A Generative Relational Account of Social Facts: A Preliminary Discussion of Journalism and the Reconstruction of Social Reality

Journalism is designated to report social facts. Whether that designation can be discharged is ordinarily treated as a question about the reporter, to be answered by care and resources; this paper treats it as a question about the object. On the account developed here a social fact has no presymbolic form, and comes to presence through the relations among situated representations produced under different language systems, so that the reconstruction available to a reader lives in the structure of divergence among them. Two consequences are derived and verified. A reconstruction so constituted survives no coarsening of the representations that carry it, which places balance and consensus summary among the operations that degrade the object they are meant to secure; and fidelity so constituted is a property of an ensemble while obligation attaches to a member, so that no single report discharges it. The paper then returns one negative result and one positive. Criteria requiring an actor to preserve or enlarge a downstream capacity are inoperable, since they require a prediction over an outcome space that cannot be specified in advance, and the same unavailability places the whole burden of prediction on departures from faithful report. What survives is a condition internal to the artefact: the domain of a claim is contained in the relational neighbourhood its material was drawn from, or the extension carries a declared warrant. The paper contributes an ontology in which divergence is constitutive, an assessment condition checkable at the time of writing, a case in which two rationales for one professional practice prescribe opposite remedies, and a formal apparatus whose propositions were checked before being stated.