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Joel Best, "Just the Facts: Untangling Contradictory Claims" (U California Press, 2025)
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Dr. Joel Best
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- [01:29]
Dr. Joel Best
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Michael Johnson
Hello and welcome. My name is Michael Johnson. This is another episode of New Books in Sociology, a channel on the New Books Network. Today I have Dr. Joel Gordon Best, who is professor emeritus and a Francis Allison Award winner in the Department of Sociology and Criminal justice at the University of Delaware. His specialty topics are social problems and deviance. And today we're going to be talking about his most recent book, the that is titled Just the Untangling Contradictory Claims, published just this year, 2025 in University of California Press. Welcome to the show, Joel.
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Dr. Joel Best
Thank you, Michael.
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Michael Johnson
So, to start off with, I would like to ask, how did you come about writing this book? What inspired you to write about just the facts?
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Dr. Joel Best
Well, I came at this the same way I often come at book projects. That is, I just noticed that in the ether and the conversations go around us, people were talking a lot about facts and they were irritated about facts, they were mad about facts. And that's often a signal that there is something to write about. You know, years ago there I had the same kind of reaction about prizes. You know, goodness, people are complaining about prizes a lot. And I wrote a book about prizes. And so I thought, well, facts would you know, facts are clearly social and there's something that a sociologist should study. And you know, I don't think there's been a lot written about it. And I started looking around and once you get past people worrying about what Durkheim meant by social fact, there's really not a sociological literature about facts. And so I thought, oh well, that's something that I could do.
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Michael Johnson
Well, actually this is a great bridge then to our first question. You know, you talk about once somebody, Winston Bill Durkheim talks about social facts and people get through arguing with that, there's something there then about maybe agreement and facts. In your opening chapters, you point out that facts are socially constructed through agreements. And how does this process happen and operate in society today?
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Dr. Joel Best
Yeah, well, let's start by saying that nobody likes to hear that facts are socially constructed. We like to think that facts are little nuggets of truth that are out there in the world and we found them. We say we discovered facts and the facts have a pre existence and we didn't have anything to do with it. And if you stop and think about it, that's silly. Everything that we know is socially constructed. That is, it's. We have to use language to talk about it. We get the language from other people. And all of the sense making that we do in the world, all of the ways in which we make sense of things involve a social process where we use language to try and describe what is around us. And so facts are no different than that. A fact that I start the book with and that I like very much is the time of day or the date. I can look in the corner of my computer screen right now and it tells me what the time is, it tells me what the date is. And these are facts. And not only that, but I know that around the world, the vast majority of people adopt that same timekeeping system and that same calendar. Okay? And we could all agree that it's a fact that this is, as it happens, September 17th. And you know, it's a specific. It's six minutes after the hour, and so on and so forth. But when you pause for a moment, you realize that there's nothing in nature that says that it's September 17th or that it's six minutes past the hour. This is simply an agreement that we've come to. It's a convention, you know, and there are people who've written about the histories of calendars and the histories of timekeeping. And you know, there have been other calendars. There have been, you know, certainly there were Other ways in which people kept track of time before we had 24 hour days and so on. And the fact, and this is a fact we all agree on, I believe it's a fact, but it's a fact because we've all agreed to agree that this is what makes a fact. And all facts are like that, okay? Now we like to believe that our personal facts are really, really true. And some other mistaken people may think that they have facts. But you know what, my point is that all, all facts are at bottom social agreements where little social worlds come together and they make sense of facts.
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Michael Johnson
And you know, Emil Durkheim even talked about the social deviant slightly, not too much in detail. But even people who bring counterfactual elements to the discussion, argument, whatever it might be, must recognize the fact that it's at its most basic foundation, otherwise there would be no argument to be had.
