KellyAnne Conway was roundly mocked in 2017 for having observed that there were "alternative facts" concerning the size of the crowd at President trump's inauguration, and former vice-president and current leader in the race for the Democratic nomination for president Joe Biden has been similarly mocked for asserting the other day that "We [presumably meaning Democrats] choose truth over facts."
Media guffaws notwithstanding, Conway was completely correct when she referred to the possibility of alternative facts. For any given claim facts can be adduced which count both for the claim and against the claim. These may reasonably be considered alternative facts, and anyone with common sense understands that.
Nor was Mr. Biden completely deserving of the derision that has come his way for his assertion that Democrats choose truth over facts, for as odd as his words sound they are completely in keeping with the current understanding of truth among our elite cognoscenti.
Most of us would say that a proposition - for instance the proposition that Mr. Biden is 76 years old - is either true or false. If it's true, it's a fact. If it's false, it's not a fact. That's the simple, common sense understanding of the relationship between truth and fact, but in our contemporary culture common sense no longer reigns and truth has been divorced from fact, as Mr. Biden suggests.
In our postmodern era truth is a matter of how one feels about things, and facts don't necessarily have much to do with it. As philosopher Richard Rorty once put it, "Truth is whatever your peer group will let you get away with saying."
When someone with male anatomy, for example, insists that he feels female then, if others are willing to accept his claim, that becomes his truth. He's a female regardless of the objective anatomical facts of the matter. Gender becomes a matter of psychology, not physiology.
Parenthetically, it's an interesting question as to how psychology has come to be privileged over physiology, but it has.
Or, if someone feels strongly that President Trump committed treason with the Russians or that Justice Kavanaugh is a vicious sexual molester then the actual facts simply don't matter. Guilt is based on how others feel, not on what Trump or Kavanaugh actually did.
In her book Total Truth Nancy Pearcey notes that some middle school curricula teach that there are no wrong answers in mathematics, only different perspectives. She adds that truth is being presented to generations of college students as wholly relative to particular interpretive communities and that all knowledge claims are social constructions at best and power plays at worst.
It was philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's view that everyone has a different perspective, sees things differently and no one can claim the privilege of having the "correct" perspective. Thus, different individuals and different groups - racial, sexual, religious, economic - all have different truths. Truth is no longer thought to be out there waiting to be discovered, rather it's an entirely subjective construct. We create it, we don't discover it.
All of this follows, according to Rorty, from the loss of belief in God. Rorty argues that the idea of an objective truth, "is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation, the work of someone who had something in mind, who Himself spoke some language in which He described His own project."
In other words, if God exists then there's at least one objective truth, at least one ontological fact. And further, if God has spoken to man then what He spoke is also objectively true, and it is the belief that God has spoken to human beings that is the source of our intuitive belief that truth is objective and that what is true is factual.
Take away God, however, and it becomes much harder to hold on to the belief that truth and facts are anything more than subjective preferences which happen to be popular with one's peer group at the time. Truth is little more than a fashion.
Now Mr. Biden was probably not thinking at all along these lines when he made his odd-sounding statement, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was. If so, then we can take him to mean that Democrats do not believe in objective truth and don't accept the relationship of identity between truth and facts.
This may put him in good stead with progressive elites in academia, but I doubt that the average Democrat voter really agrees with this view of truth. At least I hope not.
If truth is severed from facts then there is no truth at all, and Biden's statement itself cannot claim to be true.
