Glen…walls definitely exist. there are material things in the world that can be known – though not discussed or shared or possibly even conceptualized, depending on their complexity – without language. but most of the things we call facts rely on language, and while the word “fact” does what Actor-Network-Theory calls “blackboxing” (or hiding, disappearing) their construction, it doesn’t mean they are without history and position conflated into whatever remains in the “fact.” a fact is not a material thing in the way a wall is a material thing. that we need to breathe? true. materially evident. that air is 2 parts hydrogen and 1 oxygen? true, but a product of a complex knowledge-production discourse that is kinda useless to know outside of a broader context of the historicity and applicability of science.

years ago, i lived in the Arctic. i took a class in the Inuktitut language and failed miserably. it doesn’t use nouns the way English does. so the teacher would point to an object in the corner of the room and say, “sometimes this is called a thing you sit in. sometimes a thing that is white. or orange. depends on the colour.” we all agreed that the thing in the corner – which i call a chair and consider a fact – was there, material and real. but my concept of a chair as an absolute, a thing? didn’t exist. in that language, that’s a contingent idea.