[nerdfiles]

I believe bringing the concept of a fact into question will do more harm than good. A phone book is _not merely_ a set of facts, but also a set of agreements. Surely one can look inside the phone and disagree with one's own listing. If one were to dive into an API and find that it mistakenly calls an undefined function, or typos abound, in this case the API would need to be changed because it has become less functional. It may be rendered useless. A phonebook cannot be rendered useless if even all the numbers are incorrect; though I doubt such a philosophical argument need be presented (Sorite's Paradox).

My goal here is to understand the analogy that is being made. True, one could development algorithms from a phonebook such that bank robberies and pranksterism may take place. This possibility secures a conceptual machinery for viewing a phonebook and an API as conceptually similar, since such practices would likely presuppose a concept of hierarchical relationships between numbers and names in the book, assuming sophistication. However, such practice is not the intent behind the phonebook, and so further a concept of hierarchy is unnecessary essentially to the phonebook. An API depends on some basic conceptual metaphor (@see Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson to grok the sense in which I use "conceptual metaphor") of:

A FUNCTION IS INSIDE A CLASS

(I do not count sorting or grouping concepts in a phonebook as "hierarchical.") And this concept is essential to the working of the API. So I believe the comparison is unfair, if not misleadingly true (that APIs and phonebooks are compilations of facts) when thinking of phonebooks whose institutional facts are conceptually nearer, by analysis, in proximity to their brute facts (those facts to which no other facts are necessary to ground their truth). An API and a phonebook are compilations of institutional facts, and should be compared only if the structures of those facts they assert are grounded in relevantly similar conceptual spaces (the institutions wherein those facts are true).