What's a fact?

Photo by Walls.io

These days, far too much is treated as relative. What is truth, anyway? Is it my truth? Is it yours?

Somewhere along the way, opinion began dressing itself up as fact. But the notion that truth itself is a fiction—that nothing can be known, nothing verified—is not just intellectually lazy. It’s absurd.

Unless you’re philosophically inclined to believe we can’t be sure we exist at all, we operate in a world where some things are verifiably, undeniably real. Drop a stone from a rooftop, and it falls. A properly calibrated thermometer can tell us how hot it is. A bank account, tragically, does not inflate to match our feelings. We can access it to confirm the numbers (or lack thereof).

In other words, a fact is not a matter of belief. It’s a claim that can be tested and confirmed—through observation, measurement, or reliable documentation.

Water, for instance, boils at 100°C at sea level. We can check whether a Gallup poll reported a particular statistic by examining publis…