Truthiness and Factiness and How We Speak
Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 8:22AM | by Otter Reader and RipChurch contributor Susan R. asks this in the comments section of my post on Christians’ language about the Resurrection:
Otter, could you elaborate on the “fact” vs. “truth” idea, as you see it? Some of the dictionary definitions of fact actually use truth as a synonym for fact, and the link below is certainly thought-provoking, as it states that facts can be easily proven or disproven.
http://oii.org/cyberu/html/fact.htm
Which leads to my follow up question: how, or to what degree, can “historical facts” (vs. scientific facts) be proven or disproven? For example, is a statement such as, “My mother was born in Harvey, IL.” a fact, strictly speaking? Certainly it would be regarded as one in ordinary conversation … but I’m not sure it could be easily proven or disproven.
The site you cite holds to a definition of “fact” that refers to it as a provable or disprovable claim. That’s a fair definition, a little at odds with the normal usage, which is a claim that has been proved: but it relates nicely to my comments on the Resurrection, an event that cannot be proven to have happened (and cannot be falsified either).
But what I have in view when I talk about facts and truth is this:
Some truths are subject to falsification and verification. That is, some truths can be comprehended under the word “fact.” If you tell me about your mother’s birthplace, we can agree that there is no really good reason to doubt the story your family tells: we “take it as fact” because we have no really good compelling reason to doubt the family oral history.
But let’s say your mom was a notorious criminal, and she had a really good reason for concealing the fact that she was born in Cicero, Illinois. In that case, you and I (your resident skeptic) will agree that certain “verifications,” such as birth certificates and hospital records, will suffice as evidence for verification. They do not grant an impregnable degree of certainty, of course: records can be falsified, for instance. But they usually aren’t, and so long as nobody really skeptical stands up to rationally doubt the records, we agree they remove our major doubts about your mom’s birthplace.
That phrase “rationally doubt” is important. If our skeptic stands up and says, “I don’t believe in records. They can be falsified. God said Susan’s mother was born in Cicero, the love-child of Al Capone, and that’s what I believe in spite of the records,” he’s way outside the boundaries of rationality. Or if he just disputes evidence on principle (“Records aren’t always accurate!”), he’s not balancing our experience (“records are usually reliable”) with his doubts.
Note that the “birthers” who made such a disaster of American politics by questioning Barak Obama’s birth certificate embarrassed themselves on this score.
Is it? Isn’t it?
Having said all that, some truths cannot be expressed in factual language without loss.
For example, if somebody tells you “My love is a red, red rose,” he is speaking of an unverifiable emotional experience and inviting you to share it through the power of evocative imagery, and of course faith.
When we use simile, we do the same thing: “Reading your blog is like sliding naked down a razor blade into a pool of lemon juice,” a comment that shows up in my mailbag with startling regularity.
We certainly can verify certain aspects of the claim about love and roses: we can verify that the speaker is deeply stimulated in his brain, that his body exudes the same sorts of chemical reactions to his beloved’s presence that it exudes when he’s confronted with a rose (perhaps); but ultimately the truth of the thing depends not on any verifiable “fact” that would be reasonable to any disinterested observer but on a commitment to a subjective reference: his feelings.
In a strange way, this requires faith on the part of the audience: they have to want to believe in and share in the experience that provokes the comment, “My love is a red, red rose.”
This is why I don’t always share my skeptical colleagues’ disdain for non-factual (and religious) language. A great many truths are of this kind, and so long as they don’t get their feet tangled in the desire to be “factual,” they are often far more compelling than a factual version of the same truths would be.
The more we know about neuroscience, the more we know that there are connections that can be formed and are formed between people based on this sort of language or shared experience, a so-far-mysterious connection that comes from sharing emotional realities (that is, having faith in one another) rather than an exchange of verifiable and falsifiable data.
Imagine our love-is-a-red-red-rose guy telling his beloved, “When I see you, my pituitary gland excretes at an elevated rate, my heart-rate and perspiration increase by about twenty percent, I experience a thickening of the muscles in my neck and chest, my testi…” Well, yeah. Accurate and factual it is. But I have yet to meet the girl who swoons when I say it: it isn’t that sort of language that creates connections, though it has enormous power to create agreement. These are statements that can be acknowledged as true or false with some ease, but they don’t engage the sympathies or emotions in any particularly deep way.
Then, too, some language is what we call “performative language.” That is, it creates the realities that it describes. When you make a contract or speak an oath or vow you’re creating a new reality, and this too depends on the faith of your audience.
Susan continues:
Since, as far as I can tell, the resurrection of Jesus cannot be easily proven or disproven, I can see where you would object to its being regarded as a fact. But that’s a mighty big can of worms you’re opening: millions and millions of facts (statements that can be easily proven or disproven) would cease to become facts as time marches on and proof becomes inaccessible. Do those facts then get downgraded to opinion? theory? What, then?
Well, for starters, the more extraordinary the claim the more extraordinary the evidence will need to be as time goes by. To claim that Jesus lived is no great controversy. To claim he was extraordinarily charismatic seems likely. That he did miracles might raise some eyebrows among those who haven’t seen miracles. That he rose from the dead is unparalleled in most human experience, and therefore represents a particularly extraordinary claim.
