Fact-Opinion 6, more data on the changing sense of 'fact'

It was standard for textbooks on critical thinking in the 19th- and early 20th-Century to devote some space to a fact-opinion distinction. As was noted in my last post, this distinction was typically presented in connection with the topic of testimony as a source of evidence.

What I'm calling critical thinking textbooks were referred to at the time either as textbooks on philosophical rhetoric or as logic texts, where the logic was of the sort that would be eclipsed by the new formal logic. Much of the subject matter of these old texts (fallacies, Mill's methods, etc.) is now generally presented to students in critical thinking courses.

One difference between these old textbooks and today's post-secondary, critical thinking texts is that the latter volumes seldom include material about a fact-opinion distinction. Why? I conjecture that the change is due, in part at least, to shifts in the  meanings of the key terms.

I've posted some notes on an older interpretation of 'fact', on which only particular, observable occurrences (or conditions) were said to be facts. General laws of nature, mathematical truths, etc. weren't. This older reading of 'fact' was evident in some of the textbook passages quoted in my last post. It's even more in evidence in John Grier Hibben's 1905 textbook, when Hibben calls

attention to the difference between the terms, a 'truth' and a 'fact'. A fact carries with it only the special and individual character of the particular occurrence in which it is manifested. A truth, however, is always universal in its very nature, admitting of universal application, and capable of illustration in an indefinite number of different facts which embody its essence. (Hibben, Logic: Deductive and Inductive [1905], pp. 171-2)

Clearly, Hibben (who went on to become President of Princeton University) did not equate facts with truths, not even with objective truths.

It's interesting, though, that back in 1849, George Cornewall Lewis acknowledged another reading of 'fact', one that sounds more modern. Recall what Lewis wrote:

A fact, as so defined, must be limited to individual sensible objects, and not extended to general expressions or formulas, descriptive of classes of facts, or sequences of phenomena, such as that the blood circulates, the sun attracts the planets, and the like. Propositions of this sort, though descriptive of realities, and therefore, in one sense, of matters of fact, relate to large classes of phenomena, which cannot be grasped by a single sensation, which can only be determined by a long series of observations, and are established by a process of intricate reasoning. (Lewis, 'Essay on the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion', 1849, pp. 1-2 [Emphasis added]) 

Lewis here allows for a broader reading of 'fact', one on which the term applies to any reality.

The ambiguity of 'fact' is explicitly noted by Father George Hayward Joyce, a Jesuit whose textbook, Principles of Logic, first appeared in 1908. He wrote:

The Fact is sometimes restricted to signify the particular concrete facts of experience. Sometimes it is extended to include whatever has been proved to be real, and in this sense can be used of a theory whose truth has been established. (Joyce, Principles of Logic, 2nd edition [1916; 1st ed. 1908], p. 362 [Emphasis in original])

Perhaps, by the early 20th Century 'fact' was being used often in its more general, modern sense (at least in the UK and Ireland). Authors of textbooks (such as Hibben) may have been fighting a rear-guard battle, insisting on the word's older, proper use -- much as writers of critical thinking texts now insist on the old meaning of 'begging the question' even though that reading has largely been abandoned in the wider culture.

By the 1950s, philosophers seem to have given up and adopted the more popular interpretation of 'facts' as being equivalent in meaning to 'truths'. Some scientists, though, stuck to the old meaning of 'fact'. At least, such divergent uses are indicated by Henry Siggins Leonard in his 1957 text, Principles of reasoning: an introduction to logic, methodology, and the theory of signs. After defining 'facts' as true propositions (p. 47), Leonard adds that 'some scientists use the word "fact" in a somewhat narrower sense, perhaps to refer to those true propositions whose truth can be directly confirmed by observation.'^{(Leonard, Principles of reasoning [Dover, 1967, 1st published in 1957], p. 47, n. 3)}

This state of play is partly confirmed by Stuart Chase in his Guide to Straight Thinking, with thirteen common fallacies (1956). When it comes to facts, says Chase, he'll rely on the definition adopted by scientists rather than that of the philosophers. His definition is as follows:

A fact is an event in space-time which remains the same from different viewpoints -- or, more technically, is invariant under a transformation of axes. In ordinary discussion a fact is invariant as seen by competent observers. (Chase, Guide to Straight Thinking [Phoenix House, 1959, 1st published in 1956 by Harper's], p. 47)

This conception of facts preserves part of the old meaning by including in the category of facts all the objective, observable occurrences. It diverges from the old meaning by not explicitly requiring that all facts be observable (e.g., facts will include micro-events that are too small to be seen even via our best microscopes); and it diverges from the old reading by not including the inner mental events that can be detected by means of introspection.

