Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

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Veritas Aequitas
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Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

Peter Holmes wrote: Sun Apr 04, 2021 11:52 am .....
Note my main principle of 'what is fact', i.e.
whatever is claimed as 'fact' must be verified and justified empirically and philosophically within a credible FSK.

What I claimed as moral facts has met the above requirements albeit its credibility is not as close as science, but the major inputs into my moral FSK are scientific facts.

Because what is fact to me is via a FSK [human construct], FSK-based-facts are NEVER absolutely independent of the human conditions.
  • 1. On the other hand, what is you claimed as fact is opposite to mine, i.e. they [facts] are absolutely independent of the human conditions.

    2. But then you agree with the empirical verification and justification of your facts which has to be done within a human constructed FSK, e.g. the scientific FSK thus mingling your 'fact' with the human conditions. This is a contradiction to your 1 above.
How do you resolve the above contradiction?
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Terrapin Station
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Re: Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by Terrapin Station »

I don't know to what extent Peter's views on this are the same as mine but "fact" isn't defined as "something that obtains independently of persons," (specifying "persons" is important because it wouldn't only be humans who have mental phenomena). It's just that most facts are independent of persons.

Facts are states of affairs--(dynamic) ways that the world happens to be. Most of the world doesn't consist of persons. But some of it does. So a fact such as Venus' atmosphere being presently comprised of about 96.5% carbon dioxide is independent of persons, but a fact such as human brains producing mental phenomena obviously isn't independent of persons.

One thing that causes confusion here is that most facts, even those having to do with persons, are independent of persons' beliefs. So, for example, a fact such as human brains producing mental phenomena isn't independent of persons, but it is independent of the belief that mental phenomena are really a non-personal manifestation of God. The only facts that aren't independent of beliefs are facts about beliefs, such as the fact that "Joe believes that mental phenomena are a non-personal manifestation of God."

"Whatever is claimed as 'fact' must be verified and justified empirically and philosophically within a credible FSK" isn't true, by the way, at least not stated that way. If you were to say, "Whatever is claimed as 'fact' must be verified and justified empirically and philosophically within a credible FSK in order for me to believe it," or something like that, then that could very well be the case.

By the way, there's no need to add the word "absolutely" in your post, and I have a pet peeve about the term "human condition."
Last edited by Terrapin Station on Tue Apr 06, 2021 2:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by Terrapin Station »

By the way, if you want something contradictory, the simple belief that facts obtain due to consensus (in some epistemic system/framework), where facts are NOT independent of persons/their beliefs/etc., BUT facts require verification/justification, is contradictory. Well, at least outside of thinking that the verification/justification they require is simply checking what other people say/believe. You'd not be able to appeal to people checking what the world is like outside of what other people say/believe.

(And how you'd ever get to being able to check what other people say/believe, if you believe that we can't observe what the world is like aside from ourselves, is a mystery you've yet to tackle or even acknowledge that you understand the need for tackling.)
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Re: Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by Peter Holmes »

Veritas Aequitas wrote: Mon Apr 05, 2021 6:00 am
Peter Holmes wrote: Sun Apr 04, 2021 11:52 am .....
Note my main principle of 'what is fact', i.e.
whatever is claimed as 'fact' must be verified and justified empirically and philosophically within a credible FSK.

What I claimed as moral facts has met the above requirements albeit its credibility is not as close as science, but the major inputs into my moral FSK are scientific facts.

Because what is fact to me is via a FSK [human construct], FSK-based-facts are NEVER absolutely independent of the human conditions.
  • 1. On the other hand, what is you claimed as fact is opposite to mine, i.e. they [facts] are absolutely independent of the human conditions.

    2. But then you agree with the empirical verification and justification of your facts which has to be done within a human constructed FSK, e.g. the scientific FSK thus mingling your 'fact' with the human conditions. This is a contradiction to your 1 above.
How do you resolve the above contradiction?
What we call a fact is a feature of reality that is or was the case. That's my take on the Concise Oxford definition: fact - a thing that is known to exist, to have occured, or to be true.

