Philosophy is a “fact-based discipline” that makes progress, says Bryan Frances, and to prove it he offers up “200 straightforward facts directly about philosophical matters that virtually all philosophers know and non-philosophers don’t know.”
They are listed in the appendix to a recent article of his in Philosophical Studies (unpaywalled penultimate version here). The actual article consists in explaining the kinds of facts they are, how to interpret them, and why they’re important.
The facts are what Frances calls “basic facts,” by which he means that “they are elementary compared to the facts philosophers pursue, such as the truth-values of theses regarding physicalism, consequentialism, and so on.”
They’re so elementary that
the Basic facts in philosophy are almost entirely hidden from not only the typical moderately-educated adult (as argued in the next section) but even from philosophers. We know the Basic facts, at least dispositionally, but we almost never think about the vast majority of them.
He also provides some guidance as to how to read the list of basic facts. Here’s one point:
In saying that these are facts, I’m assuming the falsehood of radical views such as eliminative materialism, radical skepticism, compositional nihilism, semantic nihilism, truth nihilism, and so on, each of which conflicts with a non-trivial portion of the 200 claims. Such an assumption is nearly ubiquitous in epistemology and metaphilosophy discussions. If you like, we can throw the assumption of their falsehood into an antecedent for the 200 claims, now conditionalized.
Also, for some of the fact sentences, “there are ways of interpreting them that won’t bring consensus amongst philosophers, and in the philosopher’s traditional search for flaws it can be tempting for a reader to choose the least charitable interpretations. I want to avoid those.”
You’ll have to read the paper for the full set of interpretive directions, but the general instructions for reading the items on the list are as follows:
when you read an item and think to yourself, “Well, that one can be true but only if you interpret a certain way, and under that way it’s pretty trivial”, that’s the very meaning I have in mind—the so-called trivial one (or ones). In order for an item to mistakenly be on the list, there can’t be any charitable interpretation of it that makes it come out true. The objection, “But since they are trivial, they are inconsequential” is mistaken.
In formulating the list, Frances limited himself to epistemological facts, though “after seeing it actually done for epistemology, I suspect that we could list hundreds of Basic facts from at least some other subfields of philosophy.”
He also notes that “a significant, but not overwhelming, percentage of philosophy’s elementary facts will also be parts of other fields, such as linguistics and psychology. That’s fine; we aren’t fighting turf wars.”
What’s the significance of these basic facts? Among other things, Frances says,
There are hundreds of Basic facts in philosophy, including the 200 I gave… Philosophers today know almost all of them, or are easily and consistently disposed to accept them given the interpretation instructions… As a consequence, amongst philosophers there is massive agreement alongside the well-documented massive disagreement… Any significantly accurate conception of philosophy must include the idea that it is, in large part, a factual, results-oriented discipline.
The typical moderately-educated adult today who isn’t a philosopher knows only a small percentage of the Basic facts and for most of the others is not consistently disposed to accept them. The transition from [not knowing these facts to knowing them] is an enormous epistemic improvement, compared to most other significant learning episodes [and] provides significant practical benefits for one’s ordinary life.
Frances thinks that paying attention to the convergence on Basic facts is an important corrective to certain skeptical thoughts about philosophical progress and philosophical expertise:
there is genuine philosophical expertise, but almost all of us have been looking in the wrong places for at least one of its central components. When looking for philosophical expertise authors usually look at intuitions about controversial thought experiments, such as those about the reference of proper names, Gettier cases, compatibilist free will scenarios, the Chinese room, Mary in the black-and-white room, Fake Barns, Twin Earth, Nozick’s Experience Machine, Thomson’s Violinist, and various personal identity scenarios…
The serious objections to philosophical expertise—doubts about the reliability of philosophical intuitions, cultural variations of judgment, framing effects, and so on—have no plausibility when applied to our knowledge of Basic facts (for evaluation of those objections, see papers mentioned in previous paragraph). Those objections target our opinions on the truth-values of philosophical claims that are much more controversial—such as ones associated with the thought experiments listed in the previous paragraph. Even if those objections are sound when hitting those more controversial claims, they don’t touch our Basics knowledge.
So what are these Basic Facts of Philosophy?
