Reading [amazon_link id=“159184472X” target=“_blank” ]The Half-Life of Facts[/amazon_link] has left me with mixed feelings: even if enjoyable by its recollection of scientometric research and their masterful presentation by countless anecdotes, the thesis reached by their inter-waving, that everything that we know has an expiration date and other grandiloquent and post-modernistic statements, is just an immense non-sequitur: not only is the author intentionally leaving aside mathematical proofs (notwithstanding Gödel’s Incompleteness theorems), the very definition of fact applied is very misleading and tendentious. Facts should not be directly equalled with immovable truths: stripping out the context of how the facts were established and ignoring that the different Sciences offer different degrees of truth (5 sigma in particle physics and 1 sigma in sociology) is a disservice even to the author’s purposes.

And this is not just an argument from the analytic philosophy of language, à la Wittgenstein: in a chain of reasoning, it seems obvious that conclusions cannot be taken apart from their premises and inference rules; that is, facts are logical consequences of a set of statements because they were deduced from them, in a deductive-theoretic sense, so those statements are at least as important as the facts themselves.

Not to mention the problematic implications of applying the book to itself, in a recursive way: because what is the half-life of scientometric statements about the half-life of truths? Nullius in verba carried to n-degree!