Arendt homes in on a distinction between scientific truths and factual truths. In my memory, as a practical upshot, I have found this essential test useful: if I wanted to lie to future history about something, how much would it cost me to erase the evidence available to their scholars and scientists to verify for themselves?
Based on this test, the lower the price of erasure, the more “factual” the truth is, and the higher the price of erasure, the more “scientific” (or “philosophic”?) it is.
(The essay also explores the difficulty of keeping each particular truth secret, but that test is harder for me to use and remember.)
The verifiable “truth” that gravity constant’s specific value relative to human measurement standards is 6.6743 × 10⁻¹¹ m³ kg⁻¹ s⁻² could be erased by destroying human civilization such that it forgot how long a meter actually is (or a kilogram or a second), but this is a very high price (probably trillions of dollars?) so this is a very very scientific truth!
Then consider the ratio of the mass of a proton to the mass of an electron is ~1836.15 with no units, and there you’d have to do something destructive to like “physics itself” in order to destroy people’s future ability to recover this truth. Since causing damage to physics itself might be impossible, this would be an infinite price, and so this truth, by this test, has essentially zero facticity due to being essentially 100% scientific :-)
The sort of obvious latent background here is the holocaust and the holodomor (and the denial of such events), but in the Arendt’s essay these gets one the briefest of mentions (bold not in original) but also their specific position within the typologies of truth (and specifically how dangerous they were to talk about) gets a direct claim and become central to a line of thinking:
To be sure, state secrets have always existed; every government must classify certain information—withhold it from public notice—and he who reveals authentic secrets has always been • treated as a traitor. With this I am not concerned here. The facts I have in mind are publicly known, and yet the same public that knows them can successfully, and often spontaneously, taboo their public discussion and treat them as though they were what they are not—namely, secrets. That their assertion then should prove as dangerous as, for instance, preaching atheism or some other heresy proved in former times seems a curious phenomenon, and its significance is enhanced when we find it also in countries that are ruled tyrannically by an ideological government. (Even in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia it was more dangerous to talk about concentration and extermination camps, whose existence was no secret, than to hold and to utter “heretical” views on anti-Semitism, racism, and Communism.) What seems even more disturbing is that to the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free countries they are often, consciously or unconsciously, transformed into opinions— as though the fact of Germany’s support of Hitler or of France’s collapse before the German armies in 1940 or of Vatican policies during the Second World War were not a matter of historical record but a matter of opinion. Since such factual truths concern issues of immediate political relevance, there is more at stake here than the perhaps inevitable tension between two ways of life within the framework of a common and commonly recognized reality. What is at stake here is this common and factual reality itself, and this is indeed a political problem of the first order. And since factual truth, though it is so much less open to argument than philosophical truth, and so obviously within the grasp of everybody, seems often to suffer a similar fate when it is exposed in the marketplace—namely, to be countered not by lies and deliberate falsehoods but by opinion—it may be worthwhile to reopen the old and apparently obsolete question of truth versus opinion.
For, seen from the viewpoint of the truthteller, the tendency to transform fact into opinion, to blur the dividing line between them, is no less perplexing than the truthteller’s older predicament, so vividly expressed in the cave allegory, in which the philosopher, upon his return from his solitary journey to the sky of everlasting ideas, tries to communicate his truth to the multitude, with the result that it disap-pears in the diversity of views, which to him are illusions, and is brought down to the uncertain level of opinion, so that now, back in the cave, truth itself appears in the guise of the dokei moi (”it seems to me”)—the very doxai he had hoped to leave behind once and for all. However, the reporter of factual truth is even worse off. He does not return from any journey into regions beyond the realm of human affairs, and he cannot console himself with the thought that he has become a stranger in this world. Similarly, we have no right to console ourselves with the notion that his truth, if truth it should be, is not of this world. If his simple factual statements are not accepted—truths seen and witnessed with the eyes of the body, and not the eyes of the mind—the suspicion arises that it may be in the nature of the political realm to deny or pervert truth of every kind, as though men were unable to come to terms with its unyielding, blatant, unpersuasive stubbornness. If this should be the case, things would look even more desperate than Plato assumed, for Plato’s truth, found and actualized in solitude, transcends, by definition, the realm of the many, the world of human affairs. (One can understand that the philosopher, in his isolation, yields to the temptation to use his truth as a standard to be imposed upon human affairs; that is, to equate the transcendence inherent in philosophical truth with the altogether different kind of “transcendence” by which yardsticks and other standards of measurement are separated from the multitude of objects they are to measure, and one can equally well understand that the multitude will resist this standard, since it is actually derived from a sphere that is foreign to the realm of human affairs and whose connection with it can be justified only by a confusion.) Philosophical truth, when it enters the marketplace, changes its nature and becomes opinion, because a veritable metabasis eis allo genos, a shifting not merely from one kind of reasoning to another but from one way of human existence to another, has taken place. Factual truth, on the contrary, is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony; it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about, even if it occurs in the domain of privacy. It is political by nature. Facts and opinions, though they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other; they belong to the same realm. Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation.
