I don’t think I have a firm enough idea hammered out of what reality is to be able to offer much of interest on the subject. But as to truth, I see the ‘standard’ theories—the most popular being correspondence, which you appear to start with—not as theories of what truth is, but as declarations of what it does. I started years ago with Aquinas’ interpretation of Avicenna in the Summa, Part One, Q. 16, A. 1, "Whether Truth Resides Only in the Intellect?”, “The truth of each thing is a property of the essence which is immutably attached to it.”
From here, I factor in Mortimer Adler’s comment in “Ten Philosophical Mistakes”… “In Book VI of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle, clearly cognizant of what he himself had said about the character of descriptive truth, declared that what he called practical judgments (i.e., prescriptive or normative judgments with respect to action) had truth of a different sort. Later philosophers, except for Aristotle’s medieval disciples, have shown no awareness whatsoever of this brief but crucially important passage in his writings.”
…to answer your first question, what is fact? Facts as I see them are (as you suggested) relations derived from a union of truth content of the intellect (“living” information) in union [apprehension] with truth content in external states of affairs. Facts are truths discerned of the so-called material realm. This seems in line with your comment,
As to question 2, best answer I can give might be taken from Joseph Margolis in his Introduction to Philosophical Problems, where he identifies the difference between, "…the nature of numbers and…of fictions and the nature of perceptual objects and the like…where we hold that we may think of, or consider, or admit, or refer to, or speak about, whatever we may (in purely grammatical terms) make predications of, we are referring to what “exists1”—which does not, as such, commit us to holding that what we refer to exists in the actual or real world (“exists2”, or “really” or “actually exists”).
I apologize if I’m piling on too much unwanted info, but in order to attempt an answer to your later questions I feel the need to flesh out where I’m coming from as it’s a bit unorthodox.
In my book, both existence1 and existence2 are “real”, though as Margolis notes, not equally real.
I agree completely with your position here, and might explain it thus: Everything that exists is information, and all information (being) is value-bearing. Most informational entities (both existents1 and existents2) are truth-bearers. All matter is truth-bearing—hence, part of our ease discerning factual value. I use the term “value-bearing” because there is also falsity. Only one type of information can be falsified: the intellect. Though I haven’t an articulate defense just yet (I’m still drawing breath and am working on it), I believe “freedom” of the will (such as it is) wields the power to fragmentally falsify the truth-bearingness of consciousness or the intellect. It seems to me a state of indistinctness and uncertainty with respect to abilities to process, discern and hold true beliefs would logically be the natural state of a fragmentally falsified consciousness–hence our inability to understand, recall, express, etc. clearly.
Falsified information is prescriptive because the intellect, though united with matter, is pure prescriptive value/information. This prefaces how I’d answer your question:
It’s not that truth itself is being eroded per se, it’s that fragmental falsification appears to be increasing. It’s now common enough knowledge that there is something going noticeably “wrong” with our social/moral/political/cultural affairs that it’s being questioned even on national news shows. But of course I’ve now approached the threshold of theology, and philosophy prefers to not mingle in what to her is so odious a house. I’ve enjoyed our walk nonetheless.
This sounds quite reasonable to me. Good stuff, thanks encode_decode.