FACTS are the invulnerable constants in a world full of speculation and rhetoric. They are descriptions lifted off the surface of reality. Once established, they remain true forever. Or do they?
Essays by and interviews with Steven Shapin, Daniel Rosenberg, Lisa Gitelman, Matthew Stanley, Randolph Head, Paul Duguid, Richard Green, Daryn Lehoux and Sergio Sismondo.
In the sixteenth century, ‘scientists’ in Europe believed that garlic could weaken the power of magnets. By the eighteenth, however, they had grown so sceptical that they dismissed the existence of meteorites as absurd.
What explains this upsurge in incredulity? Were these attitudes rooted in the same source: an inability to ground beliefs in evidence?
In the two centuries that divide these perspectives, a significant shift occurred in how the fledgling scientific communities of the West approached the world. The scientific advancements of the seventeenth century prompted governments, scholars, businesses and individuals to take data seriously. It sparked a revolutionary but painstaking effort to gather facts—tables filled with seemingly insignificant information that, over time, led to more accurate understandings of reality and overturned centuries-old theories rooted in tradition and authority.
In a sense, the West ‘atomized’ reality and ‘discovered’ facts. Reports of new phenomena—of talking plants and new stars—were considered or dismissed based on how much they deviated from the established body of facts—an epistemic filtering process that pre-scientific Europe simply could not perform.
However, as this ‘culture of fact’ permeated the political foundations of European society, it also served as a tool to justify empire, slavery and prejudice. The findings of pseudoscientific disciplines, such as phrenology, commanded the reverence and certainty of factual knowledge, and were invoked to justify invasion and oppression.
Today, we regard facts as the indivisible building blocks of knowledge, distinct from values and theories, and immune to human subjectivity, bias or prejudice. Anyone who questions an established fact is often seen as delusional or acting in bad faith, in dire need of ‘fact-checking’.
But if some ‘facts’ have later been proven untrue, what does that say about the nature of facts? Are they objective descriptions of the world? Or are they inferences—informed guesses—drawn by observing the opaque surface of reality? Are facts found, or are they made?
Forthcoming
In this volume, the old tale, that money arose to ease the friction of barter and gradually matured into the instrument of capitalism, gives way to a more difficult picture. This is a story of temples, palaces, households, marketplaces, networks and clans: of how they made money, legitimized it and compelled trust in it. Of how debt came before cash, and obligation before the market.
Essays by Frances Berdan, Scott Hutson, R. Alan Covey, Richard von Glahn, Anna Prentiss, Kenneth Hirth and Jesús Bermejo Tirado.
What is the point of counterfactual history, of asking ‘what if’? Does it even merit the label of history? Do we emerge as better readers of history when we willingly suspend the clarity of hindsight in order to immerse ourselves in the chaos of the past? And why are thinkers on the left, most invested in envisaging more egalitarian alternate futures, so vehemently opposed to ‘what-iffing’ the past? And conversely, what are the stakes for the political right in imagining other historical realities?
Essays by and interviews with Catherine Gallagher, Carlos Eire, Martin Bunzl, Jack Levy, Peter Bowler and Crystal Bartolovich.