POLSCI 2M03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Doxa, Nuclear Fission, Comparative Politics
17 Apr 2021
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Week 1: introduction to the course and comparative politics. No, you"re not entitled to your opinion, the conversation, c_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for. The problem with i"m entitled to my opinion is that, all too often, it"s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for i can say or think whatever i like and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, i suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse. Plato distinguished between opinion or common belief (doxa) and certain. You can"t really argue about the first kind of opinion. I"d be silly to insist that knowledge, and that"s still a workable distinction today: unlike 1+1=2 or there are no square circles, an opinion has a degree of subjectivity and uncertainty to it.
