Facts and opinions

E'er the twain shall meet

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.”

This statement has been ascribed to Daniel Moynihan, James Schlesinger and doubtless others. Lately it's been deployed as a lament against post-truth journalism. The deployers are invariably people who are confident the facts are on their side. They have facts, while their opponents merely have opinions.

It brings to mind another saying, attributed to some hardened courtroom lawyer: “When you have the facts, pound the facts. When you have the law, pound the law. When you have neither, pound the table.”

The lawyer knew something Moynihan didn't—or rather that Moynihan, a shrewd character himself, didn't acknowledge in his statement. Facts and opinions aren’t always separable. And neither category has ever ceded primacy to the other in political debate.

Two contemporary questions have pushed the matter forward in a particularly pointed way. Did Joe Biden fairly win the election of 2020? Is climate change real and caused by humans?

Most who quote Moynihan would deny that these are legitimate questions. Mainstream media have long branded denial of Biden's victory a lie. Likewise the denial of anthropogenic climate change. 

They should be careful in doing so. In the first place, they conflate their own opinions with facts. Was the 2020 election stolen? The honest answer is almost certainly not. More precisely: no credible evidence has suggested it was. But this isn't the same as a categorical no, which the facts don't allow. To pretend otherwise is to yield to opinion.

Similarly with climate change. These days the New York Times and the Washington Post make a point in most articles about extreme weather events to say that these are associated with climate change. Maybe they are, but quite possibly they’re not. The papers would more accurately say–and sometimes do say–that such events are simply more likely in an era of rising temperatures.

Precision of language isn’t the only issue. The more categorical an answer, the more tempting it is for the other side to say: Prove it. Can you prove that votes weren’t stolen in the 2020 election? Negatives are notoriously difficult to prove, and this one can’t be. Can you prove that Hurricane Harvey wouldn’t have dumped 40 inches of rain on Houston if it had happened a hundred years ago? No.

The urge to give simple answers is understandable. The election-deniers and the climate-deniers give simple answers, whereas a requirement for the affirmers to give complicated explanations of probability would leave them at a disadvantage in the noisy arena of politics.

There’s something else. The Moynihanists appear to think that if they can get their opponents to concede what the Moynihanists consider to be facts, they’ll win the political argument.

This is almost certainly not true. If Donald Trump announced tomorrow that, yes, Joe Biden won the election of 2020, his followers wouldn’t suddenly abandon him. In fact they might breathe a sigh of relief that they no longer have to explain away this one of his many unsupportable claims. He and they would simply retreat to a position of “he should have won the election, and will win the next one.”

The climate-deniers don’t have to deny the existence of climate change in order to oppose the measures the climate-affirmers advocate. They could accept the reality of anthropogenic climate change and still say that the mitigation efforts are too costly, or premature, or impossible to enforce against free riders in other countries.

The Moynihan adage is a good rule for academic debates, where the goal is to show how smart you are. In the political arena, where the goal is to elect candidates and pass legislation, something different is required. Certitude is sometimes equated with certainty, but the former is more properly a feeling or attitude than a state of the world. And belligerent certitude almost never changes minds. Humility sometimes does.

As a young man, Benjamin Franklin studied rhetoric and related arts of persuasion. By the time he wrote his memoir, he had distilled study and practice into a few sentences. “I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner that seldom fails to disgust,” he wrote. “For, if you would inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention.” He further refined his philosophy of debate into a couplet: “To speak, tho’ sure, with seeming diffidence / For want of modesty is want of sense.”