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Originally Posted by Aaron W.
So in your view, facts can be unproven reality? I can go with that framework. I usually conceptualize that as capital-T Truth. This Truth is what's actually out there in reality. (Admittedly, that's a somewhat lazy distinction as far as language is concerned.)
Yes. I don't view "fact" as an epistemic concept, but an ontological one. I try to avoid using capital-T Truth in my internal vocabulary.
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It would require us to use adjectives with "fact" to clarify for other purposes. If I talk about "the fact that the car is blue," I might be referring to the underlying reality of the blue car or I might be referring to the collective agreement that the car is blue (maybe the car isn't actually blue in reality, and we're all deceived about it). Maybe it would be better to talk about "the collective belief that the car is blue" when referring to the statements themselves and not the underlying reality?
A lot of this is kind of just nit-picking to me. But I enjoy a picking a good nit.
Well, I'm proffering a definition of "fact," not a theory of facticity. For instance, presumably, if some version of Berkeley-style idealism were true, then the 'realness' of a wet street being wet would be a matter of our sense experience of the street being wet. That is, our facts about the world would then be also facts about our experience, since our experience just
is reality. But this is the same definition of "fact" as under a materialist view of the world, where what makes it a fact that the street is wet is the underlying physical reality of the world, independent of our experience.
