Fact-Opinion 11, Against epistemic conceptions of fact

I've written before about epistemic conceptions of fact, according to which the first word in the phrase 'established fact' is redundant. These conceptions define 'fact' in such a way that a fact must already be established, verified, or known by (at least) some community of experts.

Here are three examples of recent, epistemic definitions of 'fact':

First, there's this definition in a psychological dictionary:

Fact: An actual occurrence or state of affairs, empirically established and usually consensually validated, distinguished from fictive, confabulated events. The latter may be held as opinion, belief, or theory. (Raymond J. Corsini, The Dictionary of Psychology [Philadelphia, PA: Brunner Mazel, 1999], p. 362)

Next, there is the definition that Justin McBrayer quoted in his contribution to the New York Times (March 2, 2015), according to which something can be a fact only if it 'can be tested or proven' ^{(McBrayer, 'Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts', New York Times [March 2, 2015])}.

Finally, I obtained (from a source in California) this image of teaching material for a Grade 6 class:

'Fact' is here defined in terms of a consensus among the relevant experts. In this case, the definition requires that a fact be believed (or agreed to) by qualified scientists but doesn't strictly entail that this agreement on the facts should rise to the level of knowledge. Still, given the context, agreement among qualified scientists seems to be what grounds knowledge. (I'll leave aside the difficulties in the conceptions of theory and law in this image.)

I'm baffled by these epistemic conceptions of fact. Surely, it makes perfectly good sense to say, 'We don't know all the facts,' where 'we' refers to all of humanity. That is, there remain facts about our world no one yet knows. But if we adopted an epistemic definition of fact, then any such expression of epistemic humility would involve a self-contradiction; for, given an epistemic definition, the statement that 'Humanity does not yet know all the facts' would be equivalent to saying, 'Humanity does not yet know all the known facts.'

Or consider this uncontroversial expression of epistemic humility: there are facts that no one yet knows. Given the first definition that I quoted, this claim would be equivalent to saying, 'There are empirically established (and therefore known) facts that no one yet knows.' On the second definition, it would be equivalent to saying, 'There are facts that can be tested and proven (and that are therefore known) that no one yet knows.' On the California definition, it would be the same as saying, 'There are things currently agreed on by qualified scientists (and thus known) that no one yet knows.'

Not only do these epistemic definitions render a perfectly sensible claim self-contradictory, but they are inimical to the continued progress of science; for they nullify a primary reason for continuing to pursue scientific investigation. There would be little need, if any, to pursue science if humanity were already in possession of all the facts about the world. The continued pursuit of science presupposes that we don't know all the facts. It assumes that there remain facts about our world and its workings that continue to elude us -- all of us (even the qualified scientists).

Fact-opinion 10, Opinions and matters of opinion

Let's begin with a quotation of Raymond S. Nickerson, a psychologist who uses 'opinion' as another term for taste:

We might say that a belief is something that, at least in principle, can be shown to be either true or false. It does not make sense to say that an opinion is true or false, because people differ greatly in their preferences and tastes. ... Here, an effort will be made to use beliefs to represent our ideas about what is objectively true, and opinions to represent such subjective matters as preferences and tastes. (Nickerson, Reflections on Reasoning [Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1986], p. 21)

Granted, Nickerson's claims have an air of stipulation. Still, why limit opinions to taste? Previous posts show that 'opinion' hasn't historically been defined in terms of taste. Indeed, before the 20th century, authors generally kept tastes out of the extension of 'opinion'. For example, here's a bit from Hume's 'Of the Standard of Taste' (1757):

Every voice is united in applauding elegance, propriety, simplicity, spirit in writing; and in blaming fustian, affectation, coldness and a false brilliancy: But when critics come to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes; and it is found, that they had affixed a very different meaning to their expressions. In all matters of opinion and science, the case it opposite: The difference among men is there oftener found to lie in generals than in particulars; and to be less in reality than in appearance. An explanation of the terms commonly ends the controversy; and the disputants are surprised to find, that they had been quarreling, while at bottom they agreed in their judgment. (italics added)

In the first part of this passage, Hume is talking about taste (about which 'critics' dispute). He then turns to 'opinion and science', which are not matters of taste. His use of 'matters of opinion' as being different from matters of taste seems sensible in view of the meaning of 'opinion'. In his time, 'opinion' had come to mean something like a belief for which the justification was less than certain. The opinion would concern some matter of fact (on our more modern use of 'matter of fact'); e.g., it might concern whether all ideas originate in the senses. So, opinions were true or false, even if there was no consensus about their truth value.

Hume's use of 'matters of opinion' fits with the definitions of 'opinion' in today's general dictionaries (addressed in an earlier post). For example, the most recent edition of Webster's has it that an opinion is 'a belief, judgment, or way of thinking about something'. Hume's use is also in synch with the definition of 'opinion' in the American Psychological Association's Dictionary of Psychology, in which an opinion is said to be 'an attitude, belief, or judgment' ^{(2007, p. 648)}.

