Moby Dick there too? — creativesoul

Let S = the set of all x where x is a sequence of English sentences.

Let T = the set of all s such that s is an element of S and s forms a story with a named whale in it.

I maintain that Moby Dick is an element of T, even in the counterfactual situation in which Moby Dick was never written.

Conclusion: The novel Moby Dick exists as an element of a set, even were it were never written.

|>ouglas

P.S. If you want to quibble about rigid designators, the novel that is in T in the counterfactual situation may not be the same novel as the one written by Melville, but it would have all the same words in the same order.

The point is colors do not actually exist, and that is a fact in the sense that in the outside 3d person empirical reality there are only electric and magnetic fields, and they are transparent. There is no field of purple or substance of green. Therefore, we do not see colors, we "see" something else as colors. For example, colors could be mapped to magnetic density or electric voltage scales, or different orientation of molecules, or even symbols and numbers in some higher order representation mapping. — Zelebg

This line of reasoning leads to madness. You end up with nothing but quantum probability waves existing and nothing else.

|>ouglas

The point is colors do not actually exist — Zelebg

Colors are properties, and properties exist.

|>ouglas

3+2=5 because we won't let it equal anything else. — creativesoul

3+2=5 because it can't equal anything else. We have no power to let it equal anything else.

|>ouglas

Novels before the author just has no compulsory force whatsoever to me. There's not enough evidence in support of such a claim. All evidence is to the contrary. — creativesoul

Quite to the contrary. All the evidence supports that much more is possible than is actual. And that math is inevitable once there are beings intelligent enough to discover it. Once we have math, we have theory of computation. Once we have that, we have the set of all possible programs. Once we have the set of all possible programs, one of the elements of that set is the program that Melville's brain instantiated. Once we have the program that Melville's brain instantiated, we have the set of all possible inputs to that program. Once we have that, we have the set of all possible outputs of that program. And contained in the set of all possible outputs is Moby Dick.

|>ouglas

I've a hard leaning towards methodological naturalism — creativesoul

There's nothing supernatural about necessary truth, such as that which is expressed by mathematics.

Any intelligent space-faring beings will need to have discovered much of the same natural law that we have, along with much of the same necessary truths that we have.

|>ouglas

The number three is a specific mark of our own invention. We use "3" as well as "three" to pick out a specific quantity of individual things. — creativesoul

If and when we meet space-faring aliens, I guess it will come to you as quite a surprise to you when they have "invented" the same math that we have. What will explain that, pray tell?

|>ouglas

Moby Dick there too? — creativesoul

If one is a modal realist, then of course Moby Dick has always existed and always will.

I'm not a modal realist, but I guess a Platonist of some sort. Though most of the professional philosophers I've met seem to be realists of some kind about mathematics, possibilities, etc. For me, yes, I am a realist about Moby Dick having always existed as an abstract entity in the domain of possible novels.

|>ouglas

You too with the equivocation... — creativesoul

I wasn't equivocating, I was elaborating. Invention is discovery of something in the abstract space of that which can be invented. The word "discovery", however, often has a connotation of stumbling upon something, while the word "invention" has the connotation of creativity. All invention is discovery, though not all discovery is invention.

The number three is the name we've attributed to a specified plurality of things... a quantity. Numbers are names for quantities. — creativesoul

No, "three" is the name we give to the number three. The number three is not a name; it is an abstract entity that represents certain properties of a certain quantity.

|>ouglas

Predicate logic, when used as too strict a guideline for everyday thought and belief, places a linguistic boundary around that which is not linguistic. — creativesoul

I couldn't disagree more. Logic, like math, is discovered, not invented. Though I believe that everything that is invented is actually a form of discovery.

The predicate P that picks out chairs, existed as an abstract object in the space of predicates long before people existed. It will exist long after we are gone. It would exist if we never existed. Its existence is a necessary, eternal truth.

Likewise for the number pi. Likewise for all of math. Likewise for all of logic.

|>ouglas

I like Chalmers. I think Mary's Room is an excellent thought experiment. — RogueAI

Mary's Room (or as it is more commonly called, "The Knowledge Argument") was actually by Frank Jackson, not Chalmers. Though I'm sure Chalmers must have talked about it in his book.

