How does blindly doing what they say repair the trust in those for whom it has been lost — Isaac

That's not what I am trying to do. As I explained, I am trying NOT TO UNDERMINE trust. I'm not trying to actively shore it up, but I don't want to contribute to its fall.

Where have I assumed this? — Isaac

public health policy is not science. Following it does not have the same logical imperative as following science would have. — Isaac

Science doesn't tell you what you ought to do. It just tells you what is.

If people don't trust public policy to be in their interests, how does blindly following it regardless help to restore that trust? — Isaac

I'm just doing my bit, considering the moral duty, in a time of crisis, to support the community I live in. At the very least, I am trying not to undermine trust by my own behavior.

Are you suggesting the problems in the DRC would have been solved if people would only have just unquestioningly done what Kabila told them? — Isaac

No. I am suggesting that public trust is the only thing that binds us together in societies. Protecting it, when and where it exists, is important to avoid chaos, especially for one who shares this trust, which is my case, and especially in times of crisis.

It is an extraordinary poem. I will have to read it again. Did you translate it ?
It does read very well - but I wasn't sure about:
Est redevenue le " machin " qu’on sait
Is once again this "thingy" we know

A minor detail but 'thingy' jarred a little. Why not just use the word 'thing' ? — Amity

Yes I did translate it. Translating poems is always a treason though. As the Italians say: traduttore traditore.

As you know I am not a native speaker so I get things wrong all the time.

Le "machin" is a reference to De Gaulle calling the United Nations (The House of Glass in New York) "un machin" (a thing, but derogatively, i.e. a thing that doesn't do anything). I tried to render the derogative nuance with "thingy"... Any suggestion?

You've provided no mechanism by which we can distinguish the occasions when public policy is based on science and pursues public goods from the occasions when it is not, rendering the advice to follow public policy completely useless. — Isaac

Neither did you, and yet I am quite certain that you understand the value of having a public policy and of trying to enforce it.

I am also quite certain that science never ever told anyone where to go next, reason for which it would be impossible to "follow it", as you wrongly assume, while it is at the very least possible to follow public policy. I would further argue that it is being a good citizen to follow public policy, especially when this policy aims to save lives in times of emergency. It's called being disciplined.

In my country, public policy generally pursues the public good. At least that is the general perception. It might not attain it; it might damage the public good here or there; one might disagree with how it defines the public good; and of course there are exceptions, i.e. cases where a policy is crafted to benefit or protect private interest, which is bad. There are also token policies, i.e. policies that are not really meant to be implemented, but mere gesticulation. In this case the policy is dishonest, it does not really pursue the public good; it just pretends to.

But by and large, French policies are seen as bona fide aiming to protect citizens' interest, which is a condition sine qua non for their applicability. In other words, a social contract still exists in France, but it's eroding, and IF this public trust in public policy was to disappear, then our republic herself would disappear. A republic is literally a Res Publica; it depends on public trust to exist.

I've lived and worked in places where public trust had evaporated, such as DRC. I don't want this for my country. And if I need to take a shot of a vaccine, the usefulness of which might not be totally established, in order to protect or rebuild public trust, I will personally do so.

It's not just about statistics.

Superb....




......Have you come here to play Jesus
To the lepers in your head?......

Thanks. I love this poem very much, makes me cry every time I read it. I hope the English reads well.

