In base 2 numeration, it is a fact that 1+1=10. — Olivier5

Like the t-shirt says:

There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't.

(Another nerd favorite: "There are two kinds of people, those who can extrapolate from incomplete data and ...")

I want to revisit quickly one of the examples I gave earlier, because there's something odd about it:

We use the same language to challenge each other to contests: "Bet I can beat you to the mailbox" might be met with "You're on!" and the kids race, or with "Loser takes out the trash?" in which case there's now an actual wager being offered, but it's still not a wager until the other says "Deal!" — Srap Tasmaner

First of all, we can compare this to the Lakers-Celtics example:

The Lakers and the Celtics will compete. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. They are playing a scheduled basketball game.

You and I are not competing. — Srap Tasmaner

I think what you mean to say is that we're not playing basketball. But we are indeed competing. There's a winner of the bet and a loser of the bet. If I win, you lose; if you win, I lose. That's a competition. — InPitzotl

No, I really did mean to say we're not competing, because I don't think betting is competing.

When you're competing in a contest, you can make an effort to win (or lose) the contest. What you do while competing at least in part determines the outcome. It is one of the hallmarks of a bet that its outcome is entirely dependent on the outcome of another event, the one you're betting on.

There are two points here. First, you may have the ability to affect the outcome of the event you're betting on, but to do so is universally considered cheating: if I pay one of the players on the Celtics to throw the game, I am cheating. Second, having established a link between two outcomes -- the event we're betting on and who owes who money -- there is nothing I can do to modify that link. This is hard to see clearly, I think, but if this were a contest, I could make an effort to make it more likely that if the Lakers win, you'll owe me, or to make it less likely that if the Celtics win, I'll owe you. I should, if this is contest, be able in some sense to strengthen or weaken the link between the outcome of the event we're betting on and the outcome of our bet. I cannot. Just as I cannot influence the event we're betting on without being a cheat, I cannot upon losing shirk my obligation without being a welcher.

But what about the race to the mailbox? Now that's a curious thing, because there is definitely a contest here, and there is a prize for winning the contest, as there sometimes is. If some other kid had arranged the race and offered the prize -- winner gets to ride my new bike around the block -- we wouldn't have considered calling this a "betting" situation. What makes it feel like a bet, is precisely that the prize has the structure we expect of a bet: the loser acquires an obligation. The agreement reached as to who will acquire an obligation, based on the outcome of the race, is again not something either can influence by racing; it is, once agreed to, set in stone.

In making a bet, you put, by choice, something outside your control: you commit to taking on an obligation, a debt, if you lose. Typically, there is a reciprocal commitment on the other side.

This is the essence of the bet, and what makes it a speech act: it engenders something that counts as a fact, something that is not any longer "up to me", namely, the link between the outcome of an event and someone acquiring an obligation, a debt.

You can, I suppose, say something like this: "If the Lakers win tonight, then I win the bet; if I win the bet, then you owe me $5." For you, the step in the middle, "winning the bet" is the most important; for me, the step in the middle is redundant. The bet is the link between the outcome of the Lakers-Celtics game and the ensuing obligation, and most people just make that link directly: "If the Celtics win tonight, I owe Dave a hundred bucks." This is simply what it means to have a bet on the Lakers-Celtics game. The bet establishes that link, and in some sense is that link; the link between event and obligation exists because we agree that it does. We have, by speaking, added this fact to the world. (There's another curious way of putting this: "If the Lakers win, that means Dave owes me a hundred." Our future obligations are now an aspect of the Lakers-Celtics contest, a property it has only because we say it does.)

A prediction is not the same thing as a bet. A prediction is either true or false, but a bet is either won or lost. When you bet on a prediction, you're adding something personal. Suddenly it's not just a matter of some X being true or false; it's about you, winning if X is true; and you, losing if X is false. Even if it's just a token win, that's a stake, and it's precisely that that makes a bet and a prediction distinct. — InPitzotl

If you know the outcome of an event you're betting on, that's not gambling at all, and most likely you're cheating someone. If the outcome of an event is unknown, then we can only talk about in terms of predictions. There's a funny back and forth here, because betting looks sometimes like an elaboration of predicting: I say I think (or "I bet") the Lakers are going to win tonight, making a prediction; you say, "You wanna put money on that?" offering to add on a wager. But it's also clear that gambling is sometimes itself the goal, and gamblers go looking for things to bet on. Gambling needs both predictability in one sense and unpredictability in another.

If I predict that the Lakers will win, what am I doing? I am not causing the Lakers to win, certainly. I am also not prophesying that the Lakers will win; I am not making a claim to knowledge of the future. A prediction, in the sense that matters here, is simply a truth-apt statement about the future, or a statement that will become truth-apt in the future. Some future events, while unknowable, are extremely predictable: if I watch a leaf falling from a tree, I cannot know that it will hit the ground, and indeed it freakishly might not, but it's behavior is still extremely predictable. These are not the sorts of things we bet on. To make this perfectly clear, gambling deliberately engineers events the outcome of which cannot be predicted. If I know that a leaf has finished falling, that this event is over, I can be almost certain, without looking, that it has hit the ground; if I know that a standard die has finished rolling, I cannot, without looking, even make an intelligent guess about which of its six faces is up.

