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Part I

Fact-minded Metaphysics

The first part of the book will explain the history of fact from a philosophical vantage point. This begins by returning to a time before scientific investigation was tantamount to gathering all of the facts that make up our universe. A “fact”—that elusive kernel of truth which fights valiantly against speculation and assumption—is itself based on an assumption. This is important because we often allow facts to stand by themselves. This means that, in order to humiliate a far-right politician for his inane worldview that discounts the importance of facts, there must be a worldview that assumes that such facts are not only possible to discern, but that they may be relied on to the exclusion of other forms of understanding. But remember, believing a fact is a judgment call that you must make—something for which you are responsible. In the end, it is your fault if the fact turns out to be inaccurate because you chose to give up your own responsibility to understand the more complicated sets of relationships that the fact stood for. But it is much easier to deflect responsibility elsewhere: “How could I have known better? It was a fact, after all!”

That the universe may be understood “in fact” is an assumption. A powerful one, indeed, but an assumption nonetheless. More specifically, this assumption is called positivism. Positivism is the assumption about reality that eventually replaced Theology in the 19th century. As the story goes, the church was no longer what people could turn to with questions about the universe, about education, about child-rearing, ethics, and so on. They were left with nothing. Imagine that. You would have nowhere to turn for how to restore old barn wood except for your old chemistry lessons. People were no longer able to deflect responsibility onto a spiritual text or figure—“I did it because the pastor said ….” The modern Europeans quickly found something else onto which they could deflect their responsibility for understanding. Auguste Comte proposed a new gospel—that of positivism! Positivism is the assumption that there are a finite number of things that can be known about the universe. That is to say that there could be such thing as universal knowledge. Without the guidance of the church for “best practices” for child rearing, parents threw up their hands in despair. To them, Comte explains that there is a best manner of raising your children, and we just need to learn what it is. With positivism, all the answers to life’s questions are “out there,” waiting to be discovered. Scientists are on the front lines, peeling back the frontiers in their quest to know everything. More on positivism later.

The fundamental unit of understanding within the positivist worldview is a fact. “The Earth spins on its axis” is a fact. As denizens of this world, you and I are spinning, too. Neither of us experience this directly, but we take the astronomer’s word for it. I looked at the stars periodically last night. They appeared to be moving in the sky. What does this observation accomplish? As an observation, my perspective is important in understanding my relationship with the world. I can understand how compelling the geocentric theory must have been. The geocentric theory maintains that the stars are traveling around the world (which stays in the same place). That is certainly what it seems like. I don’t experience the Earth’s movement, after all. The theory was generated because it fit the observation of the astronomers up to the 17th century. A handful of astronomers took painstakingly careful notes, mapping the movement of the stars in the sky and found that there were a few observations that didn’t fit into this geocentric theory. They witnessed something happen that wasn’t supposed to. But since they did witness it, they realized that the “way it was supposed to happen” was wrong and needed to be changed. They had a difficult existential decision to make: trust themselves and thereby challenge the common-belief and Biblically-supported idea that the Earth was the center of the universe or “take the other scientists’ word for it” and thereby invalidate their own observations. It was eventually amended into the heliocentric theory that we still use for understanding the spatial relationship between planetary bodies (but not before extreme sanctions were doled out).

Now imagine if Copernicus had said “planets moving in ellipses?—impossible!” and concluded that his perception had been mistaken. How often do students, educated in our schooling system, have the opportunity to question what they have learned? What if the planets didn’t revolve around us, but that the Earth was also in motion and revolving around some other star? Other students—the good students who do what they’re told and learn what they’re supposed to learn—would probably have laughed at him. Well, they had different methods of discouraging free-thinking back then such as banishment and house arrest. Today we use humiliation. We would brand Copernicus with a learning disorder so that nobody takes him seriously, then spoon feed him the facts of the universe in a private, go-at-your-own-pace classroom until he stops trying to understand it himself.

