Issue 127 Facts are stubborn things.

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Issue 127"Facts are stubborn things. They cannot be altered by our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions."

Whether facts are stubborn things or could be altered by human beings always is an old and perpetual question puzzling us both in the area of philosophy and the area of almost every disciplines. Are they really can’t be changed by our wishes, inclinations, and passions as indicated in the title statement? In my observation according to theories and empirical evidences, no wishes, inclinations and passions can change the reality.

What is fact? Fact is a term that all of us are familiar with and are pursuing for. It refers to verified and objective reality about past or present conditions. In epistemology, fact reflects the relative truth and makes us learn more about our objective environment and ourselves; in science, fact is pragmatic evidence or proved principle of physical environment; in history, fact is the event and individuals in particular period of time that had happened and never changed. All of those can’t be determined and changed by our wishes, inclinations, and passions, no matter what efforts we have done. In this sense fact is absolutely stubborn and anyone who wants to change it disobeys the truth. For example, although religion had strong disagreement with the notion of a Sun—centered universe and tried to persecute those who supported the notion, although it challenged most of people’s knowledge in that time and was regarded as false theory, it is proved to be right and be a fact later. Nowadays with development of science and technology, this once false theory is accepted by most of us.


However somebody may argue that why some people hold different or wrong ideas about the same objective fact if it is stubborn and can’t be influenced by our wishes? Not every fact is as simply as what we can image. In most of time, fact is a complicated and concealed system that is just like the tip of the iceberg, in another word mankind can only observe very little part of it. We people just like the blind men in the old Chinese fable who want to know appearance of a large elephant. Everyone touched only one part of it, such as a leg, the nose and the tail, as a result all of them could not know the integrity. Fact exists objectively, yet human beings can’t know it due to limited science, technology and knowledge. Besides, human being is actually a tiny part of universe and to some extent is too week confronting the huge universe, they has a characteristic in nature to incline to accept or refuge part of fact according to their won wills. So it not strange to see they refuse to believe the death of their loved persons, they hope to be immortal and be young all their life time, they want be the centre of universe. Above all the complexity of fact and truth and the qualities of mankind in nature make people to be confused about fact and to want fact to change according to their wishes, inclinations, and passions.

Fact is stubborn and objective is a conclusion beyond dispute. Nevertheless it is not to say that we must wait for it negatively. As the definition mentioned above, it is unique and specific in definite time, that is present or past time. In some area such as situation or status quo of policy, economy and society we can change the coming fact with our wishes and efforts. In those places we must try our best in order to change our future, however we must recognize that the present and past fact is the fact we can’t change, and most objective fact can’t be changed. What we have to do is try to find its won order and to unearth the truth.

In sum, I agree with the speaker’s view that fact is stubborn and can’t be altered by our wishes, inclinations, and passions. We just follow its step to make a greater progress in the aspect of knowing more about the truth and of condition of humanity.


提纲:
  1提出自己的观点,同意
   2提出发fact的定义,从认知,科技,历史3个角度说明其是不能改变的,并举例.
  3分析为什么人类会有fact是可以被人类改变的思想:1 不能全面了解2 人类的天性
   4fact是对过去和现在的绝对的不可变,但是在某些领域,未来的事实是掌握在自己手里.
   5总结

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