Over the ages, facts and theories have vied with one another as the avenue to truth. In the present century, both have been replaced by charisma, and woe is us.
Epistemology is the study of how people learn and was traditionally assigned to whether people were blank slates who learned from experience or were people who had inherent ideas which were brought to bear on experience. A modern empiricist theory of epistemology is John Dewey who thought pure logic could find its way of mastering what is available in experience and a modern idealist is Noam Chomsky who thinks that the building blocks of language and therefore thought are inherent in the mental facilities. A different way to think of epistemology is as to whether facts or theories are the basis for constructing and relying on thought, and also to ask if there is a single line of development whereby facts overcome theories as the way to know things or there is instead a very long cycle whereby the two of them replace one another as dominant, and I would suggest the latter.
Duns Scotus reintroduced from the pre-Medieval world that theories should be informed by facts, facts having been central in ancient philosophy, where Aristotle theory of ethics rested on the fact that there was, in fact, a golden mean between extremes and that a consideration of politics rested n comparing the various constitutions of the city-states. But Medieval thought rested instead on syllogistic derivations of what had to be the case because the conclusions descend from first principles, as when God exists according to Saint Thomas because some things are better than others and existing is better than non-existing and therefore God must exist because He is the best. Duns Scotus allowed for some leverage or independence of fact from the certainty of theory by noting that at least when it comes to natural events, which means events not open to free will, it is possible to associate frequency of causes with frequencies of consequences and regard that as a proof in itself, as when he shows an eclipse regularly or frequently occurs when the moon is between the sun and the Earth. Moreover, surprising facts can be associated or derived from self evident facts. It is self-evident that bodies such as the moon can interrupt the visibility of the sun in an eclipse. There is not yet the quantification of science, the reduction of observations to formulas and amounts, but the terminology is already there in that he thinks relating frequencies to one another is important. The foot is in the door. Subsequently. facts have become the royal road to knowledge. Truth has become seen as the operation of the experimental method. Galileo’s experiments with inclined planes set the stage for Newton’s theories and Einstein’s theory of relativity was confirmed by examinations of the perturbations of the planet Mercury.
The greatest flourishing of theory was among the seventeenth century philosophers who were very supportive of science, such as Spinoza, or partly invented it, which was the case with Leibnitz. Spinoza supported his view that his empirical observations of how one emotion transformed into being was validated in three different ways. The argument through geometric reasoning seems plausible if not conclusive. The assertion is one of many ideas that fit into a system and so the sturdiness of the system is made plausible or certain by its various struts, just as the three laws of motion by Newton are mutually reinforcing. Third, the particular assertion seems plausible or certain because it provides a distinct insight into the emotion in question just as the adaptability of the structure of one species after another suggests that species in general adapt so as to survive in a particular niche.
It might seem that the grand system builders, the theorists, of the seventeenth century, were replaced by the experimental and scientific emphasis on facts but that is not the case, even though the eighteenth century emphasized experience, the mind a blank slate filled with information encountered. But Locke was a builder of theories, as was Jefferson and Madioson, the Constitution a compendium of clocklike devices where one device would check another and so constituting an interlocking system. Moreover, Linnaeus created in the eighteenth century an elaborated interlocking set of classifications which set the scene for nineteenth century evolution, and the nineteenth century invented nationalism, democracy, and the Maxwell equations, all of which are theories meant to gather together various facts so that they are related and thereby proven. And the twentieth century is also an age of theory, having invented Fascism, Soviet Marxism, and the theory of relativity, even though te anti theoretical bent of philosophy created ordinary language theory which concentrates on the variety of ways language can function without a general theory of how language works, which was different from Kant, who thought language demonstrated what was necessary.
Shift to the twenty-first century by first remarking that politics, for the most part, does not engage in metaphysics, which is what it is to be a state of being, though it does deal with political philosophy, which includes the legitimate basis of authority. So the Declaration of Independence says that the purpose of government is to provide people with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, goals not generally recognized before that, and the U. S. Constitution says it is a compact of people, the source of government legitimacy. But every once in a while, politics, which seems metaphysically superficial, does get to redefining a state of being. The New Deal redefined the government by treating the Constitution as no longer what it could not do but what it was not prevented from doing, though it took the end of the Thirties to recognize that the NLRB and the other alphabet agencies could meet muster as allowable. That is a chane in being because to open possibility from restriction is to deal with two different experiences and definitions.