Arendt’s essay is very interested in politics, but for myself, as a data scientist, the test for facts calls my attention sometimes in my daily life when “facts” do, in fact, disappear!
Consider that today I went to Oliver’s Supermarket and bought MRM brand Veggie Protein with Superfoods and paid with a credit card. Oliver’s Supermarket has the data in their computers. Visa also has the data in their computers. Now the fact has been added here to this LW comment.
Supposing that I had not written about it here, eventually the fact might be erased from the computers of the store and the bank due to data retention policies (which are hilariously named, because the point of a data rentention policy is to give political cover to the decision to NOT retain certain data, but instead to erase it).
I’m likely to try this product a couple times and see if I like it.
Eventually the container will be shipped off to a dump, and go into the landfill (though it might retain some of my DNA there which could hypothetically be recovered for many years).
In between these events, when will I drink any of it? What will my reactions be?
These very detailed questions about the microstructure of my life will be very very very hard to reconstruct, either with data forensics, or taking a garbage dump apart atom by atom with archaeological nanotech, or even for modern surveillance capitalists.
Based on the erasure test, here we find “facts” that almost cost negative amounts of money to erase! Like you would have to SPEND money to PRESERVE such facts! You’d have to log the data, and put it in the cloud, or something like that.
Brains often flush such details, and they leave few traces, and what traces they leave are often destroyed in a matter of course during daily life, and daily cleaning, and so on.
Something interesting about the trajectory of history is that many kinds of daily historical truths with negative “cost of erasure” (that are very very very “factual” in this sense) have changed to become positively costly to erase! More and more incidental data is captured, and much of it is retained. Someday the CIA’s metadata archives will be a treasure trove to historians!
The essential line here has long been known, with “historians” seeking after facts in archives (and “history” beginning with writing, essentially) whereas “archaeologists” seek after facts that are NOT in the archives, but in the physical residue.
For example, the current best estimate for “the beginning of the history of war” is arguably April 16, 1457 BC because, so far, The Battle Of Megiddo is the oldest military battle that can be reliably determined to have “been written about”.
Before that, surely there were wars, and surely these wars had battles, but these were so “very merely factual” as events that no one was willing to pay the data retentions costs to let the future remember them, and therefore detailed records of them (fully of lies or honesty or whatever) doesn’t seem to exist.
A possible claim: as measurement and archival technology advance, many specific categories of truth (like truths about battles and deaths and what people had for breakfast) are “moving anti-factward” because they are “moving scienceward” towards being cheaply and abstractly apprehended by the mechanisms and processed of socialized literacy and communal reason.
An interesting question: what are currently the MOST EXPENSIVE facts to RETAIN archival evidence of?
A second interesting question: among such facts, which might be worth such costs, and why?
A third interesting question: why do courts (whose archives tend to be hidden, and censored, and very expensive to search, and not allowed to be recorded by microphones or cameras, and so on) so often embrace facticity very strongly, and make their proceedings so murky to so many?
In 2019 I was trying to study the relation of truth and power because I was studying prediction markets from a design perspective and I found the 1967 essay “Truth And Power” by Hannah Arendt.
Arendt homes in on a distinction between scientific truths and factual truths. In my memory, as a practical upshot, I have found this essential test useful: if I wanted to lie to future history about something, how much would it cost me to erase the evidence available to their scholars and scientists to verify for themselves?