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Dr. Joel Best
Yes, yes, you know, we, you know, and, and so if you look around, you can recognize that there are institutions that are producing facts. And you know, our facts come from institutions. So that, you know, the, the, the most obvious one for people in our era is science. And scientists go through, you know, careful procedures to try and develop findings. And when they're really, really convinced that those findings are correct, they call them facts. Okay? And you know, we, we, we, and they tell us how they went about getting that information and they, you know, they, and we can replicate it and so on and so forth. Now, you know, one of the difficult things about the history of science is that periodically facts change. In the early 20th century, people laughed at the idea that the continents were moving apart. And today it is considered a scientific fact that there are tectonic plates and Africa and South America are indeed moving a little bit apart each day. And so that what we think we know gets revised. And scientists know this. Now, I don't think it's very likely that we're going to discover that there's an additional atomic element between oxygen and whatever number nine is in the periodic table, that there's an element that's got a value of 8.5 or something like that. The periodic tables held together pretty well for a while and you know, I rather imagine that it will continue to hold together for a long time. But it is always the case that scientific facts can be changed.
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Michael Johnson
That's interesting, Joel, that you mentioned that facts, at least in, well, facts are made in institutions and there's a variety of different institutions in which they're made. And the fact making process varies from governmental to legal to Scientific and journalistic. And as you mentioned with science, facts, I think, are made, produced and refined in science through conferences as well as through journal manuscripts that are written and then published, but prior to that they're verified. There's some fact checking going on, but we'll talk about that a little bit later. But could you talk a bit more about how these different institutions produce and practice fact making?
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Dr. Joel Best
Sure. Well, a second institution is government, and the government produces facts all the time. A kind of classic example is the census. We go out and count noses and we say, this is how many people there were in 2020 or there will be in 2030 and so on and so forth. And, and, you know, we all understand that on the one hand, that is the government's very best effort to get the very best, most accurate information they can. And they work really hard at it. And people who know understand that all of those census figures are going to be wrong. They're probably undercounts. But because, you know, there are two kinds of mistakes that you can make in building the census. You can, you can count people twice or you can have people that don't get counted. And, you know, while there are some people who get counted twice, mostly we, we, we overlook people, people who are unhoused and, and, and so on. And, you know, so we, we, we're, we're making the best estimates that we can, and we, we're used to receiving factual information for the government all the time about the crime rate rate, the rate of inflation. And all of these are generated by bureaucrats who are using the best available information to try and get a grip on what's going on in our society. Okay? And so the government produces facts. Another example where facts are produced is in law. You know, you, you have a, a finding in a courtroom and people talk about the facts of the case. And, and there's testimony, there's evidence that's been presented, and there is agreement that these are the facts. This is what happened in this case. Journalists go out and produce facts. They go out and come back and they observe things in the world. They come back and they report on them to the best of their ability. And all of these institutions are producing facts, and they're all creating them in slightly different ways. And they are all, when you stop and think about it, best efforts. But they're also imperfect. They aren't some genuinely true bit of information. They are the best information that we have using the best methods that we have for gathering that information.
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Michael Johnson
And within these institutions, I think that it's important to know that they are organized slightly different in how these social facts are developed and produced and reproduced from one organization to the next. And government, law, science and journalism may all be talking about the same thing, but slightly different. But it doesn't make anyone less true. They're facts. And there's a process, just as there's a process in the research method which makes the scientific method not some other method, just as there's methods to producing facts.
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Dr. Joel Best
And it's also important to understand that there are going to be other little social worlds that may not have the institutional authority of science, government and so on, but they also produce facts. You know, a kind of amusing example is people who believe the earth is flat. Okay. Now, there's a great deal of scientific evidence that suggests that the earth is not flat. But it's possible to go online and find websites of people who are convinced that the earth is flat. Sometimes this is grounded in religion. I think sometimes it's kind of a prank to, to just show people that, that, you know, you know, that, that, you know, they, they can't prove something that they're convinced is true. But, but, you know, there are some people who say, no, we have evidence. We, we, you know, and this may not be evidence that you find persuasive, but in their social world, this is true. There are going to be people who say that I have a holy book here and every word in this holy book is true, and that's a fact. Okay. And, you know, other people may not accept those standards, but you and I may not accept those standards. But within that social world, that claim of facticity is considered quite reasonable.
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Michael Johnson
Yeah, it's interesting. I think in science particularly, we never prove a hypothesis. We always go to try to disprove it.
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Dr. Joel Best
Yeah, yeah.