So, again, the old fact-opinion distinction that was a mainstay in old critical-thinking textbooks relied on a different (and much narrower) understanding of 'fact', according to which the facts did not include all the objective truths. As a result, it was a very different distinction from the one that is so often conveyed today to high-school students.

In the next post in this series, I'll document changes in the use of 'opinion'.

Fact-Opinion 4, Alfred Sidgwick

In my previous post, it looked like the old fact-opinion distinction presupposed some privileged set of data, facts, which were assimilated to pristine and pure observation, untainted by theorizing (or by opinions or beliefs more generally). This leaves proponents of the distinction open to the sorts of objection that were directed at logical positivism. To wit, any attempt to present or articulate the facts implicates them (or perhaps shows that they were already implicated) in a conceptual framework, thereby taking them up into the theories that breathe life (or meaning) into the concepts. The so-called observation statements, which purported to give 'just the facts', are theory-saturated. They already involve interpretation (via the applied concepts), so that the facts are inextricably bound up with fallible opinion right from the get-go.

Something like this point was suggested by a quotation of George Cornewall Lewis that I posted a while ago. Among the older logic textbooks, one finds similar points being made by Alfred Sidgwick (cousin of Henry). Here's Douglas Walton's list of Sidgwick's books:

Sidgwick, Alfred: 1884, Fallacies: A View of Logic from the Practical Side, D. Appleton
Co., New York.
Sidgwick, Alfred: 1892, Distinction and Criticism of Beliefs, Longmans Green and Co.,
London.
Sidgwick, Alfred: 1893, The Process of Argument: A Contribution to Logic, Adam and
Charles Black, London.
Sidgwick, Alfred: 1901, The Use of Words in Reasoning, Adam and Charles Black, London.
Sidgwick, Alfred: 1910, The Application of Logic, Macmillan, London.
Sidgwick, Alfred: 1914, Elementary Logic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

The books are available on-line. Here are just a couple of quotations from Alfred Sidgwick's books to illustrate the above point:

As soon as a fact is named, or described, or conceived in this or that way, it is seen in the light of theory, and the theory may be mistaken. (Sidgwick, The Process of Argument, 1893, p. 15) 

Also,

[F]acts are supposed to have a solidity and a certainty which statements of fact have not; and it is only a short step from this to the notion that some facts exactly as presented to us are beyond the reach of criticism. For the most part this belief is not a result of any definite theory about the relation of facts to our recipient minds, but rather of a comfortable absence of theory in the matter, and a hazy remembrance of some convenient metaphorical expressions in common use. Our minds are conceived as "bombarded" by facts, or as "taking them in"; we are supposed to be passive recipients of something that comes to us from outside, something that remains unaltered when it reaches us, though our opinions may be altered by it. One way of correcting this view is by showing that the distinction between conceiving a fact and describing it (i.e. stating it) turns upon nothing more important than the question whether we keep the fact to ourselves or try to impart it to someone else. In either case what we call the 'fact' is only our opinion about the fact. (Sidgwick, Elementary Logic, 1914, p. 237 [Emphasis added])

In short, seeing is believing, opining, which involves interpretation.

It's hard to find much info about Alfred Sidgwick. There's an entry on him in the German Wikipedia but not the English one. He seems to have been overshadowed by two of his first-cousins (Henry and Arthur). According to Peter Radcliff, Alfred Sidgwick published many pieces in Mind between 1878 and 1941. That journal ran a brief note upon Alfred's demise, noting that he graduated from Oxford 'with a 4th class in Jurisprudence' and that 'Sidgwick's books attracted little attention at the time of publication and were never used for teaching'. ^{(H. Sturt, 'Alfred Sidgwick, 1850-1943', Mind 53 [1944]: 379-380)} His wife, Cecily Sidgwick, wrote novels and non-fiction.

Fact-Opinion 3, the shifting sense of 'fact'

In his 'Unfair to Facts' (1954), J. L. Austin consulted the OED about the history of the word 'fact'. He said that the modern usage of this word 'is just what it was in the eighteenth century' ^{(Philosophical Papers, ed. Urmson & Warnock, p. 113, p. 165 in the 3rd ed. [1979])}. Not so. In this post, I'll summarize some research by historians of science (in the past 35 years) which highlights the different use of 'fact' in the 17th Century. This old use survived well into the 19th Century. It can be found in some widely used textbooks from that era (though I'll mention only one of these books in this post). Echoes of this older sense are evident in some modern versions of the fact-opinion distinction.