Hume wasn't alone in keeping tastes out of the domain of matters of opinion. Consider these sentences by Jeremy Bentham:

There is no incident imaginable, be it ever so trivial, and so remote from mischief, from which this principle [of sympathy and antipathy] may not extract a ground of punishment. Any difference in taste: any difference in opinion: upon one subject as well as upon another. No disagreement so trifling which perseverance and altercation will not render serious. (Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. 2, sec. 16 [1789])

Bentham is making a general claim about all disagreements. To cover such a wide range, he conjoins differences in taste with differences in opinion, implying that the former are not already included among the latter.

In recent fact-opinion distinctions, it has been customary to categorize expressions of taste as matters of opinion or even to equate opinions with tastes (as Nickerson does). I maintain that before the 20th century, matters of opinion were not equated with, or even taken to include, matters of taste. Matters of opinion concerned beliefs that were true or false and that were subject to logical principles. By contrast, rightly or wrongly, many authors from the 18th century to our own time have subscribed to the adage de gustibus non est disputandum ('there is no disputing about tastes') and have accordingly regarded matters of taste as lying outside the domain of logic and truth claims.

It's difficult to support my contention by finding old (pre-20th-century) examples of authors explicitly distinguishing between matters of opinion and matters of taste. So, I'll have to rest content with the less direct support that I've taken from the above quotations of Hume and Bentham, supplemented by two quotations from less famous sources. First, in his study of the New York Public Library's history, Tom Glynn says that near the end of the 19th century, the library's administrators took the view that 'there is a great distinction between matters of opinion and matters of taste' and that the library's holdings should include materials that represented both sides in debates over conflicting opinions ^{(Glynn, Reading Publics: New York City's Public Libraries, 1754-1911 [New York: Fordham University Press, 2015], p. ???)}. Next, there is a line in a memorial to a Unitarian preacher, James Freeman, where the author says that Freeman 'carried [his] freedom of mind into matters of taste as well as matters of opinion' ^{(James Freeman Clarke, Annals of the American Unitarian Pulpit [1865], p. 169)}. The author is compelled to mention matters of taste because they are not included among matters of opinion.

At some point in the 20th century, authors began to include tastes among matters of opinion and even, in some cases, to use 'matters of taste' interchangeably with 'matters of opinion'. For example, in a 1958 article, David Peace writes that '"Matters of taste" are matters of opinion' ^{(Peace, 'Planning and the Promotion of Good Taste' The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health 78 [1958]: pp. 339-40)}.

Similar views are evident in empirical research about when children are able to distinguish between statements of fact and of opinion. In one study, the authors say, '3-year-olds acknowledge and understand disagreements between individuals about matters of taste and opinion more readily than disagreements about matters of fact' ^{(Larisa Heiphetz et al. 'What do Different Beliefs Tell us? An Examination of Factual, Opinion-Based, and Religious Beliefs' Cognitive Development 30. April - June 2014 [2014]: 15–29)}. Here, statements of taste and opinion are lumped together as being mere subjective expressions that must be distinguished from statements concerning objective matters of fact (claims about what's true independently of us). In the 'Appendix' to Heiphetz et al., all of the 'statements of opinion-based belief' that were used in their research are expressions of taste (e.g., 'Oranges are the tastiest fruit', 'Monopoly is the most fun game'). Something similar happens in this report about an article by G. P. Goodwin and J. M. Darley ^{('The psychology of meta-ethics: Exploring objectivism' Cognition 106 [March 2008], pp. 1339-1366)}. (One sometimes gets an impression of similar uses of 'matters of opinion' in the literature on faultless disagreement, though contributors to that literature are generally more careful about the phrase.)

Even if we set aside its deviance from the pre-20th-century use of 'matters of opinion', this recent equation of matters of opinion with matters of taste is puzzling. After all, one today hears occasionally about opinions as including primitive prejudices that stand in the way of science. That seems to account for the popularity of this Hippocratic line: 'There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.' (For more about this quotation, see the end of this post.) But if opinions were mere tastes, then how could they obstruct science? After all, claims about what is the most fun or the tastiest don't pose any apparent threat to scientific data or theories. Clearly, if opinions are to include anti-scientific prejudices, they can't be mere expressions of personal taste; they must involve (wrong-headed) truth claims about something other than tastes.

Somehow, the phrase 'matters of opinion' slipped its moorings and drifted away from the standard meaning of 'opinion'. This slippage has prompted some authors to consider the possibility that many opinions (even those that do not count as knowledge) do not concern matters of opinion ^{(Reuben Stern and Sam Wilkinson, '“That’s Just Like, Uh, Your Opinion, Man”: Jesus, the Dude, and Ordinary Language Philosophy', in The Big Lebowski and Philosophy: Keeping Your Mind Limber with Abiding Wisdom, ed. Peter S. Fosl [Wiley, 2012], p. 244)}.

