Cogito, Ergo… Hang On
A classroom exchange this week reminded me of dear Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. His book opens with a sequence of claims: The world is everything that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things. The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts. At first glance, it sounds less like philosophy and more like the mission statement of an especially enthusiastic data analyst. Facts are what matter. Facts are what exist. Facts are what determine the world. As somebody who has spent a fair proportion of his professional life staring at assessment data, exam figures and spreadsheets in which a suspicious number of cells have been coloured amber, I can understand the attraction. Facts are reassuring. They can be counted, checked and displayed in graphs. They rarely answer a question with the infuriating phrase, ‘Well, it depends.’
The classroom exchange concerned a student’s opinion. He had made an observation and then, almost immediately, began to retreat from it. ‘I don’t know if that’s right,’ he said. ‘It’s just my opinion.’ I asked what made him think it was wrong. ‘Because I can’t prove it,’ he replied.
There was something revealing in that. He had absorbed the idea that facts belonged to the serious business of knowledge, while opinions occupied the slightly embarrassing waiting room outside. If you had a fact, you had something. If you had an opinion, you had, well, an opinion. The implication was that the proper destination of education was to move us steadily away from the second and towards the first.
There is, of course, something admirable in this instinct. We should be suspicious of unsupported claims. The world contains quite enough people who confidently announce things without having bothered to find out whether they are true. Indeed, I am often one of them. I have opinions about football tactics despite a passing acquaintance with the sophistication required to understand them. I have opinions about economics despite once putting a few pennies into cryptocurrency and discovering that my investment strategy could be summarised as ‘hope’. I have opinions about DIY despite a long and distinguished career in which every attempt to improve something in the house has ended with the phrase, ‘I’ll have to get someone in.’ An opinion, it turns out, is very easy to acquire. Justification is considerably more demanding.
We often say that everyone is entitled to their opinion, but philosophers like Patrick Stokes have pointed out the ambiguity in that phrase. You are entitled, in a free society, to hold any bizarre belief you choose. I am perfectly entitled to believe that I can fly. Nobody need confiscate my opinion or call a meeting to discuss it. The difficulty arises when I decide that my entitlement also obliges reality to accommodate me, or obliges others to take my claim seriously without evidence. As Stokes tells his philosophy students, you are not entitled to your opinion; you are only entitled to what you can argue for. One is a matter of rights. The other is a matter of judgement.
That distinction has become blurred. Expressing an opinion has never been easier. A person can wake on a Tuesday, drink half a cup of coffee and before breakfast announce a definitive view on economics, international relations, education policy, nutrition, artificial intelligence and the moral decline of modern football. The rest of us can then spend the afternoon informing them that they are wrong. It is one of the great achievements of the internet that it has made having an opinion almost completely frictionless. We should not be surprised that so many are poorly constructed.
Yet I wonder whether our response has sometimes been an equal and opposite mistake. In our determination to value evidence, we can begin to imagine that facts are the only respectable form of knowledge, and that anything which cannot be measured, quantified or verified is suspect. That was my student’s error. He had confused I can’t prove it with I can’t argue for it. Those are very different things. Nobody can prove an interpretation of Hamlet, but a good one can be defended, tested against the text and revised. It is not a fact, and it is not ‘just’ anything.
The trouble is that facts, important as they are, do not answer every question worth asking. Wittgenstein himself is useful here, because the opening of the Tractatus gives a misleading impression of where the book eventually takes us. By the end, he is confronting the limits of factual language. Ethics, aesthetics, value and meaning are not simply further items in the catalogue of facts. We can describe what happens in the world without necessarily being able to say what it means, or why it matters.
That distinction is everywhere once you start looking. We can establish the factual details of a person’s life, where they lived, what they did, what they wrote, when they died, and still not have answered the question of whether they were good. We can describe the chemical composition of a painting without explaining its beauty. We can identify the notes in a piece of music without explaining why those sounds, arranged in that way, can leave us sitting in an emotional silence after the final note. Facts can tell us what happened. They cannot always tell us what mattered about what happened.
