Hacker News Reader

Comment by elendilm | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it must be considered from the perspective of the speaker. He may have a particular dentist in mind when he says "the dentist" and maybe the listener not having privy to it may not be relevant.

And he may be saying "a" about the word "nice" instead of about the word "evening".

Note: This is just my opinion and an attempt at trying to make sense of it. Purely subjective take as I usually refrain from making purely opinion based arguments.

View on HN

No matter how much we try to make objective statements, they are never based on "full, provable truth", and are thus opinions. Conversing with other humans is exchanging opinions based on their own previous knowledge. Thus no need to — when conversing with non-malicious people — state that your opinion is, in fact, your opinion. I appreciate it for what it is, and if I am curious about the basis for it, I will inquire more.

All of the above is in my opinion, but I never state that and assume a good faith reader will take it as such (here for demonstration purposes only :)).

So in short, thanks for your opinion, and I agree this is the largely the basis for choosing between an indefinite and definite article, also opening them up to inquiry ("I am going to the store" — "oh, which one?"; compare to "I am going to a store" — "what are you getting?").

I appreciate your good faith, the suggestions, and your elaboration on them.

For context, extensive coding over two decades has ingrained in me the habit of explicitly disambiguating my statements of machine-executable logic expressed in natural language from personal guesswork and opinions.

I should integrate your suggestion and try not to explicitly qualify my guesswork. Using passively implied qualifiers in the structure of my opinion pieces would be a step in the right direction.

I believe it can be even simpler.

"Chocolate ice-cream is the best" is very clearly not an (attempt at) objective statement and needs no qualifiers. Only if the reader really wants to be malicious, they can question even that too: what do you base that on? how many ice-cream types have you tried? is there a study confirming preferred taste among a large population? is it cultural and has that been tested? ...

"In my opinion, based on roughly 60 ice-cream flavors I have tried in my life, and having tried chocolate flavor in at least 50 different places, I find that the taste of chocolate ice-cream on average is the best tasting ice-cream regardless of my mood, fullness or place of production and variety of 'chocolate' used" makes for a very boring conversation — except sometimes when you are making a go at it :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com