As an antidote to this frankly screwed-up change in the use of 'matters of opinion', I recommend Michael Scriven's 1971 contribution to the Diablo Valley Education Project in Orinda, California. Scriven's paper is called 'Values and the Valuing Process' (pdf). Scriven there writes, 'Matters of opinion are issues where the possibility of the opinion being right or wrong exists; matters of taste are not' (p. 3).

There's also a 2009 psychology paper in which the authors try to make sense of some recent data by distinguishing between matters of opinion and questions of taste. They say, 'we define matters of taste as essentially arbitrary preferences that therefore have no intrinsic power or prestige associated with them, whereas opinions (like beliefs) refer to views that can at least in principle be evaluated at some level for their correctness' ^{(Russell Spears, Naomi Ellemers, and Bertjan Doosje, 'Strength in Numbers or Less Is More? A Matter of Opinion and a Question of Taste' Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35 [2009]: pp. 1099-1111)}.

Fact-opinion 9, opinion (part d)

The earliest English-language logic texts carried over the medieval distinction between knowledge and opinion, according to which contingent statements cannot be known but are, instead, fit only for opinion.

Let's differentiate between two types of knowledge-opinion (and fact-opinion) distinction. On the one hand, such distinctions can be drawn in a way that is topic-neutral; in which case, there is nothing in the proposition in question that determines whether it can be known or merely opined. A proposition that is opined on one occasion can, in other cases, be known, and what determines whether it is known or merely opined will be the amount of evidence in its favour. On the other hand, a knowledge-opinion distinction can be topic-based; in which case, the content of the knowledge or opinion determines its status as known or merely opined; that is, the nature of the proposition determines which of the two categories it can fall into. For example, recent fact-opinion distinctions tend to relegate value-judgments to the category of opinion simply because they concern values.

The medieval knowledge-opinion distinction was topic-based. Only universal, necessarily true statements were candidates for knowledge. Contingent propositions could be, at best, opined but not known. This topic-based distinction appeared in several English-language texts in the 16th and 17th centuries. Examples follow. (I've reproduced here two quotations from the previous post this series in order to gather these examples all in one place.)

First, we have Abraham Fraunce's The Lawyer's Logic (1588), according to which, 'Artificial logic then is the polishing of natural wit, as discovering the validity of every reason, be it necessary, whereof cometh Science: or contingent, whence proceedeth opinion' ^{(Fraunce, The Lawyer's Logic [1588], p. ???)}.

Next, from Blundeville's Art of Logike (1599) there is this proclamation:

All these intellectual habits are contained under a certain and most sure knowledge, which is always true, for uncertain knowledge is sometimes true, and sometimes false: whereto belongeth opinion, suspicion, conjecture, and such like. (Thomas Blundeville, The Art of Logike [1599], p. 28)

The next example is from a text (Elementa logica, 1598) that was first published in Latin and then translated by the author into French. The author is Pierre Du Moulin. His text was very popular in Europe and went through 40 editions. It was translated into English by Nathanael De Lawne in 1624. According to Du Moulin,

To have the science of a thing, two certainties are required. The one is, that the thing be certain of itself and unchangeable. The second is, that the persuasion which we have of it be firm and clear. If either of these two certainties be wanting it is no Science, but opinion. ... Science is a certain knowledge of a certain thing by the next cause. Opinion is a doubtful or false knowledge. Faith is a firm persuasion grounded upon the testimony of some other. If a man know certainly a thing because he seeth it, or toucheth it, that is neither called Science, nor Faith, nor opinion; but sense, which knoweth only things singular : but Science is of things universal. (Du Moulin, Elements of Logick [1624], pp. 162-3)

Thomas Spencer's Art of Logick (1628) has this passage:

A true axiom is ... Contingent, when it is in such sort true, that it may also at sometime be false. This is called opinion' ^{(pp. 156-7)}.... Illations being pronounced by God, have always a necessary verity .... [B]ut these propositions being pronounced by man, do contain (at the best) but opinion, contingent, and conjecture all knowledge. (Spencer, The Art of Logick [1628], p. 232)

In his Art of Logick (1654), Zachary Coke distinguished between contingent and necessary syllogisms, adding that 'a Contingent ... getteth a suspended and weak assent to the conclusion, and is called opinion' ^{(Coke, Art of Logick [1654], p. 157, italics in original)}.

Finally, we have this selection from Robert Burthogge's Discourse of Reason and Truth (1678):

Firm Assent in matters in themselves mutable and of a contingent nature, may be called Confidence: but in matters of a necessary, firm, and immutable nature, it is Science. Infirm Assent, or Assent with Dubitation, is called Opinion. Suspicion is a beginning Assent, or an inclination to believe a thing, and is short of Opinion. Suspicion on grounds is called just suspicion. Suspicion on no grounds is mere suspicion. Probability is appearance of Truth : And ground of Suspicion is Appearance of Probability. (Organum Vetus &Novum or, a Discourse of Reason and Truth [1678], p. 47)

Lyrics NSFW.

