Georg Lukács

I believe that Georg Lukács once said that if the mere facts disagree with theory, then "So much the worse for the facts." He also, as I remember it, believed that the Communist Party represented the class consciousness of the Proletariat, and as they were the true movers of history its proclamations should be taken as true, even where they disagreed with his own logic.

I've been thinking about this, and I think it is possible that theory cannot disagree with facts.

The issue here is that to recognise a fact as such, we must have already made judgements about it. Therefore some part of our theoretical framework must have already recognised a contradiction.

What if, then, we split theory into two parts: explicit and implicit theory. Explicit theory is our attempt to bring our way of expressing our view of the universe. But because languageis imperfect it never quite expresses the implicit theory, which is the basic epistemological assumptions behind it.

So, when facts contradict with theory we have three possible causes of the conflict. The first is that the "mere fact" could be an ideological structure that is not necessarilly true: for instance, all facts brought forward in our society are already biased towards the upholding of our system and need to be re-examined rather than accepted on faith.

The second is that our implicit theory may be wrong, because the assumptions that we have worked out in a rational way havenot reached the subconscious; For instance someone brought up in a racist community might know intellectually that racism is wrong, but their subconscious conditioning still makes them interpret facts about people in a racist way.

The third is that explicit theory might not properly express implicit theory's insights. For instance, a creationist bases all knowledge, including ultimately their faith, on a way of understanding truth. But their faith stops them from accepting the facts about evolution.

So the object's apperance must be separated from its essence - in that we understand nothing is as we understand it. Theory is how we understand this.

Theory is itself an object with an essence and appearance: an implicit and an explicit formulation. But the implicit theory itself, because it proceeds dialectically from the object, is made up of an essence and appearance. Its essence is the object, which itself needs to be examined. So knowledge carries with it at every stage its own doubt.

This is not good.