"Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities."
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, a
"Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the worlds data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them."
"The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think."
"You had to know the facts if you were ever going to find the solutions."
"Where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes."
"Results from a given approach are "facts" as long as the approach fits the group or the tradition that is being addressed"
"Matters of fact, which as Mr Budgell somewhere observes, are very stubborn things."