Fact-Opinion 8, Opinion (part c)

As indicated in the previous post, the Aristotelian, medieval philosophers drew a clear distinction between science (episteme, scientia) and opinion (doxa, opinio). Opinions were inferior to science (=knowledge or fact in its epistemological sense). The inferiority was marked by saying that opinions are merely probable (rather than certain). Of course, the medievals (and Aristotle) meant something very different by 'scientia' than what we mean by 'science'. According to Ian Hacking,

In medieval epistemology, science -- scientia -- is knowledge. Knowledge is knowledge of universal truths which are true of necessity. (Hacking, The Emergence of Probability [1975], p. 20)

Science was restricted to knowledge of universal, necessary truths that are either axioms or deducible therefrom with demonstrative certainty. The deliverances of the senses had no significant role. According to Douglas Lane Patey (whose book contains a wealth of info on this topic), the sciences typically included theology, metaphysics, mathematics, and physics ^{(Patey, From Rhetoric to Science, [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984], p. 11)}.

This knowledge-opinion distinction appeared in some of the earliest logic books to be published in English. Here are two examples:

All these intellectual habits are contained under a certain and most sure knowledge, which is always true, for uncertain knowledge is sometimes true, and sometimes false: whereto belongeth opinion, suspicion, conjecture, and such like. (Thomas Blundeville, The Art of Logike [1599], p. 28)

A true axiome is ... Contingent, when it is in such sort true, that it may also at sometime be false. This is called opinion' ^{(pp. 156-7)}. 'These Illations being pronounced by God, have always a necessary veritie .... [B]ut these propositions being pronounced by man, doe containe (at the best) but opinion, contingent, and coniectur [conjecture] all knowledge. (Thomas Spencer, The Art of Logick [1628], p. 232)

While inferior to knowledge, opinion wasn't relegated to some purely subjective or non-cognitive dustbin, and it was taken to be amenable to some form of rational support. In fact, whole disciplines, such as law, medicine, and history, were regarded as trading in opinions rather than scientific knowledge. So, the medievals (and many renaissance and early modern scholars) took it to be a matter of some importance to draw up canons for the intellectually responsible management of opinions. In this endeavour, they built on Aristotle's (and Cicero's) dialectical and rhetorical studies.

For the most part, even as the understanding of science changed (becoming more empirical), opinion retained its old status. Here's a passage from Locke's Essay:

The entertainment the mind gives this sort of proposition is called belief, assent, or opinion, which is the admitting or receiving any proposition for true, upon arguments or proofs that are found to persuade us to receive it as true, without certain knowledge that it is so. (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Ch. 15: 'Of Probability')

As in the medievals, opinions aren't so bad. Sure, they're not knowledge, but they're there when we need 'em and they get us through the day. Just be sure to trust one only when it's vouchsafed by some argument. As Isaac Watts put it,

Where we cannot find weight enough on either side to determine the scale with sovereign force and assurance we must content ourselves perhaps with a small preponderation. This will give us a probable opinion and those probabilities are sufficient for the daily determination of a thousand actions in human life and many times even in matters of religion. (Watts, The Improvement of the Mind [1741], p. 207)

It comes as some surprise, then, to find Joseph Glanvill's righteous fulminations against opinion in 'The Vanity of all Dogmatizing' (1661). This work includes the following magnificent lines:

Verisimilitude and Opinion are an easie purchase; and these counterfeits are all the Vulgars treasure: But true Knowledge is as dear in acquisition, as rare in possession (p. 64). ... Opinions are the Rattles of immature intellects, but the advanced Reasons have out-grown them. True knowledge is modest and wary (p. 226). ... I Expect but little success of all this upon the Dogmatist, his opinion'd assurance is paramont to Argument, and 'tis almost as easie to reason him out of a Feaver, as out of this disease of the mind (p. 224). ... 'Tis zeal for opinions that hath fill'd our Hemisphear with smoke and darkness (p. 229). ... Thus Opinions have rent the world asunder, and divided it almost into indivisibles (p. 231).

Glanvill associates opinion with the wars over conflicting religious and political opinions. In future posts, I'll try to identify other reasons for the growing pejorative connotations of 'opinion' in the the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Fact-Opinion 7, Opinion (part b)

This note adds to my introductory reflections on 'opinion'.

In its current use, 'opinion' is generally value-neutral. It does not mean 'mere opinion'. Opinions include responsibly formed beliefs and can even be instances of knowledge. The Oxford English Dictionary's definition reads as follows:

a. What or how one thinks about something; judgement or belief. Esp. in 'in my opinion': according to my thinking; as it seems to me. a matter of opinion: a matter about which each may have his or her own opinion; a disputable point.

In an older use, to label something as an opinion implied an epistemological limitation. Opinions were less certain than knowledge. It doesn't follow that opinions are devoid of epistemological value or that they must be irresponsibly formed.

