Question I have been reading the recent discussion about whether "facts" can be "rational" or "irrational" http://www.askphilosophers.org/question/2829). Professor Rapaport suggests that philosophers use facts differently than most non-philosophers. Facts, he says, "simply 'are'". They are not like beliefs, which are more like sentences. His statements have left me very confused. The Earth is round. Is that a fact? We all die. Is that a fact? Seems to me that it is. And it's simultaneously a sentence. I don't see how a fact can be anything but a sentence. But suppose facts are not sentences. They are situations. One big fact would be the way the world is, I suppose. A smaller fact might be the way my room is right now. Fine, why can't situations be "rational" or "irrational"? I think very often we come upon a situation and say things like "This situation is totally crazy", by which we mean, it is irrational. As the questioner said, dictionary.com defines "rational" as "agreeable to reason". Certainly many situations are agreeable to reason; others are not.

Accepted:
August 22, 2009

Comments

I'm happy to try to clarify: I don't think that philosophers use facts differently from most non-philosophers. Rather, I think that philosophers use the word 'fact' differently from the way most non-philosophers use it. I think that most non-philosophers use it to mean more or less the same as the expressions 'true sentence', or 'true proposition', or 'true belief'. I think that most philosophers use it to mean more or less the same as the word 'situation' or the phrase 'state of affairs', i.e., a bunch of objects having properties or standing in relations. Used in this way, I don't think it makes sense to call a fact "rational" or "irrational", any more than it makes sense to call, say, the number 3 "beautiful" or to call, say, the color red "odd" (in the sense of not evenly divisible by 2).

In this sense, the sentence 'The Earth is round' is true. And the reason that it is true is that there is a fact that corresponds to it, namely, the fact consisting of the object that is the Earth having the property of being round. The sentence might be considered "rational" or "irrational", but the corresponding fact simply "obtains" or "holds".

What might it mean for that sentence to be "rational"? I don't think that there's a standardly accepted definition of "rational" in this sense, but here's one plausible possibility: A sentence is rational if it coheres with other true (or believed) sentences, and it is irrational otherwise. So, given the usually accepted claims of science, the sentence 'The Earth is flat' -- or, better, the belief that the Earth is flat -- might be considered irrational.

The sentence 'We all die' is true. That we all die is a fact. The sentence is not simultaneously a fact. Rather, there is a fact that corresponds to that sentence.

You say that you don't see how a fact can be anything but a sentence. I agree that in the usual non-philosopher's use of the word 'fact', it is usually used in the same way that the word 'sentence' is. But my understanding of the original question and Allen Stairs's original reply was that there was a confusion about how philosophers use the word. If you think that we use it in a strange way, so be it, but there is a distinction to be made between sentences and situations (or whatever you want to call them), and reserving the word 'fact' for the latter is the way some philosophers speak when they're wearing their professional philosopher's hats.

I do agree that the way the world is is one big fact and that the way your room is right now is a smaller fact (which is part of the bigger one). But as I said above, I don't see how such things can be "rational" or "irrational".

How are you using the word "irrational" to apply to situations? Do you mean that the situation doesn't "cohere" with other situations? But what would that mean? A person's actions might be irrational, I suppose. But an action isn't a fact.

I'm not quite sure what dictionary.com's "agreeable to reason" means, but if it means something like what I suggested above, namely, cohering with other true sentences, then it can't apply to facts considered as situations. (By the way, "agreeable to reason" doesn't mean that a reasonable person likes it or finds it "agreeable". A person could like a fact, but that's not what's meant in that definition.)

Boy, we philosophers love to split hairs, don't we? :-)