You are not entitled to your opinion
Jun. 4th, 2009 02:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
- You Are Never Entitled to Your Opinion
- Sorry, but you are not entitled to your opinion
- Why You Are Not Entitled To Your Opinion
[Poll #1410915]
(edit: removed Harlan Ellison quote, which doesn't really express what I'm getting at here)
no subject
Date: 2009-06-05 06:26 am (UTC)I certainly believe "You may be entitled to believe that an author means X, when the words on the page are communicating to many other people that he means Not X." I don't go so far as to think "all readings are equally valid" - which is probably the extreme post-modernist position he's attacking there - but without a lot of further clarification, I take issue with the way he states it.
And I see from the comments that he prefers Keats to Hume, and thinks that "beauty is truth and truth beauty" is a good counter to "Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them." I mean, what the fuck? If you're using the "beauty is truth" line to counter Hume's assertion that beauty is not an intrinsic quality in things, and if (like Mike Bock) you're not inclined to let people differ about what "truth" might be even when interpreting Shakespeare, then presumably not only do you think that beauty is an independent quality that exists outside of people's minds (OK, show me something that isn't a mind that can measure it), but you think there is one true standard for beauty, and someone who thinks an ugly thing is beautiful is simply wrong.
Perception of beauty is one of those areas where I think it might be reasonable for someone to say "I'm/You're entitled to my/your opinion". It's certainly not at all clear to me why I should think my opinion about whether any given thing is beautiful is any more or less valid then your opinion, or anyone else's. I do still have the "entitled by whom?" issue a little, but in the case of beauty I think it's fair to say "entitled by me, and I'm the only one who gets a say in what I'm 'allowed' to find beautiful, so that's all the permission I need."
no subject
Date: 2009-06-05 07:11 am (UTC)I'm not so sure about the qualitative difference between statements about the moon's composition and those about author intent, but I think that would take quite a long comment to pick apart and I need to think about it more first!
no subject
Date: 2009-06-05 12:41 pm (UTC)To take a trivial example, I am of the opinion that The Apprentic is worth an hour-and-a-half or so of my time once a week while it's on, and I think the world would be a better place if Big Brother were not on at all. Others are equally entitled to hold their own opinions about various reality TV prgrammes; and that entitlement places no duty on anyone else, as far as I can see.
But use of the phrase to shut down debate on important matters -- in particular, matters where there is objective truth to be found -- should definitely be discouraged.