this may be the wrong forum, but this is my first thread so…
Can an opinion be wrong?
no specific incident to discuss, but if someone states their opinion based on facts that you percieve to be wrong, does that imply that their opinion is wrong?
yes, but that’s just my opinion. let’s wait for other posters to see what they say.
A thread that might help.
Yes, an opinion can be wrong, or at least factually incorrect; for example, if I opined that tomatoes are not the natural product of plants, but are in fact covertly deposited on the plants by teams of tiny flying mauve robot penguins, my opinion would be wrong. I might still doggedly hold the opinion, but it would be factually inaccurate - ‘wrong’ in any useful sense of the word.
Now if my opinion is that double chocolate chip ice cream is nicer than mint-choc-chip, we’re into uncertain territory; such an opinion is only likely to be wrong if I insist on some kind of objective standard for the word ‘nicer’, which is nigh on impossible.
To expand on that, I expect you’re thinking of those awkward debates that end with one party lamely protesting “Look, that’s my opinion, OK, I have a right to my opinion, don’t I, you can’t say I’m wrong, it’s my opinion!” - in nearly all cases, this actually means something like “Look, I don’t want to face up to these uncomfortable facts you keep throwing at me”.
Of course everyone has a right to whatever bizarre and contorted opinion they care to hold, but in the context of a debate (which, as I said, is where the issue often becomes a hot one), unsupported (or unsupportable) opinions are pretty worthless and insisting that they stay on the table is rather poor form.
Yes, an opinion can be wrong - if a person’s opinion disagrees with mine, then their opinion is wrong. Rather simple all in all.
I agree. an opinion, by its nature, is neither right or wrong. The facts that you draw your conclusion from are what they are. If you choose to ignore them, that’s your right. But your opinion probably won’t be respected if you tell people your opinion and it’s based on hogwash.
Here’s my not-quite-hijack:
On a related topic, I always get annoyed when I hear someone say that someone is great, wonderful, etc. because “he really believes in [idea]. He’s really committed to it.”
In and of itself, believing in what one is doing is meaningless, and not especially admirable. If I lived in, say, Germany in the early 30s, and really, really believed that all the problems of my country were caused by an international cabal of Jewish financiers, and started a political party to address this problem, and came up with some very effective but brutal means of doing so, well, that makes me a fascist and a Nazi, not someone who’s admirable because he really stands up for what he believes in.
Back to topic. So, it’s the content of a belief or an opinion that justifies it. Nothing else. One may, in terms of society and politics, have the right to hold a stupid and uninformed opinion, but that doesn’t make said opinion any less stupid or uninformed.
My husband said that the other day. He doesn’t like Bush, but he doesn’t like the fact (or not-so-fact) that Kerry has waffled on some subjects. He wants someone who is decisive.
I wanted to throttle him.
Absolutely, although as I said, there are two kinds of opinions (or more likely a continuum, the two extremes of which are):
-Opinions on subjective matters (What is the nicest flavour of ice cream? Is George Clooney attractive?) - this kind of opinion can’t be objectively judged wrong because it isn’t objective in nature.
-Opinions on objective matters (Where do tomatoes come from? What is the distance from London to Paris) - this kind of opinion can be judged objectively wrong if it does not conform to empirical data. My opinion about NanoMechaAeroPurplePhytoPenguins would just be wrong and worthless, no matter firmly I believe it.
You might say that the second kind of opinion should not really be termed ‘opinion’ at all, but is better described as ‘knowledge’ (when correct and ‘ignorance’ when incorrect), but I’d disagree; look at the amount of debate that goes on about objective matters like the whole creation/evolution thing - which should be an objective issue, but people argue from subjective opinion rather than fact or knowledge (and in some cases actively resist objectivity).
De gustibus non est disputandum.
Otherwise, it is certainly possible for an opinion to based on false premises, or on a logical fallacy.
I would sub-divide those:
[ul][li]First-order objective opinion: (I made that up, don’t google for it) The roundness of the Earth, evolution, etc.[/li][li]Second-order objective opinion: Those that are drawn from facts, but take several or many steps to get there. [/li][li]Philosophical subjective opinions[/li][li]Moral/ethical axioms; world-view axioms[/li][li]Artistic subjective opinions [/ul][/li]I broke it up this way because there are a lot of second-order objective opinions that masquerade as philosophical or artistic opinion, and are mistakenly justified because of that. An example might be a person who claims that “free” markets do this or that good or bad thing, and are therefore good or bad. People seem to often justify these claims on grounds that really aren’t relevant and that often contradict empirical fact & mathematical logic, and can therefore be called “incorrect opinions.”
