There's a faux-innocent tone, "don't yell at me, I'm only passing on the facts", which is hard to argue: these are merely facts.
If one were to insist that the sense-level entities were the genuine and only facts, the corresponding reference-level entities would be merely fact-like, and contrariwise.
The "faithfulness to reality" of an observation report is always mediated by a theoretical Überbau, disabling the role of observation reports as an impartial, merely fact-dependent arbiter between different theories.
If one wanted to follow this privileging strategy, one might say, for instance, that only reference-level facts were genuine facts, the relata of the identity relation at the level of sense being merely fact-like entities, not bona fide facts.
What determines her concept, thus, is not merely facts about her use and dispositions to stand corrected, but facts about the use of the term in the wider practice.
Our main goal was to gather the GPs' views and preferences on maintaining competences and not merely facts on how they maintained them.
Rather, what mattered was merely the fact that you were watching TV.
"It's not merely the fact that there are a lot of rich people," he tells me.
There was nothing particularly noble about this — merely a fact, a moment in a nation's life.
"Merely the fact that the court will hear and decide on this case is of huge importance," said James Boyle, an intellectual-property professor at the Duke University School of Law.
This suggests that a non-factual state of affairs — a merely possible fact — must be part of a merely possible physical world.
