Comment by raincom
5 years ago
There are no such things as facts; that's the consensus of the debates in 1960s from history and philosophy of sciences, philosophy of language. Facts are facts of a theory: or, facts are theory-laden. Or observations are theory-laden.
When two parties engage in an argument, some theory-laden facts become facts (for instance, propositional logic in this context is seen as fact), other facts become theoretical claims.
That's the issue here: you call it a 'fact', I call it a theoretical claim. The dispute is at the level of describing the phenomenon itself. If one follows the best theory of argumentation in the market (that of pragma-dialectical school), this way of transforming theory-laden descriptions into facts violates one of the rules of dialogue.
> There are no such things as facts; that's the consensus of the debates in 1960s from history and philosophy of sciences, philosophy of language.
That is itself a fact claim—not just that that is the consensus of the debates in those fields, but even that such debate has occurred is such a claim. So either there are facts (and the conclusion of the debates to the contrary is false) or there are no facts and it makes no sense to cite the supposed debates or their supposed consensus. In either case, the claim about the debates is of no value.
Beautiful. Use the claim recursively on itself to destroy it. (And I suspect that all "there is no truth" positions are vulnerable to the same argument.)