Predicting is important here, but it's complicated, and betting is not just an elaboration of predicting, something like "predicting + actually caring about the outcome". To look at predicting to understand betting is looking in the wrong direction, inward, toward our beliefs; to understand betting you have to look outward, where an event we do not control will have an outcome that determines our future obligations.

Incidentally, I'll bring this up now... it's been bugging me for a while. I think you're distracting yourself with the contract business... bets can be contracts, but bets are not fundamentally contracts... rather, they are fundamentally games. More precisely, bets are things you win or lose. The thing you bet on defines the win condition. The wager is simply an add-on to give a penalty and/or reward for winning or losing. — InPitzotl

Suppose the Lakers and the Celtics are playing tonight. Now suppose I agree to pay you $5 if the Celtics win, and you agree to pay me $5 if the Lakers win.

Tonight, at the appointed time, the Lakers and the Celtics will be playing a game; that game will conclude at some point with one team having won and the other having lost. The Lakers and the Celtics will compete. You and I are not competing. We have simply agreed to take certain actions -- one paying the other what is owed -- based on the outcome of an event. That's my view.

You say we are playing a game of our own, that we are competing and that one of us will win the game and one will lose. How do we play? If I say, "I'll bet you five bucks the Lakers win," are we playing now? Was my saying that the first move of the game? If you say, "Fuck off," is the game over? Cancelled maybe.

Anyway, it's not that kind of game. We could continue to negotiate the wager, but that's just an add on, no more a part of the game itself than the medal you receive for winning a race. But how do we play? Where's the competition? After the Lakers-Celtics game has concluded, one of us will turn out to have been right and one of us wrong. --- Actually, our beliefs don't even enter into it. It doesn't matter what method I used to pick which team to bet on: I could do careful analysis, flip a coin, add up the number of letters in the names of the players, it doesn't matter. What matters is that I say, "The Lakers will win" and you say "The Celtics will win" and one of us will turn out to have said something true and the other something false; one of us will have stated a fact, and the other not.

So we compete by assigning differing truth values to a statement such as "The Lakers will win." You win if you assigned the correct truth value. This is my understanding of your view of betting. And on this view, other people aren't really necessary, and the circumstances are irrelevant. All of that is to do with rewards and penalties that we might add on. Betting is simply assigning a truth value to a statement of as-yet-unknown truth. Maybe you never even find out if you were right, never find out if you won. Doesn't matter. If you have assessed some statement as true or false before knowing whether it is, you have made a bet.

I won't argue that we don't use the word "bet" in ways awfully close to this -- I do -- and for very good reason, namely that what I've described here is indeed very closely related to betting. But it's not betting, it's predicting. Betting "proper" is making a prediction with stakes. You can sit at your desk wadding up failed proofs and betting that you sink them in the waste-paper basket -- but those aren't really bets; those are predictions.

One last point. To say that I win the game by my prediction being right is just to say that my prediction was right. Competing at "being right" doesn't add anything. It's like saying saying the Lakers and the Celtics compete at "winning a basketball game" and whoever wins the game, wins.

But nobody has to resolve this for there to be a fact of the matter regarding it. It's basic theory of mind that each of us knows things the other has no clue about, but it's kind of perverse to suppose that if you don't know a thing, there cannot be a fact about it. We often have to revise what we consider to be facts as we get new information. When we do so, it's a bit ridiculous to propose that it's the facts that are changing. — InPitzotl

I'm first going to state your worry as I understand it, then answer -- if I've just misunderstood, then at least that will be clear.

My position, as you see it, is this:
(a) someone has to know you've made a bet(1) for there to be one;
(b) which means if no one knows it, then there isn't one, it's not a fact;
(c) and thus once they know about it, somehow their knowledge brings the fact about, which is crazy because it was the action of the bidder that brought about the fact of an offer having been made.

I hope I've understood you correctly.

Here's how I would explain what's going on here. We're not talking about just any sort of action, or just any sort of speech act, but specifically about the making of a binding offer, what we're calling a bet(1). So I'm only looking at what's needed for such an offer to have been made.

The simplest thing to say would be that you have not succeeded in making an offer if the person you want to accept the offer doesn't know you made one. (Only talking now about situations much like this one, an ephemeral offer made face-to-face -- no filing paperwork with a third party or something.)

That's all I had in mind here:

That's the whole point of formalizing these things, so that everyone can know when a binding offer has been made. — Srap Tasmaner

And this is what you want. Your offer is genuine, meaning you want someone to accept, so you want them to know you've made an offer.

Of course, you're no more a mind reader than anyone else, so whether they know or not isn't a fact directly available to you. We could imagine a formal fix for this, say, having people repeat your bid back to you so you know they heard you and know what your bid is. But would we also need you to say what they said back to them to confirm that what they said agreed? Yuck. It would never stop.

Instead, just as the circumstances of playing bridge and following its conventions provide people guarantees about what you mean by what you say (that you're serious, using words in the standard way and so on), you are also entitled to an expectation that you will be understood and that everyone will know what you've bid.

What if someone doesn't hear? You could stand on your rights and refuse to repeat yourself, but remember that your goal is not just to say certain words but to make an offer. If they inform you, in so many words, that they do not know what offer you have made, you cannot consider your effort successful. Now it's no longer a matter of presuming they know, but of being informed that they definitely do not; under those circumstances you have to conclude that you have failed to make an offer, even though you said what you wanted to.

