Wikipedia has this to say: "A fact is a thing that is known to be consistent with objective reality and can be proven to be true with evidence. For example, "this sentence contains words" is a linguistic fact, and "the sun is a star" is a cosmological fact. Further, "Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States" and "Abraham Lincoln was assassinated" are also both facts, of the historical type. All of these statements have the epistemic quality of being "ontologically superior" to opinion or interpretation — they are either categorically necessary or supported by adequate historical documentation.
Conversely, while it may be both consistent and true that "most cats are cute", it is not a fact (although in cases of opinion there is an argument for the acceptance of popular opinion as a statement of common wisdom, particularly if ascertained by scientific polling). Generally speaking, facts transcend belief and serve as concrete descriptions of a state of affairs on which beliefs can later be assigned.
The usual test for a statement of fact is verifiability — that is whether it can be demonstrated to correspond to experience. Standard reference works are often used to check facts. Scientific facts are verified by repeatable careful observation or measurement by experiments or other means".
This makes sense to me. Could this define a common plattform, or are there issues with this?
This is brilliant. I think that we need to give our FE friends the benefit of eliminating this part, "Standard reference works are often used to check facts." I think we can all agree with the rest of it, but we would not want to accept any existing reference work as fact without verification. Sound fair?
I propose that any verifiable, repeatable observation would be considered factual by all. The INTERPRETATIONS and CONCLUSIONS drawn from any given observation is something we would need to discuss further. There are also observations that are inconsistent. There is a lot of talk about these. If an observation is demonstrably inconsistent, then each individual observation is still factual, but we can also gather that they are inconsistent. Like if I flip a coin and it comes up heads, that much was factual. If I deduce from this that the coin will always come up heads, that is probably not going to fly as a fact. I can do 3 coin tosses in a row and get 3 heads, and now we'd start to think maybe it IS heads every time. But then on the 4th time, I get a tails. So all 4 coin tosses are factual, but the statement, "it always comes up heads" is clearly not. One more point that's often overlooked is that we can establish the RANGE of values we get even with this inconsistency. After tossing the coin many times, we can establish that we get "heads" and "tails", but we never get "banana." Furthermore, we can establish that we get heads about 50% of the time and tails about 50% of the time. (Depending on the coin, it IS possible to get "edge" in very rare cases, but I digress.)
Edit: There are also certain observations made in error or deliberately fraudulent. These are a dangerous area for friendly discussions. Let's agree to start from a position that the observer was genuine, but they may have made some mistake. If we can identify the mistake, we can react accordingly.
So I would like to invite all of our FE contributors to weigh in on this. Can we establish certain facts that we would all agree on within this type of framework - stressing that the CONCLUSIONS will NOT be considered facts, but that the observations would?