NOTE: AN IMPROVED VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE IS NOW ON RIBBONFARM: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/09/03/wittgensteins-revenge/
The atomic metaphor
Matter is “the stuff of the universe,” and atoms are the indivisible particles of this stuff.
If truth is like matter, what indivisible particles is it made out of?
I don’t know, but facts isn’t it.
Facts sound like they’re atoms — hard, granular, indisputable little things. Like atoms, when you stick a bunch of them together, you should get big things.
But “truth” can be weird.
Truth laughs from all angles at our puny physical laws: Meanings are like objects that occupy the same space at the same time. Paradoxes are both distinct and indistinguishable. Possibilities both do and don’t exist.
If facts are like atoms, there is no assemblage that can respect any of these things, all of which are embedded in notions of truth.
The “atomic metaphor” of facts is aggressively low-resolution — hostile to truth and its ethereal weirdness.
Facts are 8-bit.
Experimental isolation
When conducting an experiment, scientists try to isolate the things they’re experimenting with from the rest of the world so that results can’t be influenced by random factors they’re not paying attention to.
This cannot be done with facts. There’s no boundary by which concepts can be separated from one another.
As a literal banana explains:
When you think of “spinach” or “eggplant” in the context of a tweet, you probably don’t think of it as an index for people (unless perhaps you know a banana and attribute personhood to bananas). But in the context of a server at a restaurant, it is natural to map food to people. Eggplants, like bananas, can yell about politics.
I call this Wittgenstein’s Magnet:
Ms. Banana peels away the assumptions buried in seemingly plain statements with this parable from Wikipedia:
An astronomer, a physicist and a mathematician are on a train in Scotland.
The astronomer looks out of the window, sees a black sheep standing in a field, and remarks, “How odd. All the sheep in Scotland are black!”
“No, no, no!” says the physicist. “Only some Scottish sheep are black.”
The mathematician rolls his eyes at his companions’ muddled thinking and says, “In Scotland, there is at least one sheep, at least one side of which appears to be black from here some of the time.”
The joke is illustrative, but there may be a further lesson: There’s no real end to such refinements.
“In Scotland, there seems to be at least one sheep, at least one side of which appears to me to be black from here some of the time. It’s also possible I’m dreaming, on drugs, or that I’m actually the sheep having an out-of-body experience.”
A fact is a fractal wasteland of hidden interpretations. Looking for indivisibility in a fact is like looking for cheeseburgers in the Mandelbrot set.
Indexical communication
In order to reorient society toward useful (i.e., indexical) facts, a literal banana recommends science return to a posture of vigorous curiosity, resisting the urge to impose narratives:
The second possibility is to engage in forms of research that seek to locate and preserve the information that is indexical to a situation, rather than attempting to create global knowledge at all. That is the goal of the tiny field of ethnomethodology, for example. This kind of science is still rare. There’s a proverb to the effect that biology without Darwin was just stamp collecting. I don’t know how much hope there is for social science to stop hallucinating Darwins everywhere, and go back to honest stamp collecting, but I suspect that it is the only way toward social science knowledge that would be genuinely valuable. These methods look more like watching reality with heightened attention, acquiring from each situation the tools with which to understand it, rather than devising contrivances to advance narratively compelling theories (and sometimes even ostentatiously boring ones).
Indexical science is fascination simply with what there is.
This banana sounds like Marshall Rosenberg of Nonviolent Communication, who recommends people confront one another like this:
- “When you did x, I felt y.”
There’s no compelling narrative attached, such as “you made me feel y.” Is this indexical communication?
- “I liked the movie Titanic”
seems to be indexical communication—a fact. You’re the ultimate authority on your feelings. If you say you liked it, nobody can say you didn’t.
- “The movie Titanic is good”
is an interpretation disguised as a fact. Anyone can say “no it isn’t” with just as much authority.
What makes both non-indexical communication and non-indexical science so feeble is its infinite disputability.
In order to be indisputable — i.e., useful—perhaps “facts” must be redefined to include only what is measured by instruments, plus attribution (plus mathematically provable manipulations of those measurements).
- “Frank’s thermometer says the temperature outside is 76 degrees.”
- “According to the sensor at the intersection of Wilshire and 18th, the average driving speed is 36 miles per hour.”
Like your feelings about Titanic, if facts require subjects, they’re far less vulnerable to dispute. Only the subjects are: “Does John have a motive to lie? Did Volkswagen build those sensors?”
This seems like an improvement.
Regardless, it shows the extent to which facts are symbolic, divisible, and only useful under strict supervision.
Coronavirus: Window to the soul
Stories make sense of facts. The same states of affairs can amount to completely different stories, implying completely different possibilities and meanings.
In gaps between the usual stories propagated by corporate media, there are gems like this:
Wait, so there's a biological research lab with the exact same logo as the Umbrella Corporation right in the city where the #coronarvirus originated, AND corona is an anagram for racoon.
— UNDΘΘMΞD (@Undoomed) January 26, 2020
What the fuck has this timeline been smoking??? pic.twitter.com/Avpl37UZB7
(Racoon City is from the Resident Evil series of video games, in which a company called Umbrella Corp causes a zombie outbreak.)
Confluences like these create gravity wells of meaning that are difficult to ignore.
Is this pure synchronicity, a mystical twist in the fabric of the universe? It a sinister conspiracy orchestrated by humans? Either way, the orderliness has a quality that draws us in, especially now that we are under no threat of molestation by credible institutions.
A certain banana concludes:
In realms of guaranteed ignorance, what do the “experiments” offer (other than ritual sacrifice, if not of animals then of undergraduates’ time) that folktales or thought experiments with similar content couldn’t provide just as effectively? It is only folkloric and narrative value that the classical experiments retain.
We’re not interested in fact-atoms, we’re interested in stories—and that might not be so bad.
Descartes gone wild: methodological credulity
If the Methodological Skepticism consists of doubting everything and seeing what remains, Methodological Credulity consists of believing everything and letting the contradictions cancel themselves out.
“If every story is presumed true, which one respects the greatest number of others?”
Stories are truth-like in that they can accommodate both facts and nuance. This gives them a power that facts cannot possess.
Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, shares a story:
I started taking flying lessons recently, do you know what my flight instructor told me? He said if you’re heading East, and you have a cross wind, you will drift and land in the wrong place, so you have to do what we pilots call ‘crabbing’ [flying as if the destination is another place upwind].
This holds also for man I would say. If we take man as he really is, we make him worse. If we seem to be idealists, over-estimating, over-rating man, you know what happens? We promote him to what he really can be. So we have to be idealists in a way, because we wind up as the true realists.
Do you know who said this? This was Goethe.
Now you will understand why I in one of my writings once said that this is the most apt maxim and motto for any psychotherapeutic activity.
To seek better narratives is to elicit the truth of our potential from ourselves and from each other.
Notably, presidential candidate Marianne Williamson defines a miracle as a change in perspective.
We don’t know what possibilities will appear when we make better sense of what we already know.
And that’s a fact.
Read more of this article on: https://medium.com/@harmonylion1/facts-are-not-atoms-of-truth-fd669bf91728