Names and faces to bikes

natureboy
The other way for something to be a fact is for it to be a formal statement which is basically incapable of being wrong because it concerns things whose definitions we create, the best example being mathematical statements like 'a square has 4 sides' or '5 is a prime number'.

True, mathematics generates proofs, but mathematics are not statements about the physical world, only representations.

And with the level of my own mathematical abilities, hardly even representations !! :)

natureboy
The idea that 'facts are the preserve of the inerrant religious/supernatural thinkers' refers, I think, to the first type of 'fact' (the ones which rely on evidence and are essentially theories) since strictly speaking, they can never be proved absolutely incontravertably correct - like scientific theories, they can be proved incorrect (by a single experiment) but never proved correct.

Yes! 'facts' about reality - 'truth claims', these are what I refer to with the statement 'facts are the preserve of the inerrant religious/supernatural thinkers'.

natureboy
So, if you hold some notion about the physical world to [be] absolutely correct, then you are guilty of faulty reasoning.

Yes !

natureboy
But for many practical purposes, the difference between 99.99999... % sure and 100% sure is negligible so we may as well carry on calling such notions 'facts' in everyday life (if not in cycling forum philosophy discussions...)

Indeed, I am sure no one here gets involved in exacting and precise epistemological punch ups every time someone presents something entirely 'reasonable' as a 'fact'.

But . . .

I shall stand by my comment that the overwhelming majority of us understand that most of our ideas are at best simply well reasoned notions and can be changed with sufficient evidence, it tends only to be the minds of the religious/supernatural thinkers that 'know' with unquestioning certainty that their inerrant knowledge is fact.