Do Interpretations Precede Facts?

[Masha]

Hypothesis:

Gravity, as a Natural Law, is contingent on:

1. Apparatuses of Perception
2. Use Value

Use value requires us to start from the political realm, which is a realm predicated on economic conditions, i.e., the historical patterning of social infrastructure.

E.g.

Gravity is often categorized as an indisputable law of nature, as though nature was something that was created; that it is an artifact. This is a carry-over from the Judeo-Christian conception of God as a carpenter; a divine maker.

I posit that denotations, "laws of nature", etc., are in no way "laws", as their existence is solely predicated on their use-value to beings, not on any objective, found truth (a conception based on the the correspondence theory of truth, which appeals to imaginary undefined entities -- rendering it incoherent).

A popular understanding of laws of nature is that they denote an objective reality. This is true insofar as we understand denotations to consist of nothing more than deeply embedded social connotation-networks; the sum total of the intentional interpretations beings have about the world, and for human beings, also intentionality about intentionality itself -- which is the main distinguishing feature between human consciousness and animal consciousness.

To put it pithily, denotations are the sum of the total connotations we have about a phenomenon.

------

"Against the positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only facts," I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations..."

Nietzsche, Notes - 481

[Alet]

This is correct to a certain degree as there is no truth outside of human observation. But what we call truth is not an arbitrary interpretation - we do this because it has a practical meaning. Facts and laws do exist, not because nature was created or eternal truth is written on Tablets of Stone, but insofar as, say, the law of gravity is practically relevant.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

There is no such thing as objective reality, true. However, it is not true that if there is no objective reality then there isn't or wasn't reality.

For example, a historical fact that has not been discovered yet is not reality according to human consciousness. We don't know it exists yet, because we haven't discovered it either because the evidence hasn't been discovered, or the information relating the evidence doesn't exist any more. So according to our own consciousness this 'fact', whatever it may be, does not enter into our consciousness, individually or collectively. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It does. Or it did. Or maybe it did in the past. Or maybe it does somewhere else in the world but isn't being shared.

This is a key question for historians, and indeed anybody who 'writes', because if we accept the idea that interpretations precede facts then we essentially say that there is no 'objective' history, but rather all interpretations in history are at the whim of the writer. To historians this presents a real problem, as we see our task as documenting, understanding, and analysing the past. The best way to do this and come out with reliable results would seem to be to base our interpretations on what the facts tell us.

[Masha]

Ah, but you leave out the most interesting part, Alet -- FOR WHAT ENDS is the law of gravity "practically relevant"?

If interpretations are necessarily political, and our facts are contingent on our interpretations, then how we interpret the world isn't reflecting the world in-itself, but reflecting our intentionality; the "aboutness" of awareness, rendering conceptualization (of the so called "material" world) fundamentally a creative act predicated on an intrinsic historical social contract about what is and what isn't, as well as, and more importantly, what is the significance of a thing (a "think") to the whole of society (and to our individual organisms), and in what ways is it insignificant?

Also, where did I indicate that truth is anything other than a matter of practical meaning or that an objective reality doesn't exist? I do, however, avoid the terms "subjective" and "objective', to distance myself from Cartesian dualism, which I find an inarticulate way of talking about existence. I'm more thinking of being in Heideggerian terms here.


What my argument basically is is that facts and laws are mental categories predicated on our organismic capacities and social functionalities.

So, as long as those truths written on the Tablets of Stone were practically relevant, they existed (existence being a matter of how beings perceive, formalize, and interpret experiences) as objective phenomena. The flatness of the Earth was an "objective truth" until our ability to conceptualize the world changed due to more precise tools of measurement.

Gravity does not hold a special eternally true category no more than the theory of phlogiston. It just happens to be what our society agrees is a justified true belief based on the information AND GOALS our sciences, politics, and personal thoughts are about right now. Gravity, of course, has had a longer shelf-life and more universal membership of believers than phlogiston ever did. Concepts that have been even more successful than gravity are TIME and SPACE, which took on a fundamentally transformed re-conceptualization during the Enlightenment, arguably to better serve the needs of the rising god, Capital. And even more pervasive than those was the Christian God, which was experienced by many as a fundamental, objective truth for quite some time, and even lingers on (and thrives in some places) today directly, and indirectly through our concepts and language -- the ways we communicate about existence constantly reinforce their functions and maintains the present modes of production, which includes modes of thought and communication.

