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Single Idea 8323

[filed under theme 7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 8. Facts / a. Facts ]

Full Idea

Although 'fact' is grammatically a count noun, it strikes us as being at best whimsical to talk about enumerating facts - to talk, for instance, about how many facts I learned today before breakfast.

Gist of Idea

It is whimsical to try to count facts - how many facts did I learn before breakfast?

Source

E.J. Lowe (The Possibility of Metaphysics [1998], 12.4)

Book Ref

Lowe,E.J.: 'The Possibility of Metaphysics' [OUP 2001], p.258

A Reaction

I always liked the question 'how many facts are there in this room?' One might make a serious attempt to decide how many facts I learned before breakfast, and reach a reasonable approximation, especially if one didn't open the newspaper.

The 21 ideas with the same theme [general ideas about facts]:

14778 Facts are hard unmoved things, unaffected by what people may think of them [Peirce]
6111 As propositions can be put in subject-predicate form, we wrongly infer that facts have substance-quality form [Russell]
6434 Facts are everything, except simples; they are either relations or qualities [Russell]
21709 You can't name all the facts, so they are not real, but are what propositions assert [Russell]
23473 Do his existent facts constitute the world, or determine the world? [Morris,M on Wittgenstein]
7610 A fact is simply what it is rational to accept [Putnam]
18488 We normally explain natural events by citing further facts [McFetridge]
8386 Events are picked out by descriptions, and facts by whole sentences [Crane]
17287 Facts, such as redness and roundness of a ball, can be 'fused' into one fact [Fine,K]
8314 Are facts wholly abstract, or can they contain some concrete constituents? [Lowe]
8316 Facts cannot be wholly abstract if they enter into causal relations [Lowe]
8318 The problem with the structured complex view of facts is what binds the constituents [Lowe]
8323 It is whimsical to try to count facts - how many facts did I learn before breakfast? [Lowe]
15137 If 'fact' is a noun, can we name the fact that dogs bark 'Mary'? [Williamson]
14095 Facts are structures of worldly items, rather like sentences, individuated by their ingredients [Rosen]
4698 What counts as a fact partly depends on the availability of human concepts to describe them [O'Grady]
5736 No sort of plain language or levels of logic can express modal facts properly [Melia]
5735 Maybe names and predicates can capture any fact [Melia]
21661 There are probably ineffable facts, systematically hidden from us [Hofweber]
18916 Facts are not in the world - they are properties of the world [Engelbretsen]
17267 The identity of two facts may depend on how 'fine-grained' we think facts are [Correia/Schnieder]