Practically speaking, I don't think it is important to achieve the sort of goals humans generally want to achieve.

Okay. You are telling me something about your preferences then.

If I'm trading you ice cream for flour, what we really need to nail down...

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.

Then, we can negotiate a trade without knowing each other's preferences.

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.

In contrast, if we only know each other's preferences, we won't get very far.

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.

there are possible minds whose only desire is to only know the other person's opinions.

True, but not what I'm discussing. I am discussing how to satisfy both people's preferences in an interaction between two people.

I meant it as an assertion of what's generally true in human interactions.

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.

So as I intended it "less important" applies in a stronger sense than "I disapprove" since compared to the other type of knowledge those facts are less often necessary and less often sufficient.

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.

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.

Interesting. Thanks for your perspective. I think you probably know more about this topic than I do. What do you think the expectations are for the husband, and for the wife's family? It seems that there is an expectation that the husband is able to earn money (ie. since you mentioned that large amounts of money are given to highly educated men, my assumption is that the wife's family is expecting him to earn money with his education, but if you think that's untrue I'd be interested to know your reasoning). However, you seem to be saying that there is also the expectation that the wife's family will help him with money. Is this expectation generally only for a short duration of time or is it considered a long-term obligation? Is there any expectation in the reverse (that the husband help the wife's family with money)?

Actually, my point is that an opinion = facts + preferences. First, you form a belief about the state of the world, and then you may assign a value to that state and decide on an action. Two people may have identical beliefs about a certain fact in the world, but may not assign identical value to that state. If this is the case, there is no point in trying to prove the fact being considered wrong. Sometimes it is the preferences themselves that differ. This can sometimes be resolved, but it does require thinking about the thought processes behind those preferences, and not just focusing on the facts we are assigning value to. Your last two sentences imply that opinions have a truth value. I am saying that they don't. Only the facts that opinions are based on have a truth value.

Agreement on opinions requires not just agreement on facts, but also agreement on preferences. I feel a high degree of confidence that people's preferences are not identical. Therefore, I suspect that agreeing on the facts alone rarely solves the problem. If we verify the fact that one person has one preference, and another person an opposing preference, the verification of that alone will not resolve their disagreement. The only approach is to try to understand the similarities and differences in the preferences involved, and see if anything can be worked out from there.

Factual incorrectness is not the only objection a person could have to something. In many cases, people present what they believe to be the facts and then give their response to those facts. For example, someone says that Amy is 80 years old. They could then decide:

1.) Amy should be treated with unquestioning respect--they want to live in a society that respects their elders.

2.) Suggest that Amy should treat her children with unquestioning respect since they will have to take care of her.

3.) Say that Amy should be accorded respect, but not unquestioning respect because their preference is to treat others in an egalitarian way.

4.) Any number of other things.

You could then have objections to either the fact they stated (if it is not true), or to preferences they stated (if yours differ), or to both. Preferences can reference facts, especially if they are contingent on facts to achieve other, more central, preferences. And so sometimes you can use facts to show that someone's preferences are not in accordance with their core preferences. But a person's core preferences only convey a fact about the person holding them, not a fact about the world. The world has no preference about what happens to us. Only we do.

Upvoted for your thoughtful reply, which clarified a number of your points quite well. I will try to address some of your points and ask questions for those things I am still unclear on. Firstly, in your previous posts, it seems like you are discussing two separate issues—the first is the extent to which our decisions are based on external factors, the second is the extent to which our decisions are based on unconscious processing as opposed to conscious processing of those factors. Since your last post focused more on the second issue, this post will do so as well.

Here is what I did to analyze in more detail the position you are taking. I followed the link you supplied (this link being one of the reasons I upvoted your post—also, the use of the quote is very helpful to quickly establish relevance) and also used that page to get some information on the original source of the study mentioned. This led me to a paper by Nisbett and Wilson where this experiment is described by the original researchers. They also did a review of the literature to describe similar studies.

Reading Nisbett and Wilson's paper changed my point of view on this subject since they discussed a variety of confabulation research in great detail. I would now agree that unconscious reasons can be an important component of understanding healthy decisions, although I still think this doesn't always tell you any more useful information than the conscious reasons (specifically this may not always or even usually be the case where the conscious reason is correct, regardless of whether it is a confabulation). Their description of the 1931 experiment by Maier stood out especially for me, since it showed that healthy individuals could incorrectly explain how they knew the answer to a problem (as opposed to just saying that they don't know how they figured it out). I'm not sure why I found this additional information more compelling than the more relevant clothing example. Maybe it helped to illustrate the more widespread existence of confabulation in cognition. I'll have to think about this.

However, I think this paper outlined an important distinction, and that is that even when the reasons are correct, this doesn't mean that they were discovered from introspection. Your link also discusses this concept of confabulation. However, a confabulation is not necessarily wrong (it is just necessarily not obtained from introspection). When the reasons are correct, they are still consciously known. It would be incorrect to say that they are not consciously known. It might be correct to say that the reasons for the reasons are not consciously known, but this is not quite the same thing.

