Facts vs. Values

We have this now iconic phrase “alternative facts,” which we know means lies or if we are being generous falsehoods. This is where we start to go down the path of trying to define these terms. A lie is something that someone says where they know they are saying something that is untrue. While a falsehood is a statement that is untrue, and we do not know whether the person saying it is aware that it is untrue. We are being nice by not ascribing unkind intentions to the person. However, I think this muddies the water because what is especially relevant about information is not necessarily whether something is true but what it means to us. I argue that there are very few facts. A fact can be defined as something that everyone agrees is true. I argue that there are very few facts because if everyone believes something to be true is has very little meaning or value to us. For example, a lot of facts are things like what day of the week it is. The day of the week is a non-controversial statement. The value of our statements comes in the interpretation of what they mean. Valuable interpretations are built on an orderly progression of non-controversial “facts.” This is why facts matter. They don’t usually matter individually unless we get stuck on individual facts. This is where we have issues in contemporary conversation. This isn’t new. But it is increasingly relevant. So why am I bothering to be so pedantic about facts? My point is that what really matters is the meaning and interpretation that someone wants to ascribe to a fact or more likely a set of facts. If we are interested in evaluating an argument, we need to be looking for those interpretations of the facts first, and then evaluating the facts. Our values come before our facts. They inform the facts that we look for. This is not wrong or bad. This is human. But this means we have to understand our values - our own values and those we are evaluating if we are going to understand other people, persuade other people, and effectively make change in the world. Values are not facts.

Before I reflect more on values, I want to discuss a certain type of fact - scientific and social scientific fact. Science is a way of obtaining facts. The premise of science is that scientists use a method that can be repeated. They conduct experiments or studies. So for example, if a bunch of medical scientists get a large population of people. And they observe that the resting heart rate for those people is between 60 to 100 beats per minute and they repeat this in a lot of different populations, then they would conclude that this is average. Their population would probably include some people who were below 60 and over 100. Those people would be considered outliers from what is typical. They might even be able to go on to continue to study people and make association that people with higher or lower resting heart rates were more likely to have certain medical conditions. The main reason they are able to make these claims is because they can repeatedly demonstrate them. If they can’t continue to show this, then this information is not scientifically sound. Even in science though there are exceptions. There are people with resting heart rates that are high or low who have no medical conditions and people with average heart rates who have lots of medical issues. The next piece of this is that science, especially science that deals with humans, involves human judgment and our values. “Science” used to accept the idea that black people were intellectually inferior to white people. The widespread acceptance of this idea in scientific circles was no longer accepted by the 1930s (Slaton 22). However, that doesn’t mean that individual scientists still don’t try to promote this idea in their work. Eugenics was still promoted formally and with much academic power in certain enclaves throughout the U.S. for many years. As recently as 1994, a best-selling book call The Bell Curve reinvigorated these ideas. Even though the science it promotes is discredited, those who want to believe it promote it. The problem here is with the interpretations and assumptions. If we administer tests to black people and white people and the tests reveal that there are lower scores among the black people, it is an interpretation and an assumption that the tests are indicating that black people are less intelligent. We could ask different questions. What do the tests actually measure? Is it possible to measure intelligence? Are there flaws in the tests? Are the samples actually the same? Are the conditions for administering the tests the same? There are lots of reasons why people can score differently on tests that have nothing to do with intelligence. For example, one condition in the education system is food. Kids who don’t have access to regular well-balanced meals are less likely to perform well in school, including on tests. Socio-economics is a factor in this. But having testing samples with the same socio-economics doesn’t necessarily address that as black people who have the same income are not necessarily as economically stable as their white counterparts. Stereotype threat is another issue. When a group of people is known to be labeled as being less intelligent, a high pressure situation in which an individual from that group might confirm that stereotype is called stereotype threat. Taking a test which might seem to prove that stereotype true makes it harder to do well on the test. There is also a feeling among those faced with stereotype threat that if I don’t try my best then whatever the results are they aren’t true. So the person can save face personally even if the test results end up negative in the study.

So those are all explanations, and there are more, but I’m going to flip this. I’m going to use a different example than race, I’ll use gender. If we administer tests to men and women and we find that those test scores differ. How would we react? The difference here is that since 2012 we are now finding that when we do this that men score lower on those tests. Does that mean that men are less intelligent? Does this change suddenly mean that half the CEOs of fortune 500 companies are women (No, it is 5.8% or 29 out of 500 as of January 2017) or that women are more proportionately represented in Congress (No, that would be 19.4% with 104 out of 535, 21 in the senate and 83 in the house). My point is that scientists have a reason for wanting to conduct experiments. They have assumptions. These assumptions then influence their interpretations. And the interpretations are what matter. So we should care a lot about science and put a lot of weight on what is well-known to be replicable and reliable. We should also be confident in questioning those things that are not replicable and asking questions about methods and assumptions. We should also be confident about our ability to act on information that is replicable and whose methods and assumptions have a solid foundation.

Sources

Cooke, Harriet. “IQ Tests: Women Score Higher Than Men.” The Telegraph, 15 July 2012. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9401241/IQ-tests-women-score-higher-than-men.html

Gray, Emma. “Women Have Higher IQ Scores Than Men Now, James Flynn, Researcher, Claims.” Huffpost, 17 July 2012. Updated 7 Nov 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/16/women-have-higher-iq-scores-than-men-james-flynn_n_1677963.html

Slaton, Amy E. Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U. S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line. Harvard, 2010.

“Women CEOs of the S&P 500” Catalyst, http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-sp-500

“Women in the U.S. Congress 2017.” Rutgers, http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/women-us-congress-2017