And as for how you go about handling fact-claims, it’s the business of science to see which “fact claims” stand up to the test of verifiability or survive falsification. That’s difficult in the case of the Resurrection, but not terribly difficult in the case of more modest claims.
Statements that can’t be verified or falsified are kind of out of the running before they start: “The Christian God exists,” for instance.
More and more such claims have to find some sort of translation, some way of slipping into the world of verifiability and falsifiability if they want to claim the status of “fact.”
It makes no sense to say that a literal interpretation of Genesis 1-11 is “factually true” if you can’t falsify it, or (worse) if you can falsify it and do. That’s sort of insane.
But you can still proudly make unverifiable claims: you just can’t be surprised when other people don’t quite get it.
It means you have to think before you speak, and say things that are meaningful to others, not just to you.
Reader Comments (3)
Thanks much for the elaboration, Otter. I find epistemology to be almost endlessly fascinating (though I have a rather embarrassing tendency to refer to it as “episiotomy,” a subject which elicits very different reactions), so if you ever feel like delving in further at some future point, you will have an avid reader.
I was particularly pleased by the beginning you made in differentiating between the various ways we speak about fact and truth: scientific fact (very amenable to proof but extremely narrow in scope), historical truth (much broader in scope but correspondingly less amenable to proof), performative language, and poetic truth. But it feels like there are large gaps there, still. There has to be a category for truth that exists by common consensus, for example. (“The capital of Louisiana is Baton Rouge.”) And is there room in our understanding of truth for divine revelation? Is there a hierarchy of truth?
Also, how does the truth imbedded in poetry differ from opinion? If Brent says of his best girl, Roxy, “My love is a red, red rose”, but Bob comes back with, “Your love is a big, dumb cow” can we know anything about Roxy from the exchange, or have we merely been enlightened about Brent and Bob’s feelings? Huge difference.
Bouncing back to your homeschooling chicas and their declaration that, “The resurrection is a fact”: it sounds like your beef is not so much with the usage of the word fact as with their refusal to acknowledge that it is a widely contested belief that cannot be conclusively verified. Is that correct?
If so, I understand (and empathize with) where you are coming from when you react adversely to it. Personally, I fall into the camp of people you refer to at the end of the post, those who make unverified claims and remain unsurprised when others don’t quite get it. I have no beef at all with folks who wish to point out how very implausible the resurrection is. I absolutely agree that it is “unparalleled in human experience” (if it weren’t I doubt that writers of scripture would have compared it to creation itself: there’s just the one time this earth was created—it’s not a repeatable phenomenon). And I could go so far as to say belief in the resurrection is illogical—depending, of course, on ones’ primary assumptions. (It’s not illogical given my primary assumptions; millions of others begin elsewhere, and logically, they end elsewhere also.)
At the same time, I don’t worry overmuch about always couching my unverifiable truth claims in a bubble-wrap of “I believe”, “I think”, etc.—it’s tiresome and poor style. Similarly, I’m probably willing to give the definition of fact more latitude than you are. (Rabbit trail: I’ve become interested enough in the origin and usage of “fact” to haul out my OED—and find the little magnifying glass to go with it. Apparently its earliest denotations in the 16th century revolved around the idea of an action done or performed, similar to a “feat.”) Conventionally, a fact can be defined as something that is generally acknowledged to be true, and while the resurrection has never been overwhelmingly acknowledged to be true, it has been regarded as true within a large chunk of the population for a couple millennia, so I’d cut your buddies some slack there, maybe.
Again, the real problem seems to be that your friends don’t show any awareness of, and indeed are quite frightfully disrespectful to, others who move in communities that do not share their understanding of truth.
I wrestle with the looniness of faith. I feel like I should be classified as some sort of amphibian when it comes to facts and faith: I breathe in air and walk on the hard factual solid ground, but I also feel quite at home using gills to take in living water. Both mechanisms have their place. It's sort of funny how living on the shifting shore of faith works: the tide often will roll in unexpectedly and knock little frogs right off their sunny rocks.
Faith, essentially is trust, and to truly trust, you can not be privy to all the facts. Some things must remain hidden. Faith requires risk.
There is a "cerebral" wing of Christianity devoted to apologizing for The Faith. (I'm so sorry...) I guess they want to minimize the risk. Perhaps they are the State Farm wing of Christendom. People call in with their theological ten-car pile-ups and make claims, and these agents (obviously working on straight commission) perform romance-ectomies by hauling out Josephus and their big Greek to English dictionaries, and making grand assertions about the factuality of the gospels. Then they up the premiums and send the weary claimants on their way. The claim is then sent to Risk Management (usually attorneys or in this case, Skeptical Scientific Types) who rip them to shreds with their degreed experts and their carbon-dating and their hideous stacks of papers. Headaches are handed out all around, enemies are made, wars are started, bodies pile up, and all of these big brains are oddly happy: they have found Their Purpose in Life.
Is this what God intended? He (through His ghost-writer to the Hebrews) said,"Without faith, it is impossible to please Him, for he that cometh to God must believe that He is..." Loosely translated, I think God's looking for people who are a bit nuts.
Facts and truth are like squares and rectangles: all facts are true, but not all truths are facts. The oddly proportioned rectangular truths are often the ones that require the most faith to prove. They are also the truths that are too big to fit comfortably into the perfect proportions of the factual square.
Daisy--fabulous analogies, fabulously expressed. Tres cool!