The shift from the older to the current sense is reflected in Webster's Dictionary's changing definitions. In 1828, Webster's says that an opinion is supported by evidence that boosts the probability of a proposition's truth but that falls short of yielding 'absolute knowledge or certainty'.  By 1913, Webster's definition hasn't changed much, though it adds that an opinion is a 'belief stronger than impression, less strong than positive knowledge'. Today, Webster's has dropped any suggestion of an epistemological ranking, saying only (in its primary definition) that an opinion is 'a belief, judgment, or way of thinking about something'.

In linking 'opinion' to probability, the older Webster's definitions echo a longstanding tradition in medieval and early modern philosophy. The tradition derives from Aristotle's work. Like Plato, Aristotle regarded opinion (doxa) as inferior to knowledge (episteme). Unlike Plato, Aristotle accorded to opinion a necessary role in our lives and formulated rules for forming rational opinions. He stressed that opinions, while not susceptible of certainty, can be more or less probable. The close link between opinion and probability in Aristotle's works is clearer in ancient Greek, where Aristotle's word for opinion is doxa and one of his words for probability is endoxa. However, what Aristotle had in mind when he wrote of probability is very different from our modern conception. Some of the differences are brought out in Ian Hacking's The Emergence of Probability, the third chapter of which is called 'Opinion'.

For Aristotle, knowledge and opinion have different subject matters. As Sir David Ross put it (in his book Aristotle [1923]), 'Knowledge is of the necessary, opinion of the contingent' (p. 48). Roughly, logic concerns itself with what can be known by demonstrative proof; by contrast, our views on contingent things admit of probability but not demonstrative certainty and, as a result, fall within the purview of dialectic and rhetoric.

Aristotle's approach was hugely influential in medieval thinking about rhetoric (which treated opinion). Indeed, among medieval authors opinions were sometimes referred to as 'probabilities' (or matters of probabilis). According to the authors of a guide to medieval Latin (Mantello and Rigg),

True science requires certitude (certitudo), but it is also possible to have only an opinion (opinio) about physical matters or, somewhat better, to have arguments that fall short of certitude but that are credible (probabilis). Such arguments could include the evidence of the senses. (F. A. C. Mantello & A. G. Rigg, Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide [Catholic University of America Press, 1996], p. 357)

On that note, I'll conclude this post with another interesting, old logic textbook. It's by Father Peter Coffey, who taught at St. Patrick's College, Maynooth.  Coffey studied at Louvain under Cardinal Mercier. According to Thomas Kelly's brief bio of Coffey, 'He was for his time a radical social reformer, supporting trade unionism and, though qualifiedly, Christian socialism, and the ideas of James Connolly' ^{(Thomas A. F. Kelly, The Encyclopedia of Ireland, ed. Brian Lalor [Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2003])}. Kelly adds that Coffey encountered 'difficulties with ecclesiastical censorship' (ibid.) for his writings on social matters.

Coffey's Science of Logic (1912) echoes the older definition of 'opinion' (and the older definitions given in Webster's). According to Coffey: 

In all such cases, where prudent fear of error is excluded, and where the judgment to which we assent is actually true, we have certitude. When such fear is not wholly excluded by the grounds or reasons we have for our assent, the judgment is described as 'probable': our attitude towards it is called 'opinion':² the mind here inclines towards one of two contradictory judgments as true, but not so strongly as to exclude a prudent fear that it may be false and the other true. ... Opinion, therefore, is the provisional assent of the mind to one of two contradictory judgments, with more or less fear of error. When the fear is so trifling as to be practically negligible, our assent is commonly described as moral certitude. When, on the other hand, our fear of error in assenting to a judgment is exceedingly great, our assent is called a mere suspicion, rather than an opinion. (Coffey, The Science of Logic, v. 2, pp. 212-13)

In the footnote (2), Coffey adds, 'Or, also, "belief," in one of the many meanings of this term'.

Wittgenstein didn't like Coffey's logic book, which he panned in his first publication.

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 5, 19th-Century distinctions and a rough hypothesis

One can find fact-opinion distinctions in several 19th-Century university textbooks. Some of these sources are logic texts while others are rhetoric manuals. In the 1800s, in an echo of the medieval trivium, students in many universities in the English-speaking world were expected to complete a rhetoric course early in their undergraduate studies. (These rhetoric courses seem to have been largely replaced in the USA by the English departments' composition classes.) 

In a couple of earlier posts in this series, I've said that a distinction between matters of fact and matters of opinion is treated in Bishop Whately's Elements of Rhetoric. He doesn't devote space to this distinction in his logic textbook (Elements of Logic), though he does have some things to say about matters of fact (pp. 218-34). His brief discussion there again treats matters of fact as pertaining to particular, observable phenomena. In fact, he speaks of matters of fact as constituting the 'data' (p. 222) on which reason operates. (Today, it looks like 'facts' in its old sense has largely been replaced by the term 'data'.)

