Fact checking is destined to fail

The structure of knowledge makes it hard to change people's minds

Photo by Hartono Creative Studio on Unsplash

While it is often argued that we have entered a 'post-truth' world, there are many who are fighting hard to preserve the old world of truths and verifiable facts. One of the common tactics has been to establish organisations or units whose purpose is to provide definitive fact-checking. Despite significant levels of investment from a range of organisations, the broader impact of these is, at best, negligible. There has been no shift back towards a shared universe of facts that everyone agrees on - which used to define the public sphere.

While I am not as ready as others to write an obituary to the concept of a fact,¹ it is philosophically unsurprising that fact checking organisations have failed to have any significant impact. They misunderstand the nature of human knowledge - in at least two important ways.

The first misunderstanding was the subject of a previous piece I wrote on the concept of misinformation. In short, the purpose of a fact check is to provide a definitive answer that resolves the issue once and for all time. This can only make sense if we assume we can achieve epistemic certainty. I have argued repeatedly, and possibly too often, that this isn’t possible. Hence the assumption that we can routinely provide definitive fact checks is shaky.

A fact cannot survive in the wild by itself

The second misunderstanding arises from a flawed mental picture of the structure of human knowledge. We habitually think that we build knowledge in a similar way to how we build a house. We start with a range of smaller pieces - facts, evidence, data, observations - and then we use these as materials as we turn them into knowledge. Instead, it works the other way round. As I have argued previously, facts and evidence are highly dependent on bigger theories and the basic units of knowledge are broader theories rather than individual facts. Individual statements, assertions or facts only make sense and get their meaning in the context of a broader theory, worldview or ideology.²

The practical result of this is that a fact check that focuses on an individual statement misses necessary context but also what is often the most important information. It is commonly the broader theory that matters most, but this cannot be addressed with a fact check. To see this, it will help to look at a recent example from the US in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, where there was significant controversy about the effectiveness and motivation of Federal government agencies involved in disaster relief efforts.

To see the important dynamics, we need to first identify the relevant broader theories about the role and purpose of government. Let's look at three such theories, described in somewhat extreme, caricature form.

1. Responsible government - government agencies are responsible actors who play a vital role in delivering public goods and mediating the often chaotic, and sometimes violent, relationships between people, businesses and other organisations in the community. Without them, we'd be in a brutal and chaotic dog-eat-dog world.

2. Incompetent government - while they mean well, government agencies are so tied up with internal rules, bureaucracy and power-plays that they are highly ineffective and can be only relied on to stuff things up. Without government intervening, things would generally run more efficiently and things would get done a lot more quickly.

3. Corrupt government - government agencies are full of corrupt actors who, consciously or not, are only out to maintain their monopolies on power and patronage. Taxation is mostly a form of legal theft that is used to line the pockets of cronies and compliant businesses.

Put aside any emotional reactions to these theories and whether you think any of them are justified today. Each of them has been true for some governments in some places at some period of history. There are people in your community who would argue that your current government (of whatever level) fits each of these theories, so this can help us understand their impact on efforts to fact check.

Let’s now consider a public statement that is a typical form of a fact check. In response to rumours about government agencies obstructing relief efforts, the US Transport Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, tweeted:

Let's consider how someone who believes in each of the different theories of government would interpret this.

For the person who believes that the US government is responsible, this is clear evidence of the government acting as it should. We don't want chaos in the aftermath of an emergency and so the orderly management of rescue and recovery flights is necessary and an important job.

If someone believes that the US government is incompetent, they will likely read it as evidence of the government slowing down and hindering the relief effort. “Legitimate flights” will be read as meaning only those approved via the slow, incompetent bureaucratic means. It would clearly follow that there will only be a few, inadequate and slow flights arriving. Anyone else who wants to help out will be blocked from doing so because they haven't ticked the right box on the complicated paperwork.

For someone who is convinced the US government is overwhelmingly corrupt, this would look like evidence of government agencies playing gate-keeper for the purposes of profit. Legitimate to them means government approved, which presumably involves kick-backs, inflated contracts or permitted profiteering.

For each of these groups of people, the same statement - that is presumably factually correct - reads like evidence for their own theory of government. It explains exactly what they would expect to see based on how they interpret the statement. Any attempt to fact check this would likely only reinforce people’s pre-existing positions and would do nothing to establish whether the government agencies were helping or hindering the relief efforts.

Checking facts misses the things that really matter

This is just one illustrative example. But the dynamics it reveals are very common in the world of attempted fact checks. Any specific statement or fact only has a relevant meaning in the context of a broader theory, ideology or perspective. These are not checkable or verifiable in the way that a fact or data point is, yet they are often the focus of what people want to clarify. This means that organisations end up in practice trying to use a fact check as a way of arguing against a whole theory. As this is the wrong format for that sort of argument, it is destined to fail to be effective, and often ends up looking like a biased, or partisan, argument rather than a fact check.

The fundamental philosophical problem is that fact checking assumes that knowledge is made up out of free-standing facts that are justified, and make sense, by themselves - independently of any broader theory or context. As this is a flawed philosophical assumption, the common approach to fact checking will continue to fail. Instead, arguments need to focus on the broader theories at play which stand or fall as a whole, rather than trying to focus on individual facts. We can only change people's minds when we can challenge the broader theories they use to understand the world.

1. I recommend that you click on this link!! The essay by Jon Askonas is definitely worth reading. Here is the link again: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/what-was-the-fact

2. This is true at a very fundamental level - data, statistics and what we normally consider as evidence is all, for example, dependent on a range of philosophical and mathematical assumptions. But it is also true in a more substantive, practical level that I'll focus on here.