Fact
An individual fact is said to be explained by pointing out its cause, that is, by stating the law or laws of causation, of which its production is an instance.
John Stuart Mill (1862)Facts are "events that occur" or "the state of being of things" that are referred to. Facts exist independent of theory. Scientists do not construct facts, but make observations about things that refer to or represent the facts through theory. Unlike other terms of science, facts in science are similar in definition and interpretation relative to their use in common language. While the term "scientific fact" appears in the literature, facts transcend all human activity such that science cannot lay claim to them. Facts exist in the public domain inasmuch as they exist in science. In the practice and writing of science, however, there are two very broad and even oppositional classes of fact: 1) manifest, and 2) inferential.
Read more about this topic: Evolution As Fact And Theory, Evolution, Fact and Theory
Famous quotes containing the word fact:
“My confessions are shameless. I confess, but do not repent. The fact is, my confessions are prompted, not by ethical motives, but intellectual. The confessions are to me the interesting records of a self-investigator.”
—W.N.P. Barbellion (1889–1919)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)