Here are 20 of the 200 Frances lists:
7. In ordinary life we occasionally have both strong positive evidence and strong negative evidence regarding the same particular belief.
8. One’s overall evidence is the combination of all one’s evidence regarding that belief.
10. A “mere opinion” (or “just his opinion”) is typically a belief, that may or may not be true, but is evidentially unjustified and doesn’t amount to knowledge because it isn’t based on good overall supporting evidence.
23. A person can be entirely evidentially reasonable in suspending judgment on a claim they have some strong evidence for.
28. Two people could have the same belief but one person’s belief is evidentially irrational while the other’s is evidentially rational, due to the fact that the first person bases her belief on weak overall evidence and the second person bases her belief on strong overall evidence.
29. You can have strong evidence for your belief even though it’s evidentially irrational for you to have it.
38. Just because someone thinks they have strong evidence for their belief doesn’t mean that they actually have strong evidence for it. In that specific sense, evidence is objective.
45. There are lots of “kinds” of knowledge: knowing how, knowing where, knowing what, knowing who, knowing when, knowing that, knowing an object, and knowing why.
95. You can have several different reasons to believe something, and the reasons can differ in how strong they are.
96. One can have a good reason to believe something without actually believing it.
102. The term “reason for a belief” can, depending on conversational context, mean the cause of the belief or a piece of evidence for a belief, which can be either strongly or weakly supportive. So, “reason” is ambiguous.
114. In many cases, a person can be an expert in a field even though they make a significant number of mistakes in that field.
116. In many cases, you not only have evidence E1 for one of your beliefs B, but you get new evidence E2 about how supportive that evidence E1 is for B. E2 is sometimes called higher-order evidence.
128. There typically is a causal explanation for the acquisition of a belief, but in some cases the person has no good evidence for their belief, so their belief is evidentially unjustified. So, just because you explain why someone has a belief doesn’t mean that you have shown or think that their belief was based on good evidence.
131. Explanations of behavior differ from moral justifications of behavior. You can explain why he did something without even faintly suggesting that what he did was morally ok.
134. Truth and falsity are objective in this sense: whether a claim is true, or false, is virtually never affected by anyone’s thoughts about whether it is true or false.
144. A preferentially subjective claim, such as “Chocolate tastes better than vanilla”, rests upon a great number of objectively true claims about people’s reactions and preferences. Hence, preferential subjectivity rests upon objective truth.
156. It’s possible for someone to have a pretty high degree of intellectual and psychological wisdom but relatively little moral wisdom.
169. Open-mindedness is often a good thing because it allows us to acquire new, useful knowledge; but it has to be used carefully, as it can easily lead to our agreeing to false beliefs too.
195. An argument is a piece of reasoning intended to support some idea. (The term “argument” has other meanings too.) It’s a series of claims, one of which is the conclusion and the others are premises. An argument is not a claim. It is not true and it is not false. An argument can be good or bad, but it’s not true or false.
Check out the rest here. Discussion welcome.
If it were really fact-based then none of us would have to put up with the so-called ‘AI’ whitewashing going on… including here.
No idea what this means!
Penultimate version here.
Thanks. I’ve added this link to the original post. (I had originally thought the piece was open-access, not noticing that I was still logged into my library’s system when I first clicked over to it.)
I mean, surely in a sense philosophy allows us to set a collection a facts about its subject matter. One may even concede that this is a necessary requisite, but is it a necessary and sufficient one for a definition of philosophy? One could even argue that although philosophy has these many facts, such facts are derivative from something that allows us to grasp them, the very cause of these facts exist.
I don’t think there is any terribly illuminating definition of philosophy. I certainly don’t offer one in the article!
I agree that it’s a great question as to how we come to know the basic philosophical facts. I don’t know the answers.
Thank you for the clarification!