Whately was a major presence at Oxford, where he and his books influenced many students, including John Henry Newman. Whately's rhetoric text was used for many years at Harvard, where Thoreau was required to master the book. According to one author, Elements of Rhetoric was one of the two 'most widely used rhetoric texts in American colleges between 1835 and 1865, going through at least fifty-one American printings'.^{(Robert Connors, Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy, 1997, p. 61)} So, Whately's way of distinguishing between matters of fact and matters of opinion must have been widely known in the 1800s.

Other 19th-Century textbooks took up the fact-opinion distinction primarily (or exclusively) in connection with testimony as a source of evidence. For example, here's a passage from John Bascom's Philosophy of Rhetoric (1866):

An easy fallacy of testimony is confounding facts with conclusions drawn from them. For competent testimony to the first, actual observation is all that is requisite. Men, though by no means equal in their power to observe or report events, are so relatively. The value of an opinion, on the other hand, depends almost exclusively on him who gives it. False conclusions, therefore, disguised under the facts, and stated as a portion of them, may readily embarrass testimony and mislead the judgment. A man is said to be insolent, to be proud, to be angry, to be drunk. It is a question, not purely of facts, but of inference from words and actions. (Bascom, Philosophy of Rhetoric, p. 74, 1870, 1st published 1866)

On p. 75, Bascom adds this example: 'A patient testifies to the effect of medicine as if his statement were the explicit delivery of facts, and not the most uncertain of all opinions.' 

Henry Philip Tappan's brief discussion of the fact-opinion distinction appears on pp. 426-9 of his Elements of Logic (1844):

By opinion we mean a judgment of the mind, respecting a proposition as true or false. Opinion is to be distinguished from absolute knowledge, as implying that the proposition which is its object, is still debateable. Testimony cannot establish the truth of opinions or judgments. Their truth can be established only on some necessary principle of the Intelligence. Testimony, as evidence, relates merely to matters of fact. All, therefore, that a witness can testify to, in relation to opinions, is the fact that he or some other person entertains such and such opinions. But the truth or falsity of the opinions must be determined on other grounds, and wholly independently of testimony. A man may be of the highest integrity, and of sane mind, and may sacrifice reputation and possessions, and life itself, in maintaining his opinions, without affording any evidence of their truth. His testimony only goes to establish the fact that he believes the proposition in question, and that he believes it ardently and firmly. (Tappan, Elements of Logic, 1844, p. 426)

Here's Tappan on facts:

By fact, we mean phenomena [sic], — something which we know by observation merely. Facts are of two kinds: 1. Facts of the Senses, or external observation. 2. Facts of the Consciousness, or internal observation. By truth, we mean that which is arrived at by the pure Reason. We always assume observation as conditional to the exercise of Reason. But while observation supplies facts, Reason supplies the principles under which the facts are to be reduced. Now, whatever the Reason supplies, whether in intuition or in deduction, we call truth. From this comparison of truth and fact, it must still more clearly appear that testimony cannot prove truths or doctrines. Testimony is only an attestation of what has been observed. Truths or doctrines can be proved by reasoning alone. (Tappan, Elements of Logic, 1844, p. 427)

Adams Sherman Hill offered a more critical treatment in his Principles of Rhetoric (1878). Just before quoting a legal text's definition of 'matters of fact', Hill writes:

[T]oo much stress is often laid on the distinction between matters of fact and matters of opinion, — since opinion enters into almost all statements with regard to matters of fact; since the instant an individual fact is doubted upon reasonable grounds its existence becomes matter of opinion; and since doubtful matters are those with which argumentative composition chiefly deals. (Hill, Principles of Rhetoric, 1878, p. 201)

Hill then adds:

The real distinction is between matters into which fact most largely enters, and those into which opinion most largely enters; for, though the honesty of a witness is hardly ever the only thing to be considered in determining the value of his testimony, yet in some classes of questions his intellectual character tells for much more than in others. (Hill, Principles of Rhetoric, 1878, p. 202)

So, in the 1800s, university students in English-speaking universities were likely to have had some acquaintance with a fact-opinion distinction. Still, as I noted in the penultimate paragraph of an earlier post, and as the above quotations confirm (and as at least one other blogger has noticed), labeling something as an opinion was not tantamount to exempting it from rational support or critique or from the sphere of true or false claims. Indeed, as Bascom suggests (above), to call something an opinion implied that the holder of the opinion should, if anything, be held to a higher standard of intelligence and skill in reasoning (compared to a witness testifying about a matter of fact) if her/his opinion was to be taken seriously. This connotation is preserved in one of today's uses of 'opinion'; specifically, it's preserved in our speaking of an expert's opinion (e.g., a medical opinion).

Here's a rough hypothesis: today's fact-opinion distinction (esp. as taught in secondary schools) blurs elements of the 19th-Century rhetorical distinction with the fact-value distinction that would later be emphasized in social sciences. Two other factors are at play. First, there's the legitimacy of a fact-opinion distinction in the context of journalistic ethics (where both terms are given sharper, more technical interpretations). Second, there's the frequent use of 'opinion' as a translation of the ancient Greek term 'doxa'.

