Just the facts
As long as I am on the subject (see yesterday’s entry) there’s another technical distinction I would like to air on the meaning of “fact.” We use the word to mean a certain truth, but facts are neither certain nor true.
A fact is an assertion that can be objectively evaluated. “I am five feet, six inches tall” is a fact; we can pull out a tape measure and discover the truth of the matter. “I have twelve noses on my face” is a fact – a false one – which we can test by direct observation. Opinion, not fabrication, is the opposite of fact. A fact is either definitely true, or it definitely isn’t.
The definition, typically for epistemology, allows for some gray areas, because there are so many assertions which are definitely true or false, but aren’t truly verifiable. In theory, we could travel to a distant galaxy to see what it’s like in detail, but the nature of another galaxy, beyond its general shape and the spectra of light it radiates, remains an opinion, until we can start examining it in practice. Similarly, information lost to the past can look like a fact – Napoleon either ate an egg at breakfast on his twelfth birthday, or he didn’t – but since we can’t test it, the question of what he ate remains a matter of opinion.
Paradoxically, this makes the very categorization of fact a subjective matter. For our great grandparents, the chemical composition of Martian soil was an opinion; for us, a fact, despite the constancy of the soil itself over that time.