I tried to offer a definition of philosophy in a forthcoming paper https://philpapers.org/rec/LINPAA-10 (it may or may not conflict with there being basic philosophy facts, depending on how to define “basic philosophy facts”, I think)
Not only do I agree with Bryan, but I too hold the following belief, as he states: “I’m probably the only philosopher in the world who holds that (i) there is tremendous agreement amongst philosophers on the truth-values of many substantive philosophical claims, (ii) there is enormous fact-based progress in philosophy, (iii) philosophers frequently succeed in the aim to acquire communal knowledge of substantive philosophical truths, and (iv) there is plenty of genuine philosophical expertise regarding the truth-values of substantive philosophical claims (setting aside expertise regarding the discussions of those topics).” He is not alone. I would add that philosophy cares more about answers than questions (or we should). Philosophy is often marketed as question-driven, but its internal reward structure is answer-driven, and I would have to ask, are papers published for merely asking better questions, or are they published for defending positions? And what kinds of ideas, theories, views, and positions stand the test of time? Do they survive better than the questions themselves? For the question-defenders, why do we care about the questions in the first place? For the answers and fact defenders, I would argue that our discipline operates as it does because being overly question-driven can obscure genuine progress in light of strong answers. This question-driven approach, indeed, sometimes even fact less (I guess?), approach to philosophy is a problem when we not only endorse but actively promote it, especially to undergraduates, as if philosophy were only about generating questions. People then question our discipline and ask, “Well, where is the progress?!” So let’s be for real, all of you have tried to provide answers to your questions. Yes, we have asked deep and informative questions, but answers are just as important, if not more important, and I think this is entirely compatible with Bryan’s view. Still, I suspect not everyone will agree, so let’s play the meta-game of arguing about what philosophers care more about while doing philosophy about what we care about. Ready? let’s go.
I think both questions and answers are both illuminating and a huge part of philosophy. A well-articulated philosophical question, paired with some arguments for the mild conclusion that the question’s answer won’t be obvious, can be enormously insightful and even thrilling.
I think we do ourselves a disservice by focusing so much of our teaching on the controversial bits of philosophy–the stuff we discuss in our research. We could do much better by spending a lot of time going over what I call the “Basic” facts–just like they do in the sciences. Perhaps such a change in pedagogy would improve our standing in academia–and secure our place in higher education while other programs get cut or eliminated.
This suggestion about teaching is very interesting to me, and I would like to hear more if you have more to say. What would an intro course, for example, look like that focused mostly or entirely on the basic facts? Do you think we can do this with many areas of philosophy, or would we need to stay within only a few areas? Could we do this with ethics, with metaphysics, with philosophy of religion?
I think we can do it for the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science, if not more areas. I tried to give guidance on how to make these lists of Basic facts in the article.
This was so brilliant and clever and such a crisp way to take a stance on philosophical progress/disagreement! I don’t think that the “fact-based discipline” angle will take off, but seeing more sheer lists of facts in other disciplines would be immensely useful, if only to feel the pulse of the subfield.
Anyone who says an article of mine was brilliant and clever is clearly a wise soul.
Is that a fact?
to qualify as “philosophy” facts, the author suggests, those facts must be “directly about philosophical matters” and must be fact that “virtually all philosophers know and non-philosophers don’t know”. But I wonder in what sense many if not most facts listed in the appendix are ones that “non-philosophers don’t know”. e.g. don’t non-philosophers know that “Some beliefs are true while others are false” (Fact 2)? It surprises me that one would make such a claim about the ignorance of non-philosophers.
A big portion of the article addresses that very objection (section 6).
I’m not convinced by sec.6 though. Again take “Some beliefs are true while others are false” (Fact 2). I think it’s much easier to imagine philosophers disagreeing with this statement (because some philosophers have really weird takes on certain things…) than to imagine non-philosophers disagreeing with this statement (when I quizzed non-philosophy students on certain “common sensical” intuitions like this in the first sessions of class, usual answer is “of course blabla” and then they were surprised that some philosophers had raised challenges to those supposed common senses).
A related point: compare these supposed “philosophy facts” with, say, biology facts. If a self-proclaimed biologist today denies that DNA exists, we would say “You are clearly not a biologist, for otherwise you wouldn’t have deny this biology fact.” But if a self-proclaimed philosopher denies that “some beliefs are true while others are false”, a lot of us would probably not say “You are clearly not a philosopher, for otherwise you wouldn’t have deny this philosophy fact”; rather, we would say “well, you clearly have a quite unorthodox philosophical position — do you define ‘belief’ differently than most of us? do you define ‘truth’ differently? what’s your metaphysical view?” etc etc. So, excuse me for remaining doubtful on in what sense those “philosophy facts” are really “philosophy (facts)” and really “(philosophy) facts”…
I have met people who say things like “Well, no beliefs are true”. At first, I figured they are just implicitly using a highly restricted quantifier. Then I slowly realized that in some cases it’s because their grasp of the concept is truth is surprisingly weak. Please see my comment about psychology and physics elsewhere in the thread.