So in a sense you're right, the knowledge of the audience does come into it, but that's not a general point, it's only a point about an offer made by one person to another. Until both parties know about the offer, it has not been successfully made.

You probably want to look at Against the Grain. I haven't read it, but I think several folks here have.

This is an excellent example (and I envy you your knowledge of bridge).

We are in complete agreement. As you noted, the reason what happens on your turn counts as a fact is precisely because bidding is highly formalized. This is exactly what I have been claiming.

Like the christening of a ship or any other speech act, it requires specific circumstances and the cooperation of others. — Srap Tasmaner

From there we ended up on the bet(1) vs bet(2) debate, but "cooperation" there was not intended as a stand-in for "accepting an offer" -- not all speech acts work that way. Most of the examples I gave don't.

In your bridge example, all of you have accepted a set of rules and conventions, and within that framework saying "two no-trump" absolutely counts as a bet(1). No one has to wonder whether you were kidding or musing or expressing your degree of confidence; in these circumstances, that is unambiguously a bet(1). That's the whole point of formalizing these things, so that everyone can know when a binding offer has been made. Your bid, in these circumstances, absolutely engenders a fact of some kind.

By the way, going back to see if I had mis-spoken, I noticed this:

Might I suggest there are different "kinds" of facts, and they feel different because they're doing different things? But along those lines, "water molecules are composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom", "bishops always stay on their own color", and "Joe is married to Sue" all feel different to me... IOW, perhaps a taxonomy of facts would be preferred to a refinement of the concept? — InPitzotl

This is also very much my feeling. These things strike me as quite different, so I have resisted using the word "fact" for all of them, but I'd be perfectly comfortable talking about kinds of facts. They do all have in common the experience of something that is "not up to me", and it could be worthwhile to use the word "fact" for that sense, even if we distinguish different ways, or different reasons why, something is not up to me.

@Olivier5 @Janus

Y'all might want to look at Fitch's paradox, which has been discussed on this site before.

A couple random questions about the vaccines:

Would anyone put it past Donald Trump to pressure US pharmaceutical companies to cut corners and seek approval for a vaccine they weren't sure was safe and effective, and then to pressure federal agencies to approve and distribute such a vaccine? The President made much of Operation Warp Speed, and was probably looking forward to claiming victory again whether he had won or not. (In the fight against the virus, that is. No one would ever do that in a national election.)

That's an unlikely amount of paperwork to fake, and maybe there are limits to how self-centered he is, I dunno. Of course the vaccines arrive right as he's leaving, but if we was putting his thumb on the scales, the incoming administration would need time to figure that out and then what? "Sorry folks, it's going to be another year"? Yikes. More likely, they'd just hush it all up, even though it was really the outgoing administration's fault. But then they'd be getting the blowback when the thing turns out to be dangerous or ineffective, so maybe it's more of a risk not to clean up the mess you inherited.

Second question: pharmaceutical companies have been getting pretty bad press lately; would they be stupid enough to provide vaccines that were dangerous or ineffective, knowing that it would be rolled out to hundreds of millions of Americans, and probably that many more in less important places? Wouldn't they be scared of the inevitable blowback if this thing either didn't work or was actually harmful?

Again, a lot of paperwork hurdles to get through, and maybe there's enough greed to overcome what looks like a pretty big PR risk, I dunno.

These are sort of "skin in the game" questions. Obviously the makers of vaccines stand to make money. But what risks are they taking? Is there any risk from a PR nightmare, or do you just sit on your money and wait for it all to blow over? Do the feds claw back their money if you misrepresented your vaccine? What about the federal agencies involved? The CDC, once the most trusted institution in America, took a pretty big hit to its credibility. How many bureaucrats and government scientists worried about losing their jobs if they bungled this -- I'm not talking about political appointees, who have a whole different calculus. Maybe not many, but the loss of reputation could seriously hurt your options for jumping to the private sector. Who is so secure that they're not worried about sitting under the lights in the inevitable televised Congressional hearings, trying to explain how it's not personally their fault that somebody's family members died. (This isn't like climate change, where you're long gone by the time it'll be obvious how badly you fucked up.)

Just wondering.

In order for me to be obliged to pay, I must accept "it". But the "it" I must accept is called a bet; hence, it being natural to say "I accept that bet". If I reject "it", I am not obliged to pay out; but again, the "it" that I reject is called a bet; hence it being natural to say, "I reject that bet".

I'm appealing to natural use of the language as the standard by which we judge what "to bet" means... that would be the part of my quote that you left out. So I added it back in for you... just in case you want to actually reply to me. — InPitzotl

Let's use the nearby word "wager" to mean an agreement between two parties that one of them will pay the other some agreed upon amount depending on the outcome of some event. It's a kind of contract.

When you say "I bet you ...", you, as it were, write up a virtual contract. That there is such a thing could count as a fact, but it's only the fact that you said what you said.

It would be more interesting if, having written up this virtual contract, you had signed it, thereby creating a binding offer to enter into a wager. That would be a fact of more interest.

How is anyone to know whether you have signed this virtual contract? They could ask you, of course. Or they could accept your offer and then you'd have to agree or back out -- say you were just kidding, something like that. Neither is a great option.

