I’ve tried doing this in my writing in the past, of the form of just throw away “I think” all together because it’s redundant: there’s no one thinking up these words but me.
Unfortunately this was a bad choice because many people take bald statements without softening language like “I think” as bids to make claims about how they are or should be perceiving reality, which I mean all statements are but they’ll jump to viewing them as claims of access to an external truth (note that this sounds like they are making an error here by having a world model that supposes external facts that can be learned rather than facts being always conditional on the way they are known (which is not to say there is not perhaps some shared external reality, only that any facts/statements you try to claim about it must be conditional because they live in your mind behind your perceptions, but this is a subtle enough point that people will miss it and it’s not the default, naive model of the world most people carry around anyway)).
Example:
I think you’re doing X → you’re doing X
People react to the latter kind of thing as a stronger kind of claim that I would say it’s possible to make.
This doesn’t quite sound like what you want to do, though, and instead want to insert more nuanced words to make it clearer what work “think” is doing.
This doesn’t quite sound like what you want to do, though, and instead want to insert more nuanced words to make it clearer what work “think” is doing.
Yeah. And also a big part of what I’m trying to propose is some sort of new standard. I just realized I didn’t express this in my OP, but I’ll express it now. I agree with the problems you’re saying, and I think that if we all sort of agreed on this new standard, eg. when you say “I suspect” it means X, then these problems seem like they’d go away.
I’ve tried doing this in my writing in the past, of the form of just throw away “I think” all together because it’s redundant: there’s no one thinking up these words but me.
Unfortunately this was a bad choice because many people take bald statements without softening language like “I think” as bids to make claims about how they are or should be perceiving reality, which I mean all statements are but they’ll jump to viewing them as claims of access to an external truth (note that this sounds like they are making an error here by having a world model that supposes external facts that can be learned rather than facts being always conditional on the way they are known (which is not to say there is not perhaps some shared external reality, only that any facts/statements you try to claim about it must be conditional because they live in your mind behind your perceptions, but this is a subtle enough point that people will miss it and it’s not the default, naive model of the world most people carry around anyway)).
Example:
I think you’re doing X → you’re doing X
People react to the latter kind of thing as a stronger kind of claim that I would say it’s possible to make.
This doesn’t quite sound like what you want to do, though, and instead want to insert more nuanced words to make it clearer what work “think” is doing.
Yeah. And also a big part of what I’m trying to propose is some sort of new standard. I just realized I didn’t express this in my OP, but I’ll express it now. I agree with the problems you’re saying, and I think that if we all sort of agreed on this new standard, eg. when you say “I suspect” it means X, then these problems seem like they’d go away.