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Glastonbury resident antiquarians and festival,.
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thesweetcheat
thesweetcheat
6195 posts

OT - Opinion-as-fact vs objective discussion
Jul 31, 2013, 22:08
tjj wrote:
What does it matter what someone believes about Glastonbury, what is with all this 'prove it' shit.


Hi tjj, unless I've misunderstood, I don't think anyone's saying that it matters what someone "believes" about Glastonbury at all.

I think what's causing the disagreement is when what someone believes starts to be asserted as fact. "I believe Glastonbury to be a chakra" is a very different statement to "Glastonbury IS a chakra".

Quite often threads on here descend into arguments because opinion starts to become entrenched and then argued as fact. And once someone's opinion is stated as fact, it is likely to be challenged, whereas generally peoples' beliefs won't be challenged in the same way (because they're simply beliefs, thus entirely subjective).

And then the proponent of the original belief-as-fact gets upset because essentially someone appears to be questioning their beliefs, when actually what is being challenged is the assertion that those beliefs are fact.

We have had this time and time again on here and it's only going to keep happening unless people express personal beliefs as "I believe that ..." rather than "it is the case that ...".
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