Facts exist. Your first sentence has 11 words. Easy to verify, right? Doesn't matter who's counting.
May I suggest that your confusion comes from a conflation between facts and generalizations. Hard facts exist in strictly defined contexts. Relax the context, and you need to eventually reach for generalizations that less precise and potentially ambiguous.
If somebidy asked me whether the cup in you hand would fall and and shatter when they release it from their grip, my answer would of course depend on a few things I pick up from the context: what gravitational attraction would the cup experience in your current location? What material is the cup made of (porcelain, metal...)? So if we're standing on earth and the cup was made of porcelain, I'd answer that it would fall and likely shatter. Doesn't mean that any cup would shatter. Metal cups doesn't. But that's a different fact. So there is no generalized fact that all cups shatter when they fall. Some do, some don't. We can play the same game with gravity. The cup wouldn't fall if we were floating on the ISS. So the same cup doesn't fall in all locations it might conceivably be.
Many people don't want to deal with the level of precision that hard facts require. They get sloppy and then start these endless discussions of "this isn't true because..." etc. and everyone gets gradually more confused because nothing seems to be entirely true or false. The fundamental counter here is to dig in and tease the generalizations apart until they become sets of constrained hard facts.
It's, I think, quite relevant here to note that "word" is a famously hard to define concept in linguistics. That is, there is no generalized definition of the concept "word" that works across languages, writing systems (e.g. Chinese and Japanese writing don't traditionally use spaces to separate words), and ways of analyzing language (phonological words are different from grammatical words).
So to make your sentence more accurate, you'd have to say "there are 11 groups of letters separated by whitespace characters or punctuation before your first period".
> It's, I think, quite relevant here to note that "word" is a famously hard to define concept in linguistics. That is, there is no generalized definition of the concept "word" that works across languages, writing systems (e.g. Chinese and Japanese writing don't traditionally use spaces to separate words), and ways of analyzing language (phonological words are different from grammatical words).
True, but for a language like English, the various definitions for "word" agree in many (though definitely not all) cases, and in the particular example, I think you'd have to argue somewhat harder to convince me that that sentence doesn't have exactly 11 words
(maybe if you argue that "would have" often turns into "would've", which is a single phonetic unit, but then I would also write it that way). There are however other cases where it's less clear (e.g. is possessive 's a separate word or an affix?).
While I get your point, and I think it's strong, I'm entirely unconvinced.
Everything we see, do and understand exists in a context window of an individual. We have a shared language, with which we can inexpertly communicate shared concepts. That language is terrible at communicating certain concepts, so we've invented things like math and counting to try to become more precise. It doesn't make those things "true" universally. It makes them consistent within a certain context.
How far it it from Dallas to Houston? On a paper map, it might be a few inches. True, within that context. Or you might get an answer for road miles. Or as the crow flies. In miles? Kilometers? It's only fairly recently (in human history) that we've even had somewhat consistent units of measure. And that whole conversation presupposes an enormous amount of culture knowledge and context - would that question mean anything to a native tribesman in Africa without an enormous amount of inculturation? Are their facts the same?
I'm not trying to make a "nothing is true, we can't know anything" kind of argument, that's lazy thinking.
I'm making an argument for maintaining skepticism in everything, even (especially?) things that you know for sure.
You still have to distinguish between hard, absolute facts which definitely exist and representations thereof in human language. The facts never change (the distance between Dallas and Houstom doesn't change while we are having this conversation), but accurate descriptions require additional concepts and now we get into the imprecise world of human communication. Doubting the precision and accuracy of human language is a fair point, but that doesn't make facts themselves subjective.
I admire the conviction that things become absolutely true at a sufficient level of specification.
So long as facts are represented in language, they are subject to language’s imprecision and subjectivity. And I don’t think that platonic ideals of facts, independent of representstion, have much utility.
What is Dallas? What is Houston? Which parts do we measure. are we talking about road distance? That something doesn't change during a conversation is not the same the thing as them never changing
If someone says "it's 250 miles from Houston to Dallas" you know that there will be some error involved. From precisely what part of Houston to what part of Dallas, does it include the outskirts, are they estimating, is it rounded to a nice number, etc.
If someone claims "it's 500 miles from Houston to Dallas" they're wrong.
I’m going to pretend to avoid asking what is a mile and what is 250 and 500 :)
I could imagine ways we could interpret “500 miles” the same way as The Proclaimers i.e. as a noteworthy or arduous distance, under which that claim “it’s 500 miles from Dallas to Houston” isn’t contextually false.
