Facts only become meaningful through pre-existing conceptual criteria of choice

Evidence

An enquiry into a series of facts to discover the relations between them presupposes a “concept” that permits one to distinguish that series from other possible series of facts. How can there take place a choice of facts to be adduced as proof of the truth of one’s own assumption if one does not have a pre-existing criterion of choice? But what is this criterion of choice to be, if not something superior to each single fact under enquiry? An intuition, a conception, which must be regarded as having a complex history, a process that is to be connected with the whole process of the development of culture (etc.). This observation may be connected with the other one on the “sociological law”, in which one simply repeats the same fact twice, the first time as a fact and the second time as a law, and which is a sophism of the double fact and not a law at all. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1637

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes Gramsci’s crucial epistemic point that knowledge presupposes a concept, foreshadowing the Theory-Dependence and Construct/Concept claims.
• XREF: Connects forward to the Islamophobia toolkit’s representation/construction-of-the-Other theme: facts about Muslims are selected via pre-existing concepts, a core mechanism later arguments about Islamophobia will rely on. — connects to: Facticity is only ever graspable as already recovered and freely constructed — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 345; In simulation, models precede and engender facts rather than describing them. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 62; Biological facts only matter through the concrete value they have in action — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 142
• DEEPTHINKING: This dense epistemological claim — that the criterion of fact-selection is itself a product of cultural history — recurs throughout the reader’s whole toolkit and resists one-sentence summary.