What exactly did Nietzsche and Foucault mean when they declared: "There are no facts, only interpretations"?

By Rolf Bazuin

The problem he was referring to is metaphysical in nature. In essence, what he meant was that we have never seen objective reality for what it truly is, rather, we only know our experience of what we think is objective reality. There is really no way to tell how strong the correlation is between what we perceive and what is perceived, because we would have to bypass our own subjective experience, and that's impossible as our subjective experience is the only way for us to know the reality that surrounds us. So, what comes out of this, is that what we typically refer to as objectively true, is in fact a convention about truth.

Probably the best example of differentiating in this manner is the fundamental axiom of psychology: the construction of one's own reality. We know that the brain has a very limited capacity to process data; for instance, the retina has about a 127 million optic receptors, yet the image sent through the optic nerve is equivalent to about 1 million 'data units'. Also, the retina is scanned about 15,000 times per second, yet only 24 frames per second can fool our brain into believing that we are looking at a motion picture. As can be seen, the nervous system has to discard about 99.999999% of visual data even before it gets to the primary visual cortex. All this data will never even be presented to your brain. From these facts alone, it must be argued that what we perceive must have an extremely low correlation to what there actually is. All in all, the chances of us overlooking some bigger picture are extremely high.

So, what this amounts to is that there are no facts, just interpretations. Inside our head, we have all kinds of 'perfect' Ideas in the form of logical concepts. But they are just that: logical concepts. And as is argued above, proving these concepts to be objectively true is completely impossible, due to the fact that it is doubtful that we're experiencing objective reality for what it truly is. Therefore, as far as mankind is concerned, we must accept that what we think of as objective reality, is nothing more than our interpretation of it - from our viewpoint, there are no facts, only our interpretations of what we believe to be facts.