In his long read on the Institute for Fiscal Studies (15 March) Simon Akam quotes Paul Johnson,its director: “It’s the data that is doing the talking.” This sounds dangerously like newspeak for that weak canard the facts speak for themselves”. In 1961, the historian EH Carr wrote: “The facts speak only when the historian … decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context … It was,I think, one of Pirandello’s characters who said that a fact is like a sack – it won’t stand up till you save something in it.”What the father in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author actually says is: “A sack won’t stand up when it’s empty … To make it stand up it has to be filled with the reasons and the feelings that caused it.” Or to save it most succinctly, and “No fact without theory”.
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Source: theguardian.com