Peaklight

A fact is a true datum about one or more aspects of a circumstance, or an occurrence in the real world. Standard reference works are often used to check facts. Scientific facts are verified by careful, repeatable observation or measurement by experiments or other means. After accounts of knowledge of facts such as that in 2002 by epistemologist Angelika Kratzer being applied to Gettier problems, according to Paul Boghossian, the Enlightenment-era consensus justified true belief definition of knowledge in which knowledge encompasses facts is the "standard, widely accepted" one, though with Bernecker and Dretske (2000) arguing that "no epistemologist since Gettier has seriously and successfully defended the traditional view." This is despite wide, though not universal, agreement among analytic philosophers that the first two criteria of the definition are correct, i.e., that knowledge implies an agent accepting a true proposition. For example, "This sentence contains words" accurately describes a linguistic fact, and "the Sun is a star" describes an astronomical fact. Further, "Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States" and "Abraham Lincoln was assassinated" are both historical facts.