“You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”
When Dominic Monigihan said those now famous and perhaps-too-much-cited-in-Internet-forums words he was talking about people’s use of opinion to disguise arguments in favour of ill-informed and often wrong objective statements. To make an objective statement you should be able to back it up with testable, falsifiable facts. It’s no good arguing that, for example, “In my opinion, women are paid less because they don’t work as hard” if a simple test shows women work equally as hard as their male counterparts. The prefix of “In my opinion…” doesn’t add anything. The statement is making a claim – and the claim can be demonstrated to be false.
Put simply, any objective claim that you state as your opinion should work just as well if it’s made as a claim in its own right. You don’t need the “In my opinion…” prefix at all.
But is the same said of a subjective statement?
Wittgenstein argued that philosophical disagreement arises from the lack of logical perfection in language. The flexibility of the languages we use gives rise to ambiguity in our meaning. Without access to a logically perfect language we will always suffer from misunderstanding about what we mean when we make a subjective claim. For example, if I say “I feel terrible!”, you might believe that I feel the same way you feel when you make the same claim, but you don’t actually know my meaning of feeling terrible is actually the same as yours. We go through life assuming the claims of others fit with our own biases. Generally speaking though this works. It doesn’t actually matter that we have different meanings because the meanings we have are close enough for it not to really matter. What one person means by “terrible” is approximately the same as another. It’s at least good enough to hold a decent every day conversation.
If we’re questioning what other people think and claim we need a greater level of rigour considering the importance we put on having our opinion respected. The previous example of “feeling terrible” is unfalsifiable because it’s unknowable to anyone other than me – no one can argue that I’m not feeling terrible because they simply can’t know without being inside my head. The same can’t be said of other claims. If a critic makes a claim that “In my opinion, this film is dreadful” we can argue that they are subjectively “wrong” if (and only if) we can agree on a baseline for what we mean when we say a film is dreadful. “Dreadful” is a subjective statement until we objectify it by defining dreadfulness. At that point though we’ve modified the subjective statement to be an objective one – and I have already argued that objective statements are actually facts often disguised as opinion.
The consequence of this is that we can’t argue with subjective opinion unless we convert it in to objective fact by defining what we mean by the subjective claims within.
But we need to go further. While we can now state that someone’s subjective opinion can’t be wrong we must also state that the opposite has to be true – it can’t be right either. Hence, if you can’t be wrong, you can’t be right either. Nonetheless we can say that we agree or disagree with subjective opinions – so long as we must remember that all we are saying is that the claim being made is congruent with our own values. Without that caveat, opinions are mistaken for facts. We have to remember subjectivity in what we’re saying.