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Michael Johnson
And then you talk about fact checking. What a great time to talk about that. There's always checking for facts and trying to disprove it. We see it in the news all the time with this new cancel culture and sort of canceling facts and canceling behaviors that we don't necessarily agree with. But. Yeah. Why is fact checking often limited in its effectiveness? And how might sociology help us understand why people cling to certain claims despite the corrections that exist?
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Dr. Joel Best
Well, yeah, fact checking is interesting. It has an interesting history. Starts with magazine journalism where, you know, in daily newspaper you're, you're under a tremendous deadline pressure. But if you're doing, if you're Time magazine, you're producing a magazine once a week, There was the sense that we really ought to get things right. So they had special people who were charged with checking the factual information in the articles to make sure that they were true. This got ramped up tremendously with the arrival of the Internet, because the Internet meant that, you know, all kinds of, first of all, there was a lot more information out there, but there were lots and lots of claims. And how do you evaluate these claims? And very quickly you get people who start, you know, checking claims. Snopes is, is usually credited as the, the first site that really does this. But very quickly, people in school are related to journalism, they're at major newspapers or news gathering organizations or journalism schools or whatever, start setting up fact checking programs, okay? And very quickly you get responses that, well, I don't like your fact checks. I'm going to fact check your fact checking. So there are now dozens and dozens of these organizations, some on the left, some on the right, some from the mainstream, et cetera, et cetera. Just as any social world can proclaim facts, as long as people in that world are willing to accept that designation, so it is possible for any social world to fact check. Okay. And so you get interesting kinds of debates and the best known fact checking organizations like PolitiFact or the Washington Post, Fact Checker or whatever, they will, you know, they will often turn to facts of the sort that we talked about earlier, you know, well, you know, government statistics suggest that this or that isn't true or it's only partially true or whatever. And a lot of times these fact checks are in turn denounced by people. So, you know, there is no way to simply declare that this is a real fact and your facts are wrong. Okay. I mean, it's, it's, you know, that was the goal. The goal was, well, we can get everybody to agree that, you know, this, this, this claim is not factual because we have con, we have evaluated it against some factual standard. Okay, great. But not everybody's going to accept those standards. And so it was intended to be a sort of way to resolve disputes. But it turns out that it's very difficult to convince everyone.
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Michael Johnson
And then in a world of Internet, it makes it even more difficult than prior to be able to dispute and then to override a fact or to transform a fact as new information emerges. Because in the Ethernet, something that goes out into the Internet and is available can be found even after new information emerges. So how does this process of revision reveal some deeper tensions between the stability and change our systems of knowledge?
- [19:55]
Dr. Joel Best
Yeah, well, yeah, that's an interesting thing. We revise facts all the time. And, and, you know, for all our insistence that here's a fact and it's a fact and it, it isn't going to change, we actually are continually revising facts. You know, macroeconomics is a place where this is done all the time, where you'll get the employment figures, the government will produce. A monthly bank is a monthly report on the number of jobs created in the past month. Now, this is done through a very elaborate data collection system. It is the best available data collection system, and the government produces this fact. But they also schedule revisions. They schedule two further revisions because they know that inevitably when they gather this month's data, some data is going to be slow to arrive, okay? And so it's not going to arrive. And so you're going to get additional information and they'll produce a revision and then a revision of the revision, okay? And there's nothing sneaky about this. This is done quite openly. It's an effort to make things more accurate. And there are studies of this over time that the revisions tend to be higher or lower than the initial figures. And the answer is, well, both. Sometimes they're higher, sometimes they're lower for different reasons. Most of the time they're pretty close to accurate. Sometimes they're quite a bit higher, quite a bit lower. And, you know, nobody is scandalized by this. They understand that this is an inevitable process. You want to get this information as quickly as possible. Well, you want it as quickly as possible. There's going to be some slippage, and it'll be more accurate in another month. It'll be more accurate when we do the second revision, okay? And now the problem, of course, is that you get the headlines for the initial statistic, okay? And the revised statistics tend to get depleted. And this has become an issue this year where President Trump did not like the Bureau of Labor Statistics job report and, and, and fired the person who did it and, and insisted that this was a, a politically gimmicked report. And the reaction to that is everybody that knows about this looks at it and says, that's really not how this works. And the idea that if you bring in a loyalist, the loyalist can produce the correct figures. There's a whole process to producing these figures that the loyalist is probably not going to be able to affect much.
