As an easy illustration, the political debate is frequently bombarded by "appeals to the facts," claims that the facts point to this conclusion or that, that the facts support my ideology and refute yours. How can each side have “facts” that prove their viewpoint when these viewpoints are necessarily contradictory? There is apparently some misnomer in our idea of ‘fact.’
The word ‘fact’ in fact (no pun intended) refers to something that occurred in reality, is actual. We generally refer to historic events, scientific evidence, numeric counts, and biographical sketches as facts, reproducible by any learned individual who may be petitioned in a Jeopardy-like fashion. But what is fact really? And who gets to decide it?
Implicit in that second question is the idea that a ‘fact’ may be perceived differently by more than one individual, such that a “correct” account must be decided upon before it becomes fact. Indeed, all things known to us are no more than our own perception of them. Certainly actual things happen, real things exist, and there is a reality. But to us reality can be no more than what we perceive, for we exist exogenously of those real things. Even our own selves lies to great extent beyond our own comprehension. Thus while it may be that we all perceive some event simultaneously, and we all agree that we saw it, that it happened, our interpretation of the event will necessarily differ to some extent based on our unique individual knowledge, vantage point, context, and even genetic makeup.
As a simple illustration, suppose that I stroll down the sidewalk with a friend and note that I saw a green car drive by. My color-blind friend simultaneously saw a gray car pass. Who was more correct? Who was the observer of fact? In general, we would probably say that I am the more correct, that the car was in fact green, but my friend, due to a genetic ‘defect’ if you will, was unable to perceive it. We say that I am the observer of fact merely because most people are like me, and would see the car as green. But if I was the one with the genetic mutation, and most everyone else saw the car as gray, would not my friend’s account be the ‘factual’ one?
Referring back to that list of 'facts' above, historic events are very easily interpreted in many ways, and even our perception of time is subjective (why is it that sometimes you don't know where the time went, and other times you can't believe how long the day or week seems to last?). Scientific evidence is often believed to be irrefutable up until it is refuted by newer, better scientific evidence. There are many flat worlds in science. Even numeric counts can be and are subjective, as it depends entirely on how we classify a single entity to be counted. For example, when counting apples, do the large ones count exactly the same as the smaller ones (and if so, isn't that a distortion of reality)?
I am reminded of a Calvin and Hobbes strip which depicts this ability to perceive reality so differently.
Reality is largely a factor of our own mind, of the reality that we expect based on our own understanding of it. For example, marketing scholars found in a study that, if they put a couple of drops of balsamic vinegar in beer, blind tasters generally preferred the beer with vinegar to the same beer without it. But when they alerted tasters to the fact that there was vinegar in the beer before they tasted it, they found that the tasters very much disliked the beer with vinegar. So what was the difference? The reality that we have constructed in our minds influences the way we experience things by forming expectations, toward which we are quite biased toward confirming. In the blind test, the tasters had no reality yet constructed for the beer because they did not know what it was, thus they could not form expectations and compare the taste to those expectations. In the second experiment, the knowledge of the vinegar creates an expectation based on the participant’s knowledge of vinegar, its taste, and their knowledge of beer and its taste. They had a reality which they have mentally constructed with its accompanying expectations, and are asked to compare the sample to those expectations. As I mentioned before, the expectations generally win out, and our preconceptions confirmed. This is how placebos work. We cannot say that placebos do not work, for the evidence shows clearly that they had an impact on its partakers. They work because our minds create a reality which tells us they work, and we react as if they work. This reality may be in conflict with the physical world, in which case the effects tend to wear off as our realities collide, but the power of the imagined reality is, ironically, real.
We clearly must now see that reality is subjective. It exists only in our minds. Again, there exists a physical and actual reality, but we are not privy to it, and thus it is of no real consequence. While our reality is influenced by these external events, it is our perception of those events that matters to us. What we learn, know, understand is based entirely on the unique perspective by which we experienced it, and our own interpretation of that experience. Thus once we convince ourselves of something, it doesn’t matter if it is true or not, we think it is true and thus it is fact. The world is flat. The science is settled.
The take-away is that we should never convince ourselves of anything, except perhaps in cases of faith. Once we know the gospel is true, we must proceed with that in mind, in spite of perceptions of evidence to the contrary (remember that perceptions are not equal to reality). But even in the gospel, open-mindedness is a key to learning and growing in faith. When we see only in black and white (this is right and that is wrong, this is true and that is false), we close our minds to new understanding, insight and a reshaping of knowledge. Or do we suppose our knowledge to be complete and unerring? It reminds me of why Jesus taught in parables. “He who hath ears, let him hear.”
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