Is a fact, in fact, a fact?

I'm very interested in the climate change debate, not just as an environmental scientist, but also because of my abiding fascination with epistemology.  Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge:  how do we know what we know; or how we know what we think we know; or how we think we know what we know.  You get the drift.

Nothing characterizes the debate over environmental issues more than the accusations that the other side is ignoring science.  Today for example, I typed "ignores science" into Google:

• Arkansas legislature ignores science, mandates toxic fluoridation for entire state
• Government's badger-culling plan "ignores science"
• DeGette Embryonic Stem Cell Research Bill Ignores Science

In the climate change arena, you have on one side the combined weight of virtually every scientist conducting research in a relevant field stating with a high degree of probability that global warming will likely be quite nasty for future generations.  And you have on the other side a collective "Pshaw!"  What is fascinating to me is the enormous success the Pshaw! side is having.  They have basically managed the climate change file off the top ten list of government policy.

People agitating to do something about climate change are somewhere between puzzled and livid.  They double-down:  "Very well then, we'll do even more research, and present them with even more facts, with even more certainty. That'll learn 'em!"  But, of course it doesn't.

This is because facts are vastly overrated.  It's one of our enduring illusions that we, humans, are rational beings. 

Look at addicts--their worlds can be collapsing around them, but they will all steadfastly maintain that their addiction is not a factor.  We view this behavior as pathological, but all of us, I think, in our minds, build these elaborate labyrinths of mirrors and glass so that we simply don't see what we don’t want to see.  We're all, untimately, prisoners of our own biases.

René des Cartes, the founder of modern philosophy, sought to unshackle himself from those bonds of bias.  His primary motivation for his seminal work Meditations on First Philosophy was to find a single,  irrefutable fact.  His epiphany, perhaps the most famous one-liner in philosophy, was Cogito, ergo sum.  I think therefore I am.  But of course, people refuted it.

Even the word itself--fact--is suspicious. What is the difference between "I am in Kabul" and "It is a fact that I am in Kabul"?  They both say the same thing; the second just emphasizes the point by appealing to truth, to the set of Things That Are Real.  Therefore, preceding a statement with "It is a fact that..." is not a logical argument, but a rhetorical one.  I don't go around saying "It is a fact that my name is Adam" because I don't need  to persuade people to believe it.  "I am Adam" suffices.

And there are virtually an infinite number of facts from which to choose, so the selection of even perfectly "objective" facts (if there were such an animal) itself becomes subjective.  Even if it's the same fact.  For instance one person says that 99% of all UFO reports are proven false, and another says that 1% of UFO sightings cannot be explained. 

Science actually has a way around this. Scientists tend to use the term "observation" instead of fact.  Instead of "It is a fact that it is raining" they say "I observe that it is raining."  So they move out of the "objective reality" of a fact to the "subjective perception" of the observer.

So hammering the so-called deniers over the head with facts is ultimately futile, in our post-objective world.  The main reason the skeptics deny climate change is because it challenges values.  And facts may be transient, but beliefs and values are not.  They are bedrock, baby. 

The deniers are almost exclusively on the political right--that's telling right there.  What the so-called deniers are denying is not climate change itself but the implied policy remedies to climate change--one-world government; international regulation of capital; centrally planned wealth distribution; unrepresentative technocracy.  These things are all more threatening to many than some potential nastiness with the weather fifty years down the road.

If you want to get somewhere, start the discussion with values, not facts. And state the way you see things as observations instead of facts.   But I grow weary.  More of this another day.