Facts and Opinions Christoffer S. Lammer-Heindel, Ph.D. Loras College, Dubuque, Iowa, USA christoffer.lammer-heindel@loras.edu The following manuscript was published in a condensed and edited format in Philosophy Now, No. 115 (August/September 2016). The published version is accessible at https://philosophynow.org/issues/115/ Facts_and_Opinions. From a very young age, we are encouraged to distinguish facts from opinions. However, the fact-opinion dichotomy is a false dichotomy which rests on a category mistake. The ability to distinguish facts from merely alleged facts and the ability to distinguish opinions from considered judgments is an important skill. But in claiming that facts and opinions stand in a dichotomous relationship we ignore the two classes which stand in genuine opposition to each: facts are opposed to what we variously call non-facts, merely alleged facts, fictions, or falsehoods; and opinions stand in opposition to considered judgments. A fact is whatever is the case. When someone asks, “Is that a fact?” they can be understood as asking, “Is that really the case?” or “Is that ultimately true?” When someone says, “It is a fact that…” they are telling us, in other words, “It is the case that…” or “It is true that…” Facts are not themselves statements; they are, rather, the state of affairs or the reality to which a true statement corresponds. It is neither necessary nor useful—indeed, it is positively misleading—to define ‘fact,’ in terms of what is indisputably the case, yet for some reason this is a qualification that people sometimes make. We should resist the temptation to include this further qualification for the simple reason that whether a particular matter is disputable or not has no bearing on what is the case. Moreover, there is very little that is not, at least in some sense, disputable. As a means of coming to appreciate that disputability has no bearing on whether something is or is not a fact, consider the following case. It is well-known that some people believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill the former president of the United States, John F. Kennedy (at least not on his own), while many others believe that he did. This is clearly a disputable issue. To say that a point is disputable is to say, at the very least, that different individuals hold different views on it—views which are backed up by reasons and supported by at least some evidence. Nevertheless, there is a fact of the matter as to whether Oswald was involved in the assassination: he either was or he wasn’t, and if he was, he either acted alone or in concert with a least one other person. One of the two options must be the case. The same thing can be said about the question of whether God exists. This is clearly an issue that is disputable, but we must recognize that it either is the case that the being referred to by the term “God” exists, or it is not the case that such a being exists. (The fact that people have differing conception of God doesn’t serve to undermine this point but simply to make it more complicated: for each conception of God, the being so conceived either does or does not exist.)