Description
Book SynopsisThe politicizing of facts and factual claims has led some to abandon all talk of a meaningful distinction between a fact and a strongly held political commitment. This book argues that what we need, instead, are better accounts of facts and their relationship to explanationones that take seriously the dependence of facts on communities of practice and on consensus procedures of measurement, but do not abandon the epistemic distinctiveness of facts.
Bringing clarity and order to the discussion by disclosing both key commonalities and significant differences between the ways we talk about facts and explanations, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson argues that although intrinsically more contestable than facts, social-scientific explanations can nonetheless be related to them in ways that allow researchers to evaluate explanations based on whether and to what extent they accord with the relevant facts in each situation. Ardently defending a pragmatist account of knowledge that has no patien
