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On Friday night, I went with a couple of friends to Haverford's Lunt basement to see live music. As we waited for the band to play, my two friends talked; I was tuning in and out of their conversation, when I heard one of them say (heavily paraphrased): "I don't like opinions. I think they are a type of judgmental mindframe; everyone should just take in new ideas and not apply their pre-existing opinion to them." And I couldn't help but think, upon hearing this, "What would Derrida say?" If I have understood the class discussion of him correctly, he would say that this statement is ridiculous, and that we will never simply evaluate, completely fresh, every new piece of information we receive. Instead, new information is molded against ideas that are already inside of us, but are also not uniquely our ideas, but our translation of some other basic outside idea.

Or something.