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So "if only they would listen to the facts" is a thing people sometimes say about climate change, for example. It implies that 1) there are established truths about climate change 2) which the speaker knows and 3) which the speaker's opponent ought to also know.
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan
I get that epistemology is hard, and I get that the meaning of things is relative, but I don't get why people say facts don't exist. Can you help?
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IOW "listen to the facts" implies that the speaker and their opponent share an epistemic process for establishing shared truths and that the opponent is not participating in it. But we don't have such a shared process anymore. No shared trust in science, institutions, news, etc.
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So "listen to the facts" gets heard by the opponent as: "I have better access to the truth than you." It's epistemically rude. Not a good way to get people to actually listen to you. Will not convince anyone who thinks climate change is a liberal conspiracy.
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People who say "well, science is obviously trustworthy and has clearly established facts about climate change" aren't grappling with the genuine difficulty we now face of figuring out which fields of science we can trust and which suffer from reproducibility crises etc.
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