Another word of great rhetorical force which owes its origin to the same historical transformation is “fact.” Today’s speaker says “It is a fact” with all the gravity and air of finality with which his less secular-minded ancestor would have said “It is the truth.”[176] “These are facts”; “Facts tend to show”; and “He knows the facts” will be recognized as common locutions drawing upon the rhetorical resource of this word. The word “fact” went into the ascendent when our system of verification changed during the Renaissance. Prior to that time, the type of conclusion that men felt obligated to accept came either through divine revelation, or through dialectic, which obeys logical law. But these were displaced by the system of verification through correspondence with physical reality. Since then things have been true only when measurably true, or when susceptible to some kind of quantification. Quite simply, “fact” came to be the touchstone after the truth of speculative inquiry had been replaced by the truth of empirical investigation. Today when the average citizen says “It is a fact” or says that he “knows the facts in the case,” he means that he has the kind of knowledge to which all other knowledges must defer. Possibly it should be pointed out that his “facts” are frequently not facts at all in the etymological sense; often they will be deductions several steps removed from simply factual data. Yet the “facts” of his case carry with them this aura of scientific irrefragability, and he will likely regard any questioning of them as sophistry. In his vocabulary a fact is a fact, and all evidence so denominated has the prestige of science.