The Understanding of Facts

The most relevant teaching of all what we know of facts is the conceptual ambiguity of the very notion and the variety of its uses, itself a source of philosophical debates.¹

For philosophy, a fact is not what in reality is but what has been asserted about it.² When referring to a fact ("it is a fact that...", "it is established as a fact that...", etc.), we have a statement about our linguistic communication instead of reality. Accordingly, facts are what factual statements refer to³ or, in a strict formulation, "[f]acts are what statements (when true) state; they are not what statements are about."⁴ That is to say, fact is what makes a statement true or false. It is something of a connection between things but not a thing itself, as things can only be named, in contrast to facts that are stated.⁵ Fact is attached to speech acts to such an extent that "[i]t is highly misleading to say that if a new thing comes into existence facts about it come into being along with it. It is better to say that what comes into being is a new subject for factual statements to be about."⁶

Providing that I seek a criterium not in the "truth" of the statement (as one of the possible results of cognition) but in

1 Cf. SHORTER (1962), pp. 283ff.

2

"The thing is not a fact; only that from the thing is a fact that it exists..."

E. Husserl in the debate of June 2 1 , 1906, of LALANDE (1983), pp. 3 3 8 - 3 3 9 .

3 MACKIE (1951) as summarized by HERBST (1952), p. 93; as well as MACKIE (1952), p. 121.

4 STRAWSON (1951). p. 136.

5 Cyorgy MARKUS' note 6 in his Appendix to WITTGENSTEIN (1921), p. 181.

6 HERBST (1952), p. 112.

answering the question of what entitles me to say that I take anything to be a fact, I can only reply that, in one way or another, I am in a position that I can attest to it, as I have a decisive argument or consideration in favour of stating it without doubting it. Analytically, a statement of fact is distinguished from matters of opinion by its direct and authoritative character.⁷ The differen-tiation between fact and opinion here is not the one of truth and the lack of it, but of the certainty of truth and the absence of it.

Or, it is nothing else but the distinction between episteme and doxa, already known in the classical Greek philosophy and for-mulated by Plato who, by chance, happened to exemplify it by merely the judicial establishment of facts. "When, therefore, judges are justly persuaded about matters which you can know only by seeing them, and not in any other way, and when in judging of them from report they attain a true opinion about them, they judge without knowledge, and yet are rightly persuaded, if they have judged well. [...] And yet, o my friend, if true opinion in law courts and knowledge are the same, the perfect judge could only have judged rightly without knowledge; and therefore I must infer that they are not the same."⁸

In addition to the approaches outlined above, there are other explanations as well. Ontological attempts at reconstruction, for instance, aim at overcoming the reduction of facts to their linguistic statement. One author defines fact as a particularized universal.

When perceiving any property, e.g. recognizing something as red, I take notice of the property not only as a peculiar possession of this but, at the same time, as a feature possibly common to other things as well, that is, I take notice of the property in question as a potentiality of this for resembling in some way other things.

Accordingly, fact is nothing else than the exemplification of a property, or a relationship, by a particular.⁹

7 W. al pp. 9 4 - 9 5 .

8 PLATO, 2 0 1 [ b - c ] , at p. 408.

9 SPRIGGE (1970), pp. 82-85.

Finally, there are also attempts to reach a synthesis. According to the more sophisticated approach, "a fact is the objective correlative of every true descriptive statement".^{1 0}

Such a definition already makes it possible to formulate reason-able questions and also to suggest further notional distinctions. As to its extension, comprising only what descriptive statements refer to as entities objectively existing in reality, it excludes everything that is a mere function of evaluation, ought-projection, human interpretation, or ordering. As to its contents, the question of whether it may be said to be true makes only a difference within the boundaries of description, differentiating it mainly from what is, as yet at least, unproved or unprovable.

After all, can it be claimed that what is a fact does actually also exist? The answer is rather complex. Partly and in a metaphorical sense: yes, since we have claimed the facts to be objective. Partly and also definitively: no, since it is merely the correlative of something else, consequently, it only exists in dependence on it. As expressed simplifyingly but basically, anything can be a fact only provided that we have formulated a statement on its existence as a fact and thereby asserted that it exists. For what is stated to be a fact has been named from within a totality in order to make it a subject of human communication. Or, any potentiality not actual-ized or never to actualize can also be qualified as a fact." Also in line with it, nomic necessity and hypothetical force, characteris-tic of laws established by science, turn to be a possible component of facts, too. For scientific laws are beyond the sphere of anything actual and of what can be established by observation and experi-ment. They consist not only of generalized statements but of the latter's transformation into an axiomatic foundation stone of the system of scientific explanation as well, being the result of human

1 0 WEINBERGER (1979), p. 81.

