The Realm of Facts

Aspects of Philosophical Realism

Nicholas Rescher

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110670110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Knowledge of facts is essential for the management of life. Most studies of the subject examine how we go about trying to obtain it; they describe the processes and proceedings of rational inquiry. The present work steps back from this to inquire into the limits and limitations of such processes and to identify the assets and the limitabilities of what they are able to supply for us. It examines how knowledge of facts is secured and consolidated as such, and what the resulting information can and cannot provide. It argues that the unavoidable incompleteness of our factual information also endows it with an element of incorrectness. By looking also at the negative side of human inquiry the book's perspective clarifies the nature of our grip on the facts that constitute our view of the reality of things.

1 Factual Basics

1.1 Facts

Facts constitute the conditions of reality: they manifest the way in which things actually are and configure the nature of actuality. As such, they stand in contrast to mere possibilities—the way things might be—and also to suppositions, assumptions, and surmises regarding the way things might be.

Facts can be classified according to the subject—matters at issue. Paramount here is the pivotal distinction between empirical facts regarding the natural world, and formal facts regarding the abstract domain of structure, symbolism, and language. Empirical facts relate to the substantial existence of the physical realm; formal facts relate to the realms of abstract idealizations. Our cognitive access to empirical fact is principally observational; our cognitive access to formal fact is primarily theoretical.

There are no false facts. But in this context—as in all others—people can be wrong. There are mistaken facts no more than there are triangular circles. Beliefs mistakenly taken as factual by people. It is not the facts that are mistaken by the situation of being taken for a fact by people. Here the mistake is on the part of the taker: that facts as such stand mistake-free. Still, there is a real prospect of error here. But then one cannot speak of false or mistaken facts but only of apparent facts or putative facts that turn out to be mistaken.

Facts as such—i. e., as authentic facts—are subject to various principles:

1. Factual truth: Individual facts must agree with the truth of things.
2. Factual consistency: Collectively, facts must be consistent with each other—they cannot conflict.
3. Factual integrity: The systemic integrity of fact as will be discussed below.

Only true claims can state facts. But this does not mean that only accurate and precise facts can do so. Saying that George Washington was over six feet tall states a fact. It is a fact that the Eiffel Tower is roughly 400 meters high. It is true that John D. Rockefeller was very wealthy. Yet none of these assertions has any precision to it. Every precise fact spans a multitude of imprecise ones. But when you are in possession of the precise facts on the matter, you are in a position to determine the rest: they yield no further instructive information.

A temporally indefinite statement such as “It is raining” does not state a fact unless and until the time at issue is indicated—either via an indefinite index (such as “now” or “here”) or via of a definite dating (such as “in Paris on 22 July 1980”).

Facts can come into existence in time. The fact of “George Washington’s being the first president of the United States” only became so at his inauguration.

Facts can be necessary or contingent. The former (necessity) is a matter of a fact’s obtaining on logico-conceptual grounds. (Swords—complete unbroken swords—must have blades; causes must have effects.) There are matters of conceptual inevitability. We would not call something a sword that did not have a blade. However, the Statue of Liberty’s presence in New York is a matter of contingency. Its French donors could have given it to Boston instead. Contingency is matter of reality’s conceivably variable arrangements. Even the laws of nature—gravitation, for example—are contingent.

But while the facts of the natural realm are contingent and could in theory stand differently, the facts of the formal domain are conditionally necessary. Once the communicative conventions are in place, they could not be different from what they are. Given that forks are the sort of things at issue with our terminology, it is necessary that forks (whole and unbroken) must have tines.

Facts can also be distinguished by the manner in which we obtain cognitive access to them. Three categories are principally at issue here. With facts regarding the world’s nature and workings, we must rely on observation and interactive experience. Such facts are accordingly characterized as empirical.

Then too there are facts engendering the products of our own artifice—language, laws, manners, and the like. These may be characterized as normative. They relate to the proper management of our own productions.

Finally, there are facts regarding abstractions—numbers, shapes, structures, etc. These facts—primarily logico-mathematical in substance—may be characterized as theoretical.

1.2 Real Existence Involves Mind-Transcendence

The facts constitute reality. But what is it to be real? These are two very different questions. The former is a substantive question that is best left to investigative inquiry. To find out what is real in the world we must investigate it. But the latter is a conceptual question that should be addressed by rational analysis. And only this second question falls within the purview of philosophy.

So, what is it to be real, to actually exist? In addressing this question, it seems sensible to begin with the straightforward existence of things in space and time in the manner of trees, dogs, and automobiles. And we then thus proceed reiteratively somewhat as follows, specifying that something exists if:

1. it exists unproblematically in the just-specified manner of playing an active causal role in this real world of ours in which our life and our experience unfolds, or else;
2. it is something whose actual existence must be invoked in providing a satisfactory explanatory account of the features of something that exists. (And here it does not matter if the explanatory account at issue is efficiently causal, or functionally finalistic, or conceptually explicative.)

Such a meaning-specification is essentially recursive. It proceeds by sequential steps or stages, maintaining first that ordinary material objects are existentially real, and thereupon extending this stepwise to anything whatsoever that is bound up with the existent by way of explanatory linkages.

Approached in this manner, one quintessential way of being real is by figuring in human experience through being something with which we can get into perceptual contact. This is a special concern of item (1) and is certainly a paradigmatic way of establishing a claim to reality. In fact, Immanuel Kant was sufficiently in the grip of the empiricist tradition to think this experiential route to afford the only viable pathway to reality. But this view of the matter is too narrow. For we do well to include in “reality” not only those things that we experience, but also those processes and factors needed to explain them.