The Knowlege Argument certainly did provoke a lot of debate, and physicalists at the time presented mostly bad arguments against it. But there is still a huge challenge to it for dualists. The Knowledge Argument is not as strong against physicalism as it might appear at first: Imagine that we put a zombie version of Mary in the same circumstance. Zombie Mary would have the exact same reaction when she is let out of her black & white room as Mary would.

|>ouglas

The existence of conscious minds is the most surprising thing about this universe, I think. It needs an explanation and science is failing spectacularly at providing one. — RogueAI

That's why I spent years studying the issue.

Don't expect any satisfying answers, however!

Unless you turn out to be a functionalist physicalist/representationalist. Then you can live a happy life feeling confident that there's no truly "hard problem" and all the rest is just a lot of detail that may take us many decades to figure out.

But if that's what you decide, you will, alas, be wrong. Though you'll be in good company.

|>ouglas

P.S. You could also read Chalmers, who is not a physicalist. But I'm not sure that will leave you satisfied.

I guess to me, to say that something exists is merely saying that there is a predicate that when applied to everything yields some results. E.g.

The set of all chairs is the set of all x such that P(x), where P is a predicate that is true for chairs and false for non-chairs.

(Let's ignore, for the sake of argument, the x for which there is no fact of the matter about whether x is or is not a chair.)

Now the predicate P that picks out chairs is going to be something that's very complicated. But a predicate is like a number. The number three would exist, even if there were no intelligent beings to comprehend the number three. Likewise, the predicate P that picks out chairs exists, even if there were never any humans to breathe life into P.

|>ouglas

What did you study? — RogueAI

Philosophy of Mind. (And Computer Science.)

|>ouglas

I spent my entire undergrad education at MIT studying this very question, and I'm no closer to an answer today than when I started.

|>ouglas

There is some truth to this, but if you haven't yet surveyed the extensive literature on the subject, then perhaps the review articles that I posted at the top will go some way towards disabusing you of the notion that this is a settled issue in philosophy. — SophistiCat

I take it that nothing is ever settled in Philosophy. But I've also noted that if you swim against the tide, the onus then is usually on you to make a very strong case, and if you swim with the tide, you need say little to defend your position.

Does this make the tide necessarily right? Of course not. Tides change from time to time, and philosophical debates can rage for thousands of years. But if we are to believe that Philosophy is of any use at all, other than just as a means of honing one's ability to think and argue well and coherently, it seems that one must be committed to the belief that following the tide is the path that is generally most likely to lead to knowledge.

I did some skimming of the references you provided that were actually available to me. One thing I noted that was of interest is that in a closed timelike curve, there can be no consistent entropy gradient that gives time its forward arrow. If there were such a gradient, you couldn't return in the loop to the same point in space-time, since that point must have the same entropy, and consequently it wouldn't be a closed curve. It seems that this would make traveling around one unpleasant. But, I suppose if it were large enough, you could refrain from going all the way around the loop, and I suppose there could be a gradient that does not change direction in the part that you stay on. Well, this is probably neither here nor there for this discussion, but I found it an interesting worry.

So, I've been thinking about time-traveling wormholes instead. Let's say that you enter a wormhole headed for the past. Your lovely wife died and you are heartbroken. You wish to be with her again. While you were with her, she mentioned that she had had a wonderful boyfriend in the past who was a lot like you, only older. Unfortunately, he eventually died in a freak gardening accident, but they had been very happy together for many years while he was alive.

You decide that you must have been/will be this man, and so you enter the wormhole and begin your new life as your dead wife's sugar daddy. Only she's no longer dead from your new location in time.

So what is happening here with respect to existence? We already know the eternalist view, so I will elide that. But there are two other possibilities that I can think of:

(1) When you enter the wormhole, reality splits in two, and now there are two presentist universes. Though they are both on deterministic rails. Such a split happens every time someone enters the wormhole. Oh, but wait? What about random particles that enter the wormhole. Do they cause a myriad of forking realities?

I find this view to be highly unsatisfying.

(2) Presentism is correct and the only existing point in time is now. When you enter the wormhole you cease to exist. I.e., you die. You committed suicide. It's really very tragic.

But to soften this tragedy, there was a time in the past when there were two of you. Unfortunately, one of you just appeared without any cause or history, and so this mysteriously appearing version of you is not really you at all, but rather a weird clone of you made by space and time out of nothing but random particles and energy.

