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Is there a fact about how many people were in Fes one morning in 1200, if nobody recorded it?

Youssef Berrada Fellow
· 5 replies
TruthAmericanAnalyticIslamicC. S. PeirceIbn Khaldun#correspondence#history#lost-facts#truth-and-evidence
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My students love questions like this one. On a particular morning in the year 1200, there was some exact number of people inside the walls of our city. Nobody counted. No register survives, and no amount of future research will ever find the number.

Is there nonetheless a fact of the matter? Is "there were exactly 98,412 people in Fes that morning" either true or false?

My instinct says yes. Something happened, whether or not anyone wrote it down. But a philosopher friend told me that some theories of truth make this difficult. If truth is what inquiry would eventually agree on, as the pragmatist Peirce held, then a question no inquiry could ever settle seems to have no true answer. If truth is coherence with our beliefs, then nothing in our beliefs decides it. Only if truth is correspondence with how things were does the sentence have a definite truth value regardless of our ignorance.

This matters to me as a historian. Ibn Khaldun, at the start of the Muqaddimah, criticises historians who repeat impossible numbers, for instance the claim that Moses counted six hundred thousand fighting men among the Israelites, without asking whether such numbers make sense. He clearly thought there was a fact to be checked. His whole method assumes the past is fixed even when our access to it is poor.

So: are there truths about the past that are simply lost? And if a theory of truth says no, is that a reason to reject the theory?

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5 replies

  1. Lars Eriksen

    Fellow

    Physicists argue about whether information can ever be destroyed in principle; the debate about black holes is partly about that. But even if the information is preserved somewhere in the correlations of the universe, it is not accessible to any finite inquirer. So physics doesn't rescue the pragmatist. "Recoverable in principle by a god with the full state of the universe" is not what Peirce meant by inquiry.

    I share your instinct. I would find it very strange if the number of people in Fes depended on our records.

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  2. Mateo Quispe

    Fellow

    In the Andes we have a different version of the problem. The Inca kept records on khipus, knotted cords, and many still survive. We can read some of the numerical knots. The narrative content, if there was any, mostly we cannot. So there are truths that were recorded, whose record we hold in our hands, and which we still cannot read.

    That makes me think the issue is not only whether the evidence survives. Sometimes it survives and the key is lost. For a correspondence theorist that changes nothing. For a theory tying truth to inquiry it may matter: is a fact recorded in an unreadable cord more "true" than one never recorded?

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    1. Youssef Berrada

      Fellow

      Mateo, that is a haunting example. My students would say the khipu truths are true because someone once knew them. But then the 1200 number becomes the hard case again, because no one ever knew it, even at the time.

  3. Derek Hollis

    Fellow

    In fairness to Peirce, he saw this objection coming. He considers facts that seem buried for good and answers, roughly, that we are never in a position to say that a given question would stay unanswered however far inquiry were pushed. That is hope rather than proof. Later pragmatists split on it. Some bit the bullet and said there is no fact about unrecoverable matters; others moved towards a more realist view.

    I tend to think your Fes number is the strongest case against the pure inquiry theory, because it's so ordinary. No mystery, just people in a city.

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  4. Ana Clara Ferreira

    Fellow

    I came to this through intuitionism in mathematics, so I'll mention Michael Dummett, who carried the intuitionist idea from mathematics to language and wrote about exactly this under the heading of the reality of the past. The anti-realist he explored holds that for some statements we cannot assume they are either true or false independently of our ability to recognise which. Statements about unrecorded past quantities are his kind of test case. Few people follow him all the way, but his point was that the question is really about bivalence, whether every statement is true or false, rather than about any particular fact.

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