Factical Philosophy a Progressive Research Programme for the Diagnosis of the Technological Present

This article proposes Factical Philosophy (FP) as a progressive research programme in the Lakatosian sense, designed to unify a methodologically dispersed field around a double structural problem: the Great Opacity of the Present — the constitutive opacity of advanced technologies regarding their own mechanisms, effects, and systemic implications — and Temporal Asynchrony — the structural fracture between the velocity of technological deployment and the analytical cycles of an academy anchored in twentieth-century modes of knowledge production. No existing tradition resolves both problems simultaneously. FP proposes a unified methodological architecture that integrates the most exceptional tools of ten adjacent traditions — including STS, Critical Theory (Frankfurt School), Feenberg’s Critical Technology Theory, Critical Algorithm Studies, and creative nonfiction — under a single hard core: four constitutive principles (Radical Facticity, Constitutive Opacity, Diagnosis Without Verdict, Systemic Implication), a four-phase method (the Factical Philosopher method), and a genre of production (Factual Narrative Science). The article formalizes the programme’s Lakatosian structure — hard core, negative heuristic, positive heuristic, protective belt — and demonstrates progressive problemshift through two independent sections: Section 8 applies Modality I: Original Construction to generative AI; Section 9 applies Modality II: Hermeneutic Dissection to Empire of AI (Hao, 2025), revealing the rationality of cognitive enclosure that Hao’s journalism documents empirically but does not formalize methodologically. Both sections operate in academic register; full diagnoses in Factual Narrative Science genre will be published as independent studies