"While not, strictly speaking, my province, I confess I'd be interested if you could tell me a little about your plans for the registration of Premises."
"I haven't decided quite how to express them yet," Gurgeh said.
"I'll register them tomorrow, probably."
"As a rule, contestants must be prepared to defend their views with arguments, should the Bureau find it necessary to challenge any of them, but I hope you will understand that this will hardly be likely to happen to you... Personally, off the record, I would imagine that you could be quite... oh, one might almost say 'vague'... and nobody would be especially bothered."- Iain Banks
You should distinguish your philosophical premises from your empirical beliefs from your opinions.
- Here are my philosophical premises. What people would call an ideology, though I prefer to save that term as a pejorative for philosophies that are primarily validated by social factors rather than justified by reason and evidence. Premises are broader than just facts, because they include value judgments; or because they are ampliative 'facts' of metaphysics; or because they are very thick facts. Mine range in confidence from 10% to 99%.
- Here are some neglected facts I find important. They are all narrower than the premises and have more or less straightforwardly empirical justifications. They range in confidence from 60% to 99%.
- Here are the predictions I make based on those. My hit rate is currently about xx% (absolute) and I am xx% overconfident on average.
- My 'teachers' are a good enough picture of my opinions. (Where 'opinion' is a mental proposition that is not truth-apt.)
- And these are my favourite aphorisms. They're like premises that require wit. Or one-line poems. They are a decent picture of who I want to be.
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