This is in reference to a call featured in the Sept. 29 episode, "Dog and Pony Show" -- waywordradio.org/discussion/topics/dog-and-pony-show/
Fact or Opinion?
I believe that Grant and Martha completely missed the boat on the "fact" question. In the language of reason, logic, rhetoric, religion and, most significantly, law and science, the teacher was absolutely correct about what "fact" means. It means a statement that can be proven to be true or false. It is contrasted with things like opinions or beliefs. That means that there are such things as true facts and false facts.
For example, in American defamation law, a person might have a claim for defamation if he or she can show that the defendant has intentionally and publicly made a false defamatory statement of fact. For the plaintiff in such a case to prove this kind of claim, he or she must show elements like this (the specific details might vary depending on the jurisdiction, but they generally follow this pattern):
1. The defendant made a statement of fact (that is, not a statement of opinion or belief).
2. The statement was false.
3. The defendant had the intent to make such a statement.
4. The statement was published (that is, made public).
5. The statement of fact, if believed by members of the public, would tend to harm the plaintiff's good name or reputation.
Notice that the questions of whether the statement was a statement of fact and whether the statement was false are two separate questions. You can't be liable for defamation for stating an opinion, only for making a false statement of fact. That's not a contradiction of terms. It just reflects a meaning of the word "fact" that is relevant to a particular context. And that context is also the operating context when a teacher is educating kids on distinguishing between statements of fact and statements of opinion.
It is particularly relevant that the child in this case was reading a breakfast cereal box, because the distinction between statements of fact and other kinds of statements are relevant to things like advertising, marketing, sales, and product promotion. A lot of advertising is directed at children, especially for things like breakfast cereal, and I believe that the teacher was establishing the grounds for an important lesson about claims made by the sellers of products.
By going through the statements on a box of cereal, and identifying which ones were claims of fact (things that are capable of being proven true or false) and other kinds of statements (say, opinion or puffery) this child was engaging in a very sophisticated act of rational analysis.
A prominent example of this important meaning of the word "fact" is reflected in the works of the late Christopher Hitchens, the political polemicist and crusading atheist. He is noted for asserting that any statement of belief in a supernatural power or divine creator is a "statement of fact" that must be proven with evidence, and if evidence is not forthcoming, it must be considered to have been a false statement of fact. This is not a fringe or insignificant meaning of the phrase "statement of fact" or of the word "fact." It is very important in our society today to understand this kind of assertion and its significance.
Now, it is also important for a child to know the more popular and less specialized meaning of "fact," that is, "a true fact," but I think Grant and Martha did a disservice by telling the caller that the teacher had done something wrong in teaching the child this very important definition.
I'd like to expand on the scientific use of the word "fact" as it's not quite the same as the legal use you cite.
In science, an hypothesis is something that can be shown as true or false. And even then, "truth" is usually a long time coming. While an hypothesis can be immediately falsified by a single counter-example, whether or not it's a truth is (almost) always open to question. Only after a long run of corroborating evidence from varied sources does the assertion begin to approach what science considers to be "truth," at which point the term "law" or "theory" starts being used to describe it. But it's the nature of science to admit that future discoveries could falsify what has been deemed a "law" or "theory."
For example, Newton's "laws" of motion were thought to be inviolable for over two centuries, and were based on definitions that most felt made them as rock-solid as Euclid's laws of plane geometry. Yet in the early part of the 20th century, Einstein showed that Newton's laws were a special case of a more general system of equations (now called relativity theory). But we still use the term "law" to describe Newton's ideas, since it's understood they apply perfectly well under most conditions.
There are, of course, scientific "facts," and this is why I included the parenthetical "almost" in my first paragraph. At one point in history, the idea that the Earth was round was an hypothesis (though they weren't doing much real "science" back then). These days, that statement has become a fact. Facts can also be the result of direct measurement or observation, as in "The average distance from the Earth to the Moon is 247,000 miles."
Scientists can still be a bit sloppy with their use of terms like "law" and "theory." In informal discussion, you'll often hear things like "I have a theory that ..." when they really mean "I have an hypothesis that ..." But in research publications and textbooks, they're more careful about their use.
I agree with AnMa that the teacher was using and teaching a specialized use of the word "fact." Even the caller allowed that. But it would disturb me if that teacher didn't ackowledge that this use is specialized to the students, and even moreso to the parents.
I blame the misunderstanding on the caller. It seemed to me he got all hot and bothered about this specialized usage and confronted the teacher, which, as might be expected, resulted in a less-than-satisfactory explanation.
What the caller should have done, if anything needed to be done, was simply tell his daughter that when she hears people saying "fact" in ordinary conversation, they might mean something different, specifically, "true fact." It's also an opportunity to introduce the idea that words can have different meanings in different contexts.
And this is what I think Grant and Martha should have told the caller. But instead they said, "You're right and the teacher was wrong." And I think that was the wrong message.
AnMa, thank you for your impassioned remarks. However, the legal aspect does not come into it at all. That meaning — if it exists in law as you say it does — simply does not pertain to a grade school classroom.