"fact" = stated notion, suggestion, or idea (even if untrue)

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:24 AM -0700 5/25/05, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>How 'bout, I reject the "claim" or "notion" or "suggestion" or "idea" ?
>
>"Idea" in particular is pretty unfalutin'.

I see a slight but real differentiation among these--"claim" and
"suggestion" tend to suggest a previous utterance (unlike "fact" and
"proposition"), and "notion" and "idea" seem more ineluctably
cognitive or subjective.  Suppose mammals, or more generally
intelligent life, had never come into existence.  The quite objective
fact that the earth revolves around the sun would still hold, and the
proposition that the sun revolves around the earth would still be
false, but intuitively (for me), there would then be no "notion" or
"idea" that either is the case, in the absence of any
cognition-possessing critter to come up with said notion/idea.  If
that's right, "fact" remains the closest match for
"proposition"--except for the inconvenient property of being factive.

Larry

>
>I believe other examples should be findable by searching for "What
>about the fact that...?"

Many of these will in fact be factive.  For me "What about the fact
that all creatures evolved?" is well-formed, but "What about the fact
that every species was created by God in its current form?" is not,
but others will differ--both according to which one *is* a (true)
fact, and according to whether the "fact that" form can be used
willy-nilly.

>So "fact" comes increasingly to embrace "nonfact" just as "novel"
>comes to embrace "nonfiction."
>
>JL
>
>Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: Laurence Horn
>Subject: Re: "fact" = stated notion, suggestion, or idea (even if untrue)
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>At 8:34 AM -0700 5/25/05, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>This is absurdly common in speech, but it's hard to find an
>>unequivocal example, one not attributable to a disagreement about
>>what the facts really are.
>
>How about the standard politician's disclaimer of the form "I
>(categorically) deny/reject the fact that..."
>
>Here are a couple of relevant cases off the internet:
>
>We must reject the fact that these young American students will undergo an
>aggressive brainwashing and indoctrinating process
>
>I reject the fact that, just because I purchased something years ago, I am no
>longer a customer.
>
>Still I reject the fact that youth has not only waned, but that I'm way past
>mid-life.
>
>I deny the fact that consciousness is an *objective* property of
>matter, just because you can not define a physical property,
>measurable by an external apparatus, whose measure could determine
>the degree of consciousness
>
>Why do you think I deny the fact that my homeplanet will be destroyed? I don't
>wanna hear about it and I don't think it will happen.
>
>I deny the fact that flesh I'd never seen before has suddenly appeared oozing
>out the edges of Spandex
>
>Actually, the last one may be factive, amounting to "I falsely
>deny...", but how could I omit it? But a lot of them aren't. I
>remember about 30 years ago when I was working on the Kiparsky's
>"FACT" paper (1968) and first came across a headline of this sort in
>the Post or Daily News, but since then I've stopped noticing them. I
>think it's partly because the appropriate alternative, "deny/reject
>the proposition", is just too highfalutin, and others (like "claim"
>or "statement") are inaccurate or misleading when the content hasn't
>been overtly expressed.
>
>Larry
>
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