Position to Know

A slightly different way of thinking about authority

In Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers there was an addendum addressing what we meant by facts. I said a fact is:

• something that is generally not disputed

• by people in a position to know

• who can be relied on to accurately tell the truth

Later I would change that last bit to be more specific:

• something that is generally not disputed

• by people in a position to know

• with incentives to take care with the truth and a history of doing so

However, the “position to know” part would stay the same.

What is “Position to Know?”

Generally, “a position to know” denotes expertise or opportunity.

Let’s take a car accident as an example. Your car and my car collide on a deserted road. Who is in a position to know what happened? Well, obviously you and I. If we both agree to what happened–say, we both agree that I drifted into the oncoming lane due to a lack of sleep–we can probably treat that as a fact — that is something not disputed by people in a position to know.

Perhaps someone else disagrees with that. No, says a person who reads the account of the crash in the newspaper, that’s not how it happened at all! Do we suddenly have to start treating this account of the crash as a claim that does not have the status of fact?

It depends. The crucial question is whether this third person is in a position to know. Did they see the crash? Then yes, we have to stop treating our account of the crash as fact. Do they have some deep knowledge of crash forensics that shows the crash is impossible? Are they a crash expert? Well, yes, then perhaps the fact is in dispute, though to override the evidence of our claimed experience, we’d want more than a single expert opinion–we’d want expert consensus.

On the other hand, if they did not see the crash but instead believe that very few crashes happen due to lack of sleep and therefore this cannot be an explanation, then no, we can still treat this as fact, because the people in a position to know are in agreement. The disagreement of a person not in a position to know does not undo that.

With questions involving expertise, “position to know” generally indicates expertise, but even here there is opportunity at work. As an example, consider debates about the effects of social media on teen mental health. To have an informed opinion on this issue, you’d need some expertise in data analytics, sociology, and psychology. But just having the expertise is not enough. To evaluate the issue thoroughly you’d want access to the sort of information that social media companies collect — use patterns, internal sentiment analysis, etc. Indeed, one of the struggles here is that very often the people with the best combination of expertise and access do not have good incentives to be careful with the truth. We see similar issues with research on oil well safety funded by Big Oil, or police investigations of police behavior.

By the same token, opportunity isn’t always enough. A person may take a photograph, for example, of something they think is a lynx but turns out, when reviewed by experts, to be a cougar. If three people witness an animal dart across the road, and one works in a zoo, we might be inclined to weight the zookeeper’s opinion of what the animal was more heavily.

We use position to know rather than expertise because it spans these two types of positions (opportunity and expertise), but also because it allows us to see the value of other forms of expertise not often thought of under that term. So “position to know” can include lived experience (the experience of being a veteran, a Black woman, or someone who grew up poor). It can include indigenous knowledge. For a person who is religious, on matters of religion it will include religious authorities. (For a person outside that religion it will not).

Because “position to know” is so important to claims of fact, when we look at sources we are always asking ourselves, “What puts this person in a unique position to know?” If the answer is “nothing in particular,” then we find new sources.

One final thing–and it’s perhaps the hardest thing to swallow. In most cases we, the readers, are not in a position to know about specific facts ourselves. Our experience matters, but as readers we tend to vastly overrate its value in ascertaining questions of fact where we have neither expertise or opportunity.

We don’t get a vote on the facts; we get a vote on who is most credible. And this means we usually have to trust someone other than ourselves.