That’s the tyranny of fact-mindedness in a nutshell. To know something “in fact” means that it is unquestionable so don’t bother trying to understand it. This means that you must give up your own authority of understanding and entrust this to someone else: a teacher, textbook, blogger, or fake-news-reporter. See the connection? Fact-minded education has taught students to distrust their own ability to think and to problem-solve. Year after year of “it couldn’t be! Well, it must be because my teacher/textbook/news anchor said so.” The good students master this at an early age—they give up the whole project of trying to understand why 10x10=100 and just memorize that shit. Nobody is alarmed by this, because at least she will have memorized what is factual! They’re the facts she’ll need to go far in life! Nobody realizes that she has given up something far more valuable: the ability to think for herself. Now she’ll believe the fake news reports (unless, of course, someone tells her that it is fake, but even then …). So Facebook and Twitter are sanctioned because they didn’t protect their users from in-credible news sources.

The goal, once more, is to challenge the assumption that facts run the world, guide our experience, or tell us anything even remotely important. At worst, facts distract you from your own concrete experience. At best, a fact can alert you to something about your own experience. Though in the best-case scenario, it is necessary that the fact be misunderstood. This is to say that facts, when misinterpreted, can be a vehicle for understanding.

Positivism is a compelling assumption about the nature of reality for several reasons. It promises that every question has an answer, that ignorance is temporary, and that if you are equipped with the proper methods and training, you can never be taken as a fool. The deductive prowess of Sherlock Holmes, who relies on his skills of observation and logic to solve mysteries, is the hero of positivism. But perhaps more compelling than these reasons, positivism promises that with enough time, humankind will eventually develop the skills to manipulate and control the entirety of the universe (and manipulate and control we have done!).

The positivist approach has worked for many decades. It gave people a reason to continue asking important questions about meaning, why things happen, and how to make our experience better. In medicine, this model of understanding, manipulation, and control of the relationships of organic matter has nearly eliminated the threat of death by infectious diseases. In physics, the understanding, manipulation, and control of matter has led to the development of engineering, all manner of transportation devices, the utilization of energy sources, and so on. The trajectory this promises for humankind is alluring, but this doesn’t make it any less of an assumption.

The positivist assumption isn’t always helpful. Contemporary physicists have had to suspend what they “know” about the relationships between material bodies—particularly when they deal with particles that are smaller than an atom. It’s as if positivism applies to the world of atoms, but once you get smaller than this we need a new model for the universe. This is a problem when the worldview is supposed to include everything. In medicine, there are some diseases that cannot be isolated and treated. One example is the leading cause of death in the industrialized world: cardiac disease. Cardiac disease patients did not catch a bug or acquire an infection that needs to treated; they have made certain lifestyle choices that have inhibited the healthy functioning of their bodies. The food they eat, how they choose to spend their time, and the friends they keep are unsustainable. Treatment is not as easy as taking an antibiotic, and encouraging lifestyle changes in service to health isn’t as easy as it sounds.

We will first break down the term metaphysics. “Meta-” indicates that a process is being applied to itself. In psychology, for instance, “meta-cognition” means “thinking about thinking.” If by physics we mean “the rules by which the physical universe operates,” then meta-physics refers to “the rules by which we understand the rules by which the physical universe operates.” The first of these is epistemology. Epistemology is concerned with how we know what we know. For example, how do we know what a fact is, in fact? My argument, obviously, is that we don’t. A fact is itself an epistemological impossibility. Since knowledge about the universe presupposes a universe, epistemology is contingent upon ontology—the study of being. Ontology investigates the is-ness of what is. Ontology concerns the statement of being. To argue that there is a universe, and what this means exactly, is an ontological proposition. Epistemology and ontology are closely related: how do we know that what is, is? With fact-minded thinking, metaphysical questions are ignored. “Everybody knows fact a, fact b, fact c, and so on.” Understanding the is-ness of is, and the process of its discovery, are replaced by facts.