***** In the ideology of empiricism the world is regarded as flat, uniform, unstructured and undifferentiated: it consists essentially of atomistic events or states of affairs which are constantly conjoined, so occuring in closed systems. Such events and their constant conjunctions are known by asocial, atomistic individuals who passively sense (or apprehend) these given facts and register their constant conjunctions. Underpinning and necessary are thus dehumanized beings in desocialized relationships. Facts usurp the place of things, conjunctions that of causal laws and automata those of people, as reality is defined in terms of the cosmic contingency of human sense-experience (as conceived by empiricism).
What is the meaning of the fact form? Facts are real, but they are historically specific realities. Thy mystification attached to them derives from the condition that, in our spontaneous way of thinking and in empiricism, the philosophy which reflects this, the properties possessed by facts as _social objects_ are transformed into qualities belonging to them as _natural things_. Fetishism, by naturalizing facts, at once collapses and so destratifies their generative or sustaining social context and the mode of their production, reproduction, and transformation in time, ipso facto dehistoricizing and eternalizing them. The fact form thus acts as an ideology of what Kuhn has called 'normal science,' obscuring from scientists and non-scientists alike the historically specific structures and relations generating sense-experience in science. It is an objective mystification, partly analogous to the value form, generated by the very nature of the activities in which we engage -- a mystification we must achieve distance from if we are to be able to think the possibility of a critique of the very forms in which the social world presents itself. (8-9) *****
Yoshie