It is precisely because of such uncertainties, and to avoid the necessity for one side to commit just to find out if the other has made a genuine offer, that behavior around all sorts of contracts, including wagers, tends to be formalized, to varying degrees.

Now you could say that the person who says "I bet you ..." knows whether the offer was genuine, but the rest of the world has no interest in such "private facts".

While I recognize the common usage of "I bet you ..." to mean "I am offering to enter into a wager with you such that ...", I don't consider that offer, absent a way of verifying your virtual signature, a fact.

There is a wager once the parties have a contract, and the word "bet" is also used in this sense. ("Do we have a bet?" is a member of the same family as "Do we have a deal?", "Do we have an agreement?", and "Do we have a contract?") Such a contract is certainly some kind of fact, but it is not a fact you can create entirely on your own, any more than you can make money gambling on your own game of solitaire.

But you're conflating two distinct things: (a) the fact that I can make a bet by saying "I bet I can x", and (b) the fact that I can say "I bet I can x" without making a bet. — InPitzotl

I don't understand in what sense you think I'm conflating them.

Why not? — InPitzotl

Who pays out if you win? Nobody? Then what were the stakes? Nothing? Then no wager.

The point I'm making, once again, is not that you cannot make a bet by saying certain words, of course you can. But your speech act is then "making a bet", not stating a fact. If I make a promise, I'm not stating a fact. If I express a wish, I'm not stating a fact. If I issue a command, I'm not stating a fact. If I make a bet, I'm not stating a fact.

All these things are related to other factual statements. If I promise to do the dishes, I promise to bring about the state of affairs that could be factually described as, that the dishes are done. But I'm making a promise, not stating a fact.

The reason I don't owe him ten bucks isn't because my buddy didn't make a bet; but because I did not accept the bet. — InPitzotl

Or because he wasn't even offering a wager but expressing his confidence by saying "I'll bet I can ..." --- an alternative which you passed right over.

And no, it's not a bet if no one accepts.

Suppose he just hoists his empty and points at the bin saying, "Five bucks." You nod. Now there's a bet. What statement of fact did he make? What statement of fact did you make by nodding?

If I'm watching a baseball game, and it looks to me like a pitch went right over the heart of the plate waist-high, doesn't matter if I say "Strike!" It matters what the home-plate umpire says (these days it's just a gesture). He does not observe that the pitch is in the strike zone and report this fact. Whatever he decides becomes fact, even if PITCHf/x shows he was wrong. His speech act is of a different kind from mine; I report what I saw but he makes a call.

and by saying that, I made that bet — InPitzotl

No you really didn't. Suppose you and a buddy are drinking behind the 7-11. Your buddy finishes his beer and says "Ten bucks says I can make it." You say nothing as he arcs his empty bottle into the recycling bin across the alley. Do you owe him ten bucks?

You might, if it were custom among you two always to accept these small bets, but probably not.

Is it at least a fact that he offered a wager. Again, maybe. Maybe. Might just be the way he talks, an expression of confidence. Words are not magic spells. There is no necessary connection between the words spoken, in themselves alone, and any fact brought about in the world by speaking them.

That fact is described by what I said to make the bet. — InPitzotl

And that's especially wrong. When a judge passes sentence, by speaking certain words, he brings about certain facts but is not stating a fact. That's the whole point of the category of performative utterance. That he said what he said, is a fact. That it counts as passing sentence, also fact, and more factual consequences flow from that. But he wasn't stating a fact, and what he said is not a factual statement but a judicial sentence.

Yes, you misunderstood. — InPitzotl

Cool. Then what were you claiming, and what does it have to do with whether what we say is factual?

To say that this isn't how we propel bicycles because if the chain weren't there it wouldn't work would just be silly; there's nothing in the claim that this is how we propel bicycles that purports this to be sufficient. — InPitzotl

Perhaps I misunderstood you. I thought you had claimed that because you had said something like "I bet $5 I can make a fact by saying something" you must have made a bet; I don't think that's true. Consider your example here: if I had just reassembled the crankset after repacking it with grease, and were now turning the crank to see if it spins smoothly, I would not be propelling a bicycle, I would not even intend to be propelling a bicycle. Fine, you say, it's necessary but not sufficient; but it's not necessary either, because you can also walk alongside it pushing the handlebars or run along behind someone pushing on the seat while they steer. Just so, given the right circumstances you can place a bet just by sliding some chips across a table or buying a ticket from some guy sitting behind a little window. The words "I bet ..." are neither necessary nor sufficient to create the fact of a bet having been made.

It's a fact that I made that bet; a fact made true by the fact that I stated that I made it (is that not how bets are made?) — InPitzotl

For the record, no, that's not how bets are made. Like the christening of a ship or any other speech act, it requires specific circumstances and the cooperation of others. People also use the language of wagers to indicate firm belief ("I'll bet a million bucks Jerry's gonna be late today"). We use the same language to challenge each other to contests: "Bet I can beat you to the mailbox" might be met with "You're on!" and the kids race, or with "Loser takes out the trash?" in which case there's now an actual wager being offered, but it's still not a wager until the other says "Deal!"