Rain on Palestine
by Salah Stétié
(English translation: O5; original poem below)

It's raining rain on Palestine
Rain without rain, rain of fire
For Marie the Virgin there were seven swords
But there are more in the hearts of those
Who can’t sleep in their frail houses no more
Who have only the street of the terrible poor
To twist their arm for their lost son

It's raining rain, raining night
In the plain sunlight of the day lost
Where life begets no more the beautiful name of life
The heart can’t do it anymore the heart can’t do it no more
To see the children cry of distress
The snotty boy the girl with the braided hair

This country of olives is of Christ
The Palm here is his long lost sign
We sang his clear birth
His fragility of convicted child
By the awful Caesar by the awful Herod
Whose hands never would be bleached
If all the Jordan came to wash them

This child of yesterday is today reborn
In the black fold of Palestinian women
Husbands are dead the sons are lost
Sheet metal and bare concrete houses
Have fallen like at Guernica pipes cry out
Facing the tanks and helmeted soldiers
Dumb from the silence of those who kill

Moses, O Moses
Did not want that

It is our planet, earthly and so blue
That was made of air and water so that they live
Together: he harnessed of leather
And the teenager left to cook
In the fire created where the cylinder
gas exploded under accurate fire

Moses, O Moses
Did not want that

Precise shrapnel aimed to the heart
Of the stillborn child in the white church
All are asleep and not just the guards
But the white man of Rome too, so old,
Democracies and their seedy leaders
That one whose forehead is so narrow
Over narrow eyes he confirms Darwin

Poor Palestine of the poor, why
Oh why would you want them to wake up?
In Jerusalem reigns Ubu Roi
Sabra and Shatila in his pocket, and the other
The Nobel Peace Prize, the fake nose

Yes, why would you want us to wake up?
If they want double portion, why not?
Our princes are fast asleep in barrels/day
Le Pen in France comes in with his glass eye
And the House of Glass, in New York
Is once again this "thingy" we know

Why would you move at all, poor Palestine
When they at long last propose to finish you off?

Country of Christ do you remember Christ?
Country of Islam why do you want to live?
There are for you the starry tanks of Sharon
As Putin is for Chechnya
And Bush is there to direct the music...
Country of Christ why do you want to live?
Easter is spent and it's the "spring epidemic"
It rains it rains it rains on you, my Palestine,
Country without rain country with rain of fire
And for Marie, "the un-touched by any man",
Always, in the heart of her heart, the thorns


Original :

Pluie sur la Palestine

Il pleut de la pluie sur la Palestine
De la pluie sans pluie de la pluie de feu
Pour Marie la Vierge il y eut sept épées
Il y en a bien plus dans le coeur de celles
Qui ne dorment plus dans leurs maisons frêles
Et qui ont la rue des pauvres terribles
Pour tordre leurs bras sur le fils perdu

Il pleut de la pluie il pleut de la nuit
Dans le plein soleil de ce jour perdu
Où la vie n’a plus son beau nom de vie
Le coeur n’en peut plus le coeur n’en peut plus
De voir les enfants pleurer de détresse
Le garçon morveux la fille en ses tresses

Ce pays d’olive est pays du Christ
La palme est ici son signe perdu
Nous avons chanté sa naissance claire
Sa fragilité d’enfant condamné
Par l’affreux César par l’affreux Hérode
Dont les mains jamais ne seraient blanchies
Si tous les Jourdain venaient les laver

Cet enfant d’hier renaît aujourd’hui
Dans le giron noir des Palestiniennes
Les maris sont morts les fils sont perdus
Les maisons de tôle et de béton nu
Sont tombés comme à Guernica les tuyaux crient
Face aux tanks et face aux soldats casqués
Muets du silence de ceux-là qui tuent

Moïse, Moïse
N’a pas voulu ça

C’est notre planète, terrestre et si bleue
Celle qu’on fit d’air et d’eau pour qu’ils vivent
Ensemble : celui harnaché de cuir
Et l’adolescent qu’on a laissé cuire
Dans l’incendie créé où la bonbonne
De gaz explosa sous le tir précis

Moïse, Moïse
N’a pas voulu ça

Précise mitraille ajustée au coeur
De l’enfant mort-né dans l’église blanche
Tous dorment et pas seulement les gardes
Mais l’Homme blanc de Rome aussi, si vieux,
Les Démocraties et leur Chef miteux
Celui-là de qui le front si étroit
Sur des yeux étroits confirme Darwin