And sure, some philosophers will say that (2) is false but they are extremely rare. The only ones would be either eliminative materials (there are no beliefs at all) or truth nihilists, who say that truth is an incoherent notion, so it has no application at all. Pretty rare. Also, please remember the conditionalized facts/presupposition point in the text, which handles these cases.
I find the same thing in my classes. It is very common for students to think that beliefs are, as we philosophers would put it, non-truth-evaluable. They associate beliefs with opinions, and they take opinions to be neither true nor false. I regularly have to spend some time explaining why this view doesn’t make sense in order to get them to relinquish it so that we can get on with the class!
Interestingly, I’ve never encountered a student who think like that. Perhaps that’s a dinstictly U.S. phenomenon? (I heard that U.S. kids are indoctrinated in primary/middle/high schools about facts/opinions distinction and that opinions can’t be right or wrong, or something like that.) In any case, what you describe seems to be that your students implicitly hold a different definition of “belief” than the common definition in philosophy. But that happens among philosophers too, no?
You are lucky. It is pretty clear to me that in North America, the fact/opinion distinction is drilled into people’s heads. This causes them to be terribly confused in the way Gary Bartlett explains.
A lot of people seem to be inconsistent non-cognitivists, in that they will gladly accept all four of these:
(1) To have the opinion that p is to believe that p.
(2) To believe that p is to believe that p is true.
(3) Normative claims can’t be true.
(4) It is my opinion that [normative claim].
Indiana Jones: “Archeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it’s truth you’re interested in, Dr. Tyree’s Philosophy class is right down the hall.”
“Fact” used to (and still does for some) mean a particular datum of experience, so any general or non-empirical claim, while it might be a truth, would not be classed as a fact.Thus, e.g.,
John Dewey: “Facts, data, are logically speaking particulars….” (‘An Analysis of Reflective Thought’, 1922).
Lorraine Daston described this old notion of ‘fact’: “The more familiar sense of fact as ‘a datum of experience, as distinguished from the conclusions that may be based upon it,’ emerges in English only in the early decades of the seventeenth century, contemporary with Bacon’s own writings.” (‘Reviews on Artifact and Experiment’ Isis, 79 [1988], p. 466).
‘Opinion’ could mean any inference or general claim that reached beyond the observed particulars. Somehow, this traditional notion morphed into the fact-opinion distinction taught now in schools. Many students have interpreted it as some mangled pop-version of positivism (viz., there’s empirical science, where our assignments are objectively graded, and then there’s BS, where we enter the dreaded realm of subjective grading).
I don’t know exactly how this cultural vandalism arose, but it’s all over school curricula in North America. There’s a decent paper on this monstrous fact-opinion distinction and how to manage it in college philosophy courses: Hutchins and Kelley, “Fact and Opinion,” Informal Logic 43 (2023). A fun critique is Perry Weddle, “Fact From Opinion,” Informal Logic 7 (1985).
Thank you for this and especially for the references.
Just a great, obvious point made by Frances. One of my initial thoughts upon reading the article was that we often display our knowledge of these facts when answering students’ questions. I can easily see a student who does not find it intuitive, for example, that you might have a justified belief that P, then be justified in believing not P because you found new reasons, and then be justified in believing P because there’s new evidence (perhaps undermining the evidence against P). And I could imagine being in a scenario where a student asks a question and my answer would leverage that I know this fact.
At least when I teach my critical thinking course, I hope that students come away knowing very many facts of these types.
A really cool contribution to philosophy.
I guess that’s why we still produce Aristotle scholars, just like physics still produces Newton scholars, and mathematics produces Pythagoreans!
Is there a particular reason why “fact” is being used here? Or can I reformulate the main idea here as that philosophy essentially aims at understanding/truth and that it in fact progresses in the sense that philosophers progressively understand more and reach more true judgments? So philosophy is not, to describe what we may call a few “rival conceptions”, a kind of art or poetry, or a matter of feeling, or something that undermines itself, or inherently a kind of relativist or subjectivist activity in which there is no such thing as correctness or truth simpliciter. (Is the “Third point” on page 2 of the penultimate version that nothing more than this is meant by “fact”?)
