Wrong Opinions

One of my pet peeves is the belief that there are no wrong opinions. This usually comes up when someone has said something stupid, been argued into a corner, and responds "Well, this is just my opinion... opinions can't be wrong". What the person is saying (and let's call this person Stator) is that they are expressing their own world view about a subject, and matters of taste are subjective. Thus, just because you don't agree, and hold a different subjective opinion, doesn't change the fact that this person holds a different subjective opinion.

Here's an example: My favorite color is yellow. Just because someone else likes blue doesn't change the fact that I prefer yellow. You can argue all you want about the cool aspects of the color blue, but I will continue to like the happy, warm glow of a bright yellow.

Strictly speaking, this is an opinion, and it can't be wrong unless I am lying to you about my love of yellow (which is entirely possible). But this is not really what annoys me. What annoys me is when people take it a step further. When someone says (pick a pop music singer, I will call this person Pop Princess): "Pop Princess is the greatest musician in the whole world!" What they mean is that they like this musician the most of any musician they have heard up till that point. What they are actually saying is that in the set of all people who can be referred to as musicians, this person is the best. This is an entirely different statement, and you can make many valid arguments that this is not in fact the case. This is when the person usually says that it is just their opinion and therefor can't be wrong.

Why is the latter statement different you ask? Because instead of being about the person making the statement (i.e. that THEY like Pop Princess) they are saying that she is the best musician. This statement can be evaluated. First we must figure out what the stator meant when he/she said "best" and what that person meant by "musician". If we can know these two facts we can start to evaluate a set of likely candidates for being better.

Why establish a definition of "best"? Because otherwise you will be talking past each other. If Stator is using the term to mean most prolific and you are using the term to mean most talented, then you could both be right, and still be arguing with each other because you don't know the other person means something else. But once this is established, it narrows the set of musicians down to a set property or properties that can be discussed productively.

This is also why defining the word "musician" is so important. You could both agree on what is meant by best, and still each come up with different people depending on what you mean by musician. For example, you could both agree that by best you mean most talented, and one person argue for a singer/songwriter, and another pick a composer. They both make music, it's just one does it with song and instrument, the other by writing large complicated chamber pieces on classical instruments.

But now that you have those two defined, i.e. the set of people who qualify as "musicians" and what qualifies as "best", you can now analyze the statement made at the top and see if it is in fact the case. And you can do it without one person being able to fall back on it being "just their opinion". The reason is that it is not in fact just their opinion, but a statement about the world that may or may not be reasonable. By such means we can do away with people relying on the statement "that's my opinion" and "opinions can't be wrong" in most cases (i.e. because most people who say that have wrongly used it on something which is not in fact merely an opinion).