Factive expression and recognising opinion

In this post I want to discuss some phenomena in terms of how ideas are presented. I want to talk about how certain arguments are misleading because they are presented as a factive expression.

A factive expression is an expression that encapulates a proposition and presents the underlying proposition as factive, i.e. is the truth. Examples of factive expressions are 'inform', 'explain'. So 'x informs y that p' implies that p is a fact, that it is a true proposition. If someone explains to me that q, then I'd assume that q is true.

One underlying issue is that factive expressions seem to imply that the agent has knowledge. So for x to inform y that p seems imply that x knows that p, and then we might think the truth of p comes from the factivity of knowledge. We know that knowledge is a complicated topic, and that we doubt in many instances that we actually have knowledge. For example when we making claims about the external world, that I have hands, this seems to rely on an assumption that we aren't dreaming or in some kind of matrix. We cannot entirely eliminate this possibility and it still seems we can make knowledge assertions, but we shoudl just have this possibility in the back of our mind.

Explain is often used when discussing mathematical facts. For example I might explain to my friend how there are infinitely many primes owing to a certain proof. Yet even here we must make some implicit assumptions about infinity and what a prime is. We seem to even require assumptions about proof and logic. This doesn't make mathematics redundant. It is just important that mathematicians have an underlying awareness of this. That what they view as the truth seems to require certain assumptions about the world.

Where it seems to get messy is when we discuss social sciences or the humanities. The thing we need to emphasise is the status of what backs our views if we wish to use factive expressions concerning them. In philosophy it is important to emphasise that when expressing a view, it is just that, a way of viewing the world. Just like mathematics it requires many underlying assumptions. It might certainly be the best way of explaining certain phenomena, but we should be rather careful in assuming it to be a fact. There's a certain instability of these views in its subjectivity, compared to physical facts which we might think to be close to the truth (but still requiring assumptions that the external world exists).
Certainly we thank these academics for their views, as they offer valuable insight for us to consider. Yet we should remember that these are still views. Our choice to express these phenomena in a factive way should be because we see the underlying assumptions as justified relative to our context, not because we have certainty that the expression is truthful.

So the reason I made this post was because I saw this video online titled: These Asian and Asian American actors explain why it's important — and long overdue — for the media to reflect reality

Now let me say that I partially agree. There are certainly arguments, that I see to be of some value as to why this thesis is correct. Yet to use the factive expression of explain i find to be largely misleading. It implies that what they have said is the truth, that it's very much a fact. I mentioned that in ordinary cases of mathematics, we can express theorems such as 'there are infinitely many primes' without having to invoke our assumptions about set theory, logic, number theory. I think that is somewhat acceptable for two reasons:

1) Mathematicians on the whole seem to be aware that the truth of such claims rely on background assumptions in set theory and logic.

2) Initial set of assumptions for proof are often explicitly stated (and we demand a proof for the claim), for example defining a prime number.

The video's claim lacks these two properties. Firstly, I think it's quite likely that most people who would read such a title lack an awareness that the claim relies on a number of assumptions about race, media and so on. Secondly, the assumptions are not stated here. Thus in this context, it seems unjust to use factive expressions. Because it misleads people to genuinely think that the statement is a fact. If you want to 'explain' what someone else has said, that's fine. If you want to explain a 'theory' of media representation, that's also okay. Yet using explain without reminding the reader of subjectivity, when dealing with subjective theories I find unacceptable. Even if your theory is convincing, it discourages critical thinking since factive expressions invite comprehension as opposed to evaluation.

I do understand why they do it. It's because by expressing it as a fact you can mislead people into thinking that somehow these guys have accessed the truth. It invites everyone just to listen and follow what they've said, because you can't deny facts. This way we can achieve our political agenda. I find this incredibly dishonest however, and bad in the long run. If your theories are good and convincing, you don't need to cover them up as facts to get your point across and make an impact. I find these representation argument's actually quite interesting but presenting them as facts just makes me want to deny them.