I ask this because “fact” is so commonly used to express ideas of “things being as they are anyway”, “mind- or thought-independence”, or “objectivity”. (I use scare quotes because I have in mind popular ways of speaking that sometimes don’t really make sense, I think.)
It seems to me, that given this, “fact” is at least potentially very confusing assuming that philosophy is essentially (self-)reflective in a distinctive way in which empirical sciences are not.
Or, an alternative attempt to formulate my worry: I think that philosophy is self-reflection – thought reflecting on itself; thought making explicit what it in some sense already is; thinking thinking thinking; spontaneity; not about what is the case “anyway” or what is simply “given” or “received”, but about itself. I worry that trying to describe philosophy in terms of “facts” will obscure this character which I take to be the essence of the entire enterprise.
With that being said, I am sympathetic to much of what you have written/seem to me to think. Thank you for the paper.
Most of the “Basic facts” in the article have qualifiers like “typically” or “in most cases”. Even so, I think the facts are objective in most senses of that term. All I meant by using “fact” was to indicate truths.
I’m not sure what this means, maybe you could clarify.
What does it mean for a fact to be typically or in most cases a fact? Does this mean that some of these facts are only sometimes facts? If so, how can they be truths as well, if they can be the case in certain circumstances yet not be true? Typically, I would think that facts are the product of some methodology: there are facts produced by physics, biology, etc. I’m not confident that philosophy has produced all of the purported facts on the list. I’m inclined to think that philosophy does not produce facts but rather conducts analyses.
I wonder, does even #2 (“Some beliefs are true while others are false”) have to be so qualified if we consider the Liar Paradox?
I would also contend that perhaps all non-philosophers know #2, definitely #1, #114, maybe #21, #25, and possibly many others. Could it be that many of these philosophical facts are actually just non-philosophical facts which philosophers know about?
Moreover, you list “useful rules”: but can rules be facts, or for that matter can they be truths?
I am in general agreement with the endeavor and much of what is asserted. But still having trouble with this one:
“134. Truth and falsity are objective in this sense: whether a claim is true, or false, is virtually never affected by anyone’s thoughts about whether it is true or false.”
The paradoxical versions of this – claims about one’s own thinking – can easily violate this assertion: “I believe dogs are cows” This will be True just because – and ONLY because – I believe it is True, and vice versa.
So… I don’t agree that 134 is true.
“Virtually never “. That allows for weird exceptions, as intended.
Apologies. I should have added:
“And I believe such claims are thought continuously by the average human.”
So… I don’t agree that 134 is true
I still think you’re missing the interpretation. There is an implicit quantification over claims that we discuss and disagree with in ordinary life. I constructed the list with an eye to being helpful to people outside of professional philosophy.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding a methodological point, but how can qualifying help here?
The weird exceptions to the fact obtain, even if you acknowledge them in the proposition. So, there are counter-examples–how are they defeated by saying “there are virtually no counter-examples.” But there are some. So, how can this be a fact?
Hang on, “I believe dogs are cows” is true (if it is) because I believe that dogs are cows, not because I believe _it_ is true (i.e., not because I believe that “I believe dogs are cows” is true).
This isn’t a counterexample. If “I believe p” is true, it’s true because I believe p, not because I believe that “I believe p” is true.
There’s so much to call into question here that I’m not sure where to start or what might even possibly be helpful to note. So, I’ll just raise one concern, more or less at random, out of the dozen or so that popped up immediately for me.
Frances writes, “In the Appendix I list 200 straightforward facts directly about philosophical matters that virtually all philosophers know and non-philosophers don’t know” (p. 551). I interpret “virtually all” to quantify over both “philosophers” and “non-philosophers.”
Establishing an empirical claim about what members of some group do or do not know requires, well, empirical evidence — or, at least, I’da thunk so. But as far as I can tell, not one piece of actual evidence beyond anecdotal reports about encounters with non-philosophers is supplied to convince readers that for any of the 200 “facts” listed, virtually all non-philosophers don’t know it. Indeed, as far as I can tell, Frances himself acknowledges the need for actual evidence grounded in real-world data gathered and processed carefully and nevertheless plows ahead without it. I find this astounding. (And crucially, the claim that evidence is needed holds for whatever understanding of ‘knows’ — poorly gerrymandered or not — one uses when making claims like ‘virtually all non-philosophers don’t know that….’.)
