Life & Wisdom Quote by Stanley Fish

Fish is doing what he does best: turning a culture-war assertion into a dare. The opening line, "I should have known better", reads like a self-correction but functions as a setup for provocation. It implies he once believed argument in public life still had stable rules, then found himself reminded that what counts as "evidence" is itself a political achievement, not a neutral referee.

The sharpest move is the fake-flat certainty of "a cultural, historical fact". Fish knows "fact" is a magic word in American debate: it signals seriousness while quietly laundering contestable claims into inevitability. By calling a disputed framing a "fact", he exposes (and exploits) how authority is manufactured. The line also smuggles in a reversal: pro-life rhetoric, long caricatured as religious or moralized, gets recast as scientifically grounded; pro-choice rhetoric, often aligned with medicine and public health, is painted as unmoored. That inversion is the point. He's not merely taking a side; he's showing how sides compete to occupy the prestige of science.

Subtextually, Fish is less interested in abortion than in epistemology as combat sport. "Based on scientific evidence" doesn't mean a consensus in a lab-coat sense; it means one movement has learned to speak the language that modern institutions reward: ultrasound imagery, fetal development timelines, neurological benchmarks. Pro-choice arguments do use science, but Fish is naming a shift in cultural optics: whose claims get to look empirical, and whose get dismissed as "values."

The intent, then, is meta-argument: in late-modern politics, winning often means redefining what counts as rational. Fish isn’t reporting the weather; he’s pointing at the thermostat.