Re: Speak Your Truth

Marshall Spight wrote:

> Laconic2 wrote:

>>mAsterdam wrote:
>>
>>>No! "*my* view" (emphasis mine).
>>>One of the (your) purposes of talking EDS vs IDS was to get
>>>the discussion out of this them vs. us tone, right?
>>
>>I need to clarify something here.  When I used the phrase "my view",  I did
>>NOT mean  "My opinion about what the correct view is".

Hmmm.. full disclosure: IDS is also my homebase.

> While there is a danger in becoming overly convinced of one's own
> opinions, there is another danger in the opposite direction: becoming
> overly weak about holding one's own opinions.
>
> In fact, even the phrase "in my opinion" serves no real purpose.
> Everything everyone says everywhere is their opinion. That is,
> they are describing the truth as best they understand it. (Unless
> they are explicitly hypothesizing.) Any leading "I think that..." can
> be omitted, because it is redundant.

Every time I state what I see as a fact you may think of it as being prefixed/postfixed by "I think that", or IMO. When I *do* use those phrases it is an expression of the level of my doubts or maybe the shallowness of my knowledge in a certain area.

> The best thing for a debate is when all participants speak
> the truth as they understand it.

Bold, Popperian falsifiable statements.

> As an exercise, read the version of this post below the
> signature, and tell me if it is any better than the actual
> post.
>
>
> Marshall
> -----
>
> While there is a danger in becoming over convinced of one's own
> opinions, it seems to me there is another danger in the opposite
> direction: becoming overly weak about holding one's own opinions.
>
> In my opinion, even the phrase "in my opinion" serves no real purpose.
> I believe that everything everyone says everywhere is their opinion.
> It seems to me they are describing the truth as best they understand it.
> (Unless perhaps they are explicitly hypothesizing.) I think that
> any leading "I think that..." can be omitted, because it is redundant.
>
> I believe the best thing for a debate is when all participants speak
> the truth as they understand it.

This version also suffers from discarding the dialogue, the dialectic power of the medium newsgroup/mailinglist. But yes, even compensating for that, it sucks IMNSHO :-) Received on Mon Sep 06 2004 - 17:36:49 CDT