unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation
by
by
BlackOxford's review
did not like it
bookshelves: american, aesthetics, measurement, philosophy-theology, science, epistemology-language The Cost of Truth
There is no market price for truth; buying truth would be a contradiction equivalent to seeking it by torture. But there is a cost of truth. Estimating this cost is the subject of what’s called epistemology. UnSpun is a book of practical epistemology, something particularly apt in the age of Trump and Putin. That unSpun is largely worthless as a guide to good epistemology doesn’t detract from the importance of its subject.
The premise of any epistemology is simple: everybody lies. Best friends sometimes, salesmen most of the time and politicians all the time. We all know this no matter if we live in a totalitarian atheist state or a hyper-liberal religious democracy. The value of truth to the speaker or writer of language is precisely nil. Only the hearer and reader has an interest in the truthfulness of a statement.
The central epistemological question therefore is what and whose interest is being communicated in any message. Whether it’s a commercial advertisement or a political appeal, the interests being represented are not ours. This is not cynicism, merely an emotionless principle which is logically and empirically verified universally. And it’s not paranoia since we can live comfortably with the lesser lies, fibs, and misleading hints.
Of course the difficulty is that the messages we are often given suggest interests we didn’t even know existed. Who knows but they might be ours and we hadn’t realized it. Listerine points to bad breath, for example. Apple says creativity is what is most important in life. Daz will give us whiter clothes - even for our colored fabrics. And Trump insists we should worry about Muslims and Mexicans. In the first instance it is these interests, not the product or issue, that is being sold to us. The intention of the message is to establish a criterion of choice, which if accepted will lead to ‘correct’ purchasing or voting behavior.
The first epistemological principle for dealing effectively with these suggestions about interests is simple: if the message provokes fear, inadequacy, lack of personal merit, or looming social inferiority, it is almost certainly false, misleading, or tendentious. This is an emotional not a rational signal and therefore demands a certain degree of emotional rather than intellectual maturity. Sensitivity not education is what counts. It is the emotions which can distinguish between being sold and being informed. Like any other skill, emotional sensitivity to suggestions about what is important and valuable must be learned. It’s called aesthetics.
This first ‘aesthetical’ principle can be obscured by the use of ‘facts’, particularly statistical data, quotes, and phrases like ‘more than’, ‘better than’ either stated or implied. Factual assertions are meant to ‘prove’ interests when they are associated with the interests that are being sold to us. However, what must be kept in mind is that facts do not generate interests; rather interests generate facts. This shouldn’t be controversial. In our daily lives we encounter an infinity of potential facts. Actual facts are those events which have some sort of importance that has already been established.
This then is the second epistemological principle: all factual assertions are relative to the interests they reflect. There simply are no objective facts. Factuality, like its corollary ‘value’, is a conditional not an existential characteristic. It is patently impossible to know the meaning of data presented as factual, much less the methodology by which these data were produced, without understanding the interests they are meant to further.
Some call this second principle ‘relativism’ and criticize it as promoting social and moral chaos. But paradoxically it is the presumption that there are fixed criteria that can be used to identify truth which contributes most to the acceptance of commercial and political absurdities. These absurdities are accepted within a culture because the culture itself believes it has found the ultimate standard of truth - in Scripture perhaps, or scientific method, or logical analysis, or some trustworthy person, or, quelle horreur, technology. Agreement guarantees validity. Except of course when it doesn’t. As both scientists and Adventists have found over centuries.*
It is not incidental therefore that it is American Evangelicals and the other Deplorables, with their insistence on the idea of absolute truth, who are most susceptible to the Trumpian deceptions and Creationist obfuscations that are obvious to the rest of us. Living without fixed criteria of truth is an emotional burden. It’s uncomfortable, an irritant which we’d like to eliminate, and with it the difficulties of conscience which plague those who doubt. Evangelicals are the 21st century bourgeoisie - they are emotionally lazy; they crave stability, which they find in tribal conformance. They don’t necessarily lack intelligence; but they do have uniformly poor taste.
The burden of epistemological uncertainty can be heavy. Belief, faith, loyalty to one’s cultural group is easy. Doubt is hard. Hopeful doubt is even harder. But it is the real cost of truth. And it has a name: Responsibility, specifically the responsibility for choosing the aesthetic criterion by which we view the world, by which we sort the assertions made about by ourselves and others. This criterion can never be final because the choice itself makes learning about other criteria possible. Nor can the criterion be discovered by a fixed procedure since it is logically prior to such procedure. So there is no way to avoid an entirely personal responsibility for truth.
UnSpun doesn’t like this conclusion. Its authors would like to lay down some fixed epistemological rules. While they agree that uncertainty is something we have to live with (Rule#1 “You can’t be completely certain”), they think there is an intellectual criterion called “certain enough” we can use to separate the truthful wheat from the deceptive chaff (Rule#2). The specific advice is: “In the world of practical reality weighing the facts is a matter of choosing the right standard of proof to give us the degree of certainty we need under the circumstances.”.