When you entered the wormhole, you were hoping for a continuity of consciousness. You expected to be traveling into the past. But nothing could be farther from the truth. You died. Nothing more. And it just so happens that someone else just like you, but not you, was brought into existence, at precisely the time and place you wished to travel to. Not only is your suicide a tragedy, but it is compounded by the fact that in the distant past some imposter got to spent all this wonderful time with the woman of your dreams.

I also find this view to be highly unsatisfying.

|>ouglas

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 history. 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 documentation.
— Douglas Alan

You make my point egg-zackly! For facts, their truth is granted. Different from the truth of, e.g., 2+3=5, — tim wood

Apparently you don't know how to read plain English. The sentence, "This sentence contains words" is a tautology. It is true in all possible worlds. It is analytic a priori, not a posteriori, and requires knowing nothing about the external world.

Also you conveniently ignored, "they are either categorically necessary". A categorical necessity is a non-contingent fact of the sort, "Blue is a color". I.e., its truth just follows from the definitions of "blue" and "color".

If we scroll down a bit in the Wikipedia article, we'll find:

In mathematics, a fact is a statement (called a theorem} that can be proven by logical argument from certain axioms and definitions.

There's your 2+3=5. It's a mathematical fact.

I am done with you. You started off as an ass (e.g. calling me stupid and ignorant in your first response to me), and you remain one. I will no longer feed this troll.

|>oug

And this just shows there's no accounting for what passes for philosophy in Cambridge (our fair city), MA. (home of Harvard U., and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both claimed by our boy). A hazard of institutions that teach that they're congenitally always right and correct and congratulate themselves for same, or people who having attended, make it their own methodology. — tim wood

And you are asserting that MIT carefully selects all of the reading material assigned so that it only confirms MIT's and Harvard's parochial view?

Considering that MIT's Philosophy department is ranked fourth in the world or so, they must be doing something right with respect to how philosophers in general view what comes out of MIT's Philosophy department. Likewise for the sciences at both Harvard and MIT.

Since "fact" is a word that can be defined however a group consensually decides to use it, it seems that you travel in philosophical circles that are different from mine. I wish you well on your journeys, but I do not wish to participate in them. Life is short and I do not have the time to also traipse down whatever path you are on.

As I mentioned already, philosophers around here like to use words in the same way that a layperson would when using words that are potentially of philosophical interest to the layperson.

This is what Wikipedia says that a fact is:

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 history. 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 documentation.

I.e., this is how the layperson uses the word "fact", and so philosophers in Cambridge go with that usage.

For reasons unfathomable to me, you wish to travel down a different path. I bid you safe travels.

|>ouglas

In what sense do virtual or real particles live outside the mathematical equations? — MathematicalPhysicist

In what sense do chairs live outside the mathematical equations?

|>ouglas

and it's my notion. It's about existence not subsistence(continued existence). — creativesoul

Let us assume for a moment that modal realism is true. Let us consider a possible world in which there are no humans, but chimpanzees have managed to construct what we would consider to be chairs. Do not chairs then exist in this possible world, even though there are no humans there?

Now let's agree that model realism is not true. Does this change the existential status of chairs should they have been constructed by chimpanzees and humans never existed?

I assert that rejecting modal realism does not change the existential status of chairs made by chimpanzees in an actual world that never had humans.

|>ouglas

it's worth repeating the infamous Kantian judgement that seems to baffle logicians:
All events must have a cause. — 3017amen

I'm not familiar with logicians being baffled by this assertion. Logicians, in my experience, are concerned mostly with propositions that carry a truth value. As I mentioned, some propositions, will not carry a truth value, and different logicians have different opinions about what to do about such propositions.

Some have asserted, I believe, that all such propositions are to be considered false. At least if you insert them into a logically deductive argument. Others might say that the entire argument then will just have a conclusion without a truth value.

There are also forms of logic that are multi-valued. I.e., they are more truth values than just true and false. I don't know much about these alternative forms of logic. I think they have been used more by computer scientists for implementing AI systems, for instance, than by philosophers.