Pauvre Palestine des pauvres, pourquoi
Oui pourquoi veux-tu que ça les réveille ?
A Jérusalem règne l’Ubu-Roi,
Sabra et Chatila en poche, et l’autre
Le Prix Nobel de la Paix, le faux-nez

Oui, pourquoi veux-tu que ça nous réveille ?
S’ils veulent double portion, pourquoi pas ?
Nos princes se sont assoupis en barils/jour
Le Pen en France arrive avec son oeil de verre
Et la Maison de Verre aussi, à New York
Est redevenue le " machin " qu’on sait

A quoi bon bouger, pauvre Palestine
Puisqu’on te propose enfin d’en finir ?

Pays du Christ te souvient-il du Christ ?
Pays d’Islam pourquoi veux-tu revivre ?
Il y a pour toi les chars étoilés de Sharon
Comme il y a pour la Tchétchénie Poutine
Et Bush est là pour régler la musique …
Pays du Christ pourquoi veux-tu vivre ?
Pâques est passé et c’est "printemps d’épidémie"
Il pleut il pleut il pleut sur toi, ma Palestine,
Pays sans pluie pays à pluie de feu
Et pour Marie, "la non-touchée d’un homme",
Il y a toujours, au cœur du cœur, les épines

Wonder. Not just for the ancients, though. It might be a disenchanted age but even when dispirited - I feel wonder...and keep wondering...for better or worse... — Amity

Yes. And your Presley quote is apt: modern philosophers may be playing the disenchanted, but artists are not.

the abyss of the Quine-Duhem thesis. — Srap Tasmaner

A bit of a dramatic way to put it... Duhem-Quine is but a rehash of Francis Bacon's "we need to put nature to the question". As Collingwood observes, Bacon was a lawyer and knew that this meant: "we need to put nature to torture in order to get answers". Hence the modern form of scientific experiments, in highly artificialized settings. There never was a scientific experimentation without a theoretical framework underpinning the "question being put", at least since Bacon. All knowledge proceeds through questions and answers. You can't have answers if you don't ask questions first, and questions proceed from a "line of questioning", i.e. from some framework. I wouldn't worry about that too much.

Again, public health policy is not science. Following it does not have the same logical imperative as following science would have. — Isaac

There are better reasons to follow public policy than to follow "science", which never tells you what to do next anyway so you couldn't follow it even if you wanted to. Public policy is (in this case at least) based on science but takes into consideration social goods as well. If you care for the people around you, you should follow public policy. It's only if you are anti-social that you shouldn't.

Yes, we’re educating people poorly. — Xtrix

Maybe. The PoMo genie is out of the bottle though, and it will be hard to put it back in and convince folks to believe the doxa.

It’s a fantastic story for every charlatan and crackpot conspiracy theorist out there. So 97% of climate scientists agree? Who cares! That means nothing— don’t you know most scientists thought the earth was flat once? Etc.

Quite sad and quite scary. — Xtrix

I think fear is one of the reasons why so many people lose their rationality nowadays: they are afraid of the future -- COVID, terrorism, climate change, make your pick -- and they break under the pressure of fear.

And you are right that seeing people go crazy and jettison their rationality, this adds to the fear of the rest of us.

We need to start a chess club..

Witty. Given that Morphy died in 1884 and Alekhine was born in 1892, I take this as one of these "dialogues in hell" which philosophers of old have accustomed us to. :-)

SO present your case. — Banno

You won't pay attention.

I don't think so. — Banno

Oh shoot, Banno does not think so, and he knows best.

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

Who says no? — Banno

Riemann and Lobachevsky.

I suppose you got your polio, measles, tetanus and other vaccinations up to date, right? If that's the case, you are not really an anti-vaxxer, just a COVID-contrarian. You shouldn't feel like you need to defend the loonies.

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

One of the things that has changed is we don't force our experts to drink hemlock once we find them wrong.