I don't agree with the 'is known' condition, and I think the truth condition, which is disjunctive, applies only to factual assertions - typically, linguistic expressions. Outside language, features of reality obviously have no truth-value: true or false. They just do or don't, or did or didn't, exist.

The crucial point is that what is or was the case has nothing to do with language, or any description of what is or was the case. So there were, are and will be facts that, by definition, existed, exist and will exist independently from any kind of description, such as description by humans.

VA's mistake is to conflate the two uses of the word fact and conclude that, since a fact can be a true factual assertion, and any true factual assertion we make - any descriptive truth-claim - must be human, therefore facts must be 'bound up with the human condition'. The 'feature of reality that is or was the case' part is forgotten.

And this is a simple but deeply seductive mistake - as VA and the dick-troll demonstrate.
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Re: Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by Atla »

Peter Holmes wrote: Mon Apr 05, 2021 12:12 pm VA's mistake is to conflate the two uses of the word fact and conclude that, since a fact can be a true factual assertion, and any true factual assertion we make - any descriptive truth-claim - must be human, therefore facts must be 'bound up with the human condition'. The 'feature of reality that is or was the case' part is forgotten.

And this is a simple but deeply seductive mistake - as VA and the dick-troll demonstrate.
As the upcoming saviour of humanity, VA he totally has the right to redefine the entire English language, soon everyone will be using the new version. He's just fixing the old one, he's doing us a service. Why don't you show some gratitude?
Veritas Aequitas
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Re: Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

Terrapin Station, Peter,
Terrapin Station wrote: Mon Apr 05, 2021 11:50 am I don't know to what extent Peter's views on this are the same as mine by "fact" isn't defined as "something that obtains independently of persons," (specifying "persons" is important because it wouldn't only be humans who have mental phenomena). It's just that most facts are independent of persons.
Peter Holmes wrote: Mon Apr 05, 2021 12:12 pm What we call a fact is a feature of reality that is or was the case. That's my take on the Concise Oxford definition: fact - a thing that is known to exist, to have occured, or to be true.
Noted your above posts and I believe there is a lot of confusions on the term 'fact' as used by myself, Terrapin and Peter.

To me 'what is fact' [feature of reality] cannot standalone from reality as such must be verified and justified empirically and philosophically within a credible FSK.

Terrapin has his own views on what is fact which is different from Peter's definition.

Since there are various views on what is fact,
I believe it is best to trace 'what is fact' to its historical origin.
Last edited by Veritas Aequitas on Tue Apr 06, 2021 9:06 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

I believe the term fact which was adopted dogmatical by the LPs started with Hume,
In 1739, David Hume cast a fork aggressively dividing "relations of ideas" from "matters of fact and real existence", such that all truths are of one type or the other.[17][18]

By Hume's fork, truths by relations among ideas (abstract) all align on one side (analytic, necessary, a priori), whereas truths by states of actualities (concrete) always align on the other side (synthetic, contingent, a posteriori).[17]

Of any treatises containing neither, Hume orders, "Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_p ... Principles
Note strong words and antagonism Hume used above.
Veritas Aequitas
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Re: Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

To track to the used of 'fact' by the LPs, note this;
The last well-known systematic philosophy of facts was the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Wittgenstein, which depended heavily on a conception of atomic or basic facts, conceived as logically simple, independent structures in a logical space.
But Wittgenstein repudiated the metaphysic in his later work.
Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy – Simon Blackburn
Wittgenstein repudiated his view of "what is fact" but it seem the LPs and classical analytic philosophy are still relying upon it at present.
I believe Peter's view of what is fact is similar to this definition.
Peter, do you agree with the below?

The details are below.
Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy – Simon Blackburn

Fact
Wittgenstein wrote that the world was the totality of facts, not of things.

But although facts have the nice solid ring about them that opposes them to such things as values or theories, they prove to be slippery items out of which to build anything.