I cannot possibly note quickly enough that this is only one of several grave issues with the piece. In fact, the issues are so severe that the main effect of my reading the paper was to massively shift my estimation of the quality of Phil Studies downwards.
One hopes — prays, even — that no one will send this piece to any budget-conscious dean as evidence of philosophical progress and the contributions we actually make to the world.
Some thoughts:
Like I said in the article, I can’t give empirical data to back up my claim that most people outside of philosophy know few of the Basic facts. But a couple analogies may help.
Lots of people use most of “stressed”, “anxious”, “sad”, “depressed”, and “traumatized” with little facility. They don’t know how the various states differ or are similar. Their grasp of the concepts is poor. The five terms aren’t exactly synonyms in their minds, but pretty close.
I can’t present you empirical data for that claim. But if a person has a lot of experience noticing how people talk and think using those terms, and she herself is conversant in the psychological concepts, then she can know that the claim is true.
The same holds for other groups of concepts. If one is educated in physics, one notices the same phenomenon with the group “force”, “momentum”, “energy”, and “power” (e.g., one football player hit the other one with great force/momentum/etc.).
Similarly, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to how people use key epistemic terms. I have been surprised at how weak most people’s grasp of basic epistemic concepts really is. It’s almost shocking. Just distinguishing true belief, evidentially supported belief, sincere belief, knowledge, practically useful belief, and highly confident belief is usually a revelation for most people.
So would you say most people don’t know that “Sometimes people are sad” just because they can’t carefully distinguish between related concepts?
I thought the same thing. Statements like “a fact is information minus emotion” are absolutely ridiculous, but … I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say this. Maybe Frances and I hang out with very different types of people (and no, it’s NOT that I only hang out with other philosophers). But that’s precisely why we would need some sort of empirical study here, not just Frances “paying close attention” to people he happens to talk to.
That this got published in a fairly prestigious journal really proves how different philosophy is from social science.
you say that “a fact is information minus emotion” is absolutely ridiculous. but it’s a common aphorism.
Interesting essay to which I’m broadly sympathetic. Was a bit surprised that you didn’t at least mention in passing Vicker’s book, Future Proof Science, where he has a list of facts (but about science) which he thinks are “future proof”. Of course, his targets are skeptics about whether science gets at the truth, which is a bit different. Interestingly, I don’t think he requires that such facts are “largely known by scientists but unknown by non-scientists” though presumably one could easily find such claims.
I argued against (10) in a series of papers in the early ’90s.
So, you’re saying that in ordinary conversations, “That’s just his opinion” doesn’t typically mean that the opinion in question doesn’t amount to knowledge, because it’s not based on much evidence?
I noticed you didn’t mention facts about concepts in the list, not even once. I would have appreciated having at least one to quote in my dissertation, such a bummer…
The idea that Sam Harris, or any of the other public intellectuals mentioned ‘doesn’t know’ a claim like the following strikes me as ridiculous:
There typically is a causal explanation for the acquisition of a belief, but in some cases the person has no good evidence for their belief, so their belief is evidentially unjustified. So, just because you explain why someone has a belief doesn’t mean that you have shown or think that their belief was based on good evidence.
The paper has some merit, but the claim about public intellectuals seems crazy to me (maybe I’m wrong, but it seems crazy). None of the things that would make philosophers cringe in this type of person’s writing seem to be about ignorance of the basic facts put forward. Rather it’s more stuff like:
collapsing distinctions for rhetorical force,
treating contested theses as settled,
weak argument-to-conclusion transitions,
not addressing standard objections
These are methodological/dialectical deficiencies. Not ignorance of the basic facts listed. Also, *even if* these author’s writing did seem to suggest a lack of knowledge (which I can’t see) that they do) that can be explained by the incentives they face as public intellectuals.
(By the way, I do find it plausible that, say, undergraduate philosophy students don’t typically understand these facts, but not these sort of public intellectuals)