Making Sense of Facts and Theories

Facts are things believed to be true. There are different types of facts that can be distinguished, ‘real facts’ and ‘said facts’. ‘Real facts’ are those that are always true like not being able to walk through walls and ‘said facts’ are just plain statements which declare something as a fact but can be either true or false. One needs to be careful when declaring a fact because declaring makes it a said fact. Facts themselves need no declaration, not even in a theory, ‘said facts’ if true, are made true by facts. Theories, on the other hand, can be made up of facts or can be used to explain them. Theories do not depend on facts but their truth does. This had led me to explore the following knowledge question: how are facts needed to establish theories? While looking at history and natural sciences, we will see that facts are usually necessary to be able to come up with a theory. I will be exploring my knowledge question by looking at reason and language as the ways of knowing and natural sciences and history as the areas of knowledge.