I will now address some specific questions I have about the evidence you presented for your position. Let's consider the right-side bias you presented. This is a good example because obviously nothing intrinsic to the clothing improves if you place it on someone's right, and yet people overwhelmingly chose the item on the right (and they got the reason for this wrong). Yet I have questions about the applicability of this to everyday decisions. For example, how much stronger is this specific bias than conscious factors? If instead of being presented with identical items, the items are different, would this bias still be relevant?

For the other one involving color choice based on emotions felt at the time, I was not able to find any support. Is this factor also based on research, or just a hypothetical scenario? Am I missing something obvious? I know of claims that colors affect emotion, but am unaware of claims that current emotions affect color choice.

people who believe that certain specific external things motivate their dress and other things don't may be wrong or may be right about each of those things

Okay. That makes sense to me, then.

I said I don't think that!

True. It was an unfortunate typo on my part. I have since corrected the post above to reflect my actual meaning.

I think more goes into decision making than attempting to achieve satisfaction.

What do you mean by this? Can you give an example of what a person's thought processes would be doing when making a decision (whether conscious or unconscious) besides attempting to achieve satisfaction? TheFreeDictionary.com states that satisfaction is 'The fulfillment or gratification of a desire, need, or appetite.' Maybe you mean that some of the ways the brain is wired to choose things do not actually fulfill this requirement, but are simply some sort of artifact of the wiring itself? For example, maybe this is true of the right-side preference you gave earlier. Nevertheless, if our minds have a component that positively justifies such seemingly irrelevant decisions through confabulation (ie. unconsciously making stuff up), it would seem that the overall structure of the mind is working quite hard to increase satisfaction.

You can be suspicious of anyone saying that they know your subconscious reasons without being suspicious of someone who tells you your articulated reasons are of moderate importance.

Thanks for bringing this up—I think I understand somewhat more clearly what claim you are trying to make now. I agree that being suspicious of the first kind of statement does not necessarily entail being suspicious of the second kind of statement. Still, I find it necessary to be suspicious of both. I have a relative lack of knowledge in the field of psychology and neuroscience (although I greatly enjoyed the one psychology class I took in college). In order to determine whether another person is correct in their statements, I need to closely evaluate the available evidence for those statements. This includes claims made by journal articles, the logical train of thought used, simple things like day to day experiences, and any other available evidence. I can, of course, guess based on my current knowledge, but that would bias my decision towards information I already know.

We believe there are unintuited influences, we should not pretend that all the influences we understand are all that influence us.

How would giving more weight when there is evidence for a reason (whether consciously or unconsciously known for the subject) be the same as pretending that only the intuitive kind of reason influences us? I do not think this is the correct response to a statement about examining evidence. Things for which there are evidence are not necessarily intuitive in any way. That is why science is necessary in the first place. I think this would be a more valid response to a statement saying that anything unintuitive should automatically be given less weight. That was not what I said, however. In fact, I can give more weight to your statement about people choosing items on the right now that I see the evidence that this actually occurs.

I would expect people to tell themselves flattering stories...

Yes, I did see studies that say that confabulations are often positive , so I see that there is research to support for the idea that people would choose flattering stories for their conscious decisions. However, if most confabulations really are positive, does this mean conscious thought is usually used to come up with negative reasons? Or just that people usually don't come up with negative reasons for things?

I hope that helps to clarify my current position on this matter. I appreciate the time you took to provide additional insight into your position. I'll definitely be reading more about this kind of research on unconscious reasoning to try to better understand how people make decisions.

Thanks for your comments, and for clarifying your ideas. I think I can further address some of your points now.

It really wasn't, especially coming from you

Good to know you think my writing is usually clear, even if not in this case. I agree that there should have been more background added to the first post to make the statements clearer. I will try to improve this in the future, since one of my goals for my writing is for it to be clear to those reading it. Therefore, I have tried to be as clear as I can in this post, although I suspect that it could be optimized more for brevity...

eternal-->external, sorry, edited.

Thanks for clarifying this. However, I am still confused by this sentence. Now the first part seems to be saying that if someone believes that certain external factors motivate their clothing choices and others don't, they could be wrong or right. But isn't it always the case that certain external factors motivate people and others don't? If I wear rainproof clothing on a rainy day, isn't it rational to suppose that I did so because it was raining and not because the grass was green? The second part of your sentence says that someone claiming that no such external factors are hugely influential isn't right. I agree with that, but I'm uncertain if it was intended to disagree with my assertion that I choose clothing to please myself. If so, I think that my second post addresses that what satisfies me is based on external factors, especially those external factors that produce the comfort and functionality of the clothes (such as their size and the material they are made of). Could you perhaps give a specific example of where someone's beliefs satisfies the statement you made and one where it does not?

Also, I feel that internal mental states, as they are affected by external factors, are what is actually being discussed here, and it is important to make this distinction. If the causes for our actions were 100% external from our brain, it follows that we wouldn't need one to act in the ways that we do. But in fact we have external inputs that are processed in some way by our brain, producing an internal state (with possibly both unconscious and conscious outputs) that results in some specific action.

