“A fact, at its base, is a kind of social contract.” ** Or so concluded one contemporary expert on facts—professional fact checker Alex Carp. ** Reviewing factual claims by journalists on a daily basis for The New York Times Magazine, ** he saw cracks in the once-held belief in facts, as an objective, rock-solid ground on which our political, scientific and social reality can be built. ** To tease out this alleged social nature of facts, we asked Carp and his colleague Jamie Fisher to discuss their profession, ** which took place via an e-mail exchange. ** Weren’t fact checkers supposed to be the rational answer to irrational times? ** What can we learn about the politics of facts when such apparent guardians of truth flirt with post-truth ideas? ** We observed that many artists and writers working with similar questions about the social nature of facts tend to a more speculative approach. ** By including contingency and the unknown, it becomes possible to construct alternative futures that are more emancipated than our current present. ** Yet as much as speculation is necessary for producing new political strategies and imaginaries, ** beyond Western-centrism and knowledge that suits the powerful, ** it also has the potential to erode even more trust in institutions, governments, and perhaps social life itself. ** The Department started out of the neologism ‘Speculative Facts’ ** to express our concern about this friction between two separate terms ** that seem both loaded and at times contradictory. ** We decided to think speculation through facts, and facts through speculation, by bringing them together in one concept. ** Firstly, we invited four (performance) artists to re-write, re-perform, and re-design the e-mail exchange between the two fact checkers. ** Triggered by the questions raised by their interventions, ** we continued by inviting writers, philosophers and artists to speculate on facts, to fact check speculations, ** and look at forms of agreement or facticity, ** with the idea of finding new types of ‘social contracts’ with which we can anchor ourselves. ** As a ground to work from, we proposed the following working definition of what a speculative fact could be: Speculative fact ** 1. A contract about proof with stakes in the futures it enables and the experiences it comes from. ** 2. A non-anthropocentric fact, allowing for complex stories and collective types of causalities. ** 3. The tension field between building trust, and stretching or questioning what is proved or taken to be true.