Dialectical and the normative

I've defined the dialectical now so my objective in this post is to discuss normativity and an apparent tension that it presents for the dialectical.

The dialectical seems to work rather nicely for descriptive issues. If we have a phenomenon and we want to understand it, the dialectical helps us produce the best theory. The goal here is to simply obtain the best explanation for a phenomenon, and in this case it is natural to look at all of the available evidence and take the best one. There are certainly some issues in terms of how we can determine the 'best theory', but these issues don't seem too worrying. Scientists for example have to wonder routinely about what criterion are relevant when deciding which theory to prefer. Factors that are useful seem to be explanatory depth, ontological simplicity, predictive power and coherence with other established theories. This criterion seems to be mostly transferable to any descriptive issue. The important thing is some kind of assumption about that there is this objective world that does not care what we know about it. The valuable criterion are those that give us a best picture about this objective world given the snippets of evidence that it provides us with. The crucial thing here is that we have some kind of epistemic availability. It seems that since the world is in an objective, mind independent state there is some kind of reliability and consistency about our access to it. That is, we tend not worry that the whole thing is illusionary or that we have all just made some mistake. (Sceptical arguments might do this, but these aren't really taken seriously I think).

Now when I discussed the 'best theory' we already have some element of normativity. Normativity essentially is a discussion on what is good or bad where the goodness or badness is relative to some context. For example we might be looking for a normative theory of morality, where we ask what is good or what is bad. We might be looking for a normative theory of epistemology where we ask what sort of norms our beliefs should follow. In my previous post about the dialectical and objectivity, there is some kind of implicit assumption about normative epistemology. I have assumed that the truth is the cardinal virtue of epistemology and that this is what we seek beyond all else. I have implied that dialectical which is meant to represent objective rational thought relies on seeking accuracy and truth, and following our evidence. Now whilst I have made normative and one might think subjective committments about what rationality is, I think connecting objectivity, dialectical and truth together is reasonable. If our goal is to see this mind independent reality, it seems fairly clear that our goal is truth and how to get to the truth (evidence). If we have a different goal than objectivity, that's fine. But if we're committing to objectivity, then the dialectical truth goal seems a logical conclusion.

Now we have this challenge in terms of how to reconcile normativity (what is good) and dialectical (what is the truth). One of our issues is that normativity often requires a certain kind of epistemic access to the good. For example if we want to engage in political discussion we will tend to speak in words such as 'right, wrong, moral' and so on. These are all normative claims. However to justify them we seem to appeal to things like intuition or common sense. This leads to some serious concerns. If we want to engage in dialectical about whether abortion is morally wrong or right, we want to be seeking the truth about morality. Yet since we have some epistemic issues with accessing 'the moral', it is difficult to see how we can be objective when discussing these topics. Note this is not a ontological committment about whether morality itself is objective. Morality can be objective and we still face these issues because what we are concerned about is our epistemic access to morality. Our goal is truth but any evidence we have seems to be epistemically suspect and we cannot seem to be sure of its reliability which makes it hard for us to say if we're being objective or not.

Let's consider a specific goal for now. Consider something like freedom of speech, which is intuitively perhaps something of value. We then consider an issue such as hate speech. It is natural and is in fact commonly asked whether something like hate speech should lead one to deny claims of freedom of speech. Suppose we engage in a dialectical about this issue, we might list the win conditions as follows:

Freedom > Hate: if we can show freedom of speech overides everything, perhaps even showing value in allowing for hate speech.

Hate > Freedom: if we show that hate speech is sufficiently destructive that it should overrule freedom of speech.

Obviously it's a bit more nuanced than that and we can require definitions for each. We'd also need to say whether what sort of hate speech is so bad that it might override freedom and vice versa. We have however the bare details of such a dialectical.

Now we face a challenge here with our dialectical since at some point we kind of need an argument along the lines of 'hate speech is bad for reason X, which means it overrules our reason Y for freedom of speech'. Here the good and the bad are obviously important and are normative instead of descriptive. Certain approaches of dialectical still seem important: we of course don't engage in ad hominem and our goal is the truth. Yet it seems that seeking the truth in this context is difficult because it relies on some kind of committment to the good and the bad. 

