Facts, Fiction, Hyper, and Reality

The prelude of one of the most viewable TV channels is—–Fact, Fiction, Hype, and Reality. First I was shocked but later on, I was amused. TV news channels are fabricating all kinds of news to tempt, entertain, and allow viewers to think about the issues carefully without depending on the stereotyped news giving only straight forward so-called facts. ‘Fact’ has actual existence, an actual occurrence…. a piece of information having objective reality. Some of the examples of the hard facts are — “space exploration is now a fact”, “it is a fact that the cup is blue” "Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system", “2 plus 2 makes 4”, and “Mr. Narendra Modi is the present Prime Minister of India ”. The interesting and nowadays fashionable “fact-finding commission” incorporates review through testimony, direct observation, inference, or speculation. So it seems that a fact is a reality that cannot be logically disputed or rejected. If I say "fire is hot," I don't care how great are your reasoning skills, if you touch fire your skin will burn. Friends!! Don't give me the reason that "but people can walk on hot coals!" There is a difference between the transfer of heat through conduction and training one's body to deal with the agonizing pain of said conduction. Thus, Facts are concrete realities that are simply accredited and narrated in a non-judgemental manner.

The interesting point is: just saying that you feel the heat when you touch the ice doesn't make it hot, but if 500 million people said the same, one will force to think about it. If you get enough people to admit that ‘green is red’ you would legitimately be able to claim it is so.

Hang on! My friends! We sometimes use the term ‘fact’ synonymously with truth, as distinct from opinions, and falsehoods. What makes a statement true is that it corresponds to or is coherent with facts. Lo! The possibility remains— the statement may correspond or may not correspond with facts. For example, the statement "Delhi is the capital city of India" implies that there is such a place as Delhi, and India has a government and has the power to define its capital city. The verifiable accuracy of all of these assertions corresponds to create the fact that Delhi is the capital of India, whereas the statement ‘Agra is the capital city of France’ does not correspond to the fact, so it is false. Very simple?

Similarly in science, a fact is established by repeatable careful observation or empirical evidence, which is generally believed to be independent of the observer, no matter who performs a scientific experiment. Changing perspective doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the facts. For instance, the fact that the Sun rises is explained by the theory of gravity which also explains why we see the Sun moves across the sky. Many other phenomena, such as the path followed by the Sun, the phases of the Moon, the phases of Venus, and the tides, are explained so to say. An expert may predict the position of the Sun, the phases of the Moon and Venus, the hour of the maximal tide, all 200 years from now.

Our judicial system is supported by admissible evidence in a trial. Parties who face uncertainties regarding facts and circumstances in a dispute may sometimes raise alternative pleading—separate sets of facts are produced that may be contradictory or mutually exclusive. Thus facts can be contrasted with counter-factual statements also which indicate what would be the case if events had been other than they were. I was amused, as said earlier, that the news and discussions nowadays become counterfactual. They bring all kinds of suggestions and possibilities to the viewers with enough stories and histories and interviews of the experts which are often binary in nature. Many Logicians are interested in this modal sphere of possibilities. They want to determine which entities are actually there, and wish to formulate which entities there can or must be, across all possible worlds.

Now there is …..Our very own Wittgenstein announces that “the world is the totality of facts” and that every fact is contingent because one can arrange the given items in many different ways. For example, I have 20 moveable items in my house, and each time I arrange them in a different order it becomes a fact for that moment. The seven notes of music combined in different patterns for different Raga-s and Ragini-s are facts assembled differently in infinite combination.

 

However, when one says, “I was born in the year 2004,’ one might be making a factual statement but there is additional information that I have the right to vote, I can join army, I can marry  ….So nothing is truly free from value-judgment. Although it is said that facts can be determined through the techniques of a value-free enterprise, yet values are not ignored in objective sciences too. When atom bombs were dropped, the question of value becomes more significant.

Nevertheless, what about Politics where facts become very obscure and untrue!!! Our politicians are fictional story-teller which is an important and pervasive part of human culture and faithfulness to truth is not a requirement in fiction; fiction even departs from the truth it talks about. A political leader makes a promise to the villagers that if he wins, he will bring electricity to the village but he fails to keep the promise because of his so-called real-fictional narration I suppose. For example— “Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective”: is not a fact but it is accepted as true in some derivative or at least non-literal sense, or if it is stated as an answer to a quiz question “Who was Sherlock Holmes?” The answer is “In the Holmes stories, Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective” is true. By contrast, “Sherlock Holmes was the Prime-minister of India” or “Holmes was a cook in my house” sounds false. This is called the paradox of Reality, which raises the thorny issue of the ontological commitments of talk involving fiction.

The work of fiction pretends to perform a series of illocutionary intentions, and pretend to assert without any attempt to deceive the readers. Just as children use tree stumps as props in a game of make-believe in which the stumps count as stands, a community of readers can use a text as a prop in a game of fiction. Many works of apparent non-fiction—newspaper articles, biographies, real-life adventure tales, and so on—are written in a way that is designed to engage readers’ imagination and so satisfy the conditions for being the works of fiction. While saying that a close relative has been replaced by a “sham”, we also behave in a friendly manner towards this “sham.” Thus, beliefs are not quarantined from their “real” ones. To avoid the unpalatable conclusion that works of fiction are impossible both metaphysically and logically, one can add that it serves the purpose to discover the genuine truths. If I say "God exists," and I possess strong arguments for my statement, another individual possesses strong reasoning for his belief that God does not exist, both are part of reality. Truths, as opposed to facts, are much more flowing and bendy than their empirical counterparts in factual clothing.

