people understood “science” we would all be good liberals. Indeed, the adage among the anti-vaxxers is the same as the adage of Moderna and Pfizer: “Do the research.”
Of course, those basement-dwelling, Ketone-IQ-swilling independent internet researchers were not the first people to question the fact’s value. As modern science took its infant steps away from philosophers like Aristotle towards “natural philosophers” like Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, the great conservative and defender of monarchical power, Thomas Hobbes, rose against the dominion of the fact. Much like those today who view corporate science as a form of oppression, Hobbes mocked the artificial and clubby lab-centric experimentalists of his age, claiming that the so-called geniuses of the scientific revolution were “just another conspiratorial group whose interests were in obtaining power over citizens”.
Hobbes believed that the esoteric truths created in the laboratory were entirely unrelated to the ordinary common-sense truths that emerge from everyday reality. He scoffed at the idea of a vacuum created by the air-pump, perhaps because he could not imagine the use of barometers and thermometers, not to mention microwaves and guitar amps. Faced with modern physics, he would surely have asked, what does the quark-gluon plasma created for a fraction of a millisecond in the Hadron collider have to do with us?
It was only as the Scientific Revolution proved its cash value (by way of the locomotive, steamboat, cotton gin et al), that defenders of the ancient fact succumbed to the unbridled sense of awe that marked the early industrial age. Nineteenth-century fact worship would transform into social science, thereby becoming an enduring attribute of liberalism — despite the bothersome irony that facts contravene the most basic of all liberal tenets, namely the freedom to disagree. And who would be foolish enough to disagree with the efficacy of a sewing machine — or an atom bomb? Hence the strange and cockeyed genius of Donald Trump, who perceived how thin the ice had grown beneath the scientific fact that no one really understood, and who grasped that fact had become dogma.
Alternative facts, fake news, and conspiracy theory on one side. Freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to disagree, and an end to all censorship on the other. Again and again the historians of science have proved their prescience: during the height of the Cold War, one of the founders of the field, Herbert Butterfield, was already anticipating the growth of “giant organized systems of self-righteousness — each only too delighted to find that the other is wicked — each only too glad that the sins of the other give it pretext for still deeper hatred”. The solution, of course, was democracy. But as has become increasingly evident, democracy cannot solve the problem of the fact, as democracy was itself a parallel expression of the Scientific Revolution. To prove one by the other descends into the logical inconsistency philosophers dismiss as tautology.
Instead of becoming mired in the ooze of fact and alternative fact, perhaps we would be better off if we were to entirely exclude facts from our political discussions and jettison the 400-year-old fetish. At this point, would anything be that different? Freed from the trivial battle of fact against fact, perhaps we might spend more time on the difference between right and wrong.
