More quotations about facts

(Part I from last May)

G. E. Moore (1953): '"Facts" is a very ambiguous word, although it is so constantly used as if it were clear.' (Some Main Problems of Philosophy, p. 306)

Henry Philip Tappan (1844): 'By fact, we mean phenomena, — something which we know by observation merely. Facts are of two kinds: 1. Facts of the Senses, or external observation. 2. Facts of the Consciousness, or internal observation.' (Elements of Logic, p. 427)

William James (1907): 'The facts themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are.' (Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Lecture VI. Pragmatism's Conception of Truth)

W. R. Dennes (1932): 'Facts are events. ... [T]he facts propositions report are qualified and related events which occur and cease but are not true or false.' ('Fact and Interpretation', Studies in the Nature of Facts, vol. 14 of the University of California Publications in Philosophy [Berkeley: University of California Press]: 98)

L. Susan Stebbing (1930): 'A fact is not an event. ... A fact is anything that is the case. ... Facts simply are; they are neither true nor false. Only propositions can be true, or can be false.' (Modern Introduction to Logic, p. 36)

Talcott Parsons (1949): 'A fact is not itself a phenomenon at all, but a proposition about one or more phenomena.' (Structure of Social Action, Part 1, ch. 1, p. 41)

Henry S. Leonard (1957): 'Propositions, or states of affairs, are either true or false. If a proposition is true, it is called a fact. If it is false, it is said not to be a fact. Thus, facts are true propositions.' (Principles of Reasoning: an Introduction to Logic, Methodology, and the Theory of Signs, p. 47)

Bernard Bosanquet (1885):

English custom has always recognized 'fact' as to some extent a middle term between Thing or reality, and the knowledge which is in our heads. Fact is always conceived as relative to knowledge, whereas thing and reality rather imply independence of knowledge. ... [W]e regard fact as belonging, no doubt, to reality, but as existing for us by construction and especially by abstraction, as the embodiment of it in judgments conclusively shows. I have little doubt that most men would unhesitatingly affirm the existence of things apart from percipient intelligence, but if asked the same question about facts they would be puzzled and would probably decide in the negative. Unknown facts, although a simple process of reflection forces the notion of them on the mind, are felt to be a troublesome conception. Thus I think that common-sense recognizes the true nature of that (viz., fact) on which it chiefly relies, far more correctly than we admit if we confuse fact with thing and reality, or on the other hand with the unformed datum of sense. (Knowledge and Reality, pp. 45-6; [Emphasis added])

Sven Edvard Rodhe (1939): 'The view that the truth of a judgment lies in its correspondence with a fact meets with the difficulty that a fact qua such and nothing else cannot be conceived as given otherwise than in judgments. We never attain to more direct contact with facts than in our judgments, and, unless mutually contradictory judgments are accepted as equally true, the correspondence of the judgment with fact can only be interpreted as its agreement with other judgments. The demand for accordance between judgment and fact is a demand for accordance between judgments, since the answer to the demand for fact is no fact but judgments.' ('Correspondence and Coherence', Theoria [Jan., 1939]: 23)

W. V. Quine (1987): 'Or perhaps we settle for a correspondence of whole sentences with facts: a sentence is true if it reports a fact. But here again we have fabricated substance for an empty doctrine. The world is full of things, variously related, but what, in addition to all that, are facts? They are projected from true sentences for the sake of correspondence.' (Quiddities, p. 213)

Joad and Stebbing

I know of two books devoted to Joad. There's Cyril Joad by Geoffrey Thomas (1992) and Radio Philosopher: The Radical Life of Cyril Joad by Tony Judge (2012).

Judge says that Joad and L. Susan Stebbing were friends who lived near each other in Hampstead.  Stebbing was an analytic philosopher who published an influential logic text and a critique of James Jeans and Arthur Eddington (Philosophy and the Physicists).  Her name should (but doesn't) appear in the Projected Table of Contents for the SEP.  Palgrave Macmillan will be publishing a book about Stebbing (by Siobhan Chapman).

Her friendship with Joad must have been interesting.  In my other posts about Joad, I've linked to several of his on-line bio's, from which it's evident that he was a sexist whose views of women were generally disapproved of even in his own day.  And now here's Susan Stebbing, a woman who was smarter than him and who didn't hesitate to let him know it.  She was quite scathing in print about Joad's works.  For instance, in 1926, Stebbing had this to say of Joad's Thrasymachus, or The Future of Morals:

It is an extremely clever and extremely superficial speech, as its title would suggest. Mr. Joad mistakes diatribe for argument, and appeals throughout to the herd's love of abuse of the forces that are. It is full of an inverted sentimentality that makes clear thinking impossible, and of jokes that merely obscure the issue. (Susan Stebbing, 'English Books', Philosophy [then called the Journal of Philosophical Studies], v. 1 [1926]: pp. 90-93)

In my previous post, I noted that Joad's reviewers tended to be quite complimentary of his prose.  Not Stebbing.  In a symposium at the Aristotelian Society in 1929, Stebbing said of Joad: 'As we shall see, his use of language is very inexact; hence, his statements are confused in the extreme.'

Joad felt the sting of these remarks, as is evident from his review of a volume that had been published in memory of Stebbing about five years after her death.  The review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement of February 26, 1949 (on p. 141).  At that time, the authors of reviews in the TLS were generally not named, but in the TLS's archives Joad is identified as the author of the review.  In it, he says,

Professor Stebbing had an acid manner and a biting tongue. She possessed in an outstanding degree the power to make a person both look and feel foolish ... An undue tartness was the defect of Professor Stebbing's controversial method, but if it was a fault, it was a fault on the right side, and it was more than counterbalanced by her intellectual virtues.

He felt the sting but still expressed respect for her intellect.