'Alternative facts', scientific claims and political action.

The day after Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States in January 2017, then-press secretary Sean Spicer claimed that the crowd had been larger than the crowd that had assembled for Barack Obama's second inauguration, and offered as evidence a set of what appeared to be estimates of crowd sizes:

... from the platform where the President was sworn in, to 4th Street, it holds about 250,000 people. From 4th Street to the media tent is about another 220,000. And from the media tent to the Washington Monument, another 250,000 people. All of this space was full when the President took the Oath of Office'. (1) All of these numbers were bogus. A pair of sociologists specialising in crowd size estimates placed the carrying capacity of the entire National Mall--the expanse of green space in front of the US Capitol building, where crowds gather for events like these--at only 524,103, almost a quarter of a million fewer people than Spicer claimed were present. (2) Aerial photographs also clearly showed that the space was less full for Trump's inauguration than for Obama's. (3)

The problem is not simply that Spicer was lying, but that Spicer, and the rest of the administration, kept on repeating these claims even after they had been debunked, and suggested that they were simply offering--in the infamous words of Kellyanne Conway, a senior advisor to Trump--'alternative facts' to those presented by official agencies and scholarly specialists. Combined with a dismissal of any media outlet that criticised Trump as 'fake news', this strategy drew a protective barrier around the Trump administration that effectively allowed it to make whatever claims it wanted to, and have those claims repeated and recirculated by media outlets sympathetic to and supportive of Trump. And Trump supporters gained their own separate set of supposed facts that they could draw on in discussions with other people--a set which collapsed the distinction between partisan talking-points and truthful representations of shared situations.

To simply focus on the psychological level--did Spicer and Conway know that what they were saying was untrue?--fails to grasp the broader significance of the embrace of 'alternative facts'. That untrue claims sometimes have great political valence is nothing new. But the appropriation of the epistemic authority of facts for purely partisan purposes is a new and disturbing development, and it's not just confined to the United States or to the Trump administration. The problem is that these claims are taken to be based in facts, even when they have been clearly shown not to be. This in turn indicates a very profound and wide-spread confusion about what it means for something to be a fact in the first place.

Facts and their contexts

To illustrate, consider a different example. We've all heard it said, often on romantic occasions, that a person's truest love match is their 'soulmate'. But we also know from experience that not all relationships work out, and that sometimes people whose 'soulmate' did not turn out to be their forever match end up finding a measure of happiness with someone else afterwards. In his book What If?, Randall Munroe subjects the idea of the 'soulmate' to a statistical analysis, calculating the precise odds of a person's ever meeting their soulmate and concluding that you would need 10,000 lifetimes to have a chance of finding 'the one'--and that's assuming meeting 'a few dozen new strangers each day' in the quest for true love. (4)

The absurd humour of the situation Munroe describes comes from a particular kind of epistemic confusion: taking a statement that isn't usually understood to be a testable empirical claim and treating it as though it were. Certainly most people who talk about soulmates don't mean it in a factual sense; they are instead expressing a sentiment or reporting an experience, neither of which are generally amenable to systematic empirical analysis. What makes a romantic sentiment 'valid' is that it captures the way that people feel about a situation, or perhaps the way that they believe that they are supposed to feel. In the context of a wedding, say, or an anniversary card, the claim serves to reinforce those feelings and the broader narrative of romantic love in which they are embedded. The claim does not derive its power and authority in that setting from its factuality, but (so to speak) from its authenticity: the claim is recognisable to the participants, and is repeated and recirculated just so long as it helpfully frames and summarises a situation.

So the very same words can be taken as a statement of fact, as an expression of sentiment, or a number of other things. To determine what a claim means, we need to make some decisions about the context within which it is being made, and therefore the intention of the speaker; having done so we can then bring to bear the appropriate techniques for evaluating it and seeing whether and in what sense it is valid. The context, and therefore the intention, of a claim is thus something that we the listeners or readers produce or generate by how we engage with the claim in the first place--and by how others react to our construal of the claim. If at a wedding you stand up to protest the factuality of a claim about soulmates, you are likely to be shouted down or to have something tossed at you, but not because you have failed to understand the claim; instead you have simply understood it inappropriately, treating it as something different from the ways that others treat it in that setting.

This is not just a conflation of the...