They're immune to facts and they will not change their minds no matter what happens, which is interesting psychologically. But should we engage for the sake of others who are rational yet "on the fence"? — Xtrix

Difficult question. I've debated 9/11 truthers and climate deniers for months online and got nothing to show for it. Zilch. Nada.

My sister-in-law believes that AIDS is a hoax, that aliens from other planets live among us, and that COVID is some sort of world-wide conspiracy. I love her, she's a good person and a great artist, but she's lost connection with rationality.

There's nothing you can do on a case by case basis. Crazy is crazy. These people are "lost for science", gone.

But maybe we could do something at societal level, because it does not seem normal to me that so many folks would chose to go irrational. We're doing something wrong.

Hang - you’re saying yourself that beauty as a quality probably has no substance, and yet you’re annoyed that telling a woman she has this insubstantial quality doesn’t render her grateful to you for saying so? — Possibility

That.

OK, this is getting too weird. If you want to believe that I agree with you, go ahead, you will be wrong, but it's no skin off my nose. — Janus

What is really weird is to debate a dude who would rather die than be seen agreeing with you... It is also a waste of time.

You haven't addressed the fact that when the innocent and the guilty persons are both dead no one knows the fact of the matter; which remain facts of the matter nonetheless. And you have addressed the problem with your view of what constitutes a fact as it relates to historical fact. On your view there can be no historical fact because there is no way of observing the events in question in order to determine what actually happened. — Janus

A point of form: that I haven't address points that you haven't made yet should come as ni surprise. Make your points first, and then I will try and address them.

Historical facts are accurate observations done and recorded in the past, that's all. There usually is a way to observe the record.

If the people in the known of a case are all dead and left no record whatsoever, it is improper or at any rate not useful to speak of the facts of the mater.

I disagree with your view; get over it. — Janus

Rather, you agree with my view; get over it. :-)

You did not address my objection that if truth and fact mean exactly the same thing, why have two words instead of one?

The trouble here is of course that what counts as a suitable observation is already theoretical - already an interpretation. Observations thus cannot fulfil this role as a foundation to knowledge. — Banno

And thus, science cannot possibly succeed...

What a joke!

If a convict is actually innocent of a crime is it not a fact that he didn't commit the crime even if no one knows it? — Janus

For one thing, he knows it. For another, the real guilty party knows it. The police most of times would have planted the evidence and would know it. They are the people who could -- in proper English -- say "I know for a fact that he is innocent".

If you use the word 'fact' to speak of 'truth', there's no value added to the word 'fact' as compared to 'truth'. You might as well abandon it and use the word 'truth' instead.

The only thing that differentiates facts from non-facts is knowledge gained by observation. — Janus

Voilà.
— Olivier5

I'm not saying what I think you think I'm saying. I'm talking here about how we determine what we consider to be facts. I'm not saying that facts are dependent upon being determined. — Janus

You ARE saying what I am saying, you are just too stubborn to realize it.

@Janus I trust this clarifies then, judging from your sudden silence.

The only thing that differentiates facts from non-facts is knowledge gained by observation. — Janus

Voilà.

You still haven't attempted to deal with the example I gave of prisoners who are innocent; an example that shows that what is generally held to be fact may not be, even if that fact is never discovered. What kind of definition would be able to distinguish fact from fiction in such a case? — Janus

I have attempted to deal with it by pointing out that in this example, you imagine a certain state of affairs and declare it such, as true. Eg a guy is sentenced guilty of a crime but he is actually innocent. In doing so, you take the POV of God and ask your reader to adopt it too. What I mean by that is that you KNOW he is innocent even though the court, the police, the media and the public don't know that. So you can safely conclude: "it is a fact that he is innocent" but none of the people inside your scenario could actually say that.

And that is because a fact is a statement known to be true, or accurate enough (ergo based on accurate, replicable or otherwise dependable evidence). It's not just a true statement. It's a well buttressed one.

