t(ruth)
I have a great deal of compassion for Dorothea’s crisis of truth. However, I feel a bit less sacrosanct about the covenant with a reader that blogging indeed implies. One of the striking points which Sartre makes in “Why Write?” is that the act of reading does indeed imply a contract between the writer and the reader. The reader has accepted a task—to attempt to understand the text and to follow it through as long it meets their needs. The writer, in Sartre’s view, has an ethical obligation to the reader. It is not an obligation of truth, but of freedom. The writer should not constrain the reader’s freedom by forcing them to interpret the reading in a specific way, but should allow them the freedom to go with the text in the way that they choose.
Any text establishes the relations which a writer seeks to convey—human relations. To limit these relations through false persuasion was, to Sartre, the greatest misery of writing. But for Sartre, and for most people who write about “literary” modes, truth never enters the equation. It’s about the covenant between the writer and reader. The hard reality of communication through words is that facts have nothing to do with it.
I had a crisis of faith recently. I was forced to admit that Ronald Reagan was right about something. On the inside of Frank Zappa’s 1988 album Broadway the Hard Way, he includes a quote from Reagan:
Facts are stupid things.
I used this in lecture last week. After reviewing scores of papers that were meant to be analytic, I found them to be largely the recitation of a series of facts. Facts only mean something when they are directly experienced. When they are written down, they are subject to distortions and lies that have little to do with the original event. It depends a lot on who says them. I had been, for weeks before, reciting a mantra for rhetorical analysis:
Who said it?
Who did they say it to?
How did they say it?
Most people just didn’t get it. It wasn’t the statistics, the “facts” which could be marshaled to support the argument. It was about understanding how the argument was made, by who, and to whom. Any idiot can recite “facts”— real thought happens when we can get past those into a deeper appreciation of just how knowledge is made. Rhetoric, in my opinion, is epistemic. It generates knowledge through an implicit contract between the speaker and the audience who accept something as a valid human relation. It isn’t outside science—science is also filled with rhetoric. It is only when the experimental “facts” are accepted as believable (a combination of who says them, and how they say them) that it becomes truth. Facts, in and of themselves, are stupid things.
How does this relate to the misery of a “crisis of faith” which some people feel when they find out an objectionable “fact” about someone’s writing? I would suggest that it’s merely a test of the elasticity of the relation between writer and audience. Will you let them get away with it? Or, does it violate your expectation to such a degree that you want to put down the task of reading their text? Such issues are not easily resolved, and hold themselves to the only standard that means anything—the standard of the reader.
Truth has almost nothing to do with it.
If you’d written these a little earlier, I might have been able to avoid writing anything at all on my web site, Jeff.
I think I’d have preferred to ignore this topic, but somehow it seems to close and personal to just ignore.
THat’s interesting Jeff. I remember back in the early 70’s I was helping my philosophy prof by vetting some phil 101 papers for him. The topic he had assigned his class was to discuss Plato’s concept of virtue in the Meno. By far the vast majority of that class described but did not discuss. That is they reiterated the facts but had little or no understanding of the work and certainly none at all of the question.
Perhaps I as a reader approach a writer’s work with a great deal of elasticity for I often find that those works that “violate your expectation” as you put it are often the works I come later to treasure. Those are often the works that cause you to reasses one’s own beliefs and core values.
Depends on the standard the reader chooses, doesn’t it? 🙂
Exploring downtown Tokyo
Loren Webster, Jeff Ward, and the Dynamic Driveler (amongst others) have made fresh contributions to the truth in blogging debate; Liz Lawley pointed to a post by Jill Walker that offers me the perfect opening for a series of posts about the Japanese &…
“The writer should not constrain the reader’s freedom by forcing them to interpret the reading in a specific way, but should allow them the freedom to go with the text in the way that they choose.”
I’m sorry, but this is factually incorrect.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to do otherwise, as the author canNOT force the reader TO DO ANYTHING.
“Freedom” being the biggest red-herring in use these days.
And:
“Who said it?
Who did they say it to?
How did they say it?”
I’m sorry to be so blunt, but these would BE the FACTS of the matter.
As I just posted to Jill, (perhaps incomprehensibly) people are SO “lost in the oneness of the all” that their actually AFRAID TO DEAL WITH FACTS…!!!
As if:
If We went through the intellectual-emotional-intuitive DISCIPLINE to nail down the facts..
..then We will be FORCED to all draw the same conclusion from those facts.
Facts do NOT obliverate interpretation of those facts.
As You said above, in fact, the facts are not the problem but the lack of creative interpretation is the problem. Facts help, but nothing predicts the future with any degree of certainty. And no quality or quantity of facts is gonna change THAT…!!
