The word “fact” comes from factum, the past participle of the Latin verb facere, “to do.” The oldest meaning of “fact” in English, accordingly, has it as a near synonym of “deed,” or “thing that has been done.” This meaning is still retained in legal parlance, as in the phrase “accessory before the fact.”
Much more commonly, however, in today’s English, “fact” is used to describe not just the relatively small class of things that are done, but also the much broader class of things that simply happen. Facts, then, are understood to be real occurrences, events, or states of affairs, and are contrasted with whatever has not, and perhaps never will, occur or arise. Some speak of false facts promulgated by partisans of the opposite side of an ideological battle, but they are misspeaking, for if what is claimed is false, it is eo ipso not a fact.
While facts must be true, the converse is not necessarily the case. Folk tales might be thought to be true, yet not factual. Their truth lies in some moral message or meaning-endowing symbolism conveyed in the form of a narrative. The same may be said of the truth of scripture. On this understanding, the literalist insistence that everything reported in, say, the Old Testament, must have happened turns on a conflation of truth and fact. For it needn’t have happened in order, in the most profound sense —which arguably is the only sense with which religion need be concerned— in order to be true. Sometimes, politicians as well attempt to move to that exalted mode of discourse that deals in truths not necessarily based in fact. Memorably, when Ronald Reagan claimed that trees cause pollution, he was said by his aides to be speaking in “parables” that, while perhaps not factual, were the reflection of larger truths. Ordinarily, though, we expect purported truths to be rooted in fact; if they are not, we feel betrayed. Facts would seem to be to truth, then, roughly what collateral is to a loan.
An old Soviet literary journal announced in its title that it dealt with “Arguments and Facts [Argumenty i Fakty].” This title suggests, not unreasonably, that the two domains are non-coextensive, and that, where we have facts, we cannot have any more arguments.
Naturally, it is a good idea to secure for any claim that one supports the status of fact. But what is to count? Surely, police detectives can feel comfortable that they’ve secured the status of fact for a suspected murder when DNA tests on the blood on a suspect’s shirt come out positively, or when a videotape showing the suspect in flagrante delicto turns up. A scientist believes herself to be at least on the way to establishing a fact when she reproduces the results of some experiment conducted half a world away.
But there are many things people believe to be true, the factualness of which is much more difficult for all to agree upon. Some do not believe that the discovery of dinosaur fossils does anything to corroborate the truth of the theory of evolution: they insist that these could just as easily have been planted by the devil as a ruse, or that the bones were flash-fossilized within the past few thousand years. Some do not believe that the statistics concerning the racial background of prison inmates in the US show that the prison system is inherently racist, even though these are the same statistics often invoked to show that it is. The same culture that produced Argumenty i Fakty was for many decades devoted to the aesthetic ideology of socialist realism, which had it that depictions in painting of states of affairs that were nowhere to be seen in Stalin’s miserable Soviet Union could nonetheless be thought of as truthful depictions, since the truth of socialism guaranteed that the glorified images in socialist realist art would someday become fact.
In each of these three examples, we see the difficulty in distinguishing between fact on the one hand, and one of its three opposites on the other hand: theory, opinion, and fancy. Let us look further at each of these in turn.
Fact vs. Theory. Creationists often point out that evolution is just a theory of the origin of biological species, not a fact about it. Some have even noted that evolutionists themselves concede the merely theoretical status of their chosen explanation, and take this to be a count against the theory: those evolutionists admit it’s just a theory, whereas we creationists take divine, instantaneous creation to be a fact. Thus, the reasoning seems to go, creationism beats evolution from the very start, since it makes factual claims rather than theoretical ones. But this misses the fundamental point of that truth-seeking enterprise, science. It is precisely what makes the claims of science so strong that those who make them never insist on any more robust status for them than that of “theory.” If any scientific claim were to be promoted out of the theoretical category to the rank of fact simpliciter, it would for that reason no longer be a scientific claim, but rather an article of dogma. Science’s strength is that it does not demand any results as strong as the ones the creationists believe they have already come by. Science, on all but the most anti-realist construal, looks for facts, to be sure, but it is always ready to reject what it at one point takes to be facts, should a better explanation of the phenomena come forward.
Fact vs. Opinion. Our moral educators teach us from early childhood to “respect the opinions of others.” The ability to do so is considered a virtue in a pluralistic society. But can we fully respect them without compromising our own commitments? When it comes to moral, political, or aesthetic views, often we do not want our own commitments to be taken by others as opinions at all, unless they are clearly based in nothing more than whim or personal idiosyncracy, such as a commitment to the view that red is better than green, or Bach better than Beethoven. But if I have a substantive political or moral opinion, such as the view that abortion is acceptable or preemptive war is wrong, I’m going to hold this view to be true, and thus I’m going to want it to have some collateral fact behind it. If I think tough criminal penalties for drug convictions are unjust, then I must think that your opinion, that such penalties are just, is in fact wrong. Of course, as philosophers have been well aware since the rise of logical positivism in the early 20th century, it is more difficult to account for the factualness of claims about right and wrong, or beauty and ugliness, than of claims about, say, chemical bonds or the weather. Nonetheless, all but the most rigid positivists (a moribund if not extinct breed) presume, or hope, that there is something about the way the world is, i.e., a fact, other than our individual idiosyncratic constitutions, that makes what we think is right or beautiful right or beautiful, and opinions turn out to be held, not unproblematically, only by those who disagree with us, while we ourselves trade only in facts.
Fact vs. Fancy. To believe that socialist realist painting offers a veracious depiction of its subjects is to believe, again, in a truth greater than fact. Somewhat simililarly, though also very differently, Plato imagined long before Stalin that true justice, say, is something much greater than all the flawed approximations of justice we might come across in this world. Facts about the world, on these men’s understandings, are rather lowly things; what matters is the truth that these things are bound to realize, or bound to fail to realize, as the case may be. What one fancies out to be the case, and perhaps consequently imagines is the case, usually has to do with one’s values.
Even if one does not believe in an ideal realm of unchanging truths, or in a coming utopia guaranteed by historical destiny, one may still believe in truths that are, as it were, above facts. Hume for example, among many others, distinguishes between what he calls “matters of fact” and “relations of ideas.” Any true statement involving a relation of ideas will be necessarily true, while one involving matters of fact can at most be contingently true. In this sense, a matter of fact is something that merely happens, and whatever happens, presumably, could have happened otherwise. The factual, in this sense, is distinguished from the necessary, the latter of which involves not the things and events of this world, but only ideal entities not subject to change. Here, what happens to be the case in the world is being distinguished not from what some dreamers fancifully imagine to be the case, but rather from what is true in such a robust way that its truth does not depend on any particular way the world is.
Bibliography
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Anthony Flew (Open Court Publishing, 1988).
Robinson, Daniel N. Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Applications(Princeton University Press, 2002).
Musschenga, A. W., and Wim J. Van Der Steen. Reasoning in Ethics and Law: The Role of Theory, Principles, and Facts. (Ashgate Publishing Company, 1999).
Ruse, Michael, and Edward O. Wilson. The Evolution Wars: A Guide to the Debates (Rutgers University Press, 2001).
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