{"id":203,"date":"2017-01-23T16:28:28","date_gmt":"2017-01-23T16:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/?p=203"},"modified":"2017-01-23T16:30:20","modified_gmt":"2017-01-23T16:30:20","slug":"defining-fact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/2017\/01\/defining-fact\/","title":{"rendered":"Defining \u201cfact\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Kellyanne Conway has termed a new, 1984-style neologism, that of \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2017\/01\/22\/politics\/kellyanne-conway-alternative-facts\/\">alternative facts<\/a>\u201d. That\u2019s as silly as it is outrageous. But the response to Conway hasn\u2019t been always intellectually up to par. Here\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.politico.com\/story\/2017\/01\/alternative-facts-dictionary-conway-234005\">Politico<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Merriam-Webster poked at the Trump administration through its Twitter feed, appearing to take senior adviser Kellyanne Conway to task for saying that press secretary Sean Spicer was offering up \u201calternative facts\u201d about the crowd size at the inauguration.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality,\u201d the dictionary company said in a pinned\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/MerriamWebster\/status\/823221915171061760\">tweet<\/a>\u00a0that linked to a Merriam-Webster\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.merriam-webster.com\/news-trend-watch\/conway-alternative-facts-20170122\">posting<\/a>\u00a0about how lookups for the word \u201cfact\u201d spiked after Conway\u2019s comment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Unfortunately, \u201ca piece of information presented as having objective reality\u201d is an outright <em>terrible<\/em> definition of \u201cfact\u201d. Indeed, the claim that 1.5 million people attended Trump\u2019s inauguration can well be a fact on this definition, as long as it is \u201cpresented as\u201d having \u201cobjective reality\u201d, which Trump\u2019s press secretary might well have. And some things which are clearly facts\u2014e.g., that I own a copy of <em>Ulysses<\/em>\u2014fail to be facts on this definition, as they are not presented as anything to anyone. That\u2019s because facts are facts: they just are, independent from whether they are presented in some context or not.<\/p>\n<p>This is not an exception. I tell undergraduates over and over again not to use dictionaries for serious intellectual work. This is because dictionary definitions, while good for obscure words and teaching usage, are normally sloppy, often outright terrible at accuracy, at least the kind of accuracy needed for academic writing. Generally, dictionaries are poor guides to resolve intellectual disagreements; they are normally not even good guides to resolve disagreements over definitions. Bashing Conway &amp; Co. is one thing\u2014but at least you should get your facts (ahem) straight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kellyanne Conway has termed a new, 1984-style neologism, that of \u201calternative facts\u201d. That\u2019s as silly as it is outrageous. But the response to Conway hasn\u2019t been always intellectually up to par. Here\u2019s Politico: Merriam-Webster poked at the Trump administration through its Twitter feed, appearing to take senior adviser Kellyanne Conway to task for saying that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":205,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions\/205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}