Re: Enlgish Speaking group?

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.

--
ATM, aka Jerry

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm!" - Ralph
Waldo Emerson
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Enlgish Speaking group?
    ... 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, ... It's an incorrect fact. ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: Enlgish Speaking group?
    ... 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. ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: Enlgish Speaking group?
    ... If I were to proclaim on a Usenet group that the moon orbits ... earth and moon orbit each other about their common centre of ... It's an incorrect fact. ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: Modus Ponens and Trivial Truth
    ... If the moon orbits the earth, then I am wearing white ... Here are the truth functions of modus ponens: ...
    (sci.logic)
  • Re: Modus Ponens and Trivial Truth
    ... If the moon orbits the earth, then I am wearing white ... deducing false conclusions from true premises. ...
    (sci.logic)
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