The whole reason Austin developed the theory of performative utterance was to point out that not every utterance is a factual statement. "Bet I can beat you to the mailbox" might be a challenge, might be the first step in negotiating a wager, but it is still not itself a factual statement. Everytime you speak someone -- you included -- could make factual statements about you having spoken and what you said. Same here for issuing a challenge or making a wager.

Recommending again In Search of a Flat Earth.

a rational or ethical imperative for a population to all believe one single thing, all follow one single solution — Isaac

I wrote a long rambling response about the American culture war, but I'm replacing it with this:

Yes, orthodoxy is both dangerous and repugnant. I don't cotton to it.

don’t you know most scientists thought the earth was flat once? — Xtrix

Here's the response to that from a well-read member -- don't know if he's around anymore -- in a similarly-themed thread from four years ago. (It's over there to the left in your "recommended viewing".)

Not all scientific progress is progress of the revolutionary sort. There is also progress of the "puzzle solving" sort that happens during what Kuhn called episodes of normal science. Contemporary climate science is indeed "normal science". Scientists tend to be critical of individuals who seek to overthrow the consensus wholesale and promote a scientific revolution. This is not distressing. Before a scientific revolution has occurred, the proponents of the revolution often are seen by the mainstream scientists as fools or crackpots, and indeed this negative judgement is correct most of the time.

There is a very small minority of scientists who have a relevant expertise in climate science, who aren't crackpots, and who purport to be highly critical of the consensus. I am thinking of Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, John Christy, Judith Curry, S. Fred Singer, and a handful others. It is hard to see them as promoting a new revolutionary paradigm, though, since their arguments are very weak and all over the place. They all agree much more with the basic science endorsed by mainstream climate science than they do with each other; and their advocacy efforts mainly center on attempts to sow doubts throug highlighting cherry picked results. They do agree with each other on the ideology, though, since they all seem to be ultra-libertarians who believe government regulations and taxes to constitute the highest form of evil the world has ever seen. — Pierre-Normand

All of this by way of showing that using "fact" to talk only about observations is obtuse. — Banno

Last day or so I've trying half-heartedly to form a thought about this, and maybe you have something to add.

Let's say we have reason to think disentangling theory from observation is a non-starter. (I was thinking this might be congenial to you for Davidsonian reasons, death to "conceptual schemes" and all that.)

We might, in addition, have reason to think that theories, even if we have some way of defining them -- which might happen in a moment, or might not -- aren't themselves bedrock, but are always embedded in a natural language. (I floated part of this idea in the discussion of Curry's paradox, when I was talking about the role of "Let P = the statement ...") Historically, this is just obviously true. But maybe it's also necessarily true, or necessary enough for our needs.

With those two points, I've been thinking maybe facts are exactly the right battle-line for theories, if we take "theory" to mean something like a set of statements you treat as factual (whether true or false) or simply as a set of facts (factual statements you count as true), though both looks the most promising. The idea is that maybe natural language is all you need to have such a fight, and you pass right by both incommensurability and the abyss of the Quine-Duhem thesis. We get to ignore the latter because if you count the same statements as factual and the same statements as facts, you're the same theory, end of story. Anything else would be, for us, a difference that makes no difference.

And as it happens, this gets us pretty close to the ground again, because ordinary people do fight over facts and over what's factual. Having tried for a while to have a theory of theories, we could give it up for a bad job and go back to fighting over facts like everyone else.

I share that intuition that tautologies shouldn't count. Either because they carry no information, or the information they carry is only the indirect sort that almost all statements carry, indicating something of how we use symbols.

If it's helpful to call them "facts" because it gets the point across, cool. It is also odd but a known fact that making a tautologous statement to someone can count as communication, even when it's not a matter of explaining our use of symbols. People also say, "It is what it is," and others nod in solemn agreement. Language is some weird shit.

No, it's a formula. It's a fact that people use it to determine the circumference of circles, though. Does it represent a fact? If it is a fact that the circumference is equal to pi multiplied by the diameter then yes. — Janus

I was thinking of it as the definition of $\pi$ most people learn first. They may learn other identities later, and thus other ways of deriving $\pi$, but something somewhere has to count as a definition of the symbol.

I'm fine with saying it's a fact that we use the symbol the way we do, but that doesn't make the definition itself a fact, does it?

Not "a statement of fact", if that's any clearer.

If a ship is christened, the name is a kind of stipulation. That the ship henceforward becomes known by the name it was christened with (if it does) is a fact. I see no problem here. — Janus

I really thought that's what I said, but said it acknowledging that names are a little weird.

Why does everyone go straight for names and math, areas that are notoriously odd, with generations-long debates over how to deal with them? Hard cases make bad law.

A question - is that the area of a circle is given by π r² a fact? — Banno


So you'd rather not call this formula a fact? — Banno

I'm not much invested either way. Whether you throw mathematical theorems into the fact box or not, you're still going to end up talking about them differently. The procedure for verifying a "mathematical fact" bears no resemblance at all to the procedure for verifying any kind of empirical fact. If we use "fact" because it's handy and gets the point across, especially with children or the math-challenged, I won't squawk. But it would be nice to get them to the point where they can just say "theorem".

How do you feel about this formula?

$C = \pi d$

Is that a fact?

The act of naming brings about the fact of the name referring. — Banno

In which case, "name" is there used as a success verb, right? Otherwise, no reference. So what you're saying is that naming is naming. Yeah, I'm okay with that.

