If someone in fact enjoys eating cheese, and thinks the moon is made of cheese, I’ll tend to just call his opinion that he would enjoy eating a piece of the moon “wrong”.
Certainly. As I said in my first post, you can have objections to a fact stated if you believe it is incorrect.
Disagreeing on facts is often sufficient to cause a problem.
This is also true. Whether two people disagree only on the facts or only on preferences, the same amount of trouble can be had. Also if people disagree on both.
There are a lot of facts more important than understanding the other’s opinion.
This is itself an opinion, so I cannot assign a truth value to it. The assignment of importance can only be done if preferences exist. For example, a preference may exist to gain benefit from a certain fact, but not necessarily to satisfy the preference of another person. Given such a preference, it would not, of course, be important to know what the other person’s preferences are. On the other hand, if a person wanted to satisfy another person’s preferences (or to go against them), then it would be very important. Are you saying that you generally prefer to discover facts about the world over facts about the preferences of other people, or that you think the statement you made is itself some fact about the world? If it is the first, then I assume you have more knowledge of your preferences than I do. If it is the second, then I think I have to disagree.
Okay. You are telling me something about your preferences then.
And why is that? Why are those facts more important than, say, that the ice cream is bubblegum-flavored or blue-colored or sweetened with aspartame or made from coconut milk? Knowing the temperature of the ice cream or the composition of the flour is important only in the sense that there can be human preferences in this direction.
Your example is not about people negotiating without knowing each other’s preferences. Your example is about people negotiating with a few assumptions of the other person’s preferences. Here is an example of people negotiating without knowing the other person’s preferences:
Person A: Would you like some flour?
Person B: No. Would you like ice cream?
Person A: No. I have some fruit fly eggs here...
Person B: Not interested. Would you like a computer?
Person A: Why, yes. What do you have here? Never mind—I won’t buy anything over ten years old.
True. If we only know the other person’s preferences but not any relevant facts for achieving them, we cannot expect a mutually satisfying interaction. However, if we know the relevant facts for achieving various preferences, but not which of those preferences the other person has, the same is true.
True, but not what I’m discussing. I am discussing how to satisfy both people’s preferences in an interaction between two people.
Since you state this is not a logical assertion but generally true, I assume you mean to say that it is true in the world we live in but would not have to be true in all possible worlds. However, what I am saying is that this statement does not have a truth value in any logically possible world since it does not specify the preference the importance relates to. Using the word important in this way is like leaving off the ‘if’ condition in an ‘if’-‘then’ statement, but not leaving out the if as well. The ‘then’ condition has a truth value by itself, but the ‘if’-‘then’ statement can only be evaluated if both conditions can be evaluated.
And I disagree that it can. Less important to achieve what objective? The only way a statement of importance has meaning is to relate it to the goal it is meant to achieve. That goal is a preference.
You have been trying to argue that facts are important but that knowing another person’s preferences is not very important. But important for what purpose? One possibility is that you mean that knowing other facts is more important for the goal of achieving that person’s preferences than knowing that person’s preferences. Another is that you mean that knowing facts are more important for achieving your preferences than knowing what the other person’s preferences are (since you state you don’t consider goals humans generally want to achieve as important, it seems reasonable to assume this is also a possibility). In order to say whether your statement is true, I need to know the specific preferences involved. As you have stated it here, it has no truth value.
My position is that knowing a person’s preferences and the facts about how to achieve those preferences are both necessary, but by themselves insufficient, to achieve those preferences. I do not know which I find more tragic, the person who knows the goal but not the path to get there, or the person who knows perfectly all the paths, but not which one to take.