Knowledge

Is there a logical reason why most people prefer their own opinions rather than someone else's?

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There's a conceptual reason: if I "preferred" your opinion to my own, in the sense of thinking it is more likely to be true than the one I currently hold, then I presumably would change my opinion to match yours, and your opinion would become mine.

Of course there's the matter of considering another person's opinion -- seriously trying to take account of what someone else has to say. Maybe you're asking why "most people" fail to do that, why "most people" are close-minded. In that case, I have to say that I don't think that the presupposition of your question is true. Everyone I know -- my kids, my husband, my colleagues, my students, my friends -- generally do seem to listen to and consider what other people say.

So I have a question for you: why do most people say "most people" when they generally mean "some people some of the time"?

This is a tantalizing question. On some subjects I do have a good reason to prefer my own opinions, say because I was there at the time and saw it with my own eyes. But consider philosophical opinions. Why do I bother to form my own opinions? Why don't I just agree with everything Hilary Putnam says, since he is such a good philosopher? That would save me a lot of time, and it might well increase the reliability of my opinions. Well, in the case of philosophy, I guess part of the answer is that we don't just care about maximising the chances of having the right answer: we also think there is a particular value to working things out for oneself.

One more point among the many that your question raises. Most of our opinions are not just our own opinions anyway, since almost everything we know we know because of what other people tell us. Philosophers argue over whether reason or experience is the primary source of knowledge; but at a certain level the answer is neither. Testimony or communication wins hands down. There is very little indeed that you know entirely off your own bat, without the help of the word of others.

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