state of affairs

In philosophy, a state of affairs, also known as a situation, is a way the actual world must be in order to make some given proposition about the actual world's truth; in other words, a state of affairs is a truth-maker, whereas a proposition is a truth-bearer. Whereas states of affairs either obtain or fail-to-obtain, propositions are either true or false. Some philosophers understand the term "states of affairs" in a more restricted sense as a synonym for "fact". In this sense, there are no states of affairs that do not obtain.