No neutral ground

[Belk]

Some people are more prone to be objective in how they review facts and evidence. Analytical thinkers vs intuitive thinkers comes to mind and studies have supported this.

Would you say there are different levels of objectivity? Is objectivity an ideal we can only approach asymptotically?

 

[bhsmte]

Would you say there are different levels of objectivity? Is objectivity an ideal we can only approach asymptotically?

Let me give you an analogy.

Not sure if you are a baseball fan, but the term "sabermetrics" has become big in the game in regards to objectively evaluating players and their value in the last 15 years or so.

In the past, the main way of evaluating players, was with scouts, who would watch the player perform and rate them in five basic areas; throwing, hitting, hitting for power, running and fielding. Scouts relied on their experience and their subjective determination of what they saw with their eyes. This type of evaluation, can be prone to bias, because each scout has certain things they may like or not like about a player.

Sabermetrics, was an attempt to analyze and evaluate player performances with statistics, that were directly related to events on the field, that impact whether runs are scored for your team, or runs were given up by your team. The formulas, to evaluate these players, are the most rigorous, when it came to pitcher vs hitter and are quite dependable in predicting how offensive data, will relate to scoring runs.

The sabermetrics approach is objective, because the numbers are the numbers and they tell a story. The pure scouting approach, is much more subjective and involves more intuition, or "gut feel" of how a scout feels about a certain player.

To me, religious faith takes the scouting approach of intuition and feel, and science is the sabermetrics approach, relying on the data, that can be quantified in a reliable fashion.

 

[Received]

We are always operating within a belief system. Our system may not be very organized. We may not always be conscious of what we actually believe. But we all interpret data within a system of beliefs.

Sometimes our beliefs change. Sometimes our whole system changes - what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift.

But it is altogether impossible to interpret data and "facts" in a neutral way. All the data that we receive comes to us through our belief system - pre-interpreted as it were.

Is this true? And if so, what are the implications?

Definitely true. Some people, like Nietzsche, say there are no facts, only interpretations. But I think there are facts and truth, then the