This rancid interpretation of postmodernism stands tall in most Arts faculties, at least in Australia, and is passed down from the intellectuals (as defined by Rothbard) to undergrads and to a lesser extent, high school students, as a form of wisdom. Hell it isn't uncommon to see similar views being expressed on this very board.

It is appealing because it allows crackpot theories to flourish, with a wave of the hand you can dismiss any concerns about the empirical, or especially logical, merit of your position, and take whatever stance you felt like taking before considering reality.

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged demonstrates remarkable foresight when it caricatured philosophy in a degenerating society much the same way, in 1957.

I think yes. "There are no facts" is an impossible Boolean statement (I'm sure there's a real name for this kind of thing, but I don't know what it is. If anybody does, I'd like to know).

Try self-referential fallacy maybe?

The counter-argument (which generally, even the people making recognise is crapola) is that they aren't claiming "there are no facts" is a fact, they're merely stating an opinion or "raising the possiblity" or some other garbage. Even if this were true, it would undermine their position, since they would admit the opposite of their claim was "equally valid".

But you may then ask, is it a fact they are stating an opinion?

A fact is a pragmatic truth, a statement that can, at least in theory, be checked and either confirmed or denied.

Your friends example.

The sun exists.

How do we know? We can see it through telescopes, we can see it during the day (you know during sunset it becomes easier on the eyes.) NASA has confirmed as well as other nations with space programs, etc. We can feel it's heat. How can anyone deny this? Simply by using our senses we know that it exists. This would be a scientific way of explaining it.

Now if it were in a philosophical view. How do we know what we see is not real? What if it's all made up or if our minds just perceive as such. If that were truly case (I would say to your friend, etc.) then there would be no point in anything would there, since everything would be chaotic. Nothing would follow any sort of laws or rules. That means if I run out of my room right now, I'd be in Wal-mart. Or if I closed my eyes all of sudden I would be in space. Has that ever happened to anyone? Reality is perception from our senses. Anything else would not be reality and since we are living in reality, therefore "the sun exists is a fact."

Is this chic hot?

Do you have her address and number?

I'd like to go do unsavory things to her...and get away with it because it's not a 'fact' that I did.

[/*&^%wad response]

I have liked this Stephen J. Gould description of what a fact is:


"… 'fact' doesn't mean 'absolute certainty'; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. … In science 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms."

So yes, of course there are such things as facts.

A fact is a point in time. Circumstances change, the environmental context changes, what happens to the fact?

More information is revealed. And, so forth.

Facts exist. I DID drink coffee this morning... that's a fact. Facts don't change. You can state something as a Fact and be wrong...however that means you didn't have your facts straight. Opinions can change but are not facts. New facts can come to light that change our conception of previous events...but facts are still fact. A fact is a body count...an opinion is why the guy shot up the building.

She's right in a sense, there is no such thing as known fact. Any statement we make about the absolute truth of something contains a number of unspoken caveats, ranging from "assuming we can believe the evidence provided by our sense, that we exist, and that our thoughts are logical" to "assuming the universe is as it appears to be and wasn't created 5 seconds ago to look like it does now" and right through to (alarmingly often) "assuming that I'm right and everyone else is stupid". It is laborious in normal circumstances to make plain all these caveats, and in fact in daily discourse it is largely unnecessary, as we each live most of our lives within a bubble of shared assumptions.

Consequently there are "truths" within a given community which appear logical to everyone within that community because they rely on a shared and often unspoken caveat. "Cultural divides" appear when these unspoken caveats are not shared and are too deep down to be discussed. The obvious example I can think of is "the constitution is always right" which is a perfectly reasonable working point from a US perspective, but to a Briton seems utterly bizarre to have someone think they've won an argument by proving that what is being suggested is unconstitutional.

Originally Posted by CUNxTime

Facts exist. I DID drink coffee this morning... that's a fact. Facts don't change. You can state something as a Fact and be wrong...however that means you didn't have your facts straight. Opinions can change but are not facts. New facts can come to light that change our conception of previous events...but facts are still fact. A fact is a body count...an opinion is why the guy shot up the building.

You say you drank coffee this morning.

Do you have any witnesses?

You could be lying and you really drank tea.

