> "All facts were matters of degree. The facts were always
> fuzzy or vague or inexact to some degree. Only math was
> black and white and it was just an artificial system of
> rules and symbols. Science treated the grey or fuzzy facts
> as if they were the black/white facts of math. Yet no one
> had put forth a single fact about the world that was 100%
> true or 100% false. They just said they all were."
Aargh, this begs to be taken apart! :)
>"All facts were matters of degree. The facts were always
>fuzzy or vague or inexact to some degree.
Yes, this is a very popular stance in today's US scholar establishment,
and it is also total semantic hogwash. According to Webster:
fact \'fakt\ n [L factum, fr. neut. of factus, pp. of facere]
1: a thing done : as 1a: CRIME {accessory after the ~} obs
1b: FEAT archaic 1c: ACTION archaic
2: PERFORMANCE, DOING
3: the quality of being actual : ACTUALITY
4a: something that has actual existence 4b: an actual occurrence : EVENT
5: a piece of information presented as having objective reality
Read this carefully. There are *no* fuzzy facts. Instead, fuzziness
itself may be a fact of measurement or observation. Vagueness means
lack of knowledge. Inexactness means extensive knowledge about the
scope of applicability of facts. Truthfulness is yet another attribute,
the most relevant of all mentioned to the word "fact."
>Only math was
>black and white and it was just an artificial system of
>rules and symbols.
Artificial? Oh, please! Is a rock more fundamental than number 1?
There is nothing "black" or "white" about mathematics, although it
*is* a system of rules and symbols, and a very successful one for
modelling fuzziness among other things.
>Science treated the grey or fuzzy facts
>as if they were the black/white facts of math.
Oh, yes? So I must be out of this world since I'm spending months
studying errors of measurement in order to publish a paper about some
facts I measured in less than a week?
>Yet no one
>had put forth a single fact about the world that was 100%
>true or 100% false.
Hmm, let's see: the world exists? Sounds pretty 100%-ish to me,
for all practical purposes.
>They just said they all were.
Ah, now we get to the bottom: context, context!
Regards,
--dv