Roy asked:

Is there a difference between a "Fact" and a "truth"? I realize that some people use the terms
interchangeably, but I wondered if there was a logically necessary distinction. I reasoned that the
difference between them is that "Facts" are always true. Truths are temporary. For example, "George
W. Bush is President of the United States" is true only within the length of his term (let's say 4 years).
To make the same statement 8 years from now the truth value will be false. But, "George W. Bush
was elected president of the United States in 2001" will forever be true. Is my distinction between
"Facts" and "Truth" reasonable or faulty?

============

I think you are wrong in what you're saying. Right now, "George W. Bush is President of the United
States" is a fact. It is also true. In, say, 10 years, it will be neither. So that example is not correct.

One way to test a statement is to put it through logical variations:

Statement: If P then Q.

Converse: If Q then P, which is not logically equivalent to the first statement.

Inverse: If not P then not Q, which again is not logically equivalent to the first statement.

Contrapositive: If not Q then not P, which IS logically equivalent to the first statement. "

Ok?

So let's look at the statement: IF something is a fact, THEN it is true.

What do we get out of that? Well, if that is true, then the contrapositive is true: IF something is NOT
true, THEN it is NOT a fact. Let's test that. "Unicorns exist" is not true. It's also not a fact, right? Or is
it? We know that unicorns do not exist, at least in any normal sense of that term. Is "unicorns exist" a
fact? No. So the contrapositive works.

Ok... the converse: IF something is true, THEN it is a fact. Well, we might make a distinction here
between abstract mathematical propositions versus statements about the "real world" (and I'm not
going to deal here with making that latter term clear). That is, if we say something like "the square of
the sum of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is the square of the sum of the other two sides", which is
a true statement, would we call that a "fact"? After all, there is no real triangle for which this is true, it's
only really true for ideal right triangles. And so it cannot be a fact. I could find, I'm sure, even more
abstract statements in higher mathematics which were true but not facts... and indeed one can fairly
easily create logical systems in which true statements, statements which were consistent with the
logic, and provable within the system, would be false in the real world, i.e., true but not factual. Thus I
could say, "there is a world where like electric charges attract and unlike repel". It would follow, then,
that atoms, etc., could not consist of clouds of electrons around nuclei... since the electrons would
attract each other and the whole atom would collapse. Given the assumption, those are true
conclusions. But there are no facts there.

But if that's the distinction we can make, then we must say that a "true" statement refers to any
correct statement, while a fact refers to any correct statement about the real world. That seems a
reasonable distinction to me... One could then get into some very bizarre discussions about what is
real and what isn't... which as I say I'm not going to touch here.

But that should give you a starting point, anyway, for thinking about this kind of issue. There is a
literature on "conceivability" and on "contingency" and on "counterfactuals" which you might look at,
although it's not easy reading. There's also this brief exposition on the subjunctive:

http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/061.html

and here:

http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxsubjun.html

And on counterfactuals:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/.

Steven Ravett Brown

The word 'fact' derives from the Latin and has a very precise meaning (which in our modern
languages tend to be somewhat obscured, simply from habits of usage). It means 'something that
actually occurred.' Philosophically one may include objects existing in that definition, because it is
legitimate to speak of objects as 'occurrences' in the sense that they are local concentrations of the
'event spectrum' of the universe.

In the very narrow and limited definition of truth that applies, say, in information technology, where a
value may be deposited in a memory site (TRUE/FALSE), this 'factuality' becomes a purely operative
mode. The system containing those value does not 'know' whether a value of 'true' is truly true. There
is some similarity here to the old form of syllogisms, where you can put up a nonsense maxim and
have the syllogism running through to its nonsense conclusion, for as long as the logic of the
operation is satisfied, no hiccup occurs. Accordingly (in syllogisms) it is the duty of the philosopher to
ensure that the maxim is (as they used to call it) a 'self-evident truth', such as for example, 'Socrates
is a man' and then go on from there. But of course, humans can be very simple minded; and
especially in the middle ages, many 'self-evident truths' were put up for syllogistic reasoning of which
one might say that they were very far from being self-evident. Now in relation to information
processing systems, similar rules hold: the attendance of an intelligent agent to control the 'factuality'
of the truth conditions being tested is required. Clearly if a value of True is being deposited in a
memory location, this value says nothing whatever about the truth or falsity of the condition which led
to that value being deposited, for as in the case of syllogisms, the device is responsible only to the
operative logic, not its factuality or truth.