I'm no master of ancient Greek, but from what I understand, 'doxa' differed significantly in meaning from the English word 'opinion'.* Crucially, doxa was often set in opposition to 'epistemê' (knowledge, or science), and doxa sometimes took on a very negative value, especially in works by Parmenides, in some of Plato's writing, and in Hippocrates' 'Law'. That last ancient source includes a claim that has been translated as follows:

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance. (Hippocrates, Vol. 2, trans. W. H. S. Jones [New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1923])

Those lines from Hippocrates (in assorted translations) are repeated all over the place, on syllabi, motivational sites, critiques of psychiatry, Royal Society publications, an opinion piece by a Congresswoman in an academic journal, young-adult fiction, an IEA conference site, etc. The sentiment behind uses of the quoted lines is admirable. Still, we shouldn't forget that while 'opinion' is there used to render 'doxa', the translated term was an exotic creature with a far stranger life and range of associations than 'opinion'. We shouldn't try to shoe-horn 'opinion' into the role of the old Greek term by pretending that opinion is somehow antithetical to knowledge or (even more of a stretch) to modern science.

(I say 'even more of a stretch' because 'doxa' was sometimes applied by the ancients to beliefs derived from sense experience, the source of empirical data.)

*I recommend the entry on 'doxa' by Barbara Cassin and Charles Baladier in Dictionary of Untranslatables: a Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin, trans. Rendall, Hubert, Mehlman, Stein, and Syrotinski, trans. ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton University Press, 2014 [first published in French in 2004]), pp.228-30.

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. 

Fact-Opinion 1, Introductory notes on 'opinion' (part a)

I hope to make some progress in explaining how today's fact-opinion distinction arose. Philosophers don't take well to this distinction, which has come in for much criticism of late. Perhaps some of the disagreement about the distinction stems from diverse interpretations of the key terms. Here's a quick and dirty summary of a naive and plausible interpretation of 'opinion' and 'fact', one that I take many philosophers to adopt (even if they go on to develop more sophisticated accounts of the terms):

Opinions are in the mind. They're beliefs about how things are in the world. That is, they're beliefs, or judgments, about what the facts are. The facts are objective states of affairs that exist regardless of our opinions (unless they're facts about opinions). The facts are facts regardless of whether we're aware of them. An opinion is true (or factual) if it accurately reflects the facts; otherwise, an opinion is false.

Since opinions are beliefs, and since beliefs that are true and that are rationally justified in the right way (or, perhaps, that were brought about in the right way) count as knowledge, some opinions can become knowledge. Take an opinion, add truth and enough justification (of the right sort) and, voila, you've got knowledge.

This interpretation of the key terms is consistent with some historical evidence concerning their use. For instance, via the Oxford English Dictionary (OED; not the open-access edition), I found the following nugget from John Milton:

Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. (Milton, Areopagitica, 1644)

What they now opine, they may some day know. Once they've acquired the knowledge, we may say that their old opinion is not just an opinion but, also, genuine knowledge. Or, if we prefer to treat knowledge and opinion as mutually exclusive categories, we may say that their old opinion is no longer an opinion but is, instead, knowledge. We'll incline towards this latter approach if we use 'opinion' as short for mere opinion or if we're enamoured of the ancient Greek distinction between doxa and episteme. Regardless, we may then contrast opinion with knowledge in something like the way that Thomas Reid does in this passage:

Knowledge, I think, sometimes signifies things known; sometimes that act of the mind by which we know them. And in like manner opinion sometimes signifies things believed; sometimes the act of the mind by which we believe them. ... In knowledge, we judge without doubting; in opinion, with some mixture of doubt. (Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Essay VI 'Of Judgment', Ch. I ['Of Judgment in General'], sec. iii, 1785)

Reid isn't using the terms exactly as I did in my quick and dirty account, for here (at least) he puts the knowledge-opinion distinction chiefly in psychological terms; opinion sounds like a more tentatively held belief.* Still, the contrast is between opinion and knowledge, not between opinion and fact. What would be the point of opting for the latter juxtaposition? After all, opinions are mental states, but facts are what those states purport to be about and are not, themselves, mental states. 

So, my quick and dirty interpretation is roughly in sync with the above excerpts from Reid and Milton. In addition, it  accords with the following quotation of John Locke, who also contrasts opinion with knowledge:

It is therefore worth while to search out the bounds between opinion and knowledge; and examine by what measures, in things whereof we have no certain knowledge, we ought to regulate our assent and moderate our persuasion. ... I shall make some inquiry into the nature and grounds of faith or opinion: whereby I mean that assent which we give to any proposition as true, of whose truth yet we have no certain knowledge. (Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I, ch. i, paragraph 3, 1689)

Here, to hold an opinion is to take something to be true; and this taking, while not 'yet' certain, is at least  susceptible of rational support (and critique). All three of the above-quoted authors use 'opinion' in this fashion.

