ABSTRACT
The world can be looked at and described in many different ways. It is a collection of things, a collection of qualities and a collection of events. But things, qualities (including, of course, relational qualities) or events are not facts although they are, so to speak, ingredients of facts. One of the most obvious differences between facts and their ingredients (and, on reflection, one of the most puzzling) is that whereas things, qualities and events are immersed in the world of space and time, facts are somehow frozen and abstracted from the spatio-temporal continuum. Part of the difficulty of establishing the distinction and the connection between events and facts is the necessity of using a language in which the tenses of verbs are a pervasive feature. Ideally the language in which the readers talk of facts should be a tenseless language in which the time reference (and of course the space reference too) is provided by dates and place names.
