I was taking a walk this morning around the canals of Aveiro and over-thinking about all kinds of stuff when this question popped up: Can arguments establish a facts? Never mind why it popped up. That would just muddy the water 🙂
The following example is an argument based on deductive reasoning:
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Premise 1: All humans are mortal. (fact)
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Premise 2: Socrates is a human. (fact)
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Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
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This argument establishes no facts. All the facts are already in play. If you doubted that Socrates was mortal, you could have observed him at the time of his trail following his drinking of the hemlock. Once he keeled over, you could have checked for a pulse. And, if still not satisfied, you could have observed the body as the first signs of decomposition began. Those observations would establish the fact of his death. And his death would have merely added more data to the fact of human mortality.
I have not exhausted the types of arguments, how they work, and what if anything they establish. This is just one thing that occurred to me: The facts of Socrates’s death, and his human mortality, are established by observations and the correspondence of those observations to reality as we humans experience it.
I will have more to say about this 🙂