An even more radical change in states of being evolved out of the misinterpretation offered by commentators on a remark by Kelly Anne Conway, a spokesperson in the first Trump administration. She said that she had alternative facts, by which she simply meant other facts than those proposed and those alternative facts supported her point of view. Nothing outrageous about that. But the commentators took her to mean that her facts were contrary to the facts usually proffered and so she was positing a different reality, ones concocted for her own benefit, as if facts can be manufactured rather than just either true or false, and so was taken to mean that whatever facts are posited are taken to be real or true and so not subject to an independent standard of truth.
The derogation of objective truth is the standard of the second Trump administration. To assert a claim of fact is a sufficient basis for it being treated as true. If Trump says Portland is burning, that is not a question but the truth of the matter and there is no way to contradict it with facts. An opinion of a fact is made into another being, which is the existence of a fact. The consequence of this metaphysical transformation is that facts are no longer avenues of inquiry to be established as evidence to support theories and so arrive at closure about what theories are right or wrong but are a different kind of closure whereby there is nothing else to be said once one fact or set of facts are confronted with another fact or set of facts. Asserting facts is an end of discussion. So Conservatives will say there was no insurrection on Jan. 6th, just a stroll through the Capitol and Liberals would say there was an insurrection, just an unsuccessful one, and there is nothing else to be said about it, not even needing to resort to a definition of the concept of insurrection because that was clearly visible. These two perceptions are so clearly different that Liberals think most Conservatives are lying about the obvious rather than misinformed or twisting words around, insurrection meaning something different from what it had meant before Jan. 6th. There is nothing to discuss. The two sides are at an impasse.
Discussion is presently at an impasse politically and practically and metaphysically even if sides contest one another on theories, as would happen if you had differing definitions of the idea of insurrection in that it is or is not an insurrection if it is a protest against illegal action while others think the term applies to whether it is legitimate or not, the American Revolution an insurrection whether you like it or not. So, in our time, genocide can be turned controversial becaise it applies to those killed when a colonialist power uses violence to insure its control and many casualties ensue rather than genocide refering to the deliberate intent to kill off an ethnic or religious people. What is at stake is not the facts but the overall view of world history and so the attempt to unpack what colonialism is is complex and seems far away from the issue of people who are suffering and being killed. Similarly, whether democracy is a stake with the Trump presidency requires an elaboration of what democracy requires, both sides offended at the opposite position and, it seems to me, reduced to whether Trump is considered admirable or not for his cutting through nonsense whatever other his faults. The person is more important than the facts or the principles and so we rightly call them charismatic if they can be vouched for having changed principles.
Whether the facts of the economy going better or worse is asserted rather than argued, just as whether the idea that America has been in decline is a way of expressing a bad national mood about history and its cycles and paths.ary 6th and conclude it was a peaceful protest rather than an insurrection because they prefer the interpretation and so decide which are the definitive facts or even not believe the facts are what they seem to be because the theory is consistent with another set of facts, that the election in 2020, for example, was rigged or not, a matter of fact that is proclaimed or asserted without the need for demonstration.That is very different from the theoretical claim that America is based on a Protestant theocracy and the nation should return to that, as claims, because it can be contested that the basis of American politics is set by the Declaration of Independence and the U. S. Constitution, whose Founding Fathers were Deists. An argument can proceed by mobilizing history and what seems the internal logic of Christian or Enlightenment thinking, however much the disputation is unsatisfying because it is interminable, the other side always having the last word until one or the other changes the subject, a process of communication and the cessation of communication that is a theme of Roland Wulbert’s sociology. So facts are an impasse but theories can be elaborated and one or another aspect of them continually contested.
Actually, the impasse over both facts and theories is itself likely to pass because reason itself is so useful a device that it can be dispensed with only when things are going well. America is doing quite well economically even if people claim otherwise despite the statistics and the U S has not been at war since the petering out of Afghanistan, the last stage of the War on Terror that began with plane hijacks and culminated in 9/11. A real crisis such as a war with China or a stock market crash or a mass intrusion into social life by AI might get people back to assessing both facts and theories, each one of them having their purchase.