More interesting is what knowing that things are not the case tells us about what we can know is the case. I don’t think it reveals much, but I’m not sure
This is much of science: taking a hypothesis, understanding where the bounds of that hypothesis lie, then testing the bounds to try to disprove it. Then creating a more accurate hypothesis within the space of what’s left unknown.
Unfortunately, I missed out a key word “… what knowing that things are not the case tells us about what we can know is [absolutely] the case…”
My apologies for this and with the omission I don’t disagree one bit with your reply.
On the other hand I can see how we might imagine ways we could scientifically sarisfy ourselves beliefs are not absolute, but I’m not sure how we could satisfy ourselves they are
> How far it it from Dallas to Houston? On a paper map, it might be a few inches. True, within that context. Or you might get an answer for road miles. Or as the crow flies. In miles? Kilometers? It's only fairly recently (in human history) that we've even had somewhat consistent units of measure.
No one’s opinion is going to make them closer together or farther apart, though. The distance (in whatever context) can be known. Can be objectively measured. That makes it a fact.
> I'm making an argument for maintaining skepticism in everything, even (especially?) things that you know for sure.
Are you skeptical about which way to put your feet when you get out of bed? Do you check to make sure every single time?
I think you are trying hard and writing a lot to miss the parent's point. You're thing about the number of words in the sentence is like what the parent is mistakenly calling "tautological;" another way to say it is blatantly obvious and a banal observation. This is not the type of thing we are talking about here. This is entire post is about "facts" and "fact checking" in the case of socio-political issues, the kinds of things for which there are fact checkers. The parent is obviously correct. Just look at the state of actual "fact checking" of this variety in the real world. There is a lot of controversy and a lot of words are used in a very loose way, these are not simple physics problems that you can punch into a TI-86. The issue is clearly about "who are the fact checkers" or put another way "who decides the facts." In a court of the law in the US, the judge is only arbiter of facts, these can not even be appealed.
But I agree with your overall point! :) Ok, so the statement "gravity keeps us on the ground" is not a tautology in the strict sense but you have correctly defined it here. I think it probably seems like a tautology because colloquially we might use it that way. I don't think its worth parsing out too much. This kind of stuff about coffee cups and all that has nothing to do with "fact checking" political statements and anyone else being serious knows that.
With "gravity keeps us on the ground" I was trying to point out that the word "gravity" to most folks is the same thing as "the thing that keeps us on the ground", it's just a language symbol/shorthand for that concept, so the statement would reduce to A=A, and isn't a meaningful "fact".
Everything is political, which is one of the statements made above.
Facts are political. Because facts actively change how you live your life.
The playwright who created the “kill all climate denialists” talks about how it took years for the play to get onto stage.
And then how he began to see the truth of climate denialists positions. That climate denialists believed the facts, and realized it meant their whole way of life was over. So they had to do something about it. They responded with denial. In a very real way, they lived their beliefs.
The fact of climate change IS political.
EVERYTHING is political, there is no fact that I cannot convert into a weapon, through some means or the other. Blaming fact checkers, is simply trying not to blame humans.
No, whether a coffee cup will break when you drop it or whatever that was is not a political thing. I'm not sure what the rest is about. To deny that there is a lot of subjectivity in the kinds of "facts" we are talking about her is just to deny reality.
“Facts is facts” works for counting words in a sentence.
It does not work for anything with nuance or context, or for unprovable propositions. It is a fact that there is no elephant in my house. But if you want to doubt that fact for the lulz or for profit, I will be hard pressed to prove it.
That’s where our modern populist / fascists have weaponized disingenuousness to prove that “up is down” is just as valid a statement as “up is up”.
May I suggest that your confusion comes from a conflation between facts and generalizations. Hard facts exist in strictly defined contexts. Relax the context, and you need to eventually reach for generalizations that less precise and potentially ambiguous.
If somebidy asked me whether the cup in you hand would fall and and shatter when they release it from their grip, my answer would of course depend on a few things I pick up from the context: what gravitational attraction would the cup experience in your current location? What material is the cup made of (porcelain, metal...)? So if we're standing on earth and the cup was made of porcelain, I'd answer that it would fall and likely shatter. Doesn't mean that any cup would shatter. Metal cups doesn't. But that's a different fact. So there is no generalized fact that all cups shatter when they fall. Some do, some don't. We can play the same game with gravity. The cup wouldn't fall if we were floating on the ISS. So the same cup doesn't fall in all locations it might conceivably be.
Many people don't want to deal with the level of precision that hard facts require. They get sloppy and then start these endless discussions of "this isn't true because..." etc. and everyone gets gradually more confused because nothing seems to be entirely true or false. The fundamental counter here is to dig in and tease the generalizations apart until they become sets of constrained hard facts.