On the contrary, it is indeed an empirical question. — Xtrix

Then you've agreed to fight it out on @Isaac's terms, but I'm not sure you have to. This is what I wanted to get at: are we compelled interpose a step where we play at doing social science every time we face a decision about how to be a good citizen, or just a good person?

I'm not saying our world isn't more complicated than ancient Athens -- in some ways it obviously is, but recall that there's also something like an official religion that adds its own complications. (What Socrates was convicted of in his time is no longer an issue in ours.) Maybe we're right to do all this analysis, but maybe we're just aping the practices of science out of habit.

I should say, I don't have a ready alternative. I have some sense of what an alternative might look like, but for now the question is enough: are we sure we're approaching such decisions the right way and for the right reasons?

What is said exactly is made a fact by the saying. "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth" can make it a fact that the ship has that name. — Banno

I'll bet you $5 that I can make something a fact just by saying it. — InPitzotl

Guys, I know what speech acts are. I even nodded at the concept by describing stipulative rules as a case of "saying it's so makes it so".

Note that the act of christening a ship is exactly that: it is, by performing that act, in the correct way in the correct circumstances, of conferring a name upon a ship by speaking certain words. That's not even in the ballpark of the words spoken at such a ceremony being a statement of fact. Not even if the particular words required for the christening to count are, "The name of this ship is the USS Banno."

If there the ceremony has gone off as it was supposed to, is it now a statement of fact to say "The name of that ship is the Banno"? I guess, kinda. On the one hand, if you take names as a sort of capsule history that reaches back to the baptism, then to claim that an object has a particular name is an historical claim about who said what about that object when, and that's obviously a factual matter. On the other hand, names are dependent on usage just like other words we can't trace to a baptism, or presume that we could. A person's legal name may require particular procedures to change, but otherwise names can come and go. (Here, I've looked up one: the Flatiron Building was originally the Fuller Building and nicknamed "Eno's flatiron", then widely called "the Flatiron", and eventually officially (I don't know how) named "the Flatiron Building". Persons tend to have even more say in what their name is than buildings.)

So, there as well, insofar as we're talking about the facts of the moment, how people use some word as a name to refer to some object, sure, and nothing I said contradicts that. But those are facts that are very much in play and that we might even participate in changing, precisely because they are facts about how we use particular words. ("You always call him 'Butthead'." "Yeah, I used to but then I felt bad, so I haven't called him that in weeks.") I'd be reluctant to say that everything we express in words is just a statement about how we use words.

Unless names are not facts. — Banno

I suppose I'm okay with names counting as facts, for the reasons given above, but I'm not enthusiastic about it. Fact and stipulation -- baptism being a kind of stipulation, right? -- just shouldn't end up together. Talking classification with @Athena, I think I can distinguish everything I want to: that we call animals like this "dogs" is a fact; that that animal there is a dog, is a fact, given our criteria; that what we call "dogs" are dogs -- no, not a fact, just an explanation of what we mean by "dog"; that all dogs are dogs -- not a fact, just a tautology. Names are a little trickier to get around in the same way, aren't they?

Maybe you could persuade me that stipulations and tautologies should count as facts, but for now they feel way different to me. I suspect we talk about them differently too, but I'm not going to get into that unless we have to.

All canines share characteristics in common and belong to one family called canines. They are distinctly different from cats or felidae. If that is not a fact please explain. — Athena

Is what not a fact? That animals we've classified as canines are what we've classified them as? That they share certain characteristics we used to define the box we put them in?

Call it a fact if you like. I wouldn't. I'd agree that it's a fact this is how zoologists classify animals. It's a fact that I have to work today. It's a fact that men landed on the moon in 1969. It's a fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

So if a dog is a dog, that is not a fact? — Athena

It's true. I wouldn't call it a fact, but you can if you like. It's provable. It's also uninformative.

And sometimes dogs turn out to be coyotes.

I want empirical proof. — Athena

No can do. Evidence is all you're ever going to get.

Anyway, that's the party line. I don't have a solid alternative to offer.

I think one of the things that's getting mixed up here is the difference between the question "should we trust experts opinion?" (the answer is yes) and "should we trust the majority of experts over the minority of experts of the same education level?" the answer is no - by specifying that they're of the same education level we've removed (or severely limited) the one variable which had a link to 'rightness' (education level) so the remaining variables responsible for the within class variance may or may not be linked to 'rightness'. — Isaac

I get that. It's an interesting point, a reasonable point, but what kind of point is it?

This is what I was trying to get at by asking whether we're even dealing with the same issue Plato does in the dialogues. What you're talking about is whether there is a statistical correlation between a person being a member of some group and their opinions on a particular subject being 'right'; that's an empirical question, approachable using the tools of modern science, which is the most obvious "something that's changed" between us and Plato.

When Plato says

Tell me: does this also apply to horses do you think? That all men improve them and one individual corrupts them? Or is quite the contrary true, one individual is able to improve them, or very few, namely, the horse breeders, whereas the majority, if they have horses and use them, corrupt them? — Apology, 25b

is he making an empirical observation about the population of Athens and its horse breeders? That being a horse breeder is highly correlated with improving horses?