Facere, the Latin root of 'fact', means to make or to do; hence, factory, manufacture, and artifact.

Here's the open-access edition of the OED on the origin of the English word 'fact':

Late 15th century: from Latin factum, neuter past participle of facere 'do'. The original sense was 'an act', later 'a crime', surviving in the phrase before (or after) the fact. The earliest of the current senses ( 'truth, reality') dates from the late 16th century.

[At the above link, the OED defines 'fact', as that term is used today, in an epistemological fashion, defining it as 'a thing that is known (or proved) to be true' ^{(Oxford Dictionaries, Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/fact )}].

In Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary, 'fact' is still defined as an act, but now in opposition to supposition and speculation. Johnson's first definition is, 'A thing done; an effect produced; something not barely supposed or suspected, but really done.' His second definition of 'fact' reads as follows: 'Reality; not supposition; not speculation' ^{(Johnson "Fact." A Dictionary of the English Language: A Digital Edition of the 1755 Classic by Samuel Johnson, ed. Brandi Besalke)}. These two definitions don't explicitly give an epistemological rendering of 'fact'; the 'thing done' or 'reality' can remain unknown. Still, in view of some of Johnson's samples of the word's usage, it looks like he had in mind an epistemological interpretation for at least some uses of 'fact'; for him, 'fact' at least sometimes means known or (at least) evident fact.

Notice that a fact was a particular action or 'thing done'. This is crucial, for it conditions the sorts of evidence that are to be sought when determining the facts. To use Whately's example (from an earlier post), if we want to know whether someone is in the process of killing Alexander, we should look and see whether this is happening. Direct observation is the best way to settle the matter. If the killing is alleged to have already happened, then we should seek witnesses and request their testimony. Did they observe the killing? Of course, it's better to have several witnesses independently corroborating each others' testimony. If we can't reach the witnesses, we'll look for any documentation (signed statements, etc.) that they might have left behind concerning Alexander's demise.

Of course, these kinds of support are very like the types of evidence that are considered in jury trials, in which jurors are called upon to make determinations concerning matters of fact. Barbara J. Shapiro describes the evolution of the rules of evidence for such trials in late 15th-Century and early 16th-Century England.^{(Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships Between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature [Princeton University Press, 1983], Ch. 5)} . Shapiro argues that after the advent of these rules, the phrase 'matter of fact' migrated from law, where it pertained to observable human actions, to the natural sciences, where it took within its ambit the observable natural phenomena. Shapiro writes that the phrase 'matter of fact'

had traditionally been associated with the human facts of the historian or the law court. During the seventeenth century, 'matter of fact', like 'experience', would be assimilated into natural science. (Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England, p. 20)

As Shapiro says, prior to the 17th Century matters of fact were central not only in legal inquiries but in historical studies, too. This old use of the phrase is evident in the following remark by Francis Bacon:

This facility of credit and accepting or admitting things weakly authorised or warranted, is of two kinds according to the subject: for it is either a belief of history (as the lawyers speak, matter of fact); or else of matter of art and opinion. (Bacon, 'The Advancement of Learning', Book I, iv, paragraph 9, 1605)

Bacon here expands the range of history to take in not only human but, also, natural history. According to Shapiro,

Bacon's combination of the historico-legal 'fact' of human action with the natural fact established by observation and experiment made it possible for his successors to apply a familiar legal technique of verifying events in the human world to natural phenomena. (Shapiro, Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 [Cornell University Press, 2000], p. 109)

While other historians of science (e.g., Lorraine Daston and Steven Shapin) may not attach as much influence to Bacon as Shapiro does, I take it that they generally agree about the meaning of 'matter of fact' in the 17th Century. At that time, matters of fact were particular, observable occurrences, for which the best evidence was observation. If one could not, oneself, observe the event in question, then one ought to rely on the testimony of those who had witnessed the event. One should seek corroboration by multiple witnesses. Matters of fact did not include the physical laws of nature. They did not include well-grounded theories about the underlying causes of the observed phenomena. They did not include dispositions or causal powers. Nor did they include any religious truths or truths about moral and aesthetic values that there might be. It's in that light that we should read this bit from John Donne:

Contemplative and bookish men must of necessity be more quarrelsome than others, because they contend not about matter of fact, nor can determine their controversies by any certain witnesses, nor judges. But as long as they go towards peace, that is Truth, it is no matter which way. (Donne, Biothanatos,'Preface', 1608)

In denying that the disputes among bookish characters were disagreements over matters of fact, Donne did not mean that the the disputes were mere emotional venting contests with no truths at stake. There were truths at stake, so that some of the disputants were right and some were wrong. Some held true beliefs and others had false ones. Donne meant only that the kinds of truths at stake were not of the relatively straightforward sort that could be settled just by looking (or by relying on witness' testimony).