Read that sentence again. It is somewhat awkward. Allow me to present it a bit more clearly: ‘Compare competing facts in order to determine the correct criterion for comparing the competing facts.’ The circular nonsense is obvious. Even if it weren’t, the question of how much is ‘enough’ is something the authors steer well clear of.**
UnSpun’s further suggestions are equally specious. Its Rule #3 says “Look for general agreement among experts.” One wonders where there is such a list of experts for the multitude of advertising and political claims that are made to us daily. And, not incidentally, what criteria are used to designate one as ‘expert?’ The authors don’t seem to have heard of the problem of infinite regression. Bucking the issue of truth up a notch isn’t helpful.
Rule#4 is “Check primary sources.” Absolutely first class advice when your preparing for your doctoral thesis in sociology. Not so helpful when checking the claim that brand A analgesic relieves pain twice as fast as brand B. Oh and by the way, the competing claims to being primary sources are not trivial. Ask any biblical scholar how many hundreds of ‘original’ versions of the Hebrew testaments there are.
Rule #5 “Know what counts” and Rule #6 “Know who’s talking” are unexceptionable. They are merely equivalent to saying that facts are relative to interests, although elsewhere the authors have difficulty with this principle.
Rule #7 “Seeing shouldn’t necessarily be believing.” This is indeed informative. But it is really only a restatement of the fundamental premise of epistemology: Everybody lies, including oneself, to oneself. Nonetheless its specificity is a useful reinforcement.
Rule #8 “Crosscheck everything that matters.” This is certainly a fine piece of advice for either an investigative reporter or a trial lawyer. But it is largely irrelevant for the average consumer or man at the polling booth. The authors obviously included it as an afterthought to appear professional. After all the wealth of anecdotal material they present in the rest of the book depends on doing just that.
So while unSpun has a noble objective and reads like an entertaining episode of ‘Hilarious Television Bloopers,’ it doesn’t offer much usable insight or advice about the process of finding the truth about anything. Give it a miss. That might marginally reduce the cost of truth.
*To me it is one 0f the wonders of bad thought that people who should know better suggest more epistemological poison as an antidote for the untruths being peddled. See for example: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... I have discovered that I am not alone in this opinion: https://www.thenation.com/article/dav...
**The glib reference to the category ‘facts’ in unSpunreminds me of the importance of the philosopher, Edgar Singer’s, definition of a fact. ‘A fact,’ he pointed out, ‘is that which is not contradicted by any other fact.’ Circularity does have its uses. UnSpun just uses it in the wrong way.
There is no market price for truth; buying truth would be a contradiction equivalent to seeking it by torture. But there is a cost of truth. Estimating this cost is the subject of what’s called epistemology. UnSpun is a book of practical epistemology, something particularly apt in the age of Trump and Putin. That unSpun is largely worthless as a guide to good epistemology doesn’t detract from the importance of its subject.
The premise of any epistemology is simple: everybody lies. Best friends sometimes, salesmen most of the time and politicians all the time. We all know this no matter if we live in a totalitarian atheist state or a hyper-liberal religious democracy. The value of truth to the speaker or writer of language is precisely nil. Only the hearer and reader has an interest in the truthfulness of a statement.
The central epistemological question therefore is what and whose interest is being communicated in any message. Whether it’s a commercial advertisement or a political appeal, the interests being represented are not ours. This is not cynicism, merely an emotionless principle which is logically and empirically verified universally. And it’s not paranoia since we can live comfortably with the lesser lies, fibs, and misleading hints.
Of course the difficulty is that the messages we are often given suggest interests we didn’t even know existed. Who knows but they might be ours and we hadn’t realized it. Listerine points to bad breath, for example. Apple says creativity is what is most important in life. Daz will give us whiter clothes - even for our colored fabrics. And Trump insists we should worry about Muslims and Mexicans. In the first instance it is these interests, not the product or issue, that is being sold to us. The intention of the message is to establish a criterion of choice, which if accepted will lead to ‘correct’ purchasing or voting behavior.
The first epistemological principle for dealing effectively with these suggestions about interests is simple: if the message provokes fear, inadequacy, lack of personal merit, or looming social inferiority, it is almost certainly false, misleading, or tendentious. This is an emotional not a rational signal and therefore demands a certain degree of emotional rather than intellectual maturity. Sensitivity not education is what counts. It is the emotions which can distinguish between being sold and being informed. Like any other skill, emotional sensitivity to suggestions about what is important and valuable must be learned. It’s called aesthetics.
This first ‘aesthetical’ principle can be obscured by the use of ‘facts’, particularly statistical data, quotes, and phrases like ‘more than’, ‘better than’ either stated or implied. Factual assertions are meant to ‘prove’ interests when they are associated with the interests that are being sold to us. However, what must be kept in mind is that facts do not generate interests; rather interests generate facts. This shouldn’t be controversial. In our daily lives we encounter an infinity of potential facts. Actual facts are those events which have some sort of importance that has already been established.
