It’s (not just) about the facts, stupid

James Carville, the architect of Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential run, gets the credit (blame?) for coming up with the phrase “It’s the economy stupid”. This was designed to keep the campaign on track by keeping everyone’s attention focussed on what really mattered. Now you might think that an appropriate version of this in science might be “It’s about the facts”. After all science is all about facts – discovering and communicating them. It’s not about stuff like feelings. This is not to argue that facts are easy things to work with. It can be really hard to prise them out of the universe. Just think of the time and expense, trouble and complexity, involved in finding the Higgs Boson, of establishing as a fact that it exists. However, it turns out that even in science it’s not that simple. And beyond science, in the rest of life, if the last week in the UK has demonstrated anything, it’s that a lot of things besides facts are critical.

Definitions of the word “fact” abound. Let’s assume we mean statements about things, situations, objects, processes or people that are true. Just being able to state something (eg “Trump is a chump”) doesn’t make it a fact. Although, as an aside, it’s interesting that in the social media age, it seems that the secret to establishing something as a fact is simply to say it often enough, or to have it said by enough people. But to establish a statement as a statement of fact, there has to be some interaction with evidence, with how things actually are. This moves a statement from being an opinion to being a fact. So if a Trump did or said lots of chump-like things, then we might feel happier concluding that the statement was a statement of fact, not of opinion. Of course we have the practical problem of identifying, gathering and analysing the evidence. And this all turns out to be quite tricky.

What is going to count as relevant evidence, and who is going to decide? We tend to depend on various types of institution to decide what is and what is not relevant. So we have courts and judges and lawyers with rules to decide what’s relevant in the criminal sphere. In science, different disciplines tend to act in a similar institutional way deciding what’s relevant to a given issue. So it was particle physicists who decided the rules in determining what sort of, and what degree of evidence would be required to show that the Higgs existed and had been found. They would claim that they were guided by theories that laid out mathematical criteria for deciding what was what. But it was still a community effort. And even in physics, there’s still scope for a degree of interpretation.

But when it gets really interesting is when you realise that even once you’ve got a stone cold fact, that’s when the fun really begins. Because facts don’t exist in isolation. Every fact comes embedded in a whole bunch of contextual stuff. And it’s when both are taken together (the fact/facts and the context) that we determine whether we’re going to take a fact seriously (believe it, rely on it, act on it). Take the simple fact that “it’s raining”. If you run in to my windowless office (it’s not actually windowless, but bear with me) shouting that it’s raining, just before I leave for home, then you might expect me to pick up a brolly or put on a coat. But if I know you are a regular prankster, and you are known for never quite telling things as they are and for always having your own agenda (and if your name is Boris), even if it really is raining I might actually leave my office unprotected.

There’s also the issue of deciding between facts. It turns out that how we might interpret the same fact differs depending on context. Even in science, deciding which facts to go after, is rarely a matter of the facts themselves. Experiments guided by provisional theories (hypotheses) will prioritise some facts over others. So some are discovered, others remain hidden. And prior views (beliefs and theories) can be so powerful, even in science, that we have to guard constantly against things like confirmation bias – prioritising the facts that suit our views. Our prior commitments to theories, it turns out, can lead us to interpret the same facts in different ways. It can be so bad, that we become incapable of even communicating sensibly with adherents of other views. This has happened in science in the past, even (or perhaps particularly) in physics, the hardest of hard sciences.

This sort of thing is going on now in UK politics. We have just had a referendum that was in part about facts. Facts about the economic impact of Brexit. Facts about the numbers coming into the UK from both the EU and further afield. But how those facts were interpreted, or even whether they were accepted as facts, depended very much on the prior commitments of people. And during the campaign there developed a kind of mutual incomprehension between Remainers and Brexiteers. For many on both sides, the facts were so obvious and powerful, that communication became almost impossible. But it turned out it wasn’t just about facts at all. It was about a lot of other stuff too.

So when we come to other important facts, facts like an empty tomb for example, there’s no warrant for instant dismissal on one side, or a feeling that its implications should just be obvious on the other. There’s investigating to be done, evidence to be engaged with and carefully weighed. And an awareness of background biases and prior commitments. And if you’re tempted to feel that the facts are just so obvious that you cannot conceive of how someone can come to view that differs from yours given those facts, then go sit in a dark cool room and think again.