This is one reason I have always thought the humanities misunderstood. The point of studying Shakespeare is not simply to know when Hamlet was written, how many soliloquies it contains or what the conventions of revenge tragedy happen to be. Those things matter, but they are not the destination. The larger questions are much harder. What makes a life worth living? What do we owe to other people? What happens when certainty becomes an illusion? Can knowledge itself become a source of paralysis? Is suffering capable of teaching us anything? We can accumulate facts about the play indefinitely, but it continues to ask questions that facts alone cannot settle. The same is true of King Lear, Othello, Paradise Lost, and any of the other works that have survived long enough to become inconveniently difficult to finish thinking about.
It was Shakespeare, in fact, who prompted Keats to name the quality that such works demand. He called it negative capability: being capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. I particularly like the phrase irritable reaching. It captures the impatience we feel when reality refuses to give us a neat answer. We want to know. We want to decide. We want to put the thing in a box labelled TRUE or FALSE and move on to the next item. But there are questions for which the refusal of an immediate answer is not a failure of thought. It may be evidence that thought is taking the question seriously.
None of this is a licence for vagueness. Ignorance is simply not knowing. Uncertainty can be a more sophisticated state, in which we know enough to realise that the evidence does not justify certainty. The scientist who says, ‘We don’t know yet,’ the historian who says, ‘The evidence is contested,’ and the reader who says, ‘I had never considered it that way before’ are not failing to reach a conclusion. They are demonstrating the habits of mind that education ought to cultivate.
Iain McGilchrist’s (Bingo!) work seems relevant here. One of his recurring concerns is our tendency to mistake our representations of reality for reality itself, an old idea, going back at least to Korzybski’s dictum that the map is not the territory. A map of London is extraordinarily useful. It is not, however, London. A score allows a symphony to be preserved and reproduced. It is not the symphony. A list of facts about a person might tell us a great deal. It is not the person. Facts are indispensable maps, and the danger comes when we conclude that whatever cannot be drawn on the map cannot be real or important. Some of the most significant things in human life are encountered through judgement, relationship, imagination, intuition and reflection.
Nor should we retreat into the warm bath of ‘everyone has their own truth.’ That would simply replace one error with another. Reality remains reality, whether we have an opinion about it or not. My belief that I can fly does not alter the laws of physics, any more than my belief that a particular novel is wonderful makes it so. What it does mean is that we should be careful about the kind of question we are asking. There are factual questions, where evidence can establish what is the case. There are questions of interpretation, where we must weigh competing possibilities. There are questions of value, where evidence informs judgement without determining it. And there are questions of meaning, where the process of asking may matter as much as the answer. The mature mind does not treat all of these as multiple-choice questions.
This may be one of the things education is really for. Not simply to fill young heads with facts, valuable though they are, and not simply to encourage them to ‘have a voice’, because the world is already well supplied with voices. It is to help them develop judgement: to know the difference between a preference and an argument, between confidence and certainty, between assertion and justification. To be willing to change an opinion when the evidence changes, but also to defend one that has been thoughtfully formed. To know when a question demands a fact and when it demands something more elusive: attention, imagination, patience, wisdom.
I would like to claim that I arrived at all this through years of intellectual discipline. The truth is that experience forced it on me, usually after saying something with great confidence and discovering I was wrong. It is difficult to learn intellectual humility without having one’s pride given a small but memorable going over.
So I know what I would say to my student now. His opinion was not a lesser thing than a fact, only an unfinished one. The question was never whether he could prove it, but whether he could say why he thought it, and what might change his mind. That small distance between having an opinion and being able to defend it contains a surprisingly large part of what it means to think. Facts give us something solid to stand on, but judgement asks what we should do with what we know. Opinions, at their best, are not second-class thoughts at all. They are the beginning of the much harder business of deciding what we think, why we think it, and whether we might, after all, be wrong.
Which, on reflection, is probably a more useful opinion to have than my longstanding belief that I could have made it as a professional footballer.
Until next time, happy reading / opinionating!