Fact Interpretation Quotes

Evidence is fact that discriminates between one theory and another. Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Theories can be devastated by facts but they can never be proven correct by facts. What empirical verification can do is to reveal which of the competing theories currently being considered is more consistent with that which is known factually. Some other theory may come along tomorrow that is still more consistent with the facts, or explains those facts with fewer, clearer, or more manageable assumptions.

but even the facts do not always tell the truth

In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in that aspect of it which is important for us, the rest being intentionally or from necessity omitted.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.

Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.

The significance of a fact is relative to [the general body of scientific] knowledge. To say that a fact is significant in science, is to say that it helps to establish or refute some general law; for science, though it starts from observation of the particular, is not concerned essentially with the particular, but with the general. A fact, in science, is not a mere fact, but an instance. In this the scientist differs from the artist, who, if he deigns to notice facts at all, is likely to notice them in all their particularity.

It's a very complicated issue about when is a fact not a fact in the context of opinions.

What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.

Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin.

Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.

Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.

Facts can be turned into art if one is artful enough.

You can construct whatever story you want to. Documentaries are constructions, as is all journalism.

It is that of increasing knowledge of empirical fact, intimately combined with changing interpretations of this body of fact - hence changing general statements about it - and, not least, a changing a structure of the theoretical system.

Facts per se can neither prove nor refute anything. Everything is decided by the interpretation and explanation of the facts, by the ideas and the theories.

Those who violate the rules of a language do not enter new territory; they leave the domain of meaningful discourse. Even facts in these circumstances dissolve, because they are shaped by the language and subjected to its limitations.

All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.

There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model.

All I'm going to tell you is investigations, whether it be this and others, where you have partial facts, analysts, agents are always trying to interpret what those facts mean, extrapolate from them what they mean.