Yesterday 09:30 PM
(This post was last modified: 8 hours ago by Magical Realist.)
'Facts, facts, facts,' cries the scientist if he wants to emphasize the necessity of a firm foundation for science. What is a fact? A fact is a thought that is true. But the scientist will surely not recognize something which depends on men's varying states of mind to be the firm foundation of science."--Gottlob Frege
Regularly it is supposed that facts, like things and properties and laws of nature, are objective parts of the world. That they sort of sit out there, in some mysteriously unarticulated form, waiting for us to state them. But is this so? Can anything about a fact as we understand it be ascribed with properties making it some unalterable entity independent of our minds? Not really.
Take the fact "Today is Sunday." Here I am proposing that this day right now has the name of Sunday. It is certainly undeniable today, but in fact will no longer be a fact tomorrow. It's factuality is entirely contingent on WHEN it is being stated as well as on which side of our planet it is being stated on.
Furthermore, where is "today being Sunday" in any sense existing separately from my stating it as such. The facticity of the statement lies entirely in its truth and not in its representing some objective state of the world. That's why we always say "it is a fact THAT" such and such is the case. IOW, it is TRUE that such and such is the case. We would never claim that there was any truth in today merely being Sunday. A mere state of affairs in the world is neither true nor false. It just is. It is only the statements of such that can be true or facts.
Here lies the crux of the matter that Frege was getting at. That for all the fanfare among physicalists about facts and their supposed absolute and objective ontic status, they are really never anything more than propositional truths occurring as thoughts in our minds. "Objective" perhaps AS consensually acknowledged statements that we all believe in. But nothing more than that.
Susan Sontag puts it this way: "The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is." Richard Rorty puts even more starkly: "To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations. The suggestion that truth is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own."
Regularly it is supposed that facts, like things and properties and laws of nature, are objective parts of the world. That they sort of sit out there, in some mysteriously unarticulated form, waiting for us to state them. But is this so? Can anything about a fact as we understand it be ascribed with properties making it some unalterable entity independent of our minds? Not really.
Take the fact "Today is Sunday." Here I am proposing that this day right now has the name of Sunday. It is certainly undeniable today, but in fact will no longer be a fact tomorrow. It's factuality is entirely contingent on WHEN it is being stated as well as on which side of our planet it is being stated on.
Furthermore, where is "today being Sunday" in any sense existing separately from my stating it as such. The facticity of the statement lies entirely in its truth and not in its representing some objective state of the world. That's why we always say "it is a fact THAT" such and such is the case. IOW, it is TRUE that such and such is the case. We would never claim that there was any truth in today merely being Sunday. A mere state of affairs in the world is neither true nor false. It just is. It is only the statements of such that can be true or facts.
Here lies the crux of the matter that Frege was getting at. That for all the fanfare among physicalists about facts and their supposed absolute and objective ontic status, they are really never anything more than propositional truths occurring as thoughts in our minds. "Objective" perhaps AS consensually acknowledged statements that we all believe in. But nothing more than that.
Susan Sontag puts it this way: "The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is." Richard Rorty puts even more starkly: "To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations. The suggestion that truth is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own."