This then is the second epistemological principle: all factual assertions are relative to the interests they reflect. There simply are no objective facts. Factuality, like its corollary ‘value’, is a conditional not an existential characteristic. It is patently impossible to know the meaning of data presented as factual, much less the methodology by which these data were produced, without understanding the interests they are meant to further.
Some call this second principle ‘relativism’ and criticize it as promoting social and moral chaos. But paradoxically it is the presumption that there are fixed criteria that can be used to identify truth which contributes most to the acceptance of commercial and political absurdities. These absurdities are accepted within a culture because the culture itself believes it has found the ultimate standard of truth - in Scripture perhaps, or scientific method, or logical analysis, or some trustworthy person, or, quelle horreur, technology. Agreement guarantees validity. Except of course when it doesn’t. As both scientists and Adventists have found over centuries.*
It is not incidental therefore that it is American Evangelicals and the other Deplorables, with their insistence on the idea of absolute truth, who are most susceptible to the Trumpian deceptions and Creationist obfuscations that are obvious to the rest of us. Living without fixed criteria of truth is an emotional burden. It’s uncomfortable, an irritant which we’d like to eliminate, and with it the difficulties of conscience which plague those who doubt. Evangelicals are the 21st century bourgeoisie - they are emotionally lazy; they crave stability, which they find in tribal conformance. They don’t necessarily lack intelligence; but they do have uniformly poor taste.
The burden of epistemological uncertainty can be heavy. Belief, faith, loyalty to one’s cultural group is easy. Doubt is hard. Hopeful doubt is even harder. But it is the real cost of truth. And it has a name: Responsibility, specifically the responsibility for choosing the aesthetic criterion by which we view the world, by which we sort the assertions made about by ourselves and others. This criterion can never be final because the choice itself makes learning about other criteria possible. Nor can the criterion be discovered by a fixed procedure since it is logically prior to such procedure. So there is no way to avoid an entirely personal responsibility for truth.
UnSpun doesn’t like this conclusion. Its authors would like to lay down some fixed epistemological rules. While they agree that uncertainty is something we have to live with (Rule#1 “You can’t be completely certain”), they think there is an intellectual criterion called “certain enough” we can use to separate the truthful wheat from the deceptive chaff (Rule#2). The specific advice is: “In the world of practical reality weighing the facts is a matter of choosing the right standard of proof to give us the degree of certainty we need under the circumstances.”.
Read that sentence again. It is somewhat awkward. Allow me to present it a bit more clearly: ‘Compare competing facts in order to determine the correct criterion for comparing the competing facts.’ The circular nonsense is obvious. Even if it weren’t, the question of how much is ‘enough’ is something the authors steer well clear of.**
UnSpun’s further suggestions are equally specious. Its Rule #3 says “Look for general agreement among experts.” One wonders where there is such a list of experts for the multitude of advertising and political claims that are made to us daily. And, not incidentally, what criteria are used to designate one as ‘expert?’ The authors don’t seem to have heard of the problem of infinite regression. Bucking the issue of truth up a notch isn’t helpful.
Rule#4 is “Check primary sources.” Absolutely first class advice when your preparing for your doctoral thesis in sociology. Not so helpful when checking the claim that brand A analgesic relieves pain twice as fast as brand B. Oh and by the way, the competing claims to being primary sources are not trivial. Ask any biblical scholar how many hundreds of ‘original’ versions of the Hebrew testaments there are.
Rule #5 “Know what counts” and Rule #6 “Know who’s talking” are unexceptionable. They are merely equivalent to saying that facts are relative to interests, although elsewhere the authors have difficulty with this principle.
Rule #7 “Seeing shouldn’t necessarily be believing.” This is indeed informative. But it is really only a restatement of the fundamental premise of epistemology: Everybody lies, including oneself, to oneself. Nonetheless its specificity is a useful reinforcement.
Rule #8 “Crosscheck everything that matters.” This is certainly a fine piece of advice for either an investigative reporter or a trial lawyer. But it is largely irrelevant for the average consumer or man at the polling booth. The authors obviously included it as an afterthought to appear professional. After all the wealth of anecdotal material they present in the rest of the book depends on doing just that.
So while unSpun has a noble objective and reads like an entertaining episode of ‘Hilarious Television Bloopers,’ it doesn’t offer much usable insight or advice about the process of finding the truth about anything. Give it a miss. That might marginally reduce the cost of truth.
*To me it is one 0f the wonders of bad thought that people who should know better suggest more epistemological poison as an antidote for the untruths being peddled. See for example: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... I have discovered that I am not alone in this opinion: https://www.thenation.com/article/dav...
**The glib reference to the category ‘facts’ in unSpunreminds me of the importance of the philosopher, Edgar Singer’s, definition of a fact. ‘A fact,’ he pointed out, ‘is that which is not contradicted by any other fact.’ Circularity does have its uses. UnSpun just uses it in the wrong way.
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ January 27, 2019
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