Facts seem to be shaped just like sentences: it is a fact that dogs bark and stones sink.
It may also be a fact that children have rights or that sun and rain make rainbows.
Modern thought has been sympathetic to a *deflationist or *minimalist view of the notion.
On this account it is first pointed out that ‘it is a fact that p’ is the same as ‘it is true that p’, and that both reduce to simply: p.
But if we want to know what makes it the case that p, it may be that there is no general answer.
One kind of thing (dogs barking) makes it true that dogs bark, another kind of thing (stones sinking) makes it true that stones sink, and so on for any sentence we care to exhibit.
This is not a rejection of the category of fact in favour of any kind of *relativism or *scepticism, since it is quite consistent with the view that for many examples of p we know whether p, there are no two views about p, and so on.
But it is the denial that these assertions gain anything except perhaps rhetorical force by being couched in terms of facts.

An attempt to build a more substantive theory of facts in general needs to address questions such as whether there are negative as well as positive facts, general facts as well as particular ones, facts about values as well as facts about the physical world, *dispositional and categorical facts, and so on.
It will also need principles for counting facts: is the fact that I have a sister one fact or two (two people were her parents, and the same two people were my parents).

The last well-known systematic philosophy of facts was the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Wittgenstein, which depended heavily on a conception of atomic or basic facts, conceived as logically simple, independent structures in a logical space.
But Wittgenstein repudiated the metaphysic in his later work.

See also TRUTHMAKER PRINCIPLE.
Veritas Aequitas
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Re: Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

Here is another definition from a Routledge Dictionary of Philosophy:
Fact.

Usually, [fact is] that which corresponds to a statement or makes it true (cf. the correspondence theory of TRUTH).
As such, a fact has seemed somehow to exist in the world, independent of thought and language.

Since statements have a structure, consisting of subject and predicate, etc., it has been thought that facts must also have a structure, so that the elements in the statement can correspond to elements in the fact; facts may simply be sets of objects in the world related in certain ways.
If so, a cake will be a fact, which it is surely not, though its existence may be.
Nor are facts quite the same as situations or states of affairs, for one can be ‘in’ these, and it is natural to talk of a situation, but less natural to talk of a fact, as enduring or being altered.
This may suggest that while situations, etc., are indeed in the world, facts represent rather ways we choose to describe the world, though of course the world severely constrains how we can describe it; the ways will also be objective rather than evaluative (but see NATURALISM on the sharpness of this distinction).

The view that facts are things in the world corresponding to parts of thought and language has led to difficulties about whether there are any facts corresponding to statements involving words like ‘not’, ‘or’, ‘all’, ‘some’, ‘if’, since these statements seem to be less directly about the world than are simple statements (cf. LOGICAL ATOMISM).
If we abandon strict correspondence theories of truth, which need facts as entities in the world for statements to correspond to, we can tie facts more closely to thought and language.
Are facts simple true propositions, or ‘truths’?
‘It’s true that … ’ and ‘It’s a fact that … ’ mean much the same, and we can say ‘What he says is a fact’.
But expressions like ‘His statement is borne out by (corresponds to) the facts’ raise some difficulty.
Facts but surely not true propositions can be causes (‘The fact that the match was struck caused it to light’). (On propositions see SENTENCES.)

Pg 137
Perhaps one should no more ask what facts are than what cases are when something ‘is the case’.
Some writers (e.g. Mellor) accept both these ‘thin’ facts and substantive facts.
Brute facts are either facts in general considered as given independently of how we see the world (emphasizing the objectivity mentioned above);
or facts not holding in virtue of any other facts holding (cf. SUPERVENIENCE);
or facts about the world not involving values, rules, or institutions, e.g. ‘Grass is green’, ‘I like beer’, but not ‘Beer is good for you’.
‘Smith scored a goal’ is an example of an institutional fact, depending on rules or institutions.

