Fact/Theory or Factheory?

[Piers]

Bit confused by what you’re asking however,

Facts, I prefer to use the term assumptions, which in practise I generally treat as synonymous.

[luckyme]

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Bit confused by what you’re asking however,

Facts, I prefer to use the term assumptions, which in practise I generally treat as synonymous.

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bunny and madnak have done an excellent job tearing at the concepts.
in the OP I used the repaired blind that still can't see even though they can , another simple analogy is the big dipper, which only is a fact of the night sky because we have a concept of dippers. A culture without that would just see a jumble of stars in that portion of the sky ( or perhaps a bear).

I like bunnies constraint idea, perhaps because of the role it plays in evolution also makes it feel familiar, but I probably have less confidence in the direct relationship between the constraint and 'facts'. The blind in the OP shows one possible answer to bunnies "why do we all see 3 chairs" .. apparently we don't unless we've been taught/learned to see chairs at the very least.

The main point of the OP was to check my discomfort with the confidence so often placed on 'facts' without recognizing their dependence on some model. I was seeing a messier connection between fact and model/theory and was hoping for some good discussion of it.

good input you guys, it's a great illustration of why I log on to SMP, thanks, luckyme

[drzen]

I'll try a brief answer.

Science takes as axiomatic that there is a world, and that it consists of things that can in principle be observed. It does not prima facie make assumptions about those things. It does not even claim that it can investigate the whole of the world, only that it can investigate the "natural". (Which is a bit hard to explain in a nutshell but effectively means it claims only to be able to investigate things that can have facts about them, IOW, only those things that are in principle observable.)

A fact is an observation about a thing. It does not have to be true. But it must be the same observation, in principle, that any observer would make if equipped in the same way, from the same standpoint. (Obviously, if a person is colourblind, they are not able to agree that "the apple is red", which poses the question whether that is a fact.)

Theories explain how facts are related, and generally because they explain relationships, they can predict new facts (often because the relationships they describe are implied between a fact that is known and one that is not).

Facts do not have to precede theories. You could predict facts without having any "input" to your theory. (You can predict that relationships will be seen without knowing which facts they will relate.) But of course they generally do, because they are the material that suggests relationships that further investigation can confirm to some extent or disprove. I think that looking at it from this angle should make it clear that it's a lot easier to disprove the existence of relationships than to prove them. The range of possible relationships can be very wide, and one pair of facts that are not related in the way predicted can disprove one particular relationship, so that you can never have certainty that the relationship you have identified actually holds.

But facts, in this model, are observer dependent. A different observer can have a different view. But this does not detract from science, because it does not say "these are the facts". It says "if you agree that these are the facts (ie if you observe what I observe) then you can see these relationships are possible".

[luckyme]

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Facts do not have to precede theories.

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It was more 'can facts precede theory/model' that attracted my attention.

luckyme

[drzen]

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Facts do not have to precede theories.

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It was more 'can facts precede theory/model' that attracted my attention.

luckyme

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Yes, they can, and often do. I think you would far more often have something you observe and want to explain, than you'd have an explanation in search of facts. But in explaining some facts, you create the framework to discover others, so both are true.