I don't think so, and that he's not is one way of defining what's changed. You might see, in the practices of the horse breeder, something like nascent science: careful observation, predictions that are tested, some experimentation in training and treatment of ills. But is there, for the rest of Athens, something like a science of being a citizen? A science that would tell you, among other things, to trust the opinions of horse breeders when it comes to horses?

That's a whole thing, but first of all it's a no, because even if there were such a science, telling you who to trust is not something science does. That's advice. Science at most would tell you there is, or isn't, a correlation. Can we make science do that? Could we set the terms to be correlated, or not, as "is a horse breeder" and "raises the sort of horses we like"?

It looks to me like that's what we do much of the time. Science works at what it does, so we want to use its tools for everything we possibly can. We behave as if there's a "science of being a person". --- I've mentioned that I work in a bookstore, and thinking about expertise the last couple days I have looked around the store and seen experts everywhere. The novelists are experts on stories; the cookbook authors are experts on food; the self-help authors are experts on happiness; the religious authors are experts on God; the astrologers are experts on fate. Everyone's an expert.

It's not like I don't see the appeal. If you take a largely instrumental view of intelligence, which I'm at least as tempted to do as the next guy, then you might as well be as scientific as you can. What you're headed for is just results in the form of conditionals in some special mood, imperative maybe: if you want to grow really nice tomatoes, then you should conduct as scientific a review as you can of the techniques of tomato-growers and adopt the most successful method. No one minds that there's no science in the antecedent. Publishers understand this so thoroughly that they even publish books with titles like, I shit you not, "Read this if you want to be Instagram famous". You do you; we've got the science to show you how.

I'd like to talk about more about what Plato is saying and whether we ought to care, but instead I'll close by noting yet again the cross-purposes in this damn thread: one side (mostly that's just you @Isaac) is talking about this as an empirical question, and the other side (this would be you @Xtrix) sees all Isaac's talk as a shocking failure of citizenship. (I wander between camps and get two suppers.)

Both are immortal, thank you very much.

Is that the Bishop moves only diagonally a fact? — Banno

Alekhine: No, because it is stipulated that this is how bishops move.
Morphy: But if it's a case of "saying it's so makes it so", then it must make it so, and what are facts if not how things are?
Alekhine: But facts aren't stipulated; they are discovered. Your saying the moon's made of green cheese doesn't make it so.
Morphy: My saying it wouldn't physically change the moon, but your stipulating doesn't physically change the chess pieces either.
Alekhine: It doesn't make it physically impossible to move a bishop any other way, no. But suppose it did, and suppose I "physically stipulated" that some bishop moves like a rook. Then you could study this set and discover that this particular piece had been "physically stipulated" to move like a rook. Then indeed it would be a fact that it does. That's not what we do; we say this is how the bishop is supposed to be moved. It's really nothing to do with the chess pieces; it's a rule people are supposed to follow when they're playing chess.
Morphy: But isn't it a fact that the rules of chess, including how bishops move, are what they are?
Alekhine: That things are what they are is the law of identity.
Morphy: No, I mean, the laws of chess are what they happen to be, as a matter of history; they have been different in the past, and what we call "chess" today might have had different rules.
Alekhine: Okay...
Morphy: And the current state of the rules of chess is something we discover, something handed down to us, not something any of us stipulate.
Alekhine: But they are stipulated by FIDE and by the USCF and many other official bodies!
Morphy: The official rules for sanctioned competition have to be made explicit, of course, but they're only codifying the rules as they have been handed down, not stipulating them afresh.
Alekhine: Agreed.
Morphy: And if they were to make a little change, say capping a bishop's movement at four squares, we'd all say, "That's not chess, but a chess variant."
Alekhine: Agreed.
Morphy: Then the rules of chess are historical fact that we discover.
Alekhine: They are handed down from generation to generation, and what is handed down can be discovered, yes; but what is handed down are rules for playing the game, not facts. That something is what people say is a fact, but what they say is not made a fact by their saying it.

I'll bet I can guess without reading anything but the title.

We don't end up there immediately though. You can deny that a simple headcount of experts is dispositive, without concluding that's there's nothing else, and without dismissing the work of experts entirely.

There really seem to be problems here. The usual bayesian story is that you have your prior and update based on new evidence. But what if you can't personally evaluate that evidence (maybe you don't have the training or maybe it's just impractical). Then you need someone else to evaluate the evidence. Then you also need somehow to factor in your confidence that they have properly evaluated the evidence for you. Maybe you know them, know their qualifications and their integrity. But what if you don't? What if someone else chooses for you who will evaluate evidence on your behalf? Then what? You have to keep discounting.

One obvious way to tie-off this daisy chain is trust. At some point, early or late, you trust someone or some institution. Done. But don't we have to talk about how you make such a trust decision? Maybe not. Maybe people just choose, but you're not going to like everyone's choices of whom too trust. Yuck.

Taking the beliefs of another person or of a group of people as itself evidence just doesn't play nice with certain (vaguely empiricist) views of knowledge acquisition. But it is absolutely unavoidable, so maybe those models are junk.

In the same way it would be the right answer to bet on something with a 60% chance of winning and not a 40% chance of winning -- knowing nothing else and not getting better betting odds. It's really that simple. — Xtrix

But the aptness of that analogy is exactly what @Isaac is disputing, isn't it?

something that can be proven true — Athena

But Hume.

