Factual Error Theory

Quick random thought, not meant to be fully developed.

There's this whole debate about moral realism, and one theory is called "moral error theory," which supposes that people delude themselves into thinking that there are moral truths. When these people articulate moral positions, they take themselves to be talking about real things, but in reality moral statements should be understood as emoting or affiliating with a particular viewpoint.

My random thought is that you could characterize a lot of factual debates the same way. I don't want to go full nihilist here, but it strikes me that we might live in a world of practical nihilism, where large areas of factual disagreement are not resolvable in practice, and where arguments about them take the same form that moral error theorists believe moral arguments do.

I think this is probably a trivial observation, but maybe it helps capture some of what is going on with modern politics.