It looks like somewhere along the way, 'opinion' took on another interpretation, one that exempted the opinion-holder from rational accountability. This conjecture is suggested by a 19th-Century article in the Spectator about Lord John Russell (Bertrand Russell's grandfather). The article, called 'Odd Habit in a Leading Statesman' (Feb. 17, 1849), quotes Lord John as saying,

I am told, 'you then [in 1846] opposed coercion, and you now propose it yourself.' It is quite true that I am liable to that charge. All I can say is, that I thought that bill was not adapted to the circumstances of the time .... But that, again, is entirely a matter of opinion. Those who differ from me may hold the reverse view. (Spectator, Feb. 17, 1849, p. 10)

Russell's critics then opine:

It may almost be said that Lord John Russell never gives a reason in support of his 'opinion'; for he uses that word in the vulgar sense, to mean an impression which is not to be accounted for beyond its bare enunciation. ... How is it that Lord John cannot state the elements of his opinion and the grounds of his judgment,—describe the circumstances in 1846, and show in what the bill of that year failed to fit them...?  We do not say that Lord John has not elements for his opinion or grounds for his reason; but it is not 'condensation' of oratory to omit all statement of them, any more than an impression unsupported by distinctly explained reasons is to be accepted as a well-grounded and matured, a 'wise' opinion. Lord John, as a man, has a right to his own opinion, or even to his own unexplained impressions; but few men have been allowed to retain offices of trust who have so steadily fallen into the habit of not stating reasons for what they do. (Ibid., [Emphasis added])

Once more, we see that 'opinion', in its established, centuries-old use, was not meant to preempt any call for rational critique. Interestingly, we see also that the word had taken on a 'vulgar', second sense in which it was apparently meant to do just that.



The word 'fact' has undergone more changes in meaning, which I'll examine in subsequent posts. For now, I'll note that I follow Barbara J. Shapiro ^{(in Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 [Cornell University Press, 2000])} in saying that the legal use of 'fact' set the course for that term's use beyond the law and especially in the sciences. Shapiro marshals much evidence having to do with Sir Francis Bacon, but I don't know if she adduces the following quotation (from 1605):

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, lawyer and excogitator on scientific method, here introduces the phrase 'matter of fact' as a technical term from the law. In that domain, it contrasts with matters of law.

Consider the following way of marking the contrast between matters of fact and matters of opinion, which is drawn from an influential, 19th-Century textbook. The book is Elements of Rhetoric by Richard Whately. According to Bishop Whately,

By a 'Matter of Fact' is meant, something which might, conceivably, be submitted to the senses; and about which it is supposed there could be no disagreement among persons who should be present, and to whose senses it should be submitted; and by a 'Matter [or Question] of Opinion' is understood, anything respecting which an exercise of judgment would be called for on the part of those who should have certain objects before them, and who might conceivably disagree in their judgment thereupon. ... [I]t is not meant ... that there is any greater certainty ... in the one case than in the other. [For example,] [t]hat one of Alexander's friends did, or did not, administer poison to him, every one would allow to be a question of fact; though it may be involved in inextricable doubt: while the question, what sort of an act that was, supposing it to have taken place, all would allow to be a question of opinion; though probably all would agree in their opinion thereupon. (Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, 7th edition, ch. II, sec. 4, p. 52 [pp. 58-9 in the English edition published by Fellowes], 1846)

Whately's conception of matters of fact is consonant with the one that one finds in the law. Also, Whately takes one's view on a matter of opinion to be a truth-claim, where there may be more certainty regarding the claim's truth than there is for a belief about a matter of fact. In his example, as long as we lack good evidence, our beliefs about whether Alexander's friend poisoned poor Alex remain mere opinions (about a matter of fact). This use of 'opinion' fits with the above characterizations offered by Reid and Locke -- opinions suffer from doubt or a lack of certainty. But our conviction that it's wrong to poison one's friend is held with more certainty. Indeed, we may feel no doubt on the matter. One who adopts Reid's understanding of the knowledge-opinion divide would, then, conclude that this moral conviction is knowledge of a moral fact, but I think Whately would still classify it as an opinion -- a correct, rational one, but an opinion nonetheless.

*[Note Added on June 6: While Reid there pitches the knowledge-opinion distinction in seemingly psychological terms, his more considered formulations put the difference in an epistemological way. E.g., he says that opinion 'stands upon a weaker foundation, and is more liable to be shaken and overturned' than knowledge. In accordance with an epistemological formulation such as this, Reid can say that while one might not actually harbour doubts about a belief, one ought to (owing to its weaker foundation -- of which one might be unaware), and this is what makes it a mere opinion rather than knowledge. On this account, a Reidian (and Lockean) on the knowledge-opinion distinction might say that in Whately's example, one who feels no doubt concerning a belief about morality perhaps ought to feel some doubt, since the belief has a weaker foundation, which would make the belief an opinion only.]