Re: Enlgish Speaking group?

Today, with great enthusiasm and quite emphatically, TOF laid
this on an unsuspecting readership ...


All Things Mopar wrote:
Today, with great enthusiasm and quite emphatically, TOF laid
this on an unsuspecting readership ...


james wrote:
X-No-Archive: yes

In message <MPG.1f07699553d7b46498ab72@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
the Omrud <usenet.omrud@xxxxxxxxx> writes

What's an incorrect fact?

If I were to proclaim on a Usenet group that the moon
orbits the earth, about twenty posters would get
over-excited and jump up and down, wetting themselves, and
shouting that the earth and moon orbit each other about
their common centre of mass.

It's an incorrect fact. Assuming you had an exhaustible
supply of air and gramophone needles, you could spend all
your life watching the earth from a convenient moon rock
and nary once would the earth orbit the moon. The
purveyors of incorrect facts translate a wobble into an
orbit -- the more demented ones might even calculate an
apogee and perigee.


While it's certainly possible to have a dispute about
whether such things as 'facts' exist at all in the sense
usually conveyed, the conception of a 'fact' is
unambiguous. If something is a fact, it's correct and if
it's not correct, then it's not a fact. Facts are correct
by definition.

ah, but the real trick is to know exectly WHEN what you think
you have is "fact" and when it is even 0.0001% fiction.


That's a different issue from whether "facts" can ever be
"incorrect". A person proposing that X is a fact says that
none can prove otherwise, that it's truth. If someone proves
that X is incorrect, then X ceases to be capable of being
described as a fact and "not X" becomes correct, and thus a
fact, at least in conception.

TOF

Consider the problem from a mathematical standpoint - one simply
cannot prove a null or negative hypothesis by citing examples, as
in "prove it by citing sources", as 1,000,000 hits can be refuted
entirely by a single documented exception. And, 'tis also true
that how truth and facts are perceived is more important than
their actual truth. Ask anyone on either side of the aisle in the
U.S. Congress what they think about any issue du jour, you'll
hear facts, factoids, fiction, science fiction, and all other
types of data, but no information that is really useful. And,
yes, there is a difference between "data" and "information."

--
ATM, aka Jerry

"You're gonna get your mind right" - The Cap'n to Lucas Jackson
in "Cool Hand Luke"

"This is the way he wants it ? well, he gets it" - The Cap'n to
Lucas Jackson in "Cool Hand Luke"

"What we got here is failure to communicate" - The Cap'n to Lucas
.

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