Truth, strike two

[ciphergoth]

Thanks for some interesting and surprising responses to the JFK question. At the risk of creating more heat than light, let me try another example, one that I think might be a little less comfortable to be neutral about.

It seems that many people believe that on the morning of September 11, 2001, four thousand or more Israelis who were working at the World Trade Center did not show up for work.

Are those people wrong?

(Update: amended as per ajva's caveat)

Comments

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

I can't help but think that the defence of (2) is independent of (1) and runs "dinner parties would be really dull otherwise".

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Heh :-) although to turn a serious point on a tongue-in-cheek comment, I also worry that people sometimes seem to have opinions as a thing to show off at dinner parties - that they have something to say about X rather than that they actually think something about X even when they're not at a dinner party. I've called this "opinions as stamp collections" in the past; Dennett calls it "believing in belief".

To a certain extent I think that's something we all do, but I try to make the distinction clear in conversation; if that's what I'm doing, I'll tend to preface my remarks with something like "I'm often tempted to think that..." or some such disclaimer.