I'm glad to finally see another die-hard realist/correspondence theorist here (Jenifer, I mean).
Cyracuz wrote:A fact is a claim of any kind that has the approval of enough people that it is accepted as truth, or perhaps actuality is a better word.
I find that idea totally bizarre. How many people is enough? If half the world believes that Jesus existed in 30AD and half the world believes he didn't, does that mean it's true both that he did exist in 30AD and that he didn't? How is that possible?
Believing does not make it so. What you are talking about is
apparent fact.
JLNobody wrote:When we talk of "facts" we usually indicate something that is "objective" and "absolute", like "brute" facts or "raw" data. But it seems to me that facts are really little theories and data are "cooked" insofar as we have preconceptions of what they are going to mean to the studies that use them.
If we have preconceptions about how to interpret data, then so much for the scientific method. I don't see what that has to do with the reality that we are trying (and perhaps failing) to gain knowledge of.
Water either does or does not freeze at 0 degrees celsius. Our belief that it does may be based on certain preconceptions, and may be a case of mere belief rather than knowledge. But the fact of the matter remains the same regardless of our epistemological access to it.
Francis wrote:If facts depend on the context and the perception of the observers, then they are simple assumptions.
But they don't, so they aren't.
Francis wrote:Sorry, this is far from being a fact.
Check out the roundness of the earth..
And don't tell me about approximativeness.
I'm afraid you're missing the point, which is that whether or not the earth is round is a matter of fact independent of whether we believe it. Jenifer may have been mistaken to claim that the earth is round*, but that claim was not central to her post. If the earth is not round then it is a fact that it isn't round, and it would still be a fact even if we all came to agree with Jenifer.
It is a fact that Jenifer believed that the earth was round, but it is also a fact that it isn't perfectly round.
*I'm sure she was being approximate though, and I'm not sure why you said, "don't tell me about approximativeness". Why not??
Quote:Mesures by satellites triangulation have already, and easily, proved it's false.
Even before those techniques existed, it was proven already.
Earth is nowhere close to rotondity.
But maybe you can assert that rotondity is not roundness...
Facts are NOT true or false. They depend on the perceiver.
So why are you imposing your perception, or the perception of some satellites, on the rest of us? If you're the relativist that you purport to be, why are you quibbling about whether or not the earth is round? Maybe it's round
to Jenifer and not
to you, and you're both right in your own ways.
Or maybe that's the most ridiculous idea anybody has ever come up with. The earth is of course, in reality, either round or not round, regardless of who perceives it and what they think.
I don't think anybody claimed that facts are "true or false". Facts are all true. It is statements about reality than can be either true or false: true if they correspond to a fact, and false if they do not. Falsity is the absence of a fact.
