In Praise of Facts, by Robert Gore

Facts rush towards us like an oncoming train, and facts tie us to the track.

Your car won’t start. That’s a fact. You think the battery is dead. That’s a hypothesis. Your neighbor has jumper cables and you start the car off of her car’s battery. That’s an experiment that yields data supporting your hypothesis. Maybe you drive around for a while and your battery either recharges or it doesn’t. Either way, that’s another fact, which tends to disprove or support your hypothesis. Perceiving facts, developing hypotheses, experimentation, then revising, when necessary, those hypotheses in light of newly perceived facts are defining processes of the human mind. Humans continuously perceive, hypothesize, experiment, and revise, rarely even aware of the process: call it the empirical loop.

It’s easy to laugh at the academic and student primitives who deride the loop, who even question the concept of facts. Often this rejection stands on the notion that the loop is a package of “constructs” developed by white males to oppress everyone else. Credit for the loop to white males is a compliment, not a condemnation. However, they aren’t responsible for the epistemological process necessary for any human being to deal with reality, although some white males have dealt with reality extraordinarily well. Rejecting the loop, primitives will surely be oppressed…by reality. Let one of them, regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender, step in front of a moving train, rejecting the fact that it’s a train and the hypothesis of imminent impact. Before he splatters on the train’s windshield, he may realize his epistemological errors.

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