The 17th-Century use of 'matter of fact' is also exhibited in this passage from Locke's Essay:

Probability is either of sensible matter of fact, capable of human testimony, or of what is beyond the evidence of our senses. But to return to the grounds of assent, and the several degrees of it, we are to take notice, that the propositions we receive upon inducements of probability are of two sorts: either concerning some particular existence, or, as it is usually termed, matter of fact, which, falling under observation, is capable of human testimony; or else concerning things, which, being beyond the discovery of our senses, are not capable of any such testimony. (Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, ch. xvi, paragraph 5, 1689 [Emphases added])

The 17th-Century sense of 'matter of fact' survived at least till the middle of the 19th Century, where we find its exclusion of many scientific truths being emphasized by Sir George Cornewall Lewis in his 'Essay on the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion' (1849):

By a matter of fact, I understand anything of which we obtain a conviction from our internal consciousness or any individual event or phenomenon which is the object of sensation. ... A fact, as so defined, must be limited to individual sensible objects, and not extended to general expressions or formulas, descriptive of classes of facts, or sequences of phenomena, such as that the blood circulates, the sun attracts the planets, and the like. Propositions of this sort, though descriptive of realities, and therefore, in one sense, of matters of fact, relate to large classes of phenomena, which cannot be grasped by a single sensation, which can only be determined by a long series of observations, and are established by a process of intricate reasoning. (Lewis, 'Essay on the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion', 1849, pp. 1-2)

Here, matters of fact end where reasoning begins, and facts are the data or raw material on which reason operates. In short, matters of fact were just those questions that could be settled by eyewitness testimony, without requiring any expert witnesses (that is, without requiring the witness to be especially adept at physics or medicine, etc.). A similar conception of matters of fact is evident in the 7th, revised edition of Bishop Whately's Elements of Rhetoric (1846), where Whately wrote:

If, for instance, a person ... states, that in the East Indies he saw a number of persons who had been sleeping exposed to the moon's rays, afflicted with certain symptoms, and that after taking a certain medicine they recovered, he is bearing testimony to simple matters of fact: but if he declares ... that the patients in question were so affected in consequence of the moon's rays, that such is the general effect of them in that climate, and that that medicine is a cure for such symptoms, it is evident that his testimony ... is borne to a different kind of conclusion; namely, not an individual, but a general conclusion, and one which must rest, not solely on the veracity, but also on the judgment, of the witness.(Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, 7th edition, ch. II, sec. 4, 1846, pp. 53-4 [p. 61 in the English Fellowes edition] [Emphases in the original])

Clearly, Lewis and Whately did not mean to limit the domains of inquiry in which we may legitimately seek a truth of the matter to just the domain of matters of fact. Like Donne, they would take there to be a truth of the matter in disputes about causal claims and in disputes over moral values. They would regard some people as holding false beliefs about causal relations and moral values. They would also allow for the use of reason in trying settle such disputes or in trying to arrive at the truth in such inquiries. All of this is compatible with their denying that these areas of inquiry concern matters of fact; for in their day, 'matters of fact' pertained only to those questions that could be settled by observation (or by the testimony of someone who had made the relevant observations).

I think that, nowadays, we're more likely to take 'matters of fact' as being co-extensive with topics for which there is a truth of the matter, topics about which we may hold true or false beliefs (and about which we can make progress by reasoned inquiry). If we combine this more recent interpretation of 'matters of fact' with the old idea that matters of fact are just those that can be settled by a single observation, then we'll arrive at a naive kind of positivism, one which regards disagreements about value as so much hot air, or emotional venting, mere seeming disputes for which there is no truth of the matter. Perhaps such a move led to some of the flawed, modern versions of the fact-opinion distinction that are being taught in some public schools. 

Observation statements are based on unconscious theorizing (says Sir George Lewis in 1849)

Sir George Cornewall Lewis, 'Essay on the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion' (1849):

It is true that even the simplest sensations involve some judgment: when a witness reports he saw an object of a certain shape and size, or at a certain distance, he describes more than a mere impression of his sense of sight, and his statement implies a theory and explanation of the bare phenomenon. When, however, this judgment is of so simple a kind as to become wholly unconscious, and the interpretation of the appearances is a matter of general agreement, the object of sensation may, for our present purpose, be considered a fact.