As for the sentence "All events must have a cause", I can see that people may agree or disagree with this statement. Or they may feel that it doesn't have a truth value. But in terms of how logic is to deal with it, I don't see how it is different from any other proposition that might be contentious.

Logicians and philosophers of language have worried a lot about propositions such as "Santa Claus wears a red suit", which seems to be true, despite the fact that Santa Claus does not exist. How best to handle such propositions took up much of a semester, with no clear answer at the time.

|>ouglas

You know, human condition kinds of stuff. — 3017amen

Well, I'm not sure that I do know. But there are certainly a multitude of propositions that have truth values, but for which we'll never know for sure what that truth value is. (E.g., whether the Bohm or Everett interpretation of QM is the right one.) And there are a multitude of propositions which just fail to have truth values.

Many philosophers believe that any proposition that expresses whether some act is right or wrong, for instance, can never have a truth value, since moral judgements are not the sorts of things that are amenable to being factual. Other philosophers would disagree about this, however.

I guess the existence of moral propositions might cause us to ask what is their usefulness if they can never have a truth value. That's an interesting question for sure, but not a topic I have studied. The "term" proposition originated in logic, as I understand it, and logic would not concern itself much with propositions that have no truth value. Since then, the term "proposition" has been expanded widely. It is still used to convey the notion that an attempt is being made to assert that something is true via the proposition. But clearly things can get complicated outside of the tidy domain of logic.

|>ouglas

Colors and color vision are not equivalent. I said that what chairs are is not the same as what colors are. The former is existentially dependent upon us, the latter is not. — creativesoul

I don't consider chairs to be existentially dependent on us. Chairs could exist even if we didn't. There would just be no beings that had the concept of chairs or that could pick them out.

I.e., there are possible worlds in which there were never any humans, but in which there are chairs. And if there were never any humans in the actual world, there could still be chairs in the actual world, since there would be humans in possible worlds with the concept of chairs.

|>ouglas

The short answer is that there are a multitude of propositions that go beyond simple true and false, yes or no, either/or. I just wanted to ask the MIT guy! — 3017amen

The word "proposition" to philosophers is technical jargon. Though we can actually find a decent definition for this jargon in the American Heritage Dictionary:

a. A statement that affirms or denies something.
b. The meaning expressed in such a statement, as opposed to the way it is expressed.

Such a statement can be true or false. "Horses are animals" is a true proposition. "Horses are all brown" is a false proposition. "Horses are good" is a proposition that fails to have a truth value.

I'm not sure what you mean by an "undecided" proposition. We might look at particular crayon that is orangey red and state, "This crayon is red." This statement is a proposition, but there may be no fact of the matter as to whether the crayon is red or not, and if there is no fact of the matter on that question, then the proposition fails to have a truth value.

|>ouglas

Chairs are not the same scenario though. Not at all. We - and only we - determine what counts as a chair. The same is not true with colors. — creativesoul

I would argue that it is the same with colors. Color vision is far from only in the eyes. There is a lot of cognitive processing that is unique to humans that goes into our color vision. And even if it were the case that all of human color vision were determined only by our human eyes, the eyes of all animals and potential aliens are going to work differently and classify crayons differently.

|>ouglas

This seems prima faice inadequete. If you index facts to the past, one is hard pressed to make sense of straightforward statements like: "it is a fact that the heat death of the universe will occur"; similarly, if you index facts to experience ('experiential record'), what of "it is a fact that force is defined as mass multiplied by acceleration"? Or even analytic statements like "it is a fact that batchelors are unmarried men"?; Normativity is general wrecks all sorts of havok here, anything premised on some sort of commitment: "it is a fact that fraud is illegal under the law". Facts seem to have a wider scope than your definition allows for. — StreetlightX

Exactly so!

|>ouglas

As I mentioned previously, you can find a philosopher somewhere to support any position.

At least where I am, when philosophers discuss something that might be of interest to a layperson, philosophers want to use the same meanings of the words that the layperson would be using. Philosophers around here wish to capture as best they can what a normal speaker means when they ask a philosophical question using normal English.

I.e., when answering the question of what a fact is, you have to capture the meaning that a layperson is using by the word "fact" when they ponder on the mysteries of facts.

The reason for this, is that if you use a different meaning of the word than that of a normal speaker, you've answered a different question than the one that a normal speaker would want to know when they come to ask philosophers for their wisdom. One major point of philosophy is, in theory, to answer mysteries that perplex even normal people.

