SEARCHING FOR THE FACTS

“Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.” Sergeant Joe Friday from the 1950s TV show Dragnet

Whenever there is a difference in opinion or a conflict about the best option, we seek to solve things by asking, “What are the facts?” We do this because we believe that the facts will solve the differences. If it were only that simple! It isn’t and here’s why.

Obviously, if we are to get to the truth about anything, we have to start with the facts. A fact is something that “has actual existence, a piece of information presented as having objective reality.” A fact is an external referent which you can point to, an empirical thing that you can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, etc. While that, on the surface, makes sense and sounds easy, it is not. And that’s because as Sir Authur Conan Doyle noted: “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

When it comes to facts— there are all kinds of facts. There are true facts and false facts, there are clearly stated facts and ambiguous, convoluted facts which are hard to make sense of. There are misrepresented facts, second-hand facts, emotional facts, biased facts, fallacious facts, etc. Given that there are multiple kinds of facts, we start with empirical facts, yet even these are colored by our perceptual lens.

If you perceive something as blue and I see it as green, what is the true fact? Obviously, neither. Color is not a fact. Color is a function of the rods and cons in your eyes and my eyes, it is not something “out there” in the world. We cannot say, “It is a fact that his shirt is red.” That’s an evaluation. In this case, a perceptual evaluation and one not made consciously. It is an unconscious function of a person’s visual capacities.

This explains why we have ask, “Is it a fact or an evaluation?” And sometimes it takes a good bit of thinking to figure that out. Those who don’t know the difference between descriptions and evaluations will tend to confuse their evaluations with descriptions. Many of the things we call facts are mental maps which we trust refers to a valid and true reference. Yet whatever you call a fact, it is also incomplete. It is an abstract from something and therefore not all of it. Facts also are tentative due to the fact that reality is forever changing. Facts are contextual, they depend on the context in which it occurs.

What makes it hard for each of us is that your facts and mine are perceived through our mental filters. That’s why, right from the start, it is difficult to get unbiased and clean facts. It is also why we even argue over facts. With any problem-solving discussion, we always want to begin by starting with the facts. “Okay, so what are the facts that we know for sure?” The thought is that this will simplify things and give us a foundation to start from. And while that’s true, it is not that simple.

Then there are “facts” from every domain of knowledge. These are logical facts, social facts, psychological facts, economic facts, political facts, etc. All of these are actually evaluations. In each field, there are frames-of-references creating and coloring observations and experiences that are now called “facts” in those areas. That actually makes them meta-facts— facts about facts.

We often say “It is a fact that John lied.” The statement sounds factual. If you’re not skeptical, you might quickly conclude, “Yes, that is a fact.” Or, “No, that is not a fact.” But any statement about a “lie” is not an empirical fact, it is an evaluative fact—an evaluation. Framing a statement as a lie is one possibility among many others. What else could it be? It also might have been a mis-statement, an exaggeration, a partial truth, a joke, humor, sarcasm, an attempt at optimism, and so on. What is it really?

These meta-facts actually suffer from ambiguity. That’s because by themselves, facts do not have meaning. It takes a meaning-maker (you and I) to give meaning to a fact and we do that through various frames-of-references. Our filters and cognitive biases skew our thinking causing us to miscalibrate things.

All facts are not the same because it is so easy to confuse the map with the territory. Merely saying or thinking that something is a fact, does not make it so. If whatever you are calling a fact is not a sensory-based word, but a nominalization, it is an evaluation.

Finally, there are implied facts. Linguistically, whenever you use such words as always, never, none, all, every you are using words that imply some absolute facts. Yet these universal quantifiers (the Meta-Model) are usually untrue. That’s why we challenge them, “always? There’s no exceptions?

To do higher quality thinking— critical thinking— learn to challenge “facts” and to get back to the brute facts as best you can. The Meta-Model will help you do that, training in Executive Thinking (“The Brain Camp”) will help.