Abstract

When opinion polls are conducted on some urgent matter of the day those polled are permitted to declare themselves ‘Don't Knows’. It is usually a minority who are so ill-disposed as to forget their civic duty to have an opinion on each and every subject, and they can usually expect to be rebuked as fence-sitters or slugabeds. People confronted by the demand that they take sides can generally produce a ‘view’ which they maintain against all-comers without the slightest attempt to seek out confirmation or counter-evidence. Sometimes, no doubt, this view ‘bubbles up’ from the speaker's entrenched evaluations and opinions; sometimes it has simply been selected, off the cuff, from the available alternatives and entered in the speaker's ‘axiom set’, the things she'll say when asked, or which she may even ‘act on’ in some more material way—without any implication that the alternative opinion would not once have done as well.