Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-97.81.240.58-20130603234626/@comment-24590102-20140326004653

80.216.220.71 wrote: AngryEnclaveSoldier wrote: It's not a theory, it's fact. The Towers were created to stabilise Mundus, without them (and without Talos), the Wheel of Convention breaks. That's mentioned in several Lore texts, in fact even in lore texts which weren't written by MK.

It can be both, theory doesn't quite mean what most think.

Look at theory of gravity, theory of evolution etc.

Those are facts and theories. .

In core diction, a "theory" refers to "a supposition or system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained." This does not and cannot refer to concepts like evolution or gravity which are general principles rather than explanations and which are inferred directly from verifiable facts (e.g. faunal progression, behaviour of bodies in free-fall, etc). Gravity is, arguably, a fact because it can be directly observed as the sensation you experience as body weight. Evolution, on the other hand, can never be a fact because it must always be inferred from the fact, namely faunal progression. Whether information comprises fact, inference, theory or interpretation has nothing to do with our confidence in the verity or validity of the information in question.

The correct word to describe empirical conclusions which, by their nature, are drawn from verifiable facts, is inference not theory. An inference, by contrast with a theory, is "a conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning". Please take careful note of the conjunction and its function as a specific logical operator. Both reasoning and evidence are required to produce an inference while reasoning alone is insufficient. Evidence, in turn, is "information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid". In order for information to carry this function it must comprise facts which can can only be known to be true because they can be independently be verified by observation or experiment - and the history of science (and other disciplines besides) is littered with the wreckage of broken theories which have been subsequently refuted by verifiable facts and replaced by inferences drawn from those facts.