Ideas & Opinions
We often hear someone say they saw something on TV or read it on the Internet, so it must be true. To avoid any misunderstandings here, I will redefine the following four words for the purpose of this section, and try to limit myself to those definitions. The order of listing suggests the natural progression of human experience.
1-Observations, 2-Ideas, 3-Opinions, 4-Facts
If I say I have an Idea about something, that doesn’t mean I have an Opinion, or I am proclaiming something to be true or not true. If I voice an Opinion, I mean that I have researched the Idea thoroughly enough that I am pretty sure it is valid, but I still could be totally wrong. The Fact that the Earth is more or less spherical in an endless Universe is beyond question.
In that context, the items covered here are simply leftover things that don’t seem to fit in any other place, and I am not absolutely sure about any of them, but allow me to add the following by way of an example.
Someone capriciously once said, “If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.”, so I pick a current hotly contested debate to make the point that research is not the same as borrowing opinions.
