Can facts be negative?

Of course there can be negative facts. The positive and negative are like happy or sad. View it as you would positive or negative news.

Murders exist. That’s a fact. Yet that is a negative behavior. A child who throws tantrums can be listed as a fact and yet it would be negative behavior. You have cancer. Fact. Extremely negative.
The sky is blue. Neither negative or positive. Trees providing shade can be a fact and yet be negative or positive depending where it is at. If it’s shading your home, it is great in the summer, but yet in the winter not so great because trees can actually lower the amount of sun you get and make your home colder in the winter.

War exist and will always exist. Fact and not a great thing, unless you are fighting oppression. Still not great but if you have someone who can decide whether you live or die or eat or don’t eat, at their whim like Hitler, than fighting is the only chance at survival.

It’s mostly about perspective. Even the sky being blue can be a negative for some people if they really hate the color blue.

“Negative” in this context just means “damaging” or “unpleasant.” Headlines, by their very nature, are abbreviated. They operate on the assumption that readers will read charitably (as is their rational duty) and can understand the intention given the context provided by the article’s content. Presumably, the author believed that the facts mentioned in the article undermined Bernie Sanders in some way.

I don’t think facts can be either positive or negative, but only matter-of-fact. Whether they are seen as positive or negative depends on who you talk to and what their assumptions on any particular subject are.

@elbanditoroso Facts are facts. In a voting sense facts to one person may be pro or con depending on their particular views.

It’s a whole lot easier and more efficient to use the term “negative facts” than “facts that may be perceived by a large percentage of our reading audience to be emotionally negative indicators of this candidate’s various positions on some subjects relative to the campaign.”
Gee, I really thought you might have inferred that from context..

Facts are just that. In and of themselves, they’re neutral. We assign the good/bad and positive/negative determinations, and consensus is rare.

In theory I get what you’re saying but yes, facts can be negative. My housemate can be a real bitch, that’s a fact, and it is also negative. lol

@elbanditoroso
Can I take issue with your statement about a fact possibly being erroneous?

That is wrong. If it is erroneous it is not a fact. I am not sure what it becomes at that point (fiction? speculation? a lie?), but it is certainly not a fact.

And that’s a fact.

@rojo Well, I guess we could all say that the negatives, or the bitch, arein the eye of the beholder. lol

@rojo Notice that @elbanditoroso went on to say “in which case it wasn’t a fact after all.” There are no such things as “false facts,” but there are falsehoods erroneously believed to be facts. In this case, I think we need to understand the phrase “the fact may be erroneous” in the same way we understand “negative fact.” That is to say, we need to read it charitably and in context.

In short, we need to do for @elbanditoroso what we are advising him to do for the article he read.

Perhaps I’m missing the point but isn’t “Goblins don’t exist” a negative fact?

@hsrch Yes. That’s a fairly common usage of the phrase in philosophy, for instance. But the context here is rather different, and I think @elbanditoroso was specifically about the context of the article. Maybe not, though.

@hsrch “Perhaps I’m missing the point but isn’t “Goblins don’t exist” a negative fact?”

I believe that’s a negative truth, but not a negative fact. The only factual thing I know about “Goblins don’t exist” is that you and I both typed it on this thread. But the truth is only knowable to the degree that we can know it through an accumulation of supporting facts. It may be a fact that “Goblins do exist” in an alternate universe, or even perhaps on another planet. Or something close enough to a human definition of a Goblin exists that we could by all rights call it a Goblin. But the truth is that we cannot know if it’s a fact or not, at this time.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies That doesn’t really make sense. While I agree with the underlying fallibilism (that is, the view that we ultimately cannot be certain), I disagree with the distinction you seem to be making between truths and facts. There is a distinction, but not the one you seem to be drawing.

Truth is a property of (some) sentences. More specifically, it is a property of a certain kind of sentence (namely, an assertion) under certain conditions (namely, when the assertion accurately describes the state of affairs at which it is aimed). Facts, meanwhile, are states of affairs (that is, a way that the world is). True sentences, then, are those that accurately describe facts.

When someone says ”x is a fact,” what they are asserting is ”x accurately describes a particular state of affairs.” Sure, that assertion may be incorrect. But it is no more or less incorrect than saying ”x is true.” So if one is acceptable in ordinary language, the other one must be acceptable as well.

This is especially the case considering the “at which it is aimed” rider that was included above. If I tell someone who is looking into my refrigerator that “there’s no beer,” I am not correctly understood as saying that there is no beer anywhere in the universe. My comment is implicitly restricted to the refrigerator (and possibly to my home as a whole unless I clarify an alternate location).

Facts are generally based on truths. Presenting facts that reflect badly on a person now can carry some weight and have a negative effect on say someone like Bernie Sanders. Problem is so many people have drinken the Kool-Aide that no how matter factual the fact is won’t matter one iota to the insane voters.

@hsrch I would say that “Goblins don’t exist” is really an objective fact, just as “Goblins are fictional” is also a fact.