Our concept "gravity" is an attempt to describe and measure an aspect of experience.

Think of it like this: we can look at a dog as food or as a companion, and how we interact with it; how we experience it's presence, is fundamentally different based on the function we perceive it to have. And in each case, what we MEAN -- the connotations (which, remember, arguably are the sum of the denotation itself) -- when we talk about "dogs", is fundamentally different in each case.

Aesthetics and faith therefore plays a much greater role in what we consider true than what many would be willing to admit.

[Alet]

If interpretations are necessarily political, and our facts are contingent on our interpretations, then how we interpret the world isn't reflecting the world in-itself, but reflecting our intentionality

Well, yes... if I get you right, this is the point of Marxism, or Lenin's point when he said that science cannot be impartial in class societies. When one makes a scientific statement, he is already on one side of the class struggle, not only because of the banal fact that he lives but rather because his partisanship constitutes his scientific statement. This is the basis of what you call "Aesthetics". And while you may not have said "that truth is anything other than a matter of practical meaning or that an objective reality doesn't exist", saying that we merely interpret the world sounds like a relativist statement to me - because an interpretation can be arbitrary in that it might be exchangeable with another one as it is not constituted by anything. But if we state that truth is a practical matter, we could just skip the "we only interpret the world" part, for this is, in the way you seem to understand "interpretation", already implicit. Or am I missing your point?

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Even if you accept, obviously, that interpretations will vary according to the ideas, opinions and experiences of the person creating the interpretation, accepting that the interpretation follows the facts/evidence, rather than the other way round, is a simple way to reduce the 'arbitrariness' of an interpretation. It eliminates the possibility for logical fallacy and mental gymnastics which one sees an awful lot of by people who select and distort evidence to suit their own interpretations of events (past and present).

[Invader Zim]

Vladimir innit Lenin has basically said it all. Though I do think that there is an objective reality, the point is that there are not objective or complete interpretations of it.

[Masha]

Even if you accept, obviously, that interpretations will vary according to the ideas, opinions and experiences of the person creating the interpretation, accepting that the interpretation follows the facts/evidence, rather than the other way round, is a simple way to reduce the 'arbitrariness' of an interpretation. It eliminates the possibility for logical fallacy and mental gymnastics which one sees an awful lot of by people who select and distort evidence to suit their own interpretations of events (past and present).


For what you say to be accurate, it would require me to be saying that facts/evidence follow interpretation, which is not what I'm trying to say. I'm trying to say that interpretation and thus reality-formulation of categories like "societies" and "classes" is a self-aware being constructing from basic, unspeakable "thusness", for lack of a better word, the categories of their existence -- which leads to the development of both the collective (political) and the organismic (existential) substructures. Yet both of those are only 2 of the infinitely many constitutions that can and perhaps in the 4th and higher dimension ARE PREDICATED on this ineffible "thusness", to hijack a Hindu philosophical "finger pointing at the moon" type terminology.

This is based largely on a critique of language, in particular, my answer to the question "What CAN'T language do?"; how to understand language apophatically?

From which I arrive at my paradoxical argument that even talk about "material reality" is insufficient for the task it sets itself, and, on top of that, is predicated on a mistaking of the map for the territory -- albeit, a much more accurate map of the territory than has come before.

It seems the main sticking point we're having is that you think an increase in arbitrariness is the inevitable outcome of relativism.

Yes, I'm a relativist. But only in the irrefutable, obvious sense that we all are. Namely, that awareness is only possible through contrast. A ball moving through space with no reference point is not moving through space. With two balls, you can't tell which is moving and which is not, though you, the imaginary deity observer in this analogy, can tell that movement is occurring. The more balls you add in the mix (have a ball!), the more a multiplicity it all appears. But for there to be contrast at all, there implies an underlying unity. Yet that unity should not be fetishized, as it in its turn is only possible in contrast to the multiplicity.

In other words, not only every person, but every cat, every lamp-post, every cup of water, every unnameable smudge on the kitchen ceiling, every non-imaginable nothingness you can't even think of -- they all are a form of propaganda, all a matter of, to use vulgar capitalist terminology "selling you the idea" of its active existence in the unique way it is patterning itself to you now, which is what we love (a category which quite naturally manifests in capitalism as commodity fetishism). Relativity is an affirmation of seduction (to consciously use a troublesomely culturally-baggaged word). Attraction. Relativity is a matter of attraction and repulsion (but here, please don't confuse me for a proponent of animal magnetism!)