I think people's articulated reasons are, even if true, not nearly complete.

Yes, articulated reasons are not necessarily complete, but I think that unarticulated reasons are much more difficult to evaluate than articulated ones. For example, let's say that I choose to buy a certain wide-brimmed hat. The reason I give you is that I want to keep the sun out of my eyes and because I like the color. This is my articulated reason. The first part can be examined in terms of whether the given item is likely to fulfill the stated function. The second part must be taken at face value. Let's say that I have an unarticulated reason for buying the hat—or actually, lets say I have several unarticulated reasons for buying the hat. Now, let's take a look at what these might be. Trivially, I might have unarticulated reasons that I am conscious of, but do not choose to share. However, I think you were thinking more along the lines of unconscious reasons. And here is where I become suspicious, because while it could be quite useful to know what these actually are, I think that only a good deal of reading on psychology and neuroscience can even begin to scratch the surface of these reasons.

Either way I don't trust intuitive conscious narratives people have for how they choose what to wear.

And I am wary of intuitive conscious narratives given for unconscious reasons people have for how they choose what they wear (or for why they do anything, really). I will give much more weight to reasons where I can examine the evidence and the logical chain of reasoning behind them, whether they are conscious or unconscious. In the case of unconscious reasons, a researcher might come up with a hypothesis for how unconscious behavior works, and formalize it through experimentation. While there can be plenty of valid reasons for your position, it might help to explain specifically what you don't trust about conscious narratives. Lack of completeness isn't necessarily a fatal flaw—if a person's conscious reasoning effectively predicts their future actions (especially if they can generalize this over many future actions), then there is a good reason to make use of that reasoning. However, if a person's conscious reasoning is not a good predictor of their actions, then the time and effort required to look for unconscious ones may be justified.

I think you probably choose clothing for largely the same reasons others do.

This hypothesis is interesting, but it doesn't tell me much about what you would predict for this behavior. For example, if people all choose clothing for largely the same reasons, does that mean they all wear largely the same things? Does it mean that Phil's stated desire to choose more fashionable clothing and my stated desire to choose practical and comfortable clothing are not relevant in satisfying our actual desires in this area? How would you use this idea to predict people's behavior or to give them useful recommendations to increase their satisfaction with their clothing choices? Could you clarify your ideas on this?

In summary, I would be interested to hear a more detailed explanation of your position that addresses what specific beliefs you think are correct and incorrect about clothing choices, and what predictions you would make about human behavior based on your position.

Edit: I did correctly interpret the second half of your sentence, but had an unfortunate typo in exactly the wrong place. I have corrected it above (the fix is the italicized 'isn't'). Sorry about that. Please read the remainder of that paragraph with the fix in mind.

People who believe that certain specific eternal things motivate their dress

What do you mean by eternal? What I find comfortable or functional is not eternal and varies depending on location, time of year, and the weather of the particular day, just to name a few of the relevant variables.

but I don't think anyone claiming that no such factors are hugely influential is right

Hugely influential in what way? Certainly I dress in certain ways that are indicative of the time period and culture I grew up in. I do not believe my choices are somehow unaffected by these things. Perhaps this was not clear in my original post. My intent was to say that I choose clothing by deciding if the clothing fulfills my preferences (which are shaped by external factors) and I do not generally spend much time thinking about whether other people around me will find it fashionable. I do spend a lot of time thinking about whether my clothing will keep me warm when it is cold, or dry when it is wet, and whether it is too tight or loose to be comfortable. In terms of aesthetics, I am trying to please my own sense of aesthetics (which are not necessarily unique to me). The largest exception to this that I can think of is interviews, and even then I pick the clothing I find most acceptable in terms of comfort and aesthetics that I also think will be acceptable for an interview.

But my particular preferences will not necessarily be shared by other people. Other people may give more weight to the aesthetic sense of those around them when deciding what clothing to wear. For them it will be useful to decide which of those people it's more important for them to appeal to. They will also probably want to consider what kind of message they are trying to send, since choosing clothing in this way is about communicating something. This may mean that comfort and other factors might be ignored if they interfere with this goal.

I agree. Choice of goals is based on preferences. But in order to meet the goal of being fashionable, considering subjective opinions is the only way to be objectively successful. To expand on that, I think a person would have to consider things like which people they want to judge them as fashionable. You can't please everyone--the person who likes goth styles is probably going to have a different aesthetic than the one who wears sweaters with kittens (although perhaps not always).

Fashion is a completely subjective opinion. If you want to be fashionable, you need to figure out who you're trying to be fashionable for, and figure out what they like. In my case, this is easy, since the person I dress for is myself. I therefore choose clothing that is comfortable and functional given the large amount of time I spend outdoors. I do get comments on my clothing at times, which are sometimes complimentary and sometimes not. I think it's best to wear the things you yourself like, even if you are dressing for someone else, though. Don't you want to attract the kind of people who like the things you do?