- [23:09]
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Dr. Joel Best
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Michael Johnson
Semintmobile.com yeah, and there's an antics. We can't sit there and blur the lines just because we don't like them. The facts are the facts and just the facts. And so there's kind of two different things going on here, right? We've got facts and then we've got the dissemination of facts. And facts are coming out regularly. Facts are being produced. It's the general public gaining access to them. And part of it may be due to the different chambers that we occupy in society, particularly in a society that is divided by labor. And what we're paying attention to, I think, at least in the United States, tends to be focused on where we're working and what's relevant to us.
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Dr. Joel Best
Yep, yep. And revision is, you know, is not shocking. You know, we, you know, an example that I have in a couple examples in the book, an interesting one is maternal mortality. Okay. And maternal mortality was originally defined as deaths of women within six weeks of childbirth from causes related to childbirth. And in the good old days, like, you know, 100 years ago, this was like 700, 800 deaths per hundred thousand live births. In other words, it was one in a thousand births, was ending with a dead mom. And this was a big problem. People saw this as a big problem and they worked very, very hard to reduce that figure. And so they drove it down to next to nothing. It went from like 700 deaths per hundred thousand live births to seven. Okay. I mean, that's a 99% reduction. It's one of the triumphs of modern medicine. But if you follow the news, you will hear reports that maternal mortality is on the rise. And the reason is that people are redefining maternal mortality and they're redefining it in a Lot of different ways. One way is instead of saying it's a death that occurs within six weeks of childbirth, that's related to childbirth, you say, well, it's a death that occurs within a year or in one case, eight years. And they will also say it's not just deaths that are directly related to childbirth, you know, an infection, you know, something, something like that. But it will include any death. Okay. If you're in an automobile accident, if you commit suicide, you know, within a year. So that, that you can imagine say a woman who is pregnant and terminates the pregnancy, has an abortion and then a year later is killed in an automobile accident. She is counted in maternal mortality statistics by some researchers. Okay. Now that, that, you know, when and, and, and there, there are, and they make an argument. And the argument is that, well, okay, this is a more accurate way of defining maternal mortality. And, and you know, maybe, you know, there's something about pregnancy, you know, contributed to the likelihood that you'd be in an automobile accident. Okay. That, you know, I can understand that argument. But what it damages is it damages the apples to apples comparison that you're trying to make over time. Okay. So that when you reduce maternal mortality by 99% according to one definition, and then another definition says that it's increasing markedly, we need to understand that we're not talking about the same things. It's not illegitimate to redefine a fact, but it is necessary that you talk about it carefully, that you speak about it in clear terms so people can understand that you're changing, you're revising the definition.
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Michael Johnson
Yeah. So it's the difference between the revising of an existing fact to reconstructing or not reconstructing, constructing a new fact, because that's a brand new fact that's been constructed as a result of the process in which it operate definitions, conceptualizations, and how it's operationalized.
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Dr. Joel Best
Yeah, yeah. And this turns out to be a real problem in other countries. The English have written a good deal about this, the British have written a good deal about this where a government will come in, a new party takes over, a new prime minister comes in, and they will insist on counting things differently because they think that the old government wasn't counting correctly. And so we're going to fix it. We're going to count things in a completely different way. But what this means is it's very difficult to track change over time because there's continually revised definitions. And what we, what would, you know, at least up until, you know, 2025, the United States has Been been blessed by federal agencies that have used very transparent systems for recording facts. And by March, they don't change those systems. They sometimes add to them. If somebody insists that we count unemployment a different way, then what will happen is the government will continue to count unemployment the old way and they'll add statistics for the new way so that, you know, you can, you know, the government now produces something like seven different unemployment measures. And, and that's a way of. Of trying to make sure that we can compare progress or whatever, the opposite of deterioration in social conditions over time.
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Michael Johnson
Well, and it's to leave the moral order intact if that. Cheating the system per se. There's an institutional memory that needs to be maintained across time in order for apples to still be compared to apples.