Which brings us back to where we started: with use value, which is predicated on those apparatuses that are existentially conceived in terms of perception.

And also, yes Alet, I think you sum up my original point well from a more well-grounded Marxist perspective. Thanks :)

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Masha, I think you've been reading too many Post-Modernist critiques of history.

Have a read of Richard Evans 'In Defence of History' for a critique of some of these ideas that focus on critical analysis of language at the behest of investigating. the. facts.

[Thirsty Crow]

Thclamation there is no objec

For example, a historical fact that has not been discovered yet is not reality according to human consciousness. We don't know it exists yet, because we haven't discovered it either because the evidence hasn't been discovered, or the information relating the evidence doesn't exist any more. So according to our own consciousness this 'fact', whatever it may be, does not enter into our consciousness, individually or collectively. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It does. Or it did. Or maybe it did in the past. Or maybe it does somewhere else in the world but isn't being shared.

Suppose now the evidence record is so full of gaps as to make an X unknow. But were it known, X would obviously be recognized as an important causal factor in historical change.

The question being is X real and effective? Obviously, the answer is yes. There's no getting around the brute facts of development as these aren't ontologically dependent upon future generations of people acknowledging them. Just as I personally might fail to acknowledge some pertinent (either biological or psychological, makes no difference) factors which play a causal role in me developing an illness.

And of course interpretations don't preceede facts. If they did, they'd cease to be interpretations (funny thing, the sphere where interpretations play a huge role, literary criticism, shows us that it is gaps in the stories - the stuff which is left unmentioned at all - that is the bread and butter of subsequent "filling-out" operations which count as interpretation). Then they'd be imaginations of a solipsistic substantial immaterial mind which makes up the universe.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I'm not disagreeing with you, Links.

There is, though, a difference between 'objective' existence and whether something exists in our consciousness. That's the very nature of knowledge - there's a lot of 'stuff' out there, yet only a fraction of it is in my, or your, consciousness. We could probably hazard a guess that there are some things about quantum mechanics that exist, but without coming across the evidence I couldn't tell you what these 'things' are, and therefore in my own consciousness they do not exist. Extrapolate that to the entire human consciousness: if there is something that exists but nobody has discovered it, then it has not entered human consciousness yet. Does it exist? Arguably, yes. Does it yet play an important role in the world? Perhaps it did once, but at this moment probably not - not until it is discovered. It's surely only at the moment of its discovery that it ceases to become inconsequentially existing information and starts to become useful, practicable evidence.

I'm starting to scare myself by how close i'm coming to making the post-modernists' argument for them, but there is definitely more than a grain of truth in saying that 'things' do not become real evidence until they enter human consciousness.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

I'm starting to scare myself by how close i'm coming to making the post-modernists' argument for them, but there is definitely more than a grain of truth in saying that 'things' do not become real evidence until they enter human consciousness.

You don't need to go to the postmodernists. Kant gives the basic framework that we're discussing here. Our concepts (and facts are conceptual) apply to the realm of subjective experience, and the discussion of concepts applying to some kind of primordial "thing in itself" outside of the subject is metaphysically and epistemologically problematic. This doesn't mean laws and facts don't exist, or that there isn't a "real world" with cold facts, but their existence as conceptually understood is dependent on the subject.

It is worth mentioning that Kant was the farthest thing from a wishy-washy "postmodern" relativist, though Kantianism was critical in the development of such thought (as, for that matter, most post-Kantian philosophy)


The question being is X real and effective? Obviously, the answer is yes. There's no getting around the brute facts of development as these aren't ontologically dependent upon future generations of people acknowledging them. Just as I personally might fail to acknowledge some pertinent (either biological or psychological, makes no difference) factors which play a causal role in me developing an illness.
To be understood as real entities though, they have to be able to be conceived of by a subject. It's not that there aren't things which can be understood as causes that exist prior to our recognition of them.



