  One option, in the face of apparently conflicting uses of ‘fact’, is to posit an ambiguity. (Fine 1982, p. 54) There are two kinds of entity associated with different uses of ‘fact’: one kind has one mode of being (it simply exists), the other has having two modes of being (it may exist without obtaining). “Bipolar” facts correspond, roughly, to what some philosophers call possible states of affairs.