Fact

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Facts are the world's data
- Stephen Jay Gould (1981)

A fact (derived from the Latin factum) is something that has really occurred or is actually the case. The usual test for a statement of fact is verifiability, that is whether it can be proven to correspond to experience.

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[edit] 18th century

  • But facts are chiels that winna ding, and downa be disputed.
  • Matters of fact, which as Mr Budgell somewhere observes, are very stubborn things.

[edit] 19th century

  • "I should have more faith," he said; "I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears opposed to a long train of deductions it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation."
  • It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.
  • It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
  • The fatal futility of Fact.
  • Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
    • William James, in "Is Life Worth Living?" The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

[edit] 20th century

Facts have to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning
- Bertrand Russell (1945)
  • Facts were never pleasing to him. He acquired them with reluctance and got rid of them with relief. He was never on terms with them until he had stood them on their heads.
  • The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think.
    • Albert Einstein (1921) cited in: Philipp Frank (1947) Einstein: His Life and Times, p. 185
  • I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.
  • I despaired of the possibility of discovering the true laws by means of constructive efforts based on known facts. The longer and the more despairingly I tried, the more I came to the conviction that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to assured results.
  • Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress.
  • Not only are facts and theories in constant disharmony, they are never as neatly separated as everyone makes them out to be.
  • Scientific "facts" are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious "facts" were taught only a century ago. There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may be able to see things in perspective. At the universities the situation is even worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner. Criticism is not entirely absent. Society, for example, and its institutions, are criticised most severely and often most unfairly... But science is excepted from the criticism. In society at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. The move towards "demythologization," for example, is largely motivated by the wish to avoid any clash between Christianity and scientific ideas. If such a clash occurs, then science is certainly right and Christianity wrong. Pursue this investigation further and you will see that science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer.
  • Results from a given approach are "facts" as long as the approach fits the group or the tradition that is being addressed
  • Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them.
    • Stephen Jay Gould "Evolution as Fact and Theory", pp. 254–55, originally appeared in Discover Magazine, May 1981.
  • The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind.
  • Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
  • The subversive character of truth inflicts upon thought an imperative quality. Logic centers on judgments which are, as demonstrative propositions, imperatives, — the predicative “is” implies an “ought.” ... Verification of the proposition involves a process in fact as well as in thought: (S) must become that which it is. The categorical statement thus turns into a categorical imperative; it does not state a fact but the necessity to bring about a fact. For example, it could be read as follows: man is not (in fact) free, endowed with inalienable rights, etc., but he ought to be.
  • Historical facts, many of them, have an intrinsic value, a profound interest on their own account, which makes them worthy of study, quite apart from any possibility of linking them together by means of causal laws.
Facts are constituted by older ideologies
Paul Karl Feyerabend (1975)
  • We are driven back to correspondence with fact as constituting the nature of truth. It remains to define precisely what we mean by 'fact', and what is the nature of the correspondence which must subsist between belief and fact, in order that belief may be true.
  • A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.
  • When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only: What are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.
  • A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.
  • Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
    • Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (1987)

[edit] Unsourced

  • Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!
    • Homer Simpson
  • The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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