It’s just been revealed that several news organizations, like Politico and The New York Times, to note but two examples, had been receiving a not inconsiderable sum of funding from the federal government.
This is scandalous, particularly given that the partisanship of such media outlets and that of the administration that presided over this funding is one and the same.
What is not scandalous, however, is that journalists are now, and have always been, partisan, and that the biases of journalists determine what they consider newsworthy. They are not, as they repeatedly insist, merely “reporting” upon “the facts.”
In making this claim, they default to a theory of knowledge—what in philosophy is known as an epistemology—with a long and storied history in the West. This epistemology is known as “empiricism.”
Empiricism is the epistemology which claims that knowledge is rooted in experience. Experience includes sense-perception, certainly, but it encompasses any and all modes of experience.
The “Father of Modern Empiricism,” the 17th century British philosopher, John Locke, famously declared that, prior to experience, the mind is a “tabula rasa,” a blank slate. Our perceptions, Locke said, are like mental photographs of the external world. It’s actually our perceptions that we know directly, but these perceptions correspond to the things in the world. For example, in the experience of perceiving, say, a chair, it’s not actually the chair per se that we perceive but, rather, our perception of that chair. It’s the chair that causes our perception of it, and our perception accurately reflects the chair. But the object of our immediate knowledge is the perception of the chair, not the chair itself.
In the 18th century, Locke’s empiricism would reach its logical climax in the thought of David Hume. Hume agreed with Locke’s fundamental premises that knowledge derives from experience, and that what we know immediately are our mental perceptions. Yet given these premises, Hume argued, what inescapably follows is skepticism, the theory that we can know virtually nothing.
Beliefs in the kinds of things that philosophers (and the rest of us) have taken for granted—the existence of an external world, a perception-independent world of physical bodies and minds, that exist over time; God; cause-and-effect relationships that are universal and necessary—are without rational justification. Since knowledge comes from experience, and all that we experience are our own perceptions, then, by definition, we can only know the perceptions inside of our minds.
Even the principle of induction, the principle that nature is self-continuous, that the future will resemble the past, the very principle upon which all of the sciences are grounded, is not something that could be discovered through experience (after all, it’s conceivable that the future, which hasn’t yet occurred, could be radically discontinuous with the past).
We are habituated to supposing that because, in our experience, certain types of events have been constantly conjoined together in the past, that they will necessarily be so always. Yet just because our perceptions of one billiard ball making contact with another have been immediately followed by our perception of the second billiard ball moving—just because there has been a “constant conjunction” of our perceptions of these two events—doesn’t mean that we’re justified in claiming that they are necessarily connected, that whenever the one transpires the other must do so as well.
Constant conjunction is not necessary connection. We perceive two events. We do not perceive this third thing, an alleged necessary connection between them, with which we have equated causation.
So, Hume concluded, if the foundations of knowledge are our perceptions, the “impressions” and “ideas” in our minds, then we could genuinely know very little, for most of the things that we have taken for granted are things of which we have, and could have, no perceptions.
Hume, of course, had his critics, including some, like Thomas Reid, who were themselves empiricists but who understood empiricism differently.
Immanuel Kant, however, found Hume’s critique to be so devastating that he was provoked by it to revolutionize philosophy. And he revolutionized it by claiming that space, time, causation, the self, substance (both material substance and mental substance, physical bodies and minds with steady identities that endure over time) are structures of the human mind itself. In other words, while Hume was correct that, because we have no perceptions of them, there is no justification for believing in such things on empiricist grounds, Kant responded that we can’t but understand the world in terms of these traditional metaphysical ideas, for they are preconditions of all experience:
Nothing could count as an object of experience unless it first satisfied these preconditions.
In order to be an object of experience, that object must exist in time. If it is physical, it must exist in time and space. Understanding and judgement are impossible unless it is presupposed that nature is uniform; objects are not collections of discrete sensory impressions, but uniform individuals, “substances,” with identities that persist over time; and that these objects are situated with respect to one another in an intricate and universal system of laws of cause and effect. And so on.
Western philosophy would never be the same after Kant. The mind is not a passive receptacle of information that flows to it through the senses but, rather, an active contributor to knowledge. Few people endorse Kant’s philosophy in its original form, but today it is widely accepted that it is always through the prism of some conceptual framework or other, some worldview, some paradigm, that we interact with the world. Our experiences and descriptions of those experiences are intelligible because they are shaped by our theoretical lens. Every experience is conceptualized. Facts aren’t brute, raw features of the world that compel our recognition. Facts are theory-laden.
Journalists are like everyone else insofar as their presentation of events are colored by their worldview, their theories of choice. The language they employ to characterize “the news” bears the impression of the prejudices and priorities of that worldview.
They never, because they cannot, merely “report” on “the facts.”
image, Pixabay license.
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