George asked:

If the truth is indeed 'out-there', where is the location of it? To put it another way: if simulation or
mediation are to be considered inseparable from their origin and outcome (books acting as starting
points of production/consumption for instance), where is ground-zero fact? Is it through philosophy,
science, or could it be in aesthetic rhetoric?

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If every object of human knowledge is necessarily altered by the very act of coming to know it, or
bringing it before the human mind, then it looks as though the attempt to uncover 'ground-zero' fact is
doomed to failure. There seems to be no way, in principle, that you could factor out the contribution
made by the object as it is in itself, from the contribution made by human knowledge, perception,
concepts, or language.

If the argument I have just given is correct, then there can be no exceptions, not for philosophy, not
for science. I'm not sure what you mean by 'aesthetic rhetoric'. As Hegel shows at the beginning of
the Phenomenology of Mind,if you try to describe things on a purely aesthetic level, just as they
appear prior to conceptualization, you end up babbling.

Is this a worry? Here is what I say in Chapter One of my book Naive Metaphysics,where I compare
the knowledge gained through pursuing a philosophical investigation with

...the neurosis which disappears in the course of its being brought to light, the particle which moves
when we try physically to observe its position. Yet still, neuroses are uncovered, the positions of
particles are observed. In each case, the relation between knower and known reveals an internal
complexity, a special dynamic which each form of knowledge works through in its own way. The
illusion to be got rid of is that this is somehow second best, the thought that ideally what one would
like to have before one's mind is the object itself, rather than the mere knowledge of that object.

However, the implication of your question is that if there is no 'ground zero' fact to be uncovered, then
we cannot legitimately speak of truth being 'out there'. The alternative is to say that the truth is 'in us'.
Truth is something we make or construct, rather than discover or reveal. In other words, idealism is
the inevitable conclusion.

As one of the philosophers who are prepared to take arguments for an idealist or 'anti-realist'
conclusion seriously, I think that you have tried to buy an idealist conclusion too cheaply!

Suppose we start off by assuming the existence of facts 'out there', in your sense — something like
Kantian 'things in themselves', but without the implication that these things exist outside space or
time. Knowledge, you say, always entails bringing these objects in relation to our cognitive faculties.
So what we know are only things as they are 'for us', not things as they are 'in themselves'. But note
that this conclusion is about knowledge,not about truth.The argument as it stands is not a reductio
ad absurdum of the realist belief in facts 'out there', but simply a straight deduction leading to an
empty metaphysical scepticism, which leaves all of human knowledge exactly where it was before.

Geoffrey Klempner