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Dr. Joel Best
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Michael Johnson
Then there's this final area of, rather than revising the facts, completely rejecting them, nullifying them, making them nothing. And you highlight how this rejection of the facts can be a social practice that reinforces identity and community. How should we think about denial and disbelief? Not just as misinformation, but as an organized way of making meaning and drawing boundaries. I think that sounds very Dracommianish. Even in a society of saints, there's still gonna be sinners. And even in a soc. Society of law abiding citizens, there's still going to be a criminal or two.
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Dr. Joel Best
Well, yeah, and you are. You know, I think that one of the things that's happening now is in the current environment is that there's a lot of pounding the table and saying, damn it, you know, we have the facts. You don't have the facts. And, you know, you get arguments. You know, know, this is not, you know, people care about this stuff. You know, you get, you get people saying there are two. Two genders. No, there are more than 2 genders. There may be an infinite number of genders, okay? And they're both, they're both saying, that's a fact. Or, you know, the 2020 election was free and fair. That's a fact. No, it wasn't. It was stolen. That's a fact. All right? And you get all of this table pounding, and people weaponize the word fact. They say, this is a fact. You can't argue with this. And we need to get past that. We really need to understand that our calling something a fact is not a magical tool that makes it true. Okay? And we need to appreciate that within our social circles, it may be that everybody agrees on the number of genders or the number of. Or the accuracy of the 2020 election results. But there are other social worlds out there where people are going to disagree. Now, you know, how do you deal with this? Well, you can announce that their fact is wrong. It's not a fact. And that doesn't work because, of course, the people who believe in that factor are just going to say, well, you're ignorant. You can do ad hominem arguments where you say, well, you're just the kind of person who doesn't believe in facts. And that doesn't work terribly well either. I think the secret to this is to look at evidence, okay? Evidence is really what's important here. You know, we, you know, one of the products of the Enlightenment is that we've all come to believe in evidence, okay? Now, this is it. And this is. This was a historical change. You go back in the good old days in medieval times, and what you're going to find are people who believe that the truth is set by authority. Galileo got in trouble. Galileo got in trouble. There were already Puritans in Massachusetts when Galileo got in trouble, okay? And Galileo got in trouble for saying that the sun does not revolve around the earth, that the Earth revolves around the sun, okay? He was tried, he was convicted, okay? And the argument was the Bible, you know, if you interpret the Bible correctly, it says that the sun goes around the Earth. So therefore the Bible, you know, the Bible says that it is true. That's an argument from authority, okay? Galileo was making a very different argument. He was saying, you know, we've got this evidence, okay? When we look up in the sky and observe the planets, we can see that they behave in ways that are not consistent with the sun going around the Earth, and they are consistent with the idea that the Earth goes around the sun, okay? So we've come to believe in evidence. And, you know, I'm struck by how much of our popular culture celebrates evidence. It doesn't celebrate authority, okay? It celebrates evidence so that. Think about detective stories. The whole idea with the detective story is to accumulate clues and weigh them. Think about all those medical traumas where, you know, the heroic doctors are diagnosing disease. You know, what's really wrong with this patient. Even romance stories are stories about evaluating the. The actions of another person and determining what's really going on, what's really in their heart. We believe in evidence, okay? As a culture, however it may have been before Galileo, you know, modern Americans believe in evidence. And so I think that the secret to resolving debates about facts is to say, look, let me show you my evidence and let me explain to you how my evidence is produced, and you show me your evidence and tell me how your evidence is produced. Now, you know, maybe some people will say, well, you know, I know my evidence is correct, yours is wrong. I don't have to look at yours. But, you know, the only opportunity to persuade one another is to get to the point where we're saying, look, you know, let's inspect how you know what you know and how I know what I know and compare them and see what we think. And I think that there's a little bit of optimistic potential there.
- [37:21]
Michael Johnson
So an argument or a discussion on the rationale rather than the claim that is had. Instead, looking back to see how one logically came to such a claim, bringing debates back to high schools and colleges around the world to better practice this, focusing on evidence rather than the claim itself.
- [37:42]
Dr. Joel Best
Yeah, I was a high school debater, and one of the things that has made me very sad is that high school debate turned into something very different in the decades since I debated. Where you are learning to talk at auctioneer, like speeds and, you know, trick somebody, you just, you know, it's, it's. It, you know, when we were doing it, the idea was that you were trying to persuade people in who are the listeners? And in today, it's more like, are you scoring points? You know, and it, it's not, it's not, I think, a useful intellectual discipline.
