Fact

Lore & Background

A fact is a true datum about one or more aspects of a circumstance or an occurrence in the real world. Standard reference works are often used to check facts. Scientific facts are verified by careful, repeatable observation or measurement by experiments or other means. After accounts of knowledge of facts such as that by epistemologist Angelika Kratzer in 2002 were applied to Gettier problems, according to Paul Boghossian, the Enlightenment-era consensus justified true belief definition of knowledge—in which knowledge encompasses facts—remains the "standard, widely accepted" one, though Bernecker and Dretske argued in 2000 that no epistemologist since Gettier has seriously and successfully defended that traditional view. This is despite wide, though not universal, agreement among analytic philosophers that the first two criteria of the definition are correct: that knowledge implies an agent accepting a true proposition, such as a fact. Examples include linguistic facts ("This sentence contains words"), astronomical facts ("the Sun is a star"), and historical facts ("Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States" and "Abraham Lincoln was assassinated"). In philosophy, the concept of fact is most commonly considered in epistemology, and possibly also in ontology, which studies existence, being, becoming, and reality. A fact can be defined as something that is the case—a state of affairs. Facts may be understood as information that makes a true sentence true: the worldly correlate of a true proposition, a state of affairs whose obtaining makes that proposition true. Facts may also be understood as those things to which a true sentence refers. Pascal Engel's version of the correspondence theory of truth explains that what makes a sentence true is that it corresponds to a fact, presupposing an objective world. The Slingshot argument claims to show that all true statements stand for the same thing—the truth value true—leading to the counter-intuitive conclusion that there is only one fact: the truth. Any non-trivial true statement about reality is an abstraction composed of a complex of objects and properties or relations; facts possess internal structure, being complexes of objects and properties or relations. For example, the fact "Paris is the capital city of France" implies the existence of Paris, France, capital cities, a French government with

Reader's Guide

The concept of fact is most commonly considered in epistemology, where it is central to questions of knowledge and truth. In science, a scientific fact is an objective and verifiable observation, in contrast with a hypothesis or theory. Philosophers and scientists distinguish between states of affairs in the external world and assertions of fact relevant in scientific analysis. The term fact also indicates a matter under discussion deemed to be true or correct, or may indicate an allegation or stipulation of something that may or may not be a true fact, a usage with a long history in standard English according to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

Did You Know?

• The word fact derives from the Latin factum, first used in English meaning 'a thing done or performed'.
• Charles Sanders Peirce described four methods to decide what to believe: tenacity, method of authority, a priori, and scientific method.
• The Slingshot argument claims to show that all true statements stand for the same thing, the truth value true.
• Moral philosophers since David Hume have debated whether values are objective and thus factual, known as the is–ought distinction.