Pilate Isn’t Jesting Anymore

Matt Taibbi’s Unintentional Confession.

The full quote referenced in the title is: “What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.”¹ This is the first line of Francis Bacon’s essay On Truth, a passionate defense of the pursuit of knowledge. Bacon was one of the earliest to formulate the idea of empiricism, that humans could obtain accurate knowledge of the world through observation and experimentation. Today we call his ideas the Scientific Method. He described truth as a belief that ‘fixed’ the human mind and would not allow us to exercise free will in telling lies. In fewer syllables, Bacon thought that human action should be restricted by the facts of the world. His ideas are the basis for the entire structure of modern life, from plumbing to astrophysics.²

Among the people who clearly prefer free will to restrictions imposed by facts is the self-described “journalist” and frequent subject of this Substack Matt Taibbi. In a column he wrote Wedesday, Feb 12 and which is not paywalled, he included the following:

To favor such measures one has to believe both that identifying disinformation is logistically possible, and that government should hold that role. The former idea is metaphysically crazy, the latter unconstitutional.

The context of those two sentences is his appearance before Gym Jordan’s House committee investigating the relationship between fact checkers and social media. It is Taibbi’s position that the fact-checking social media posts is entirely a bad thing, apparently because Taibbi subscribes to the Spark Notes version of postmodernism which claims that no one can ever know anything. It is in fact quite easy to identify disinformation and people do it every day.

There is a long and respectable tradition of inquiry that claims that humans cannot ever claim absolute knowledge. Francis Bacon’s philosophy actually starts from that premise David Hume’s Skepticism is one of the most succinct statements of that idea. Taibbi is not within that tradition. He flatly states in the second quoted sentence that “identifying misinformation is logistically impossible.” That is provably untrue, and the fact that I can prove that it is quite easy to identify misinformation shows just what a lie Taibbi’s statement is.

Keeping within the tradition of early modern Anglophone philosophers, Bacon, Hume, and everyone in their tradition claimed that while perfect knowledge is impossible, humans can actually increase our understanding of facts and processes by observation and experimentation. Bacon’s Scientific Method is one of the most successful means of increasing knowledge. One can easily take a statement and subject it to testing against known accurate information and observations. If the statement can be harmonized with proven knowledge, we can rely on it as true. If not, we can discount it as a falsehood.

I can refute Taibbi’s second assertion — that it is unconstitutional for the government to assess ‘misinformation’ — and the first one at the same time. There is an entire branch of government whose only purpose is to assess and rule on whether assertions are factual or not: the judiciary. The federal version is described in Article III of the US Constitution, and every state and territory has a version of the same thing. Every day in thousands of courtrooms juries and judges determine whether evidence presented to them establishes an assertion as a fact. Juries are called ‘triers of fact.’³ Lawyers are constrained by the rules of evidence in how they present testimony, documents, or other physical evidence in a case so that what the jury sees has already been determined to be somewhat reliable.⁴ Rule 401(a) of the cited rules states that evidence is relevant to a case if “it has any tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence.” If it isn’t possible to determine whether or a fact is more or less probable, there is no point in developing rules designed to make that determination.

Every profession and field of endeavor has a form of logistics used to determine whether something is ‘misinformation’ or not. Building codes, procedure manuals, instruction booklets, dictionaries — all have the foundational purpose of describing how to determine whether an assertion is accurate or not. This purpose is so basic to all endeavors that it is hard to describe. “Don’t damage a load-bearing wall while you are inside the building and this is how to find which walls are load-bearing” is the unstated first rule of all construction. “This is how to change the toner without destroying the expensive printer” is a statement that, again, rests on the unstated assumption that the person changing the toner doesn’t want to ruin the expensive and essential office equipment. The falsity of Taibbi’s statement is screamingly obvious.

When a man whose profession is supposed to be finding facts and informing the public says something that contradicts every single principle of that profession, one becomes curious as to know why? I cannot see into his mind, but I can make a pretty good guess. Taibbi is now a MAGAt. He is one of the many court poets composing paeans to Orange Foolious and his cast of bad jesters. Trump constantly says demonstrably untrue things. The MAGA movement rests on nothing but rickety lies. Like the Party in the overused George Orwell quote, MAGA demands its followers reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. If it is impossible to confirm or disprove evidence, then the mental gymnastics required of MAGAts become less Simone Biles and more kindergarten tumbling. Taibbi understands that necessity and helps it along. The fact — see what I did there? — doing so negates his entire profession just makes it easier for him. Taibbi, like all MAGAts, is bone lazy.

1. That quote, in turn, references John 18:36, from the Gospel description of Jesus’s trial and crucifixion.

2. One fact that Bacon would endorse is that he did not write the plays of Shakespeare. Should the reader wonder why I mention this, the reader can learn much more at the Wikipedia entry here.

3. “Trier” as used here is a verbal fossil left from the 1600’s. If I were in a position to do so, I would insist that the meaning is better conveyed by the contemporary words ‘tester’ or ‘determiner’ of fact. Juries aren’t making an effort to create facts.

4. Here is a link to the Texas Rules of Evidence. I will be quoting from this source and don’t want to bore the reader with so many links or footnotes, so I’m adding this once.