You define 'fact' as discrete feature of reality, state of affairs, that is the case or just-is.Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Fri Mar 24, 2023 9:14 am So the writer(s) that VA quotes are promoting a crudely limited use of the word fact, forgetting its primary use, and asserting only its linguistic use: 'a thing that is known to be true'. They then mistake true linguistic expressions - true factual assertions - for the features of reality that they assert, and proceed to deny that those things exist. Hence the absurd claim that factual language is what constitutes facts.
In different ways, this fashionable mind-warp has been deranging philosophy for many decades now. And VA and sidekick dick-for-brains keep plugging it. The irony that to deny the existence of what we call facts is to deny the existence of moral facts - thus demolishing the case for moral objectivity - is patently obvious.
What Johnson [which I quoted] is arguing is that there is no such 'fact' in the real sense as defined above.
In addition, you stated these facts are absolutely independent of the human conditions, i.e. from opinions, beliefs and judgments.
As I had argued, whatever is fact is conditioned upon a specific human-based-FSK.
At most what you deemed as 'facts' are linguistic facts within a linguistic FSK.
The most you can be assured they are facts are merely based on words, use of words as meaning [this approach is refuted].
What you assumed what-the-words-refer to, i.e. that "feature of reality" does not exist as real; it is an illusory noumenon, empty, nothing, meaningless and non-sensical.
Strawman again.And this is false. The existence and nature of water has nothing to do with linguistic description.
And VA's appeal to the credibility of scientific descriptions, because of the empirical evidence for their truth, exposes the silliness of saying that facts exist only within a descriptive context. Evidence of things (facts) that don't exist outside a description is not evidence for the truth of those descriptions. How can it be?
I have NEVER asserted "facts exist only within a descriptive context".
I have always stated, facts entangle with the human conditions, emerge and realized from within a FSK, thereafter it is known and described.
Note the knowing and description come after the emergence and realization which is based on our direct entanglement and experiences.
This is how we have scientific facts, legal facts, astronomical facts; the scientific FSK is the most credible and reliable.
Now, if you are switching to a different definition from your above to a dictionary meaning;
"Fact: a thing that is known to exist, to have occurred"
this definition is meaningless if it is not predicated upon a FSK.
If it is predicated upon a FSK, then it cannot be independent of the human conditions.
Thus, a fact is conditioned upon a human-based FSK [collective - objective].
A moral FSK enabling moral facts is possible.
Therefore, morality is objective.