Facts and myths about ‘facts’. In reference to the article of M. Danielewiczowa ‘Niepodważalne fakty. Jak o nich mówimy?’ [Undeniable facts. How do we talk about them?] (Poradnik Językowy 2017/9)

Abstract

The article refers to discussions on the semantics of Polish expressions with the word fakt (‘fact’), and it is polemical towards “objective” interpretations, in which “facts” are “fulfilled states of affairs”, independent of how they are conceptualized by speaking subjects; it refers especially to the article of M. Danielewiczowa (PJ 2017/9) on that subject. Both attitudes are rooted in the tradition of structuralistic semantics and both discuss the contemporary meaning of fakt (in various linguistic variants). It is argued that the interpretation of “fact” as an object of speaking (according to the speaker’s knowledge) is better testified in language usage, as well as it is more effective as far as lexical analysis is concerned. That is because it is a convenient starting point both for the “strictly objective” meaning (fakt ≈ what is happening or what happened), typically mentioned in dictionaries, and for popular nowadays uses of that word, in which it introduces hypotheses or subjective judgments of the speaker. The latter can be accounted for by pragmatic mechanisms of speaking, whereas the “objective” meaning is interpreted as an effect of metonymy (pointing in speaking to a particular state of affairs → the state of affairs itself).