No Mere Facts

“The greatness and superiority of natural science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rests in the fact that all the scientists were philosophers. They understood that there are no mere facts, but that a fact is only what it is in the light of the fundamental conception, and always depends upon how far that conception reaches. The characteristic of positivism—which is where we have been for decades, today more than ever—by way of contrast is that it thinks is can manage sufficiently with facts, or other and new facts, while concepts are merely expedients that one somehow needs but should not get too involved with, since that would be philosophy. Furthermore, the comedy—or rather tragedy—of the present situation of science is that one thinks to overcome positivism though positivism.”

-- Martin Heidegger from Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics 

And the positivistic-scientific mentality has colonized the idea of rationality and logic in general. We look to facts and more simply numbers to solve all problems and end all debates. This has lead us to throw facts and numbers at each other incessantly (when we are not going so low as to make our arguments out of purely emotional appeals or fill them with logical fallacies). We use and abuse facts and numbers with little knowledge or even care of the context, history or origin of them. We don’t bother to know what they mean beyond what they can do to prove us right.

That is precisely why we don't need more STEM and we need more humanities. We especially need philosophy and history that are taught as more than a survey of events and dates portrayed as self-evident facts. We need to stop trying to overcome the shortcomings of data and facts with more data and facts. We need to think about context and meaning. This is done by the humanities, and we can’t do so without proper exposure to important ideas from the history of philosophy and understanding of philosophic methods. I am not saying that the answers will be found in the philosophers of the past, though they may be. What I am saying is that without the ability to think philosophically and an understanding of the history of ideas and terms that come from philosophy, we will not be able to address the problems of awareness of context and definition of concepts that are necessary for us to understand how facts come to be and what they mean.