When I’m as sure as I can be about something, I won’t use qualifiers. For my areas of interest, I’ll try to get to this stage, which has the added benefit of making my language more concise. If you’re unsure, you should qualify, but if you qualify a lot, why are you talking? (However, for some question domains, things can’t be known, like predicting election outcomes, in which case, it’s fine to get on a soapbox and qualify.) It’s a mistake to cut out your qualifiers if you haven’t done the hard work of figuring out all the details.
Of course, qualifiers should be common because people talk about stuff they don’t know all the time, and they want you to engage with them. It’d be a bit weird to say “I don’t know” and then walk away for 99 percent of your interactions. In these situations, I’ll try to include qualifiers. Sometimes I’ll forget, and state something as if it were a fact only to be categorically shown to be wrong two seconds later. I hate this. So, for me, qualifiers are worth it. But even if you’re not embarrassed when the truth is literally the exact opposite of what you just said, qualifiers are good. They help you delineate between what you know to be true and what you think is true, which is useful for your own thinking. They also communicate your actual beliefs.
Even better than this binary distinction is using credences.
When I’m as sure as I can be about something, I won’t use qualifiers. For my areas of interest, I’ll try to get to this stage, which has the added benefit of making my language more concise. If you’re unsure, you should qualify, but if you qualify a lot, why are you talking? (However, for some question domains, things can’t be known, like predicting election outcomes, in which case, it’s fine to get on a soapbox and qualify.) It’s a mistake to cut out your qualifiers if you haven’t done the hard work of figuring out all the details.
Of course, qualifiers should be common because people talk about stuff they don’t know all the time, and they want you to engage with them. It’d be a bit weird to say “I don’t know” and then walk away for 99 percent of your interactions. In these situations, I’ll try to include qualifiers. Sometimes I’ll forget, and state something as if it were a fact only to be categorically shown to be wrong two seconds later. I hate this. So, for me, qualifiers are worth it. But even if you’re not embarrassed when the truth is literally the exact opposite of what you just said, qualifiers are good. They help you delineate between what you know to be true and what you think is true, which is useful for your own thinking. They also communicate your actual beliefs.
Even better than this binary distinction is using credences.