[grabcocque]

Facts are weird beasts. We are terrible at recognising facts, for a number of reasons. For a start people tend to confuse them with truth.

A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. The problem is, science doesn't deal in what's true. Science deals in what's falsifiable.

Most things that are believed to be true aren't falsifiable, and therefore fall into the epistemologically nebulous category of "things which are not yet false". I'd suggest that trying to build a positivist bastion of truth on such shifting epistemological sands is doomed to fail.

[coldtea]

>A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. The problem is, science doesn't deal in what's true. Science deals in what's falsifiable.

That's the epistemology of Popper. Not necessarily how science works. See e.g. Fayerabends arguments in "Against Method".

[xjay]

The half-life of facts (knowledge) [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge

[acqq]

> A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true.

Where do you get that idea? A fact has to be "established." As in the trial, in front of a jury.

Now in science, the jury are qualified scientists. Others simply aren't qualified. Even unqualified people can invalidate something that is believed to be a fact. But they can't do by just being loud. The jury has to acknowledge that that unqualified guy is not speaking nonsense.

Read about the testing of EmDrive as an example. The guy who made it and can't explain it will still be accepted to be the discoverer, if his claimed effect gets to be really proved. The jury was skeptical, but they will still accept the results, if the measurements demonstrate it "beyond any doubt." At the moment, what was measured is far from that.

Another example: global warming is a scientific fact. There are some loud persons claiming that it isn't so, but what they bring to support their claims is truly and utterly worthless. Who says that: the climate scientists, all in the world. How do we know it's true? Because that's how science works, the specialists are trained the whole life to recognize the valid claims. The valid claims would become a new facts. The deniers don't have them.

[08-15]

Bullshit. Science deals with facts and theories. Look:

Fact: "I measured the CO2 content in a sample of air, and it was 400ppm." (I didn't actually measure. Bear with me.)

Fact: "50 year old textbooks list the content of CO2 in air as 280ppm."

Theory: "The increase of CO2 content in air is caused by the burning of fossil hydrocarbons."

You can argue with the theory. You can not argue with the facts. All three of them are science, and yes, that explicitly includes the argument.

> Most things that are believed to be true aren't falsifiable

What?! Citation needed.