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Prompted by yet another iteration of that irritating old truism about opinions not being the same as knowledge.
Suppose you could read the information in a person's brain, printed out directly as simple statements. "The Battle of Waterloo was fought in 1815." "Sugar is bad for you." "It was a good day today." How would you differentiate--excluding judgments of content--between those statements which are fact and those which are opinion? Answer: you wouldn't. All our knowledge is opinion. All of it. No exceptions. All opinion, based on something we've seen or heard or read or whatever, which may or may not be a fact. Even what we know of our own experience is only what we think we know, what we have decided we know, what we believe we remember. In the brain, in the damp grey sponge keeping our ears apart, it's all the same.
I'm not saying we can't know anything, or any solipsistic drivel like that. There are facts, out there beyond the skull. Some opinions are more firmly founded on them than others, and not always the ones you're thinking of. What I am saying is that I am tired of people getting snotty and superior about other people's opinions, when they have little or nothing to go on themselves but their own. We all do the best we can with what we've got, and mostly what we've got, when you get right down to basics, is the same. One damp grey sponge per customer, full of opinions which we like to think are facts.
Worth keeping in mind.
Suppose you could read the information in a person's brain, printed out directly as simple statements. "The Battle of Waterloo was fought in 1815." "Sugar is bad for you." "It was a good day today." How would you differentiate--excluding judgments of content--between those statements which are fact and those which are opinion? Answer: you wouldn't. All our knowledge is opinion. All of it. No exceptions. All opinion, based on something we've seen or heard or read or whatever, which may or may not be a fact. Even what we know of our own experience is only what we think we know, what we have decided we know, what we believe we remember. In the brain, in the damp grey sponge keeping our ears apart, it's all the same.
I'm not saying we can't know anything, or any solipsistic drivel like that. There are facts, out there beyond the skull. Some opinions are more firmly founded on them than others, and not always the ones you're thinking of. What I am saying is that I am tired of people getting snotty and superior about other people's opinions, when they have little or nothing to go on themselves but their own. We all do the best we can with what we've got, and mostly what we've got, when you get right down to basics, is the same. One damp grey sponge per customer, full of opinions which we like to think are facts.
Worth keeping in mind.