I would say that philosophical opinions can be incorrect as well because they need to be built from premises. An example might be support or opposition to gay marriage. It beggars belief to think that gay marriage is a fundamental moral axiom in anybody’s philosophical world; the stand has to come from somewhere. A philosophical opinion that is not drawn from moral or ethical, or world-view axioms are automatically wrong—or at best, accidentally correct. If they’re drawn from axioms with bad reasoning, then they are incorrect.
Artistic opinons, I don’t know. Given the number of people who watched Home Improvement instead of Seinfeld, what can I say? 
But double chocolate chip ice cream IS nicer than mint-chocolate chip. Even if you’re wrong about this, and I’m wrong about this, we’re right. (two wrongs make a…nevermind.)
Yes, if a person’s opinion can be written as a logical proposition about the physical world, then there is a certain percentage their opinion is wrong (not a zero or 1, as by the laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, there is a small chance that as you debate the facts, the particles that are the subject of the debate have spontaneously rearranged themselves to fit the proposition. Unless of course you are talking about the past.)
However, if it cannot be reduced to such, as in the case of aesthetics where a function for beauty cannot be agreed upon, then no, their opinion cannot be wrong.
I’d break it down like this. Opinions cannot be “wrong” as they’re not fact-based.
However, as pointed out by Mangetout, in some instances what’s being stated is not an opinion but a position on facts.
And positions on facts can be wrong.
I, too, find it infuriating when the “it’s my opinion” defense is used to shield someone from having to deal with facts. It’s usually the next-to-last resort of the crappy debater (the last resort being the introduction of insults to the “debate”).
It’s funny how impossible it can be to explain this to some people, though. My sister has been known to pull the opinion card on some real doozies–I can’t think of any examples right now, but I assure you, these are situations in which there is no doubt whatsoever that she is wrong. People try to correct her nicely, she gets in a tizzy, and it goes downhill from there until you give up…but I’m telling you, it’s worse stuff than the tomato example. Time and time again I try to get it through to her that you can’t really have an opinion on something like, oh, whether or not horses have hooves. No dice. shudder
I chalk this (and other marginally less stupid opinion defenses) up to:
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Living in an argumentative family/group in which everything must be fought tooth and nail until a win is scored for your side
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Schools are really into getting kids to respect other people’s opinions, and I’m all in favor of this. But they don’t seem to be getting around to teaching what an opinion is and how to properly defend one. Pity.
To answer the OP: As others have said, it’s hard for an opinion to be wrong. But it’s really easy to incorrectly classify something as an opinion when in fact it isn’t one.
An opinion can be factually incorrect, as Mangetout said. A statement beginning “it is my opinion that…” cannot be wrong, unless you’re lying, or, well, wrong.
No examples to give on this, yet it seems that people will have opinions on things w/out thinking through how that fits into their world view. If you take the time to the pieces into place, all of the sudden, everything changes. There is a person who, since I was a child, had maintained that god was so important to having laws and morals, etc. He was also a big supporter of the god reference in the Pledge. I gave him a copy of the 9th (whatever it is) appeals decision and his opinion was significantly altered.
I don’t think that opinions really change willy-nilly like that, I tend to think that ad hoc “opinions” are modified to fit w/ more fundamental values. (Okay, maybe “I like Everybody Loves Raymond” can change willy-nilly.)
But can opinions of pure taste be wrong? Most people don’t like Guinness first time out, but grow to be very fond of it. If their original opinion wasn’t wrong, it certainly wasn’t right, was it? We might have a host of words for that: “uncultured,” “unsophisticated,” “provincial,” “immature,” or “naive” to describe opinions that are clearly not right. There may be no accounting for taste; but, does that imply that taste is necessarily always correct?
I believe that while “wrong” is not the exact word to use, an opinion can be improperly justified and thus be of no value or have negative value (ie, persuading the person hearing the opinion to believe something not supported by the facts).
For example, I like Japanese professional wrestling, or “puroresu.” Puro is choreographed and booked differently than American wrestling. While American wrestling matches are planned to get crowd reactions by surprising them (yes, it’s an oversimplification), puro matches are planned to resemble a real fight and show how the two characters and their movesets would develop in light of what happened earlier in the match and in previous matches involving one or both of the wrestlers. In essence, every move makes a difference. This is called employing psychology.
People rate wrestling matches on a one- to five-star scale, a ***** match being a mindblowingly psychological match that’s still exciting and doesn’t involve any botched moves. (Again, an oversimplification.)
I can talk to my friend Rob, who follows puro religiously, and ask him to rate a given match. I can also talk to my friend Jason, who doesn’t, and ask him to rate the same match. Rob will give me a star rating based on his understanding of the Japanese psychology system, whereas Jason will give me a rating based on how excited the match made him (using the American standard).
While these are both opinions, I think Rob’s rating more accurately reflects the “true” quality of the match.