- [38:37]
Michael Johnson
This is all great, and I really appreciate the time that we were able to talk today about facts and to really dig into this book. I told my students the reason I do this is because when I pick a book up off the shelf, I don't really know what it's about until I dive into it. And then even then I ask some questions. And it's a real honor and privilege to be able to talk to the authors of all these great books that I've read and including this one. So thank you for your time today, Joel.
- [39:09]
Dr. Joel Best
Thanks so much, Michael.
- [39:11]
Michael Johnson
I do have time for one more question, and that is, what are you up to today? What are you working on?
- [39:17]
Dr. Joel Best
Well, I've started a new project which I hope will grow up to be a book. If it does, I Probably am about 5% of the way there, 3% of the way or something. It's a big project, but I'm interested in the language of social problems. And I came at this through kind of an odd way. I was thinking about how often people talk about creep and, you know, like mission creep. But, you know, when you go around, you'll hear people Using this metaphor of creep all the time so that, you know, it's the middle of September and, you know, the stores have already had Halloween stuff out for, you know, weeks. And. And, you know, it. You know, people have talked about holiday creep and so on and so forth. And then I. Then I started thinking, well, okay, creep is interesting, but. But then there are lots of words like this. I mean, think about inflation, great inflation, and, you know, so on and so forth. And we talk about lots of social problems using lots of different words and expressions and so on. And there are words that, if you use them, are considered social problems in themselves, so that we talk about the N word and the R word and the F word, and it goes on.
- [40:55]
Michael Johnson
And on and on.
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Dr. Joel Best
Turns out the whole Alphabet has been weaponized in this way when you start looking at it. And, and it just seems to me that we take. We use these words for granted. We have to have words to talk about social problems. We can't experience the social problem without, you know, using words as the tools. And it would be interesting to think about how words are employed. So I've been writing a little bit about words and the language of social problems.
- [41:34]
Michael Johnson
Revisiting the Sapir Wharf, maybe a bit.
- [41:36]
Dr. Joel Best
Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's. Well, you know, there are lots of. Part of the reason this is a big problem is that there are lots of really smart people who think about words, you know, philosophers and linguists and so on and so forth. And I'm just a sociologist, so I'm trying to. A lot of this is above my pay grade, but I think that this is interesting. You know, I'm particularly interested in the ways that we are continually changing language in the hopes of making it more correct so that we go from talking about booms to the homeless to the.
- [42:17]
Michael Johnson
Unhoused, the medical model and from criminal model and autumn, etc.
- [42:23]
Dr. Joel Best
Etc. So that's where I'm headed.
- [42:26]
Michael Johnson
Well, about a page a day or a page every couple of days, as you say, and you'll have a book in about a year.
- [42:31]
Dr. Joel Best
Yeah, well, I think this is gonna. I think this is gonna take longer than most, but. But it's, you know, it's. It's. It's what I do. It's what I enjoy.
- [42:41]
Michael Johnson
Excellent. We'll be in touch and we'll continue talking, and I'm sure I'll see you at conferences and talking about this new project. It definitely sounds like something I want to read once it's out, so. Well, thank you again for your time today, and I look forward to our continued conversations.
- [42:59]
Dr. Joel Best
Okay. Thanks, Michael.
- [43:01]
Michael Johnson
All right. This has been another episode of New Books in sociology. My name is Michael Johnston, and Today we had Dr. Joel Best to talk about his book, Just the Untangling Contradictory Claims, University of California Press, 2025. So thank you and have a great day.
- [43:31]
Dr. Joel Best
And Doug Limu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. But now we want you to feel it. Cue the emu music. Limu.
- [43:40]
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- [43:44]
Dr. Joel Best
Increase your wealth.
- [43:45]
Liquid IV / Mint Mobile Advertiser
Customize and save.
- [43:47]
Dr. Joel Best
We save. That may have been too much feeling.
- [43:51]
Liberty Mutual Advertiser
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com.
- [43:56]
Dr. Joel Best
Savings.
- [43:57]
Liberty Mutual Advertiser
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