[From Bill Powers (951217.0830 MST)]
Kent McClelland (951213.1000 CST) --
Evidently, your disagreement revolves around the definition of what
constitutes a fact (as Bill Powers implies in his later post
(951212.1530 MST)). It seems to me that it might help to keep in
mind that facts, like other perceptions, are just perceptions.
Facts are, of course, "collectively controlled perceptions",
because they have been agreed upon as true by a relevant group of
individuals who have been able to persuade each other that they all
see the things in question the same way, the way they collectively
deem as factual. Establishing the facts of the case means coming
to agreement over what "really" happened, that is, agreeing upon a
set of verbally communicable reference standards that can be used
by everyone participating in the collective action of perceptual
control to control without undo error their own perception of the
alleged event or phenomenon.
When you say "Establishing the facts of the case means ... agreeing upon
a set of verbally communicable reference standards that can be used by
everyone participating in the collective action of perceptual control",
you are speaking of socially-agreed facts, which is the natural purvue
of the sociologist. But if that were the only kind of fact there is,
then it would be a fact that all facts are social phenomena only if we
agree that they are, and if I say I disagree I have disproven your
statement. Your thesis is therefore self-negating when applied to
itself.
I think that the "social-fact" concept puts the cart before the horse.
Suppose I go around sticking pins into people and asking "Does that
hurt?" After finding enough people in a row who say "Yes," I conclude
that "sticking pins into every person on my list hurts that person," and
everyone who participated in the experiment would agree. But why do they
all agree that this is a fact? Not because they have decided to agree
that having a pin stuck into them hurts, but because it DOES hurt them.
This is not like saying "that is a pin." We use words to designate
experiences, and attaching a word to an experience is a matter of
agreement. That is, each person agrees to call a certain visual
experience a "pin," and assumes that others who use the same word are
referring to a similar experience of an object. Behind the conventions
of verbal communication, however, are experiences which, to the
individual, are indisputably factual: that is, if they are occurring
they are occurring, beyond doubt. That kind of fact doesn't depend on
social agreement.
Consider another kind of fact. One of the neat facts in mathemetics is
that the number e raised to the power pi*i, where i is the square root
of -1, is equal to -1. This statement follows from the axioms of
mathematics; the fact of interest here is that given adoption of those
axioms, the mysterious relation among fundamental quantities does in
fact follow. Any individual who knows the axioms and operations of
mathematics, without consulting anyone else, can prove that this
statement is true (or, being unable to come up with the proof, can know
without needing any outside advice that no proof has been found).
One problem we have with facts is that we often fail to distinguish
among types of facts. Suppose one man asks another, who has just come
out of a hut, "Is the Holy One in the hut?" When the other replies "No,"
he is denying one fact but implicitly accepting another. The fact being
denied is that a certain person is in the hut. The fact being tacitly
agreed to is that this person, wherever she is, is a Holy One. The first
fact, the absence of this person from the hut, is not a matter of social
agreement: the man was just in the hut and can report that no such
person was there. The second fact, that this person is a Holy One, is
true only if the parties involved agree that she has the attribute of
holiness.
Suppose a student reports to a scientist that a rat received 60 food
reinforcements per hour. The fact that 60 food pellets were counted is
not a matter for social agreement, but for observation. But these
pellets are reinforcers only because the speaker and listener agree that
they have a special effect on the organism. They agree that each pellet
must have produced an increment in behavior, not because this
reinforcing effect was observed but because of the agreement that this
is what reinforcers do. What is observed is that the rate of behavior
increases when the behavior produces food pellets, and that as a
consequence, more food pellets appear. What is socially agreed to is
that the behavior increases _because of_ the food pellets.
So the underlying question here is not simply a social agreement on a
fact; it is about whether food pellets actually have some special effect
on an organism that makes it emit specifically those behaviors that
result in more food pellets. Do food pellets have some mysterious Holy
Attribute that gives them this explicit power over behavior? We can
report that pressing a bar makes the food pellets appear; that is not a
matter of social agreement, but of observing how the apparatus works.
But whether we interpret the food pellets as causing the behavior is a
matter for social agreement -- and disagreement.
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Best,
Bill P.