A fact is given by consensus.
Science does not produce facts but truths, which are given in (not by) experience.
Something is not a fact if people disagree that it is, even if it is a truth.
Truths must be understood to be apprehended. Facts don’t need to be understood to govern an outlook.
The overgrowth of description by way of meaning is the inescapable result of searching meaning by usage. That currency is responsible for the unawareness of mixed factual truths.
That that subtle sense of the difference can not be properly understood either through direct observation , nore through the epoche of set boundaries in situ thus defined, approximating the boundaries without which any meaning can be sensibly defined, apart from such current usage.
The lack of these different meaning sets may or may not overlap, therefore creating the possibility for misinterpretation through and for common sense.
Nietzsche didn’t say that. He spoke about phenomena, in the old sense of appearances. "…keine moralischen phänomene; sondern nur eine moralische Interpretation gewisser
Phenomena (eine Irrtümliche Interpretation!) " What he says is more like: There are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena (an erring interpretation!).
Phenomena aren’t facts. Far from it. The “fact” part came in only as Nietzsche’s early readers bought it in to make Nietzsche readable, sanitized, in the academy. One has to think through the change there to see where we live. Fact / Value has its own history which Nietzsche did not live to see. He dealt with phenomena and, on the other hand, the true, the beautiful, and the good. He also, despite what his translators often lead one to believe, knew nothing of values in the sense of this “fact/value” account which controls contemporaneity.
We all receive a vague and decayed account of these ideas as traditional authority represented in the vernacular. Most people don’t know it is the authority of the tradition speaking through them.
Note:
One should not confuse Husserl and so-called “modern” Phenomenology with the older determination of phenomena, which was not a “bracketing” based on the “ultimate doubt”.
Give a example.
Now Meno, you have been forbidden, have you not, to play with dead ideas? Marx, too, never heard tell of facts in the sense of fact/value, though he had the echo of the Hobbes Boyle usage (known also to Locke it should be said), fact as repeated act of experiment. What he thought of, was appearance and truth. Facts are not appearances. An appearance must be the appearance of something. Ergo, of reality. Facts don’t correspond to anything beyond themselves, as you mentioned, they are supposed to be “positive”. One says here, are these facts values? Or, are the values facts? Scientism wants to say: the “value”, a dependent variable of the “fact”. Logically this doesn’t quite get there does it?
Facts are not logically related as appearances even of the will supposes to link it that way, of course. Appearances and facts, however are related, cognitively, by similitude, as in such and such always occcires whenever such and such. The distinctions in an old and a newer mea ing do signifiy personal shifts , and of. Ourse one is free choose meaning according to personal preference. Any one can unearth meaning as an intentional product, regardless of the difference, and this choice skips mean ing chain gaps, because there are no derivitive that can simulate a perfect continuum of change.
Induction is such that a complete reduction can not by reveal an ideal likeness.
That is why positivism cam only entail change of proximate change , as mirrored .
That Nietzsche quote can stand by modern standards , by a future perfect that Nietzsche could not possibly have surmised even if the moral implications are completely intended to such .
Facts are definitions of
shared attributes:
I am such and such a person, because so many people have set opinion about me, irrespective of what I think of myself. How do I know? Because people have said the same thing to my face. Sure, I can deny it, but the FACT is, it wouldn’t make sense for me to think that.
The fact is, I would like to think otherwise, and so, I’d rather find a mirror which would be more conducive to produce a more suitable image more apt to represent my own desired self image than the one gathered by the consensus. The meaning of this difference is such that:
It is my opinion that I appear more like I would like to, rather then how others describe how I appear to them. (not personally, but par example)
Description is logically more tied to consensus. of set notions then the construction of the self through recomposition of abstracted elements.
Why? Because our self image usually selects desirable parts, and not ones which recompose from decomposed parts.
Opinion and facts are most striking in and through this difference between new and set usage of perceived and / or known parts, where usage, perception, and consensus are all related and formulated. They never were intended to be differentiated in sets of reified content, the whole object of Nietzsche’s studies into unearthing meaning had that attribute in mind.
Though what You are suggesting may implicate a subtlety, which consists oi the effect of seeing images in mirrors which are again are reflective in other images . This may implicate a reduction of phenomena limited only to a perceptual limit.
Set theory can understand this abysmal possibility , but perception can not, so that the next logical link will be based on the idea of l determinancy based on expectation.
I chose the self, as the best example to this query, because it is the paradigm search for a general search to the question of the difference between opinion and fact. The basic mechanism is one of representing the most common attributes which construct it, and such construction. furthers applicability of inferring other objects of perception. All objects will transform into perceptions of fact once its repeated into some formal arrangement.
Generally, though, the proposition stands without a need for a deconstruction because the reconsruction does not entail a need for it.
Other practical derivatives, such as certain mathematical formulas , have been thought with the idea, that for practical purposes it is enough to learn once how to derive them, usage need not require a constant need for it.
Nowadays, computer function makes this clear, where use and derivation of process totally negates the possibility of deriving language from function. It would be a total countereffective waste of time.
