Is there such a thing as a 'fact'?

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Consul
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Re: Is there such a thing as a 'fact'?

Post by Consul »

Two different definitions:

"Eine Tatsache ist ein Gedanke, der wahr ist."
"A fact is a thought which is true."


—Gottlob Frege ("Der Gedanke"/"The Thought", 1918)

"Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten."
"What is the case, the fact, is the obtaining of states of affairs."


—Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus, 1921)

Note that Fregan facts are true propositions, because Fregean thoughts are abstract, nonmental items rather than concrete, mental acts of thinking!

Propositions: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions/

States of Affairs: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/states-of-affairs/

Facts: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/facts/

QUOTE>
"The first truism to which I wish to draw your attention—and I hope you will agree with me that these things that I call truisms are so obvious that it is almost laughable to mention them—is that the world contains facts, which are what they are whatever we may choose to think about them, and that there are also beliefs, which have reference to facts, and by reference to facts are either true or false."

(Russell, Bertrand. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism. 1918. Edited by David Pears. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1985. p. 40)
———
"Facts are contested entities. Some, such as Panayot Butchvarov, deny their existence altogether. (Butchvarov 1979, 244–247) Others admit them but differ dramatically as to their nature. I see the main division among the friends of facts as that between concretists who locate them in the space-timeworld and abstractists who don’t. I will begin with the concretist conception of facts as contingent truth-makers. This is the conception we find in Armstrong. The next task will be to confront Butchvarov’s formidable anti-fact arguments. I then examine some of the problems with the concretist view, and how under dialectical pressure Armstrong came to modify his version of it near the end of his career. This is followed by a look at the abstractist view of facts that we find in Reinhardt Grossmann. Grossmann’s could be called a hybrid abstractist view in that he considers first-order facts to have concrete subject constituents. (Grossmann 1992, 73–84) I will not discuss the purely abstractist view of states of affairs one finds in Roderick Chisholm according to which they are “abstract entities which exist necessarily and which are such that some but not all of them occur, take place or obtain.” (Chisholm 1976, 114; cf. Plantinga 1974, 44–45) On the purely abstractist view facts are insufficiently different from propositions to warrant discussion here. Of the four main views of facts just distinguished, the eliminativist, the concretist, the hybrid abstractist, and the pure abstractist…"

(Vallicella, William F. "Facts: An Essay in Aporetics." In Metaphysics and Scientific Realism: Essays in Honour of David Malet Armstrong, edited by Francesco F. Calemi, 105-131. Boston: de Gruyter, 2016. p. 105)
<QUOTE
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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