In case someone tries to erase it, here is a different link to the same essay. Also, it is in this archive. The most canonical archive only has the paywall teaser content, I think?
Based on this test, the lower the price of erasure, the more “factual” the truth is, and the higher the price of erasure, the more “scientific” (or “philosophic”?) it is.
(The essay also explores the difficulty of keeping each particular truth secret, but that test is harder for me to use and remember.)
The verifiable “truth” that gravity constant’s specific value relative to human measurement standards is 6.6743 × 10⁻¹¹ m³ kg⁻¹ s⁻² could be erased by destroying human civilization such that it forgot how long a meter actually is (or a kilogram or a second), but this is a very high price (probably trillions of dollars?) so this is a very very scientific truth!
Then consider the ratio of the mass of a proton to the mass of an electron is ~1836.15 with no units, and there you’d have to do something destructive to like “physics itself” in order to destroy people’s future ability to recover this truth. Since causing damage to physics itself might be impossible, this would be an infinite price, and so this truth, by this test, has essentially zero facticity due to being essentially 100% scientific :-)
The sort of obvious latent background here is the holocaust and the holodomor (and the denial of such events), but in the Arendt’s essay these gets one the briefest of mentions (bold not in original) but also their specific position within the typologies of truth (and specifically how dangerous they were to talk about) gets a direct claim and become central to a line of thinking:
Arendt’s essay is very interested in politics, but for myself, as a data scientist, the test for facts calls my attention sometimes in my daily life when “facts” do, in fact, disappear!
Consider that today I went to Oliver’s Supermarket and bought MRM brand Veggie Protein with Superfoods and paid with a credit card. Oliver’s Supermarket has the data in their computers. Visa also has the data in their computers. Now the fact has been added here to this LW comment.
Supposing that I had not written about it here, eventually the fact might be erased from the computers of the store and the bank due to data retention policies (which are hilariously named, because the point of a data rentention policy is to give political cover to the decision to NOT retain certain data, but instead to erase it).
I’m likely to try this product a couple times and see if I like it.
Eventually the container will be shipped off to a dump, and go into the landfill (though it might retain some of my DNA there which could hypothetically be recovered for many years).
In between these events, when will I drink any of it? What will my reactions be?
These very detailed questions about the microstructure of my life will be very very very hard to reconstruct, either with data forensics, or taking a garbage dump apart atom by atom with archaeological nanotech, or even for modern surveillance capitalists.
Based on the erasure test, here we find “facts” that almost cost negative amounts of money to erase! Like you would have to SPEND money to PRESERVE such facts! You’d have to log the data, and put it in the cloud, or something like that.
Brains often flush such details, and they leave few traces, and what traces they leave are often destroyed in a matter of course during daily life, and daily cleaning, and so on.
Something interesting about the trajectory of history is that many kinds of daily historical truths with negative “cost of erasure” (that are very very very “factual” in this sense) have changed to become positively costly to erase! More and more incidental data is captured, and much of it is retained. Someday the CIA’s metadata archives will be a treasure trove to historians!
The essential line here has long been known, with “historians” seeking after facts in archives (and “history” beginning with writing, essentially) whereas “archaeologists” seek after facts that are NOT in the archives, but in the physical residue.
For example, the current best estimate for “the beginning of the history of war” is arguably April 16, 1457 BC because, so far, The Battle Of Megiddo is the oldest military battle that can be reliably determined to have “been written about”.
Before that, surely there were wars, and surely these wars had battles, but these were so “very merely factual” as events that no one was willing to pay the data retentions costs to let the future remember them, and therefore detailed records of them (fully of lies or honesty or whatever) doesn’t seem to exist.
A possible claim: as measurement and archival technology advance, many specific categories of truth (like truths about battles and deaths and what people had for breakfast) are “moving anti-factward” because they are “moving scienceward” towards being cheaply and abstractly apprehended by the mechanisms and processed of socialized literacy and communal reason.
An interesting question: what are currently the MOST EXPENSIVE facts to RETAIN archival evidence of?
A second interesting question: among such facts, which might be worth such costs, and why?
A third interesting question: why do courts (whose archives tend to be hidden, and censored, and very expensive to search, and not allowed to be recorded by microphones or cameras, and so on) so often embrace facticity very strongly, and make their proceedings so murky to so many?