Truths and Facts

The very idea of knowing something carries with it an implication that facts provide the kind of comfort that uniquely derives from a certainty of truth. But more than a superficial look of what is entailed by knowing leads to questions of how or why what is apparently known is or becomes known. Once such a question is asked, then it is impossible to assert that a fact speaks for itself because an element of qualification has been introduced that is inseparable from the thing known. Accordingly, it is necessary not least as a matter of low-level logic to concede that a fact is laden with attributes or qualities that either amplify certainty or imply that certainty is possible only when the conditions implied by the attributes or qualities are present along with the fact.

That truth cannot be asserted without a great deal of qualification and attention to qualities or attributes or conditions under which an assertion of truth or fact is made is the general principle governing the essays by Rich, Bronowski, and Perry. Indeed, these essays argue in different ways that a fact does not reach meaning unless it is understood within a context either of other facts or of concepts and methods governing the understanding of knowledge.

Bronowski's way of looking at frames of reference is to suggest that such frames as the humanities and the hard sciences, art and science, theory and practice, have been improperly divided and indeed set in a position of antagonism toward each other, in wa

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never reach meaning because it fails to question why or how facts present themselves. Bull knowledge may allow for a method of factual presentation, and the creation of a frame of reference for facts may open the knower to the receiving of facts in ways that lead to an understanding of their meaning and their implications. Now a "bull" presentation of context that is empty of any facts could be effective without being substantive, hence could be as empty of meaning and implication as cow presentation because no facts have been received. That is why Perry makes the point that a "bull" epistemology is not only not incompatible with hard work but requires even more hard work on the part of the knower in the project of "engagement" (733), or uniting context and fact in an organized way. Rich offers a critique not only of knowledge-as-fact per se but also of uncriticized frames of reference. In Western thought, she argues, the frame has been profoundly male-centered; Western thought itself is framed by "what men, above all white men, in their male subjectivity, have decided is important" (Rich 658). The standard of human experience has traditionally been male, says Rich, which means that the meanings attached to being human has been

Category: Philosophy - T