I also have indicated, as has Banno, the other usage equating facts with actual (as opposed to imaginary or fictional) states of affairs or situations or events or whatever you want to call them. — Janus

That would seem to imply that there could exist facts that are yet unknown to us. Which is different from saying: "we will tomorrow discover (or observe) facts that we have no clue about yet", in the critical sense that it implies the existence of a world in itself, in which there exist facts.

I believe in the existence of a world in itself, can't even imagine how one couldn't. But are there "facts" in that world in itself? I find it hard to even understand the issue here... It seems to me that it is again the POV of God.

Another way to ask the question may be: Is there a useful way for us humans to speak about "facts in themselves"? Is that a useful concept, and if yes, in what sorts of questions?

I can't, because I "both crave and fear certainty". :-)

That was soooo poetic!

I can understand your definition of 'fact' and I've acknowledged it accords with one of the common usages, but not with the other. You seem to want to dictate that the other, which makes perfect sense to me, and, I have no doubt, many other people, is somehow wrong or incoherent. — Janus

I can also agree that "a fact is a true statement." And you are right that the term is sometimes used this way in English. My point is simply that this definition does not help identify what is a fact and what is not.

Suppose I've never seen a duck. I read something about ducks in the paper and ask here on TPF: What the hell is a DUCK? Someone answers: "Ducks are Anatidae." The answer is technically correct but it wouldn't help me much. Now if you say: "It's type of bird, living in and near water, with a flat beak" you are helping. Because I can then figure out a duck and maybe even spot one next time I walk along the Tibre.

So I am looking for a definition that would help one differentiate facts from non-facts. We are not omniscient. If facts are to feature in our conversations, then we need to ask ourselves how to spot them.

Proof brings with it the air of certainty, which is what Olivier5 and T Clark both crave and fear, since it gives some support o their scientistic views.
— Banno

This is not an accurate characterization of my views. — T Clark

Banno is on his own orbit here... He doesn't even know if you and I crave or fear certainty, but he's gona accuse us of both regardless. What a joke!

You can call the distinction a mere matter of usage, but I would call - do call - using them interchangeably ignorant. — tim wood

Or redundant and useless. If there exists a word, 'fact', it must be because this word brings a nuance not brought by other words... In language, there are only differences (Saussure).

In that case I have no idea what you are arguing about. — Janus

I am arguing for conceptual clarity. I think a lot of people here, including you, want the opposite: you guys are after getting your head all muddled and confused by concepts. Gives you a kick I suppose. And that's why you have no idea what I am saying: you simply can't be bothered so you don't pay attention.

I like Luc Ferry — tim wood

He served as the Minister of Education under Sarkozy's presidency. I found him by and large ok, a bit old style.

Wow, this thread has really deteriorated. I would love to clean it up by deleting the personal attacks — Athena

Philosophers....

I would ask him whether Mary will gain new knowledge when seeing red for the first time, of COURSE!

;-)

Ciao Marco.

If you don't acknowledge that some of what are generally taken to be facts may in fact not be [facts], then I don't know what else to say to you except "keep digging". — Janus

Of course I acknowledge that not all what passes for a fact deserves the title. Which is precisely why I am interested in a pragmatic definition, that gives a sense of how facts are determined by us human beings in practice.

Belief in facts is not determinate. — Banno

What does that mean?

What does this bit of nonsense have to do with anything in this thread? — Banno

That you define "fact" in a static, unusable manner, as if the determination of what counts as fact and what doesn't was obvious or irrelevant.

perhaps you are asking when a statement ought be believed. There is no general answer to that question. — Banno

I think the question is: when should a statement be taken as fact, and when should it not? In other words, how does one determine a fact?

When cops work on a case, they are supposed to come up with facts. Do you think they write T-sentences in their notebook in order to do that?

Think on this: how do you know that the Bishop moves diagonally? What observation supports this? — Banno

I read it in the chess rules.