11 Id. at pp. 8 0 - 8 1 . According to Weinberger, such a "fact-transcendent fact" is, for instance, the potential behaviour of a bar of iron if connected to a source of current or the half-life of Uranium.

cognition, involving the mind-dependent elements of both human decision and transfactual imputation.^{1 2}

All this, however, is not an answer to the point. In order to be more specific, let me raise a question related to a domain apparently far away: what is what we call "the aesthetic"? What does the aesthetic quality consist of? The answer, as known, is polarized in two directions, both historically and logically.^{1 3} The first is the one of intuitive materialism conceiving of the world as the total sum of elementary parts and of their configurations. The world pictured as the realm of atoms is for the child: if he has a sharpened eye, he can observe, moreover, pick up and collect them; he can even make a bomb out of them (which is rather trivial an idea as inspired by the popular perception of the make-up of dynamite and trinitro-toluol). Accordingly, the aesthetic quality is objective in the same way and to the same extent as are the elements of the world and their configurations. The second is the one of naive solipsism. It suggests: I can feel pain when, let us say, knocking against the table. However, the mere fact that, by seeing and touching it, I feel I have perceived something table-like does not mean that I have known its nature to be a table. The image suggested by its sensing as something table-like is only one of the possible explanations I can have. To say it to be a table involves my own contribution, loo, to span the gap between the elements of perception and their humanly conditioned interpretation; an interpretation which, in its turn, substantiates its conceptual qualification. Or, the aesthetic quality is not something exclusively external, either. It lies in us, at least partly, in our making it. As a function of human conditioning, it may differ according to social strata, societies, historical periods, cultures. To put it another way, the human act of its identification is not simply mere reaction; at the same lime, it is genuine creation.

Can what is called aesthetic be the property of a crystal hidden in the bowels of the earth or an unknown planet? Where does the

1 2 RESCUER (1969), pp. 185-195.

1 3 POSPERS (1967), pp. 5 2 - 5 5 .

aesthetic quality of a picture taken by an electronic microscope disappear to when transformed into coded signs or computerized graphs? I can answer in only one way: I, who react to, by acting upon, am involved in person in the undertaking in question. I must actually have added something from me (an exclusively human property, like pleasure or imputation) to the subject I claim I am only reacting to.

Or, what I am talking about is not a case of subjectivization or relativization of reality but only its human appropriation. For obvious reasons, it presupposes not only the object to be appropri-ated but also the subject appropriating and his act of appropriation as well. It is relational categories that stand for the linkage of some feature of reality with its human appropriation. Relational cat-egories are two-poled. On the one hand, they convey messages about reality in an expressedly non-disanlhropomorphizing way. On the other hand, the messages they convey are not about reality in se and per se but about what the part and parcel of reality intellec-tually appropriated means or signifies to human practice. Certainly it is the structure of language and the human world picture (with its tendency to render over-absolute the process of disanthro-pomorphization in science) that are to explain why relational categories are expressed mostly in a veiled form, positing as something in itself objective what will actually be objectified only by the subject as his/her relationship to it. Or, it will always be revealed in any case that when you posit the quality to which relational categories refer, both the subject and the act of positing have indeed already been pre-posited in i t^{1 4}

Well, may it be a similar case when we question ourselves about facts? For one certainly can assert that anything that exists does exist without needing to be asserted. And when I assert anything to exist I do so not for its sake but in order that I am related to it by mentally appropriating it. And a concept of fact identified with the one of reality would for obvious reasons be senseless. Its own

1 4 LUKACS (1963), p. 175.

concept stands for the object as appropriated by the subject Accordingly, nothing but intellectually differentiated and, thereby, appropriated parts of reality can be called facts. (Appropriation, of course, does not need to be done by a conventional statement. For instance, the fire and its burning effect can be a fact to anyone able to experiment with that.)