How you are using the word "fact" has nothing to do whatsoever with how a normal speaker of English uses the word. Judith Jarvis Thomson herself would berate me for trying to use normal English words in ways that were incompatible with normal English usage when I wrote papers for her in her Philosophy 101 class. E.g., when I argued that two people could exchange bodies because they could exchange minds, and a person is a mind, her reply was, "A person is not a mind. A person has a mind." I fell into the trap of using normal English words in a non-standard way.

Now I could have fixed my argument by saying, "The only essentional component of a person is their mind. And a mind can be relocated from one body to another. The person would follow the mind into the new body, since the mind is the only essential component of the person." Or something like that. But I wasn't quite savvy enough back then to use words with that kind of care.

In any case, to your average Joe a fact is just something that is true. To Joe, it is a fact that 1 + 1 = 2. It is a fact that not all horses are brown. And it is a fact that horses are all animals.

You might confuse Joe by asking him if a toy horse is an animal after he agreed that all horses are animals. Or how it can be true that Santa Claus wears a red suit if there is no Santa Claus. But this is why you need philosophers, I guess. Joe can't necessarily figure out everything on his own, even if he knows how to use the language.

As for natural science, I have worked for scientists my entire adult life. At MIT and Harvard. None of them use the word "fact" the way that Collingwood says that they do. To a scientist, just as it is for Joe, it is a fact that 1 + 1 = 2. It is also a fact that if I drop a pencil, it will fall down due to gravity. This is not a statement about history. It is a prediction about a future event, and we know what the outcome will be. It is a fact that eventually, our sun will become a red giant. These are facts about the future, not about history.

|>ouglas

P.S. Yes, Philosophers use tons of jargon. And this jargon may use English words that differ from normal English usage. But they don't do this when a lay-mystery to be solved is expressed using those words. E.g., no layperson asks questions about the nature of "propositions". Or at least not the kind that philosophers talk about. If there were philosophical mysteries about the type of proposition that you might present to a paramour, then philosophers would, of course, not confound the jargon usage of "proposition" with the type of proposition being proposed by the paramour.

That "is" is a problem. I'd have thought that facts were things that propositions attempt to describe. — tim wood

I already ceded aletheist's point in this regard. Though, as I mentioned, the word "fact" can be and is used both ways by even famous, tenured philosophers at prestigious universities.

That is, the proposition itself is never in-itself true - or rigorously provable. And there's nothing wrong with this; it's how the world works, including science-on-the-Charles. The issue here is usage and understanding. — tim wood

A proposition can, of course, be "in-itself true" even if it is not rigorously provable. A proposition, if it has a truth value, is either true for false. In and of itself. The world is either as the proposition describes or it is not.

I studied Philosophy for many years, and not a single philosopher that I studied with ever used the term "fact" the way that you seem to be using it. To a philosopher in Cambridge MA, a proposition being a fact has nothing to do with whether you can prove it. It is a fact if it truthfully represents the world, and it is not a fact if it doesn't.

It may be the case that some people do use the word the way that you do. If so, I scarcely care.

Though lawyers, of course, have their own technical usage of the word "fact", and if I'm talking to a lawyer, then I care about how they use it. Potential paramours usually have a different idea of the term "proposition" than philosophers do. Unless they are both paramours and philosophers, in which case, hopefully, they will be able to figure out what type of proposition one has in mind.

But when I walk across the street to go to a Philosophy talk or conference, no one there will be using the term "fact" in the manner that you do, and so I chose to use the term in the way it will be understood amongst the people I am likely to actually have a dialogue with.

If you wish to say that I aspire to be willfully ignorant, then so be it. People who speak as you do, do not enter my world frequently enough for me to worry about presently. If and when the day comes that they do, then I can easily adapt.

|>ouglas

There are many entries, and if you scan a bunch of them it should be clear to you that the terms are in many of those defined as terms-of-art. — tim wood

If you prefer to discuss what the word "fact" means to a lexicographer, perhaps you should go to The Lexicography Forum instead. Last time I checked, this is The Philosophy Forum.

|>ouglas

Frivolity aside, you said categorically that a fact is a true proposition. — tim wood

For someone who likes to rail so much about stupidity, you shouldn't act so stupidly.

