§ 25 Having an opinion

I personally find the above many times more valuable than the discussion as to whether something should be allowed to be called architecture or not. But then that is just my opinion.¹

What is an opinion and what is its value?

An opinion in the analytical stance is a claim or conviction that has not been satisfactorily described and verified and can therefore not be properly conclusive.

In the critical stance, an opinion takes a position regarding something in terms of use, purpose and virtue.

That stance nevertheless never achieves becoming more than a claim or conviction unless it is judged just and right in the light of subsequent experience.

Opinions can be argued cogently and properly verified only with experience. But because everyone has their own experience, which is after all a subjectively held property of human being, verification will rarely be communal, let alone universal. Nevertheless, verification is required if a design proposition can be counted as ‘good advice’. The value of an opinion can be specified, qualified, and debated, and should be, in an open and open-ended way.

Within an analytical framework, opinions are called hypotheses and are valuable to the extent that they have a chance of being true and accurate.

Within the critical stance, an opinion determines whether a position regarding use, purpose and virtue is good, wise, admirable, or otherwise qualified, and may carry the authority of its holder as well as its receiver.

It is to be hoped that the authority is based on the cogency of the reasoning that underpins the opinion. But this is, perhaps unfortunately, not how things often work.

Opinions often sway based on all sorts of psychological interference, such as the holder’s reputation, rather than on that person’s arguments.

Nevertheless, opinions matter because the highest level of reliable knowledge about things, in the form of beliefs that are both true and justified, is often lacking.

Analysis begins in limbo, for each of us, each person spends a life developing their causal and modal competences and the knowledge that these represent.

Collectively, it has taken us centuries as a community of knowers to develop the causal capacity we now spend our youth learning and our mature lives expanding upon, applying, and teaching.

It has taken extraordinary technological advances from the invention of writing to the invention of the internet via the invention of the printed book to organise our information for dissemination and learning so that each user can turn it into a personal knowledge base, their own frame of reference.

And with each new fact, each new perspective on what is wise or what is for the best, the whole process of analysis and critique has to start again from square one, fitting the whole puzzle together anew.

© Jacob Voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

1. A slightly older version of this paragraph was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, TU/e (2024) ↩︎