Accordingly, “to exist” in the physical mode is to feature as a component or aspect of the causal commerce real world. And some jargon expression such as “to subsist” needs to be coined for contextualized existence within a framework of supposition at issue with fictions or hypotheses. Thus, merely possible objects—or possibilia, for short—are things that merely “exist” in the sense of subsistence within a hypothetical realm in a fictional make-believe world. They are not part of the real world’s actual furnishings.

To be sure, such a view of existence is anathema to a considerable array of philosophers for whom our commonplace world is not reality but mere appearance whose furnishings do not really exist. For them, what “really exists” is something that entirely transcends this world of everyday experience (Plato’s realm of ideas, for example), or that imperceptibly underlies it (such as Democritus’s atoms and the void). With such theorists, what is basic to the conception of reality is not existence as we standardly have it, but a somehow concealed manifold of being that is thought somehow to account for those familiar things. In contrast to such doctrines, the present approach to the issue of realism takes the line that in understanding real existence, as in so much else, we must begin from where we are.

Viewing matters in this light casts experience in a leading role as our cognitive gateway to reality. Experiential encounter is the basic and primary way in which one can learn about reality and experience in our inevitable starting point here. But—dogmatic empiricism to the contrary notwithstanding—this is only the beginning and not the whole story. For in the process of a theoretical systematization that seeks to explain what we experience, the horizons of our reality will inevitably expand. And as they do so, we are led to the conviction that there is always some as yet experience-transcending room for them to expand into.

Such a metaphysical realism represents the doctrine that the world exists in a way that is substantially independent of the thinking beings it contains that can inquire into it, and that its nature—its having the characteristics it does actually have—is also comparably knowledge-transcending. In saying of something that it is “a real thing,” a concrete object existing as part of the world’s furniture, we commit ourselves to various (obviously interrelated) points:

1. Self-subsistence. Being a “something” (an entity or process) with its own unity of being. Having an enduring identity of its own.
2. Physicality or world-boundedness. Existing within the causal order of things. Having a place on the world’s physical scene as a participant of some sort.
3. Publicity or accessibility. Admitting universality of access. Being something that different investigators proceeding from different points of departure can get hold of.
4. Autonomy or independence. Being independent of mind. Being something that observers find rather than create, and learn about rather than define in the course of their cognitive endeavors.
5. Experience-transcendence. Having more facets and features than do—or indeed even can—manifest themselves in experience.

These, then, are the core features of the metaphysical conception of reality. The fact is that our conception of a real thing has at its very core the idea of its projecting beyond the cognitive reach of mind. The governing idea is that there is more to reality than “meets the eye”—that reality somehow transcends appearance.

1.3 Truths vs. Facts

Some important distinctions must be drawn in the interests of clarity and precision about claims that something is the case:

1. Assertion/statement: the verbal formulation of a claim. This is a matter of how the claim is articulated. For example, “The cat is on the mat.”
2. Contention/proposition: the informative meaning of a claim—what it purports; its affirmatory substance. This is a matter of what the claim claims. It admits of many formulations, e. g., by holding (in any of various ways) that the cat is positioned on the mat.
3. Claimed circumstances: the supposed or putative state of affairs which the claim affirms—how things would stand if the claim were true. This is a matter of how things will have to stand if the claim is to be true: viz. that there must be a mat and a cat emplaced upon it.
4. The fact of the matter: the state of affairs that actually obtains. This is a matter of how things actually stand in relation to the matters at issue with the claim.

When an assertion (statement) accords with the fact of the matter, we have a truth. The realization condition for this circumstance is that the claimed condition agrees with the fact of the matter. For truth (and also accuracy, correctness, and the like), harmonization with the facts of the matter will be pivotal.

Whatever is a fact is so timelessly.

That it’s raining now in Peoria is a fact, but only if the time at issue is specific. And once this is done, the fact is so timelessly. On this basis, what is factual obtains not always and omni-temporally but timelessly and extra-temporally.

The facts are what they are. There is no time dependency here. When people grow old, it is they that age and not the facts of their age possession.

It is misleading and inappropriate to say that “It was a fact that he entered High School four years before it was a fact that he graduated from High School.” This is simply an improper and misleading way of saying “It is a fact that he entered High School four years before graduating from it.” The relation at issue obtains between events and not facts.

Facts are states of affairs; truths are language-formulated statements that make correct claims about the facts.

There is an infinite and indeed even trans-countable multitude of facts. For there are trans-countably many real objects (e. g., real numbers), and each admits of specifically characteristic facts. But language is recursively developed and thereby admits of only a countable infinitude of statements, and thus of true statements. Accordingly, reality can never be fully and adequately encompassed in language. There are just not sufficiently many statements available.

One fact encompasses another when this other is a logico-conceptual consequence of the former. This means that each fact encompasses an infinitude of others. For whenever p is a fact, so is p-or-q for any q whatsoever.

Different and distinct truths can indicate the same fact with equal accuracy. Thus, consider:

• The cat is on the mat.
• The mat has a cat on it.
• A cat is currently atop the mat.

In this way, any number of different statements represent (indicate, formulate, state) the same fact.

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Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Why Facts Matter
• 1 Factual Basics
• 2 Fact vs. Fiction
• 3 Reality vs. Appearance
• 4 Conceiving Facts
• 5 Stating Facts: Formulating Facts in Language
• 6 Knowledge of Fact
• 7 The Ramifications of Ignorance
• 8 Access to Fact (The Rational Intelligibility of Nature)
• 9 Our Limited Knowledge of Fact
• 10 On Existence, Reality, and Facts
• Bibliography
• Index