(I'll deal with the rest of your post in a later post of mine.)RJG wrote:If I claim my hearsay (my "read and heard"s) are truer than your hearsay, then that is just my 'opinion', not objective fact. If my opinion is that global warming is a hoax, it doesn't mean that it is objectively true. It just means that my "read and heard"s (hearsay) was more convincing to me than your hearsay.
What were your criteria for finding it more convincing? From the way in which you use the word "opinion", you seem to me to equate it with personal taste with no argument to support it.
Here is an argument you started to make in another topic:
Of course, the things people say about what Trump has said/done and his actual words and actions are all, to you, just hearsay, of precisely equal status to each other. Right? Your philosophical position (as I understand it) is that the statement "there is no such person as Donald Trump" has precisely the same truth value as the statements "Trump does and says bad things" and "the anti-Trump press report that Trump does and says bad things" and "the Earth has the same shape as a banana" and "it is raining". Yes? And that quantity of truth value is zero. Yes?RJG wrote:It seems to me that most Trump haters hate Trump because of what they've read and heard about Trump. But when you look at his 'actual' words and actions (not the media spin and interpretations, i.e. propaganda), he seems to be a pretty nice guy with good intentions for our country.
Yet you seem to make the beginnings of an argument, above, as to why we should trust information that we receive more directly more than we trust information that we receive more indirectly, from partisan sources. It's not a bad argument. It's one of the various techniques that we use to distinguish between different things that we've heard and read and glean objective truth value (minimising the effect of the subject on the propositions that he claims to be objective) from them.
But, given your philosophical position, why do you make this argument? Why not just say: "I have no idea whether a person called Donald Trump exists, whether a body of people called 'The Press' exists or, if either of them exist, whether what they say on any subject is true."