The "provable true or false" definition seems to be widely used in "critical thinking" curricula, and it's what Pew used in a recent survey -- more as a definition of "factual" really -- but to a lot of philosophers the word "prove" there is going to mean the word "fact" might as well not exist.

The notion of a majority of experts being a safer bet — Isaac

I've just started reading Plato again -- been a very long time -- and it's practically the founding claim of philosophy: we don't care what the majority thinks.

Except it isn't, because that's only half the point. Not everyone in town is a horse-breeder; if you want to know about horses, ask the expert. Not everyone in town is a physician; if you want to know about health, ask the expert. The situation with wisdom is apparently no different:

SOCRATES: We should not then think so much of what the majority will say about us, but what he will say who understands justice and injustice, the one, that is, and the truth itself. So that, in the first place, you were wrong to believe that we should care for the opinion of the many about what is just, beautiful, good, and their opposites. — Crito, 48a

Except it is, because Socrates has never found anyone who is genuinely wise, only people who claim to be, or who are acclaimed by others to be.

There is variation in the natural world; some cats are better hunters than others, I suppose, or some crows better at crow-things. Ants famously have some division of labor going on, and we're more like that. In spades. By the time of Socrates, there is already long since too much going on for everyone's opinion about everything to be equally valuable.

Is Socrates enthusiastic about the new order of expertise? Maybe he is but not everyone is, and that's why he makes these comments so frequently. Maybe he isn't but most are, and he is only strategically relying on their views. Either way, he does believe he has found a limit to expertise, having found no one who is an expert in wisdom.

What he never seems to consider is the simple rejection of expertise, "My ignorance is as good as your knowledge." (Is that Asimov?) It's precisely his knowledge that he is ignorant that he "celebrates" in drawing a limit to expertise.

So here we are, all these years later, or the blink of an eye later, as you like, and still trying to figure out what to do about expertise.

Here's my question: is expertise the same issue for us that it was for Athens? Or has something changed?

I think I understand what's happened here.

I did not bring up baseball umpires to make the point you appear to think I was making. I was not attacking the status of expert opinion within yet another field of human endeavor.

But baseball is a goldmine of data and I happened to recall an example that is very similar, I believe, to the sorts of examples discussing by Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein in Noise. That point is that humans are capable of consistent rule-based decision-making but sometimes external factors interfere and sometimes we even know a little about those factors, and that's interesting. (The classic example is judges handing down harsher sentences before lunch and lighter after.)

You seem to have read that as an attack on expertise. It was not. It was an argument for the claim that there is a rule-based process to interfere with in the first place. Same with chess: I was not arguing that grandmasters aren't actually trustworthy experts or something.

If the average is now up to 94% accuracy, swell, that's better than it used to be, and we probably have PITCHf/x to thank for that. It's fine with me if you want to add MLB umpires to your arsenal of trustworthy experts; that's an argument you're having with someone else, not me.

a study has never been done about this — Xtrix

Yeah it has. I mentioned it. It's why we're talking about this.

There's a fair amount of noise in any umpire's calls, and in umpires taken as a group. A pitch over the outside corner might get called correctly half the time. Almost anything on a count of 3-0 gets called a strike no matter where it ends up. Plus, as I said, the zone moves around, mainly at the top and bottom. Many people believe that sinker ball pitchers began to dominate a few years ago because umpires started calling a lower strike zone. To fight back, a lot of hitters switched to an uppercut swing, and then we start getting more home runs. So far as we know, it has never been the case that the average called zone matches the rulebook zone.

I'd say the computer would confirm the majority opinion, more so with higher consensus. — Xtrix

Then you'd be wrong. I haven't looked at Fangraphs in a while, but the "average called strike zone" tends to move around from year to year. Either umpires are trying to keep the game balanced (probably unconsciously) by adapting to trends in pitching and hitting, or they are causing those trends. I mean, obviously it's going to be both because there's feedback here. Plus the matchup (handedness of the pitcher and of the batter) makes a difference, but shouldn't.

when one makes a move in chess one cannot check with colleagues that it makes sense first, as one can do with an expert opinion. Is that wrong? Or am I missing the point? — Isaac

It's a simple point really: a chess player is a cumulative person. When you play an opening, your moves have been vetted by generations before you -- and sometimes they turn out to be wrong. Top players preparing for big matches have a team that helps them come up with new ideas in the opening. Computers have changed a lot of this. (There were still adjournments when I was a young player; you and a buddy would analyze the position and then at the appointed hour, you'd play relying on that analysis. Chess has a lot of non-obvious communal elements.)

Two roles to play in two different storylines, am I playing the master negotiator, or the dispassionate calculator of moves... — Isaac

And the second isn't really optional, not even for Tal.

I don't see any evidence of analysis existing outside of a narrative — Isaac

the issue is poor choice of narrative getting in the way. — Isaac

I lean that way too, but I sometimes wish I didn't. Still I think there are clear reasons to consider some narratives as unwanted intruders. Which of these two candidates is the better engineer? Your personal race narrative can help you make a better racist decision, but not a better engineering decision.

If we're forced to say stuff is purpose-relative, that'll work, but it feels lame to say that all the time, hand-wavy pragmatism.