>From this, at any rate, you will deduce the one important criterion which separates fact from truth. A
fact is an occurrence that may occur without any human agent knowing about it; but if a human agent
knows about it, then that agent is responsible for assigning a 'value' to it, e.g. by reporting it. If the
report stands up to scrutiny (for example, if it concerns an earthquake that can be independently
checked), then the fact and the truth coincide (as in your example of President Bush) and any claim
to the contrary will then bear the stigma of 'untruth'. Other conditions may prevail to qualify that truth.
The witness may have confused the date on which the event occurred, but this only means that an
error corrupted some aspect of that factual truth without impairing its essential content. A lot of history
writing is concerned with just such issues, and historians are constantly required to evaluate
testimony which may be essentially true, but deficient in one or another facet of this truth (e.g. the
reigns of Egyptian pharaohs, which often overlap because apparently the Egyptians did not always
rigorously separate the life span and the actual reign of a king).

But many truth situations in human commerce relate to truth which is not tied to events and the
testimony which confirms their factuality. It is fairly clear, without delving deeply into the philosophical
merits of 'truth', that FACTUAL TRUTH is always conditional. In your example of President Bush, the
factual truth about his term of office can only be established when it actually ends; any statement
made before that event is not an 'untruth', nor even an 'error', but just a verbal utterance without
meaning content. However, a fiction writer may, for purposes of their own, pretend that Bush lived to
the age of 120 and remained President for 50 years. This is where the concept of 'truth' becomes
difficult to handle. The writer may be writing before or after the President's death; in either case the
improbability of this scenario is manifest; yet if the work we are discussing has claims to be regarded
as a great work of art, it may show a 'truth content' which transcends the simply fact-truth relation that
I've discussed so far. In other words, 'human truth' need not rely on factuality, but does in fact have
much more stringent (ethically determined) values associated with itself. The example I've just used
recurs in innumerable instances throughout literature, art, opera etc. What merit of truth is contained
in Shakespeare's Macbeth? Clearly the yardstick of factuality is inappropriate here. But you may hear
it said quite often, about such figures as Macbeth, that the 'truth' about Macbeth, even though it may
be 'false' and would be recorded as 'false' in a time machine, is 'true' in a more humanly relevant
context. There is an old adage which occasionally pops up in contexts such as these: 'Even if the
deeds attributed to this person were never performed, they should have been, because they reflect
some intrinsic aspect of that person's character.'

This is the point at which the philosophical concept of 'truth' takes over. Just a few examples:

Truth is profoundly involved in the concept of justice.

Truth has a bearing on aesthetics, i.e. in the relation between art and a very dimly perceived
('inarticulate') truth content.

Truth and morality are inseparably entwined in religious and social interactions.

Truth is ingrained in something we call 'character'. What a person is, deep down.

Truth and factuality may collide in ethical situations: such as a doctor diagnosing terminal cancer and
being of two minds whether or not to communicate this to the victim. Here the 'truth' is not (as one
might suppose) the illness or its terminal conditions (they're the 'facts'), but the attitude of the doctor
and/or those whom he/she consults about the merit of communicating the diagnosis.

There is no need to go on, because your question is limited to what I have discussed above, i.e. the
difference between fact and truth. From this, you should take away the fairly important distinction
between the two, and I hope that the outcome is a 'truth' in itself, namely that the concept of truth is
considerable wider than the concept of fact; that indeed to some extent it includes the concept of
factuality as one of its aspects. But, essentially, that 'truth' relates in the first instance to the human
agent, without whom there would not be such a concept; and that accordingly it relates most deeply
to human issues, where (unlike the fact-truth relation with its essentially linear logic) the concept
shows up in its full complexity.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney.

The sentence 'GWB is President of the US' is only true during his term. But the fact that GWB is the
president of the US is only a fact during his term. In order to make both 'always true' or 'always a fact'
will involve incorporating temporal notions: Its always true that 'GWB was elected in 2001', but
similarly, its always a fact that GWB was elected in 2001. More technically, Tarski's disquotation
schema has it that:

DS: 'P' is true if and only if P

For example 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white. Hence, there is a direct link between
facts and truths. Whenever you have a truth you have a fact and vice versa. If you still want to make
the case there is a difference then I guess an intuitive difference might be that the truth predicate only
applies to sentence, whereas facts are things 'in the world'. You could also say that facts are what
make sentences true. Facts, in that sense, would be the truth-makers for the true sentences.

Rich Woodward