A clever argument suggests there might be only one fact: the truth
The Slingshot argument claims every true statement ultimately stands for the same thing, the value true. If facts are whatever true statements refer to, the conclusion is bizarre: the universe contains a single fact. Most people assume facts are plentiful and simple. Philosophers have found them surprisingly slippery.
The word comes from the Latin factum, a thing done. In English it first meant a deed or performance, a sense that now survives only in law. The modern meaning, something that is really the case, took hold in the middle of the 1500s. The historian Barbara J. Shapiro traced in A Culture of Fact how the idea grew out of English legal practice in that century, and the Oxford English Dictionary records the looser use for an alleged fact, true or not, from 1729.
Traditionally a fact is the worldly counterpart of a true proposition, the state of affairs that makes the sentence true. Pascal Engel's correspondence theory of truth depends on this and assumes an objective world. Facts seem to have parts: that Paris is the capital of France involves Paris, France and a relation between them. Negative, disjunctive, modal and moral facts resist such neat analysis. Since David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, philosophers have argued over whether any chain of statements about what is can yield a conclusion about what ought to be.
Science uses a stricter notion. A scientific fact is an objective observation or measurement that can be repeated, as opposed to the theories built to explain it, and observers are expected to agree whoever runs the experiment. Thomas Kuhn complicated this by noting that deciding what to measure, and how, already leans on theory; dating fossils, for example, relies on assumptions about radioactive decay. Peer review and accreditation exist partly to keep findings accurate.
Historians face their own problem. In What is History?, published in 1961, E. H. Carr compared facts to fish in the ocean: historians catch only a few, which hint at what lies beneath without revealing it. Back in 1870, Charles Sanders Peirce had sorted the ways people settle belief into four: tenacity, authority, a priori reasoning and scientific method.
Source: Fact