‘Factual’ is used in various ways and in each case false statements as well as true ones can be called factual.
Contrasted with ‘fictional’ it refers to the real world.
Contrasted with ‘evaluative’ it refers to what is objectively and decidably there and not merely contributed by human attitudes as evaluation may seem to be.
Contrasted with ‘theoretical’, it refers to what is decidable, directly even if not conclusively, by observation.
Contrasted with ‘logical’ or ‘necessary’, it refers either to what concerns the world rather than thought or discourse, or to what is merely contingently true or false.
However, since statements in logic can normally be proved to be true or false, one can also talk of facts of logic or mathematics (cf. MODALITIES).
Whether one can talk of moral, etc., facts is disputed.
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Re: Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

Here is another definition of what is fact;

BlackWell Dictionary of Philosophy

Fact
Metaphysics, logic, philosophy of language [from Latin factum, originally something done, a deed or an action]
Starting in the seventeenth century, a fact is described as a set of objects in the objective world, related in certain ways that can be stated by a proposition or judgment.
The constituents of facts are things and qualities or relations.
While things are named but not asserted, facts are asserted but not named.
Facts must be expressed by a sentence rather than by a single term.
Facts are objects of propositions and decide their [objects] truth or falsity.

Wittgenstein claims in his Tractatus that the world is the totality of facts, not of things, and that the ultimate constituents of the world are atomic facts.
Facts can be either positive (the s is p) or negative (the s is not p).
We can also distinguish between particular facts (the s is p) and universal facts (all s’s are p), and between brute facts (which involve no rules or institutions, such as the fact that I raise my hand) and institutional facts (which depend on rules or institutions, such as the fact that I promise).

There is also a distinction between fact (what is) and value (what ought to be).
The view that facts are independent of propositions and that the truth and falsity of propositions is determined by whether they are paired with the facts which they state is central to the correspondence theory of truth.

“We express a fact, for example, when we say that a certain thing has a certain property, or that it has a certain relation to another thing; but the thing which has the property or the relation is not what I call a ‘fact’.”
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Re: Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by FlashDangerpants »

A capable philosopher would look at that stuff and think, if I am saying that facts don't correspond to anything, have I covered all my bases, have I made sure that what I propose doesn't leave out something important that would lead people to suppose facts correspond to something?

But to become that sort of capable philosopher you'd have to stop and think about how we use facts, what we expect them to do. Lesser pissants just redescribe some concept, like fact, according to what they wish it would be to support some particualr position that they want to uphold, and don't care if they throw away some important detail of what facts are for in the process.

That's how you end up with bad ideas like having Fact mean 99% certain belief or something crap like that.
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Re: Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

From the above I can summary the confusion from my perspective.

1.In 1739, David Hume cast a fork aggressively dividing "relations of ideas" from "matters of fact and real existence", such that all truths are of one type or the other.[17][18] By Hume's fork, truths by relations among ideas (abstract) all align on one side (analytic, necessary, a priori), whereas truths by states of actualities (concrete) always align on the other side (synthetic, contingent, a posteriori).[17] Of any treatises containing neither, Hume orders, "Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion".[17]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_p ... Principles

2. Then the Logical Positivists adopted Hume's above point as an ideology and clung to the 'matter of fact' dogmatically and arrogantly but then,

3. The last well-known systematic philosophy of facts was the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Wittgenstein, which depended heavily on a conception of atomic or basic facts, conceived as logically simple, independent structures in a logical space.
But Wittgenstein repudiated the metaphysic in his later work.

4. Despite the abandonment by the later-Wittgenstein, Peter Holmes still clung onto the idea of 'matter of fact' Note the OP of Peter's trolling thread "What could make morality objective?" [Jul 2018]

5.
Peter Holmes wrote: Sat Jul 14, 2018 10:29 am It seems to me this question - which has emerged from discussion of my post 'Is morality objective or subjective?' - is the crux in the disagreement between objectivists and subjectivists.
But this assumes that there is indeed something to be known: an object of some kind that verifies the assertion slavery is wrong and falsifies the assertion slavery is right - or, perhaps, vice versa. But what is the object that makes moral judgements objective - matters of fact - and therefore true or false?
So what is it that moral objectivists claim about moral judgements that makes them objective - matters of fact, falsifiable and independent of judgement, belief or opinion?
6. I knew there was something suspicious with Peter's use of the bastardized 'matter of fact' to support his argument, thus I raised the following counter to expose the delusion.