But less generally, accountability between the facts and opinions gears down to the question of when the opinions set in as facts?
In larger sets, at what point do determining the exact number of parts within that set become determined more accurately as the set becomes smaller?
It is easier to account for 12 members in a set then in a set of 1000. At what point does determinancy become less certain in any set?
Or in other words, in a roomful of people , how can one participant try to determine the outcome of dissension or cohesion within the group , given the knowledge of their behavior? The task becomes more need of consensual interaction as the numbers go up, and t he task becomes more undetermined. Reliance on other perceptions becomes more necessary, and here is where the contradiction. starts to appear, between the necessity of determination and the reliance for other’s view of facts surfaces.
The very.contradiction. between necessity of inducing more Preception. Into perception and vica versa. The induction of higher symbolic rhetoric into description.
At what t point does opinion turn indeterminate using old symbolic representation? When there is a breakdown in the overall opinion toward the considered objects and objectives . at the point where the objectives can not be approximated as intended. Where self determination may overcome set limits of possible effects of foreseeable determinants in causation.
In other words, based on an eidectoc reduction, phenomenal reality reduced to its factual essences per intuitive processes.
Nietzsche-Husserl, on the coming crisis for lack of authorotive foundation
Sourcing and exemplifying the transcendental reduction.
Now Meno, that was all quite dramatic, but you forget, whatever is not fact still has to be accounted for. So, are opinions facts or miracles? And are miracles a special kind of fact? People act on opinions, live by them, live in them, they are facts. But, then, the distinction is a fake out. Is the distinction between the two an opinion?
Thanks, promethean.
What you recommend could be interesting, yet it does not seem operationally straightforward.
Comparing «any number of philosophical theories regarding the definition of what a ‘fact’ may or may not be beyond what signification it grants when it is used in language in an ostensive way» looks kind of daunting… Anyone ever did that? Did you? What are your conclusions?
Certainly the word “fact” is very commonly used in the US, and the Anglo-sphere in general, but when it comes to philosophical doctrines, surely the word occurs, but you don’t get often a systematic tractation of it, or at least I am not aware of that.
Probably I am missing your point. Because… why recording the various meaning of that word (which I can probably do by looking up the word in some dictionary) and establishing that there may be conflicts with the the way, say, Wittgenstein uses this word? Different “linguistic games”, so that the word ‘fact’ comes to have a more or less different meaning? Yes… that happens frequently in philosophy. That said, your point is? All this epistemological thing is some linguistic game and there are no absolute definitions? Yes, I can live with that. Yet, assuming we achieve a sufficiently common understanding of what we are talking about, would the approach you suggest answer the question “how a set observation is connected around a pivotal conceptual element we call fact”?
As for the study question, I am puzzled.
I can’t tell you what would happen if I don’t understand the word ‘fact’. Actually, I can neither claim that I fully understand the meaning of ‘fact’, nor that I don’t understand it at all. That is a very recurrent situation - for me, at least - when scrutinizing philosophical statements. A number of things can happen, I can’t hint to a specific one - and that depends heavily on the context where these sentences are placed. Let’s consider the first sentence, which is Nietzsche’s (Notebooks, Summer 1886 – Fall 1887). The whole sentence is «Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying “there are only facts,” I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations…». Here you can tell that Nietzsche uses the word ‘fact’ quoting the position he’s objecting to, the definition (if that counts as one) is that facts are phenomena, what appears, which does not get to mean, ipso facto, what it is.
Maybe it would help if you state what you think it w-/sh-ould happen.
I like this sentence very much.
I am tempted to say you nail it, but I can’t fully convince myself.
I have been pondering it for days now, and yet I’m not done.
Hume believed in miracles as factual. Some overwhelming problem strikes You, or me, or Hume for that matter for which he may have been completely unprepared for. A one in a lifetime experience , for which one is unprepared for. Like any thing, like the apple striking Newton’s head, or a sudden illumination of Proust relating to the sense of smell.
Why Hume , who by relaxing cause from effect, incurred debt of derivitives induced from the search for the absolute.
Hume’s debt became overwhelming and the answer came miraculously. At least somewhat unexpectedly, why had he expected it, others would have come to the same conclusion. Leibnitz did to a certain degree, but his primary opening was by way more toward similitude through indiscernability. The similitude towards the identifiable , at a point where identity can be expressed as a point where perception. can only state the limits and express the degree of separation as becoming inconceivable.
Such insight help careen some near madness, or into it absolutely.
Where this possibility arises, that perhaps coming too near to the absolute can conjure the phrase, “Those that God wants to destroy, he drives mad”.
At the point of the absolute, the alianation of god is drought with inordinate fear, and those who see through this dilemma , may see the philosophical-mathematical revelation as almost demonically inspired , in line with Faust, and the miracle they prescribe may be the apologia to such revelation. For them factuality and doubt are related ex-machina, as much for themselves as their families.
Oppenheimer and Einstein’s warning , signed by a.score of developers of the atomic weapon, signed a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, in a similar view toward a vindication of some atonement.