See, when you say context is important, a fact by itself means nothing without interpretation, I can follow along, if occasionally with raised eyebrows. When you say “The hard reality of communication through words is that facts have nothing to do with it,” you completely lose me. You should be worried that you’re quoting assholes like Sartre and Reagan in support of your views, neither of them exactly a paragon of tolerance. The elimination of concern for fact is a prerequisite for the triumph of know-nothingism and repression. I’m not calling you a fascist, I’m just saying you should be a little more careful before you give in to extreme rhetorical impulses. (And I hope some of your students stand up to you when you say things like that.)
I was using the word fact with a really specific meaning—an empirically observable, sensual event. When we become removed from the firsthand knowledge of such an event, and it is relayed linguistically it becomes easily suspect. What most people call facts are entirely hearsay. This is what we are stuck with. Period.
When I say that “facts have nothing to do with it” I mean it. We process information mostly from linguistic events, at least the sort of information that I was talking about here. For example, I cannot “know” that the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch was a scam or a valid act of heroism. I can only interpret competing accounts of those events. To test the truth claim involved, no statistics or empirically verifiable information are available—only testimony. Evaluating such testimony is based on the rhetorical situation, not the facts. You label this as context—context can be read as fact, but as it is isolated from the event under scrutiny, I do not consider it to be the primary issue. The question is one of belief. Which story do you believe? Facts don’t help, but rather hinder the process by confusing the true issue. Whose testimony is believable?
The point I have reached in the construction of my ethical self is that I can no longer dismiss Sartre or Reagan just because they are assholes. I must examine what they say more carefully, rather than just dismissing them immediately. People, and human relations are far more complex than just questions of good guys vs. bad guys.
The person speaking is only one part. The situation they were speaking to (context) is another part. The language employed, and structure of their argument is yet another. None of these things can be considered in isolation. That was my primary point. It’s a question of the complete linguistic contract in the construction of knowledge, not any one part. The facts are usually beyond us, and not subject to direct inspection. And even if they are close at hand, facts are stupid— they bear no human relation, no intelligence, to help us make good ethical decisions.
“I can no longer dismiss Sartre or Reagan just because they are assholes.”
And quite rightly. But I didn’t say you should automatically dismiss them, just that it should worry you that when you reach for support, that’s who you see standing by your side.
As for the rest, we’ll simply have to agree to disagree. I recognize the thrust of your argument — it’s exceedingly common these days, in fact probably a defining feature of our time — and all I can do is say yes, it can be hard to pin down the facts, but it’s (often) not impossible, it’s (often) worth the effort, and it’s (usually) not irrelevant. You say: “Facts don�t help, but rather hinder the process by confusing the true issue. Whose testimony is believable?” I respond: one way I judge whose testimony is believable is by seeing how they treat facts. If they treat them as malleable, disposable, irrelevant (it might as well have been Iraqis in those 9/11 planes, right?), I give no respect to what they have to say. The more willing they seem to go to some trouble to ascertain what the facts are, the more likely I am to believe them.
In historical linguistics, the vineyards where I used to toil, there were some scholars who dug around in dusty 19th-century journals and taught themselves obscure languages and agonized over making seemingly irreconcilable facts fit together into a coherent theory. There were others who started with an attractive theory, shoehorned what facts seemed to fit into it, and ignored the rest. (Facts are stupid things.) I imagine you can guess which camp I gave my allegiance to.
But that’s me, and I recognize my position is deeply out of fashion.
The crux of the biscuit is in your phrase:
“one way I judge whose testimony is believable is by seeing how they treat facts.” (emphasis mine)
Exactly. How they treat them. Not what they are.
That is the point of rhetorical analysis— it gives a surer foundation for making judgments regarding who you should believe. As for the existence or nonexistence of absolute facts, it really doesn’t matter in this sort of analysis. That’s the beauty of it. Each person is free to keep their own world view regarding absolutes, while being better able to explain their beliefs— without resort to absolute criteria.
I hate it when you’re right, Jeff. No, I don’t, but this time I do.
Okay. So the observed facts I can point to are that a story very similar in tone and subject to other stories on the same blog was posted. No explicit clues were initially attached to any of these stories regarding whether they were asserted as truth or not. However, the attachment of a name belonging to a verifiable person to said stories, along with a (probably mistaken) genre-driven assumption of honesty, led this particular reader to believe in their small-t truth.
Until the poster said, in effect, “Gotcha! Chump. This particular story was fabricated. Why were you so dumb as to believe me in the first place? Trust in me as a person is secondary to trust in my artistry anyway.” (I take full responsibility for this bitterly jaundiced view of what was said, by the way, and I assert that it is colored more by my instinctive and probably misguided reactions than by the actual text.)
I guess I’m unclear on how I’m supposed to feel *better* about this formulation of the situation, just because I’ve admitted that *nothing* (well, nearly nothing) said *anywhere* can fall within my sphere of personally-observed fact.
Shishōsetsu and the myth of sincerity
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