Facts and Fact-Descriptions

Abstract

In analysing the concept of a fact in the context of discussions in the social sciences, history or the humanities, one usually has in mind questions like ‘What is a historical fact?’1 ‘What is a social fact?’ The essential point of these speculations is to explore certain questions of great importance for the methodology of the historical and social sciences, questions concerning the relevancy of various factors in the flux of events to the characterisation of the historical, social or intellectual phenomena under investigation. The present chapter does not address such problems. Here we are concerned not with the proper weighing of different pieces of factual information for an adequate understanding of social and historical phenomena, but with a logical and epistemological enquiry about the structure of facts and about the forms and methods in and by which to describe them. These problems are more fundamental than the question of the determination of the relevancy of particular items of information in the setting of given problems posed in social science or historiography, for obviously it must be explained what facts are and how they can be described before one can go into the question of their relevancy.