7.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sat Nov 07, 2020 11:29 am
Peter Holmes wrote: Sat Nov 07, 2020 9:45 am What matters is the nature and function of true factual assertions - what makes them factual and true.
I believe whatever is fact based on the above is a delusional fact, i.e. based on an illusion.
........
The point is whatever fact of reality, it must be justified empirical and philosophy to be true.
.......
Thus whatever facts to you which you insist are absolutely real [unconditional] they are merely delusional facts.
8. The point is while I am trying to refer to "what is fact" as related to something real which is verifiable and justifiable,
Peter has been to clinging to 'what is fact' as some metaphysical things which itself cannot be subject to verification and justification empirically and philosophically.

9. So Peter had been trolling us with an illusion.

10. To avoid Peter's deception I should have avoided the term moral fact in relation to his delusional 'matter of fact' insisted to use the term a real moral thing which is verifiable and justifiable empirically and philosophically to be real.
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Re: Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

FlashDangerpants wrote: Tue Apr 06, 2021 10:06 am A capable philosopher would look at that stuff and think, if I am saying that facts don't correspond to anything, have I covered all my bases, have I made sure that what I propose doesn't leave out something important that would lead people to suppose facts correspond to something?

But to become that sort of capable philosopher you'd have to stop and think about how we use facts, what we expect them to do. Lesser pissants just redescribe some concept, like fact, according to what they wish it would be to support some particualr position that they want to uphold, and don't care if they throw away some important detail of what facts are for in the process.

That's how you end up with bad ideas like having Fact mean 99% certain belief or something crap like that.
I am aware what is fact from the LPs was a farce.
What I did was to refer to Wiki re what is fact which I believe is the current meaning for what is Fact,
A fact is an occurrence in the real world.[1] The usual test for a statement of fact is verifiability—that is whether it can be demonstrated to correspond to experience. Standard reference works are often used to check facts. Scientific facts are verified by repeatable careful observation or measurement by experiments or other means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact
Which led me to the emphasis on the empirical foundation of what is fact and I did try to highlight to Peter his use of what is fact is delusional. I had also posted references where modern philosophers had condemned Peter's LPs and CAPs' version of what is fact.

The meaning of any word is in its use and context and I don't think I was wrong in anyway with my use of 'what is fact' since I always qualify that word 'fact' in my context.
What is a Fact?
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=29486
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by FlashDangerpants »

And again. Try to use an imagination, if you have none of your own, borrow from somewhere.

Has it occurred to you that people get this notion of facts representing truths about the world because something makes it seem very much that way? When you are engaged in trying to disrupt this sort of world view, you need to understand how it comes about, and what makes the myth so persuasive. Maybe there will turn out to be something in there that you haven't accounted for very well in your own analysis.
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Re: Peter's 'Fact' is a Contradiction

Post by Peter Holmes »

Sigh.

I've explained my use of the word fact, which is in line with all of the dictionary definitions I've come across.

I've explained that my thinking is in line with the later Wittgenstein, who laboriously unmade the mistake he made in the Tractatus, where he wrote 'The world is the totality of facts, not of things'. 'Die welt ist die Gesamheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge.' And German friends have explained to me that the confusing English dual-use of the word fact also exists in German.

I've explained where VA's delusion - that features of reality are, somehow, created by us when we describe them - comes from. How it's a result of an ancient mistake in metaphysics: taking what we say about things for the way things are.

And on and on.

I'll just point something out here. A contradiction is a 'speaking-against itself' - which is a linguistic matter. And, outside language, reality and its features are not linguistic. So if, as all dictionaries roughly say, we use the word fact to mean 'a feature of reality that is or was the case', then such a fact can't be a contradiction. For example, a dog can't be a 'speaking against itself'.

So VA's OP title is incoherent. Among other things.

The deep philosophical mess evident in the extracts VA has reproduced, here and elsewhere, is evidence, to my mind, of the pervasive and potent nature of the myth of propositions - the delusion that a feature of reality is, somehow, identical to a factual assertion (a so-called proposition), so that knowing a feature of reality is possible only if a true factual assertion asserts it. This ridiculous idea is manifest in the JTB theory of knowledge truth condition - S knows that p iff p is true - correspondence theories of truth, truth-maker and truth-bearer theories, and so on.
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