Opinion

Opinion concerns the changing world of becoming; knowledge concerns the eternal world of being; only philosophy can bridge the gap between them.

Opinion concerns the contingent; science concerns the necessary; but dialectic, which begins from received opinions, is the gateway to philosophical understanding.

All human judgment is opinion, and all opinion is unstable; honest self-examination reveals that we have no fixed point from which to judge, and this discovery is the beginning of wisdom.

To escape opinion, suspend judgment about everything not clear and distinct; the thinking self, perceiving its own existence, gives us one piece of certain knowledge from which to rebuild.

Knowledge is the perception of the agreement of ideas; everything beyond it is probability and opinion, but opinion suffices for the conduct of life and grounds the right of toleration.

All belief about the world is custom-generated opinion, not knowledge; reason alone can tell us nothing about matters of fact, and even our most basic convictions about causation rest on habit rather than evidence.

Opinion, belief, and knowledge are three distinct modes of holding something true, distinguished by the subjective and objective sufficiency of their grounds.

Beliefs are tools for navigating experience; truth is what works, and the will to believe is legitimate where evidence is insufficient but the option is genuine and momentous.