{"id":2280,"date":"2004-09-23T09:44:26","date_gmt":"2004-09-23T13:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/09\/23\/2280.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:46:43","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:46:43","slug":"theories-and-facts-and-the-fre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/09\/23\/theories-and-facts-and-the-fre\/","title":{"rendered":"Theories and facts, and the French"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

YHB knows he keeps pointing Gentle Readers towards the same few sites, but this note<\/a> in the Language Log is quite long and appears on first glance to be devoted to making fun of the French, so even the occasional reader of that fine site may well have missed the interesting point.\n

Which point is, in fact, lifted from Adam Gopnik<\/a>. He contrasts facts<\/I> and theories<\/I>, comically invoking the famous New Yorker fact-checker to come up with the brilliant idea of a theory-checker: “Just someone to make sure that all your premises agree with your conclusions, that there aren't any obvious errors of logic in your argument, that all your allusions flow together in a coherent stream -- that kind of thing”. There is a response that in a particular academic field, journal referees are more likely to check theories than facts; from what I have seen, this is true of most academic fields. And it isn’t particularly funny, either.\n

The thing YHB found to chew on in all of that is the sense of disconnect between fact and theory; the idea that for a theoretician facts are only the occasionally nourishing, occasionally annoying bits of grit in the gruel, while for a um, American theories are meringue, and not very nice meringue at that.\n

Is part of the problem that whatever is described by the word theory<\/I> is described by the word ‘theory’? I wonder if ‘model’ or ‘principle’ or even ‘framework’ might have led academia in a different path, and led the perception of academia in a different one yet. What Mr. Gopnik describes as the American viewpoint that “the theories they employ change, flexibly, and of necessity, from moment to moment in conversation” depends on thinking of a theory as, to borrow from the American Heritage Dictionary, “An assumption based on limited information or knowledge” or even “A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena”. But that is not what he seems to be saying the French think of when they use the word.\n

The thing is this: a theory is, I think, a way of stringing facts together to make sense of them. This is as true of semiotic theory as it is of quantum theory. A theory, once adopted, changes the whole universe I perceive—it defines the universe. My religious belief is a theory. My political beliefs are theories. I happen to like them, and furthermore, I think that some of my theories make sense, and not only make sense of the facts I perceive, but of those you do as well. I suspect you think the same of yours, whether they are like mine or not.\n

You know the old science-fiction exposition mainstay of describing seemingly solid objects as consisting mostly of empty space? The atoms are far apart; the molecules are far apart; the structure holds them in place and gives them the sense of solidity. Facts are the molecules of this analogy; theories the structure. If you hadn’t guessed.\n

                           ,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

YHB knows he keeps pointing Gentle Readers towards the same few sites, but this note in the Language Log is quite long and appears on first glance to be devoted to making fun of the French, so even the occasional…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[197],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-log"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2280"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17130,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2280\/revisions\/17130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}