There are so many opinions about what exists and what does not.

I am interested in two aspects of this statement. Firstly, I am in interested in the ontological question posed. But secondly, I am more interested in the way the structure of the above statement, a seemingly unmarked structure that is often used, hides a habit that influences the way we think.

What is the structure I am referring to? Consider the original and its more accurate variation:

1. There are so many opinions about what exists and what does not.
2. There are so many people with opinions about what exists and what does not.

In my view, the first brings into existence of an entity that does not exist by its structure, and the second correctly states the state of affair that physical beings are the objects which does the action of holding onto opinions. Careful analysis of speech will show that we do this often. Making statements like the first one influences not only one’s own opinions but also other people’s opinions as well.

The second structure is of course less efficient. But also it is more accurate. I will argue that we need to be in the habit of being more accurate about what we say and then ultimately more accurate about how we understand the world. Which comes to the back to the first point I was interested in — what exists and what does not.

To state it plainly, opinions do not exist as their own entities. People with opinion exist to perform the action of forming and holding onto opinions. furthermore, the language habit we have of turning opinions into objects (first by being a object, then by counting them) is the root of many of our problems. True, we cannot escape the need for linguistic efficiency, but also we need to be clear about what is real (ontology) and what is known to be true (epistemology).