I think this is partly what makes certain aspects of debate complicated. Whilst we want to fully engage in objective thought, certain topics require large committments to normative statements that are hard to verify given our epistemic access. It seems the best we can do is to attempt a dialectical to obtain some kind of agreed upon 'axioms' or 'premises' concerning the relevant normative concept.

Defining objectivity in terms of dialectical

I've mentioned this earlier but there is some kind of inherent difficulty with being objective. I have expressed disdain towards the political but have also suggested that maybe one is unable to fully remove the political from what they say. In my previous post I discussed the concept of dialectical win conditions and that a dialectical is a certain kind of discussion or debate that focuses on accuracy or truth. In this post I want to describe how we can use dialectical to discuss some ideas of objectivity.

What is objectivity? In philosophy it is typically used to refer to truth outside of one's own subjectivity, which is meant to remove bias from the thinker. For example we might think that it is an objective fact that there exists a city called London. In this sense, objectivity has many links with realism. In fact, one might define realism as referring to an independent, objective reality that is mind independent. That is, where the truth of things do not depend on the epistemic states of thinkers.

One of the main goals of rationality seems to be to ensure objectivity and seek out this objective reality. That is, what we believe and what we do should ideally be optimal with respect to the truth. As an example, we should believe what seems to best fit the evidence we have, where the concept of evidence is taken more loosely to include both factual information but also different arguments. The reason we follow our evidence is because we might think that evidence is the thing that best leads us to the truth. Now we recall that the dialectical goal is to have a discussion where our aim is to seek this truth. Where we are not concerned about motivations such as 'being right' or the political impacts of having the discussion. It is natural then to link together the concept of a dialectical with objectivity.

Now something to note is that discussions have different purposes. That is, the discussion not only seeks accuracy. For example, we might think that certain political discussions are often veiled with some kind of moral or political goal. Politicians are limited in what they can say because their presentations and debates are not dialectical. They need to win and convince the people and thus they also often have a rhetorical goal.

A second notion of objectivity often relates to some kind of measure or objective. For example, we might think of statistics as objective, whilst our interpretation of statistics can be subjective. There are different measures, perhaps the most obvious being monetary or quantity. For example how much an average man in the UK is paid, or how many women have abortions each year. We also might however think that things like utility or happiness can also be measures. This leads us to a slightly different way of thinking; where the purpose of our discussion is to try and maximise some kind of concept in which we cannot precisely measure, but have intuition about. For example, the goal of my conversation with friends might be for enjoyment (which we may not be able to measure) and thus certain things might deliberately be false. Or I might have a conversation for the intellectual thrill, and then I might emphasise maxing out these aspects. Here, objectivity just is with respect to optimising a certain factor.

One issue we might have is to separate the accuracy goal from other objective goals. For example if we are having a discussion about morality, e.g. whether abortion is permissible. We might attempt to have a dialectical, where we say that the thing we want above all is the truth on the issue. However when we attempt to make arguments about abortion, we may have to appeal to our intuitions about morality, which is a naturally emotive subject. In fact these themselves will often be used as arguments themselves. This may lead to some kind of tension. To avoid this, we must be rather careful with our emotions in determining where our arguments are coming from. If we are engaging in a dialectical, then even when dealing with arguably emotive concepts such as morality, we should recognise where are emotions are coming from and keep in mind the overall goal is the truth.

The main benefit of seeing objectivity in terms of the dialectical is it provides us with some kind of measure of seperating the 'political'. Even when having these difficult political or moral conversations we are able to justifiably say things for the purpose of obtaining the truth. At the same time, it also makes the purpose of discussion clear. If someone forces you to police what you mean (you should plausibly police your presentation of what you mean), then this can aid you in showing that they might not be looking towards the same goal of accuracy, and make clear that their approach may not be rational.