Originally Posted by simone

You say you drank coffee this morning.

Do you have any witnesses?

You could be lying and you really drank tea.

Then it would be a lie and wouldn't be a fact. You may not believe it but it is a fact...people today seem to have a hard time with facts even when they're staring them in the face.

Originally Posted by CUNxTime

Then it would be a lie and wouldn't be a fact. You may not believe it but it is a fact...people today seem to have a hard time with facts even when they're staring them in the face.

because facts are hard and unforgiving and don't allow you a lot of wiggle room to get away with the #### you want to get away with.

Originally Posted by DrNo

A friend of mine was having a political discussion online with one of his friends. During the course of the discussion, several issues came up that she disagreed with. When he challenged her about her disagreement, stating that what he was saying was a fact, she said, "I don't believe there's such a thing as facts." He saved the IM to show me because it was so unbelievable.

He asked her if the existence of the sun was a fact, and she said no. She said we can feel its heat, but do we know it really exists? To me, this seems like a philosophical question.

Do facts really exist?

I think yes. "There are no facts" is an impossible Boolean statement (I'm sure there's a real name for this kind of thing, but I don't know what it is. If anybody does, I'd like to know). It will always be false. If it's false, it's false. If it's true, it's false, because it then becomes a fact.

I don't understand how anybody can think this way. Is it possible to be so open minded that you can eventually circle back around to having a closed mind?

Was her name René Descartes?

In philosophy a 'fact' is an actual occurance.
Facts are things that actually occur(ed), some known and identified, some unknown, and of course some are misidentified.
Statements about facts are themselves often referred to as 'facts'.
Such statements are social constructs. A group of people get together, decide they have identified an actual occurance, and they call it a fact.

Philosophy does not tell us how to 'test' or establish criterea for facts.

Various disiplines establish their own criterea.
Scientific facts are not established by the same criterea as religious facts.
Geographical facts are not established by the same criterea as astronomical facts, and so on.

Although facts themselves are, by definition, 'True', there is no gurantee that any statement of fact is true or false.

In actual usage, 'statements of fact', and facts', are indistinguishable.
We do not expect a person to say 'It is a statement of fact that the sun exists.'
What we expect is the person to say 'It is a fact that the sun exists.'

So, as the term is actually used, a fact is a social construct.
It is taken to be true within certain social groups, and rejected by others.

Originally Posted by BeHereNow

In philosophy a 'fact' is an actual occurrence.
Facts are things that actually occur(ed), some known and identified, some unknown, and of course some are misidentified.
Statements about facts are themselves often referred to as 'facts'.
Such statements are social constructs. A group of people get together, decide they have identified an actual occurrence, and they call it a fact.

Philosophy does not tell us how to 'test' or establish criterea for facts.

Various disiplines establish their own criterea.
Scientific facts are not established by the same criterea as religious facts.
Geographical facts are not established by the same criterea as astronomical facts, and so on.

Although facts themselves are, by definition, 'True', there is no gurantee that any statement of fact is true or false.

In actual usage, 'statements of fact', and facts', are indistinguishable.
We do not expect a person to say 'It is a statement of fact that the sun exists.'
What we expect is the person to say 'It is a fact that the sun exists.'

So, as the term is actually used, a fact is a social construct.
It is taken to be true within certain social groups, and rejected by others.

So because facts are created via humanity, for describing the environment of humanity, they are meaningless? There is always one truth behind every lie. If you are told an elephant is blue, purple, and spotted, that does not mean an elephant does not have a color.

Originally Posted by Atlas

So because facts are created via humanity, for describing the environment of humanity, they are meaningless? There is always one truth behind every lie. If you are told an elephant is blue, purple, and spotted, that does not mean an elephant does not have a color.

No, quite the contrary.
A social group accepts a 'fact' as being true, and acts on that.
It is understood to be true, althought sometimes it is not.
The actual facts exist by themselves, apart from humanity, but humanity identifies some of them, puts words to them, expresses these facts (actual occurances) by statements.
Everyone in the social group believes the 'fact' is true. That has value.
Now if you are the only one who sees a spotted elephant, it may be a fact to you, but no one else. And it may be an actual fact, even though you are the only one seeing it.
But being a fact, is actually less important than what the social group believes, in practice.