And of course interpretations don't preceede facts. If they did, they'd cease to be interpretations (funny thing, the sphere where interpretations play a huge role, literary criticism, shows us that it is gaps in the stories - the stuff which is left unmentioned at all - that is the bread and butter of subsequent "filling-out" operations which count as interpretation). Then they'd be imaginations of a solipsistic substantial immaterial mind which makes up the universe.I imagine the poster is using "interpretation" in a Heideggerian sense, where it serves as the basis upon which we build an understanding of the facts.

[Invader Zim]

Ok, so let's take the human brain. We know very little about how it actually works, it's complexities are so vast that we are only beginning to understand it. If a discovery were to be made tomorrow which explains how degenerative brain diseases operate, would t the cause of those diseases have not existed because we did not know? I'm not sure, Vladimir, how we can reconcile that with the finer element of your point. Perhaps I'm not reading you right?

In a rather less significant level, I recently was doing some work which produced evidence which challenged (irrevocably) my previous working thesis. So, I did have some degree of interpretation going on, in that I thought based on what I had read and previously discovered in the archive, I knew how this little scenario played out. But it turned out my interpretation was impressionistic. The discovery of a new file of documents meant that I had to jettison my entire argument and interpretation. So, in that sense the facts have to precede , or at least take precedence, over interpretation.

[Thirsty Crow]

I'm not disagreeing with you, Links.

There is, though, a difference between 'objective' existence and whether something exists in our consciousness. That's the very nature of knowledge - there's a lot of 'stuff' out there, yet only a fraction of it is in my, or your, consciousness. Yes, of course, but that doesn't mean effective causes, albeit unknown to human protangonists, don't significantly influence our outcomes. That's why I object to any insistence that there is no objective reality. Apart from serious problems with determining "objective" and its counterpart, I still think human awareness of all the stuff that influences our lives might not match up to the actual causal power itself.


We could probably hazard a guess that there are some things about quantum mechanics that exist, but without coming across the evidence I couldn't tell you what these 'things' are, and therefore in my own consciousness they do not exist. Extrapolate that to the entire human consciousness: if there is something that exists but nobody has discovered it, then it has not entered human consciousness yet.But this extrapolation would be the definition of invalid; since quantum mechanics deals with a very specific set of properties, namely that of the very small particles and "batches" of energy, it isn't at all clear if these properties influence our lives at all. The shower of neutrinos my body is subjected to right now changes absolutely nothing, either of what would be of interest to the discussion here or to myself in any way.

That's because our lives, the broadest let's say determining limits to it, is very easily explained by reference to other phenomena. Be they physical (illness) or social (wage labor, for instance).

And also this:



I posit that denotations, "laws of nature", etc., are in no way "laws", as their existence is solely predicated on their use-value to beings, not on any objective, found truth (a conception based on the the correspondence theory of truth, which appeals to imaginary undefined entities -- rendering it incoherent).


...for a spectacular confusion of known regularities in nature for phenomena accounted for by the critique of political economy.

Thing is, the rhetoric is slippery and misleading. But once otherwise mystified terms are clarified, which does occur when one substitutes "natural law" for "regularity known to occur" (and the latter is no less certain that the former in terms of rhetoric re: truth value), things are quite simple. Brutally simple in fact.



To be understood as real entities though, they have to be able to be conceived of by a subject. It's not that there aren't things which can be understood as causes that exist prior to our recognition of them.
Were prehistoric humans able to conceive of bacteria? How can we even answer this question apart from an obvious "I don't know" (which should tell you something about the vacuous nature of the conceivability criterion)?

But that's not the biggest problem out there. The biggest one would be the seeming fact human conception changes and some things are in fact conceived - but under very specific circumstances.

[Masha]

We're basically making the nominalist-realist debate in very crude terms, which has been a core issue in philosophy since the Greeks. I don't think I could explain my argument very well in the time I'm allotting myself to write on this forum. There are a couple steps you have to make to elevate yourself above that sticking point in Western Philosophy.

Two people who I think do a good job at moving past this ontological contradiction are:


1. Alan Watts, particularly in this talk:

lecture called "Alan Watts ~ Egocentricity In Humanity". Google search the terms. I can't share a link though, due to my small number of postings.


2. and Lacan, through Zizek, starting at an hour and eighteen minutes (and 40 seconds) into this video:

Slavoj Zizek "On Jacques Lacan" (Full Lecture) -- also search. I had links, but can't post them.