You have quoted me out of context. In context, I provided the requisite caveats. I'll paste them here to refresh your addled memory:

There is, of course, an entire entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on this question. And if you read it, you will quickly find that you are unlikely to get a group of random philosophers to come to a consensus on the matter.

I'll take it upon myself to cast the deciding vote then

|>ouglas

More closely, can you not see a difference between 2+3=5 and "President Franklin Pierce was born in New Hampshire? — tim wood

The difference is that one of those is a necessary fact and the other is a contingent fact. They are, however, both facts.

|>ouglas

I seem to have a problem with a proposition being characterized as true or false because, by my understanding, a proposition is not definitive — BrianW

The term "proposition", as conventionally used in Philosophy, just means a sentence that is attempting to assert something. This assertion might be true or it might be false, or it might not have a truth value.

E.g., here are some propositions:

(1) All horses are animals.
(2) All horses are brown.
(3) No three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer value of n greater than 2.
(4) Chairs are good.

#1 is true by definition.
#2 is false, empirically.
#3 is true because it can be proved so mathematically.
#4 probably has no truth value, since it expresses a value judgement rather than a way the world might or might not be.

When I said that a proposition is a sentence above, that was a lie, however. Or rather an over-simplification. A proposition is an abstraction of such a sentence, such that the sentence can be rephrased or expressed in a different language and still express the same proposition as long as the rephrasing or translation maintains the same meaning.

|>ouglas

Just a piece of advice, because alot of guys like relatively thin women, find a women who loves to lift weights. — christian2017

The problem with this is that she'll want a guy who loves to lift weights. And I prefer to sit in front of this infernal computer and debate inane topics on the Internets.

|>ouglas

I just find it helpful to maintain a careful distinction between a true proposition and the state of things that it represents for an interpreter thereof by reserving "fact" for the latter. — aletheist

Fair enough!

|>ouglas

Thanks for the offer of scripture, but no thanks. As for ending it all in what would be perceived as an accident, I prefer to just tell myself, I can always jump off a bridge tomorrow. There's no rush to get it done today. #Tomorrow_Not_Today

As for finding contentment, I'm hard at work on that. It can be a challenge, however. Especially when people who told you that you would always be "my best friend and greatest love", make a bee line for the exit when you hit a rough patch.

But when life gives you lemons, buy a shotgun and use them for target practice.

|>ouglas

I propose instead: A fact is the state of things that is signified by a true proposition.

I would not object to that usage of the word "fact". Though I think that it can be used either way unproblematically.

|>ouglas

but yours seems to me ignorance preening and congratulating itself for having said what is a piece of stupidity.

I have an SB in Philosophy from MIT and this is what I was taught the word "fact" means.

Certainly I can and did go look at the Stanford Encylopedia and see for myself that there are a myriad of different opinions on how the word "fact" should be used. One of these opinions documented in the aforementioned encyclopedia is precisely what I have said I was taught.

If anyone thinks that a debate here is going to somehow be more enlightening than what they will find in that encyclopedia entry, they are sorely deluding themselves.

Personally, I prefer the meaning that I was taught. I find it clear, concise, and useful, and no one at MIT ever batted an eye when the word "fact" was used in this manner.

|>ouglas

P.S. As for the specific content of your offensive statement, you can go frak yourself, kind sir.

This has become interesting. Can a proposition be true? I mean in the sense that, if it is true, is it still a proposition? — BrianW

I have no idea what you are talking about! I have a degree in Philosophy and propositions are usually considered to be the primary bearers of truth-value.

|>ouglas

There is, of course, an entire entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on this question. And if you read it, you will quickly find that you are unlikely to get a group of random philosophers to come to a consensus on the matter.

I'll take it upon myself to cast the deciding vote then: A fact is a true proposition. Nothing more or less.

|>ouglas

Its kind of like Fight Club (the movie). We don't fight each other but there are lots of fight clubs. — christian2017

So, I need to be invited to a special Discord chat, or something?

I'm never going to convert to Christianity, sorry. Perhaps Zen, but that's mostly just ancient wisdom for how not to go crazy and how to treat people decently. Or at least the parts of it that I care about are.

|>ouglas