lish a durable new basis for common sense, while so totally opposing
good sense.
The Two Contradictory Requirements Captured
in the Notion of FactLet us first undo the packet that until now held the concept of fact, as
opposed to that of value. We notice that it envelops two very different
requirements. We need to know how many new propositions emerge
in the discussion, and what is the well-defined essence or the indisput-
able nature of these propositions. When the focus is on the stubborn,
troubling, recalcitrant matter of concern, two features stand out that
can and must be distinguished, for they are in complete opposition:
the first stresses the importance and uncertainty of discussing; the
second stresses the importance of not discussing, ofno longerdiscuss-
ing.
Let us start with the first one, with which the second finds itself
mixed up, if not by mistake then at least by accident. The ambiguous
term “fact” refers to the ability of an entity to force the discussion to
deviate, to trouble the order of discourse, to interfere with habits, to
disturb the definition of the pluriverse that the participants were seek-
ing to retain. In this first sense, to use the expressions from the pre-
vious chapter, facts signal the existence of surprising actors that in-
tervene to modify, by a series of unanticipated events, the list of
mediators that up to then made up the habits of the members of the
collective. That a matter of concern is recalcitrant does not in any way
mean that it is objective or certain, or even indisputable. On the con-
trary, it agitates, it troubles, it complicates, it provokes speech, it may
arouse a lively controversy. External reality, as we have seen, means
two entirely different things, which we must now not only stop con-
fusing but also file in quite distinct boxes: one referring tocomplication
and the other tounification.Facts present themselves initially in the
first form, in the laboratory, on the research front, in the garb of be-
ings of uncertain status that demand to be taken into account and
about whom one cannot say whether they are serious, stable, delim-
ited, present, or whether they may not soon, through another experi-
ment, another trial, scatter into as many artifacts, reducing the num-
ber of those whose existence matters. At this stage propositions do no
A NEW SEPARATION OF POWERS
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