More than anything else, they are ways of assessing and managing uncertainty. To call them “facts” is to say that they are indisputably the case, but who of us could really check this for ourselves? The more general point is that facts – unlike their common image as “hard,” “brute” and “bare” – are precarious things that can exist only in carefully controlled environments. Only in the laboratory a fact is indisputably the case. To circulate freely in the public sphere it needs to be transformed into something else – an interpretation supported by rhetorical defenses, by the credibility of
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