Thomas Sowell's conception of a vision as an assumption of causality in A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles then suggests that fact informs us about whether a vision is correct.
If causation proceeds as our vision conceives it to, then certain other consequences follow, and theory is the working out of what those consequences are. Evidence is fact that discriminates between one theory and another. Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities. [pg. 6]
A vision, then, is not something that one can adopt in an unstructured way: a vision as a statement of causality tells us what the consequences are, a theory collects those, and the facts either confirm it or they don't.
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