By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
The statement that we never have facts without interpretations is true both trivially and nontrivially.
It is true trivially if all that it means is simply that to grasp any fact as such, as this, that, or the other thing, is to interpret it as so and so. But the statement is true nontrivially if what it means is that we never experience facts simply as such, but always only under the horizon of (in Habermas's term) some guiding interest in knowing, or, as I would be inclined to put it, some vital question to which we are seeking an answer.
2January 2009
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