meaning as the truth that is out there

What is one counting?
Rules or exception? Ancedotes or statistics?
It is a real problem,.
The power of modern science was traditionally bound up with statistics- that is with treating numbers as an entity independent of facts, a distribution whose properties were well known, and that was therefore free to use to explore reality. One counted by stepping beyond actual reality, and into a theorectical world, working out what should be i this world, is all the assumptions of the real world were right, and then testing this against reality - and so judging its assumptions and hidden values.
A method that allows one to fix certainties as a probability, and so adjudicate.
The only trouble with the method is that like so much of statistics one has to go so far way from reality to produce the figures which matter. there is a lot of theory to be one, a lot of number crunching assumed (and performed). truth becomes bean counting, as is of course only as good as the beans counted.
the last fact then leads to have to divide the process into four parts,- one needs to work out first the bean to count - the theory to test, the assumptions to make, and state them: then devise the model to use; before finally collecting the data, and testing it against where the theory would have predicted. This process is necessary as it has at its heart the assumption that the theory is independnt of any one mind. one goes through this process therefore to distance the 'truth' one stands alone and independent from the flux of perception or the demands of feeling.: What is more there is tendency in statics to yearn for clean truths and not flaccid clumpy ones. I mean here the hypothesis that one demonstrates ought to be open and clear - a single theory is then tested hypothesis - and not merely a whole clump of different associated prejudices. The truth is then not about clumps of related ideas cobbled together with a name (which is the bedrock of most verbal meaning) - a world where it is never clear exact;y what one sis saying let alone proving. Statistics yearns to be exact (whether it gets there or no).
Meaning is therefore given the right to inhabit the hidden world of truth - the one where things actually lie - the tangible yet hidden reality of actual occasions. Numbers- understood as patterns as what one would predict before the test, becomes then the way to define what lies beyond us all - what we like to think of as facts . That is things we can do nothing about - truths that are just THERE.
A process that will of course creates this own world of facts, as the one that have a statistical presence are not at all the same ones that inhabit our world. other patterns other trends are seen there: For numbers are different they do things differently there. From which in turn we end up spinning out new actors new inhabitence for this world (Social facts, Genes-for this or that) - at which point the problems actually start - for this is the moment when the truths of statistics are assumed to be real things, real actors f differing sorts in the world. The real trouble of course is always at this point what kind of actors are they?
there are so many different possibilities for truth.
these range from the statistics indicating real actors somehow hidden whose agency is infered - virus are classic example here: the mass phenomena of coordinating symptoms allowed the inferal of an agency for those symptoms and the quest to find the agent: A quest repeated for DNA but also Dark matter, and dark energy- a quest then that is the stuff of Science adventures.
but there are other facts that is a sense are merely social - the product of myriad individuals reality one with the other - they have then n actually agency beyond mass participation. Facts that the come in two different forms - either certain long terms trends (such as the classic Durkheim study of suicide) or else mood things- unique constructions of crowds and mobs.
The truth then of the hidden agent or the crowd as anti-agent.
The problem then being that most complex biological and probably social construction are somewhere in between these two points. That is they have elements of agency in them (DNA, or social manipulation), and elements of mass phenomena (protein cascades, moods in a culture as well as social pressures, and realities) in them to - and it is never very simple to draw the line between the two. The problem being Even one can devise a genuine statistical test to tell these apart (that is test some hypothesis or other according to an established model), it still remains possible that the boundary is genuinely fluid betewen these two. The results then for this test here and now might not be universal - elsewhere ti is already different and that difference might well matter. There are more things hidden in our truths than our philosophies might simply allow (which does not mean of course that such testing is difficult or should be done, or never right or even not often right- it is merely that it is complicated, and one needs to not loose sight of that fact- )
What is more it is made all the more difficult because ones one does have an agency be it individual or crowd or trend in mind the rules of statistics come under strain. not because they go wrong - they do not, but rather because of that natural tendency of mind to inhabit the world it has assumed. That is we look for what we expect to find,and so up our chances of finding it (and finding it is places we might never have looked or expected, for one reason or another,- if we had not assumed that it was their). The mere act of assuming tends to change the world, if we let it - and certainly breaks with the statics that actually defined the world in the first place. again one needs care here this is not a council of disappear, so much as a problem. Ones tendencies of mind to assume truth and inhabit run against the actually practicalities of creating a truth independent from us - and we have to respect that fact: The truth might be out there but it has little to do with us and out assumptions or conspiracies- and that is the point of it.
Across this landscape an elusive figure holds its presence- a truth objective and beyond us- a truth we are grasping at, and questing towards, and yet one that cannot necessarily be simply assumed or accepted or can be only at the cast of shifting this nature: The truth that is out there is then like nothing we normally dream or or thinking it- a fact that makes it so powerful and yet hinders our ability to simply grasp or assert it at any and every turn.