"History is written by the winners." the phrase suggests that historical facts are inevitably made up by the assemblage of many different foregone conclusions of conflicting facts, "like fish in the Ocean," of which we may only happen to catch a few only— an indication of what is below the surface and can be interpreted in many other ways. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being punctured by single lies or torn to slices by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion.

Hermeneutics proposes to begin with the problem of interpretation of facts liberating its symbolic dimension which generates cultures, myths, languages, the arts, modus operandi, and sciences. This move does not spell out a total annihilation of truth, but only a transgression of the literal meaning and of the rationalizations that have “dried it up.” The readers can play with texts as if playing with toys. There are a lot of things a text does not explicitly include. The author might write “how good for you” to mean “how bad for you,” but the reader can interpret it in both ways, as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. When Derrida was asked to explain the direction of his thinking, his reply was, “If I clearly saw ahead of time where I was going, I really don’t believe that I should take another step to get there.” “There is nothing outside of the text.” meaning thereby that every interpretation is in some sense within the text. Therefore the techniques of deconstruction can in principle be applied to everything from the writing on an Amul’s packet to the narrative of a personal home loan, to the nature of a society or political cartoons so to say. The problem is that truth, based on facts, is subject to interpretation, and is interpreted by one’s perception.

Friends! The world is calling us to shift our thinking. Scientific knowledge is, therefore, always hypothetical and never true just as “it is raining” is true in common life. Philosophical enterprise....robust understanding ...subservient to finding the truth is a wild goose chase. Rather precision leads to a loss of clarity and fertility too. Any need for precision is ad hoc only. Problems cannot be solved by analysis but by dialysis only. Umberto Eco, the author of “The Name of the Rose”, though a murder mystery is seen as a questioning of the meaning of “truth” from theological, philosophical, scholarly, and historical perspectives. It allows the reader to respect the polyphony of signs, to slow down before deciding upon meaning, and doubt anything that promises an end to the pursuit of meaning, which opens up the wonder of interpretation itself.

We now live in a world of Virtual and Augmented Reality which attempts to envelop and explore this exciting but dangerous trajectory, in which simulations of reality appear to be more real than the genuine thing. Thus, Hyper-real suggests that information devours its own content by creating an unreal world of sight and seduction. If grains of sand are dropped one by one onto a table, at some capricious moment the grains become a heap of sand, and reality shifts into hyper-reality. Simulation is characterized by a blending of 'reality' and representation, where there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. Simulation is a simulacrum that is not a copy of the real but becomes truth in its own right. What is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together, what Umberto Eco says—"The authentic fake" having ontological status for its existence.

Disneyland with its settings has been created to look "absolutely realistic", taking visitors' imagination to a "fantastic past", which makes it more desirable for people to buy this reality. If the consumers follow each rule correctly, they can enjoy "the real things" that are not available to them outside of Disneyland's doors. Interacting in a hyper-real place like a Las Vegas casino gives the subject the impression that one is walking through a fantasy world where everyone is playing along. Although one may intellectually understand what happens at a casino, is part of the "not real" world yet its post-truth existence appeals. Post-truth as a contemporary phenomenon is not about asking "what is truth?" but "why don't we agree that this or that is true”.

The term ‘post-truth’ was named Word of the Year in 2016 by the Oxford Dictionary where it is defined as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief" which should not be ignored at any cost. When arguments and counter arguments makes one wild, the critical faculties gradually beg to be excused, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, one slides, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. Post-truth sets aside the rule of law and invites a regime of myth. For most of human history, where there is major disagreement and uncertainty concerning what counts as a reliable source of truth, there was some stable combination of trust in religious texts and leaders, learned experts and the enduring folk wisdom called common sense. Now, it seems, virtually nothing is universally taken as an authority. This leaves us having to pick our own experts or simply trust our guts.

 

The notion of de-factualization identifies hyper-rationality as the mechanism that blurs the line between “fact and fantasy”— a concept very close to what we now understand by post-truth. One distinguishes de-factualization from deliberate falsehood or lying. There always comes a point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive.

Today, hyper-reality has become a permanent fixture of our life, presenting a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future. We live in an era where people have less patience for crowd-funded facts, data, and truths— an inarticulate yell of fury only prevails.
Hence, facts are not something closed off in themselves, absolute, finished, and definitive, independent of human construction. Instead, it is contingent upon our hermeneutical gestures. The fact has an open and dynamic character, which is relational or, better co-relational. The fact and its interpreter enter into relation and dance together: more or less together, as the case may be. The scientific dancer seems to dance alone, keeping his distance, but finally fails to do so; the mytho-poetic dancer seeks more contact, proximity, and fusion. This is a special kind of dance, because, in course of dancing, the dancer is transformed, into the cosmic dancer. ….We thus surrender Facts, spelled with capital “F”.