@fresco,
I like that, not the ideas but the principle. It’s good practice to summarize the result of these sorts of discussions. I’d like to do the same for
arguments presented in this thread against the transience of facts.* Without attribution, here are the best arguments I’ve seen:
1. In regular English, ‘facts’ mean all sorts of different things, from simple observations (“it’s raining”) to general patterns (“gasoline is highly flammable”), to facts as pure subjective constructions (“my wife is beautiful”), to facts as entire theories (“men evolved from apes”). These different types of ‘facts’ can’t all be lumped in the same bag. Data/observations are historical facts that will
never change, while high-order theories are highly likely to evolve. The rule of thumb seems to be: the more simple and empiric the ‘fact’, the less likely it will change; the more aggregated and abstract the ‘fact’, the more likely it is to change. IOW, data don’t change, only their interpretation does.
2. If understood within the framework of realism (and conventional English), in which reality is conceived as independent from our mind, the OP is false: there is an objective reality out there which does not change its shape and laws all the time. If understood within Fresco's constructivist philosophy, the statement means that people and particularly scientists often change their interpretation of facts. This is true but trivial. Cyr also hesitated between those two versions of the OP: the false idea that reality depends on observers, and the true but trivial idea that observers often change their mind about it.
3. The OP statement is self-contradictory: if all facts are destined to die, then “the fact that all facts die” will die, or has died already… That in itself is enough to warrant rephrasing: not “all facts will die” but “some facts
may die”.
4. The OP statement is simplistic and does disservice to the very paradigm it is trying to promote. If defined as “interpretations”, ‘facts’ rarely just ‘die’. More often they evolve, they morph into slightly different interpretations, or they give birth to other, better interpretations. Sometimes, they don’t even do any of this; they just remain as they are. There’s nothing inevitable about the decay of scientific ideas. They are not
destined to become obsolete, all of them at about the same speed, as the metaphor with half-life would imply. It’s not a valid metaphor for a process that’s much less predictable and much more dynamic, messy and creative than nuclear decay. A better metaphor would be to compare them with species in Darwinian evolution. They might die off, or they might evolve, or they might just stay as they are…
5. A much discussed point was whether the classic distinction between
reality and our
perception of reality was warranted. It was proven beyond reasonable doubt that the two must remain conceptually distinct. If the two are conceived as the same, it follows that there is nothing in reality that we don’t presently perceive... There is absolutely nothing “unknown” or “unseen” at any time, and thus there is no reason to go see what’s behind the mountain. There’s simply nothing behind the mountain… Curiosity is a waste of time and we cannot make any prediction or ever be surprised by anything. Which we all know is false.
6. The ideas that reality exists in a mind-independent way means that different people can collaborate, because they deal with the same objective reality. I can tell my wife where the keys are, and she will find them. Scientists can share notes when working on the same reality. If their results are incompatible, then one at least must be false, and they can design an experiment that will show which. None of this would be possible if we were living in different, purely subjective realities.
7. The opposite idea -- that facts are transient and reality is a construct open to negotiation -- lends itself to abuse by strong private interests and states, who will have the deepest pockets and the best negotiating teams out there to make sure that they negotiate reality to their advantage. If facts are transient, it is okay to lie. This is not theoretical: it is happening right now with resistance to climate change theory and facts. Holocaust denial is another example of where the constructivist idea can lead us. If facts can be negotiated, then they can be manipulated and bought, and thus they will be.
* This excludes other arguments made against other ideas in the thread, like Set’s argument about the origin of men, used against Fresco’s idea that human language create reality altogether.
Hard getting through ain't it !
