Facts will ding

Robert Burns 1759-1796

In 1786 Robert Burns reckoned – “facts are chiels that winna ding,/An downa be disputed” [‘facts are fellows that will not be overturned,/And cannot be disputed’].

I disagree with our national poet about this.

Facts exist in particular mindbrains and as such are subject to ongoing cognitive churn. They are thus readily overturned, disputed and subject to reinterpretation. There is nothing substantive about them. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould captured the deeper point in 1986 when he said, “The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind.”

But the supposedly hard nosed academics in the 20th century did not factor in the neurology and the evolutionary psychology behind thought and meaning in the collective, human mindbrain. The subjective nature of ‘truth’ was swept under the carpet.

Here are a few quotes that give the intellectual and objective flavor of the times:

(1912) Bertrand Russell - “We are driven back to correspondence with fact as constituting the nature of truth. It remains to define precisely what we mean by 'fact', and what is the nature of the correspondence which must subsist between belief and fact, in order that belief may be true.”

(1949) Albert Einstein - “I despaired of the possibility of discovering the true laws by means of constructive efforts based on known facts. The longer and the more despairingly I tried, the more I came to the conviction that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to assured results.

(1952) Albert Einstein - “I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.”

(1975) Paul Karl Feyerabend - “Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress.”

(1975) Paul Karl Feyerabend - “Not only are facts and theories in constant disharmony, they are never as neatly separated as everyone makes them out to be.”

(1987) Thomas Sowell - “Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.”

From this viewpoint it is as if facts existed and had objective locations in time and space.

Facts were talked about as if they were ‘things’ belonging to the category of ‘abstract’. The analogy was that as bricks make up a wall, so facts make up a theory.

I was encultured to that mechanistic scientific paradigm. I spent four youthful years training to be a Zoologist and my first Master’s degree dug the hole deeper.

However, the second Master’s degree opened doors to phenomenology, post-modernism and cultural relativism. It sparked an ongoing enthusiasm for thinking about thinking and for trying to avoid the conundrum of a mindbrain studying itself using a language that may not be up to the task.

These days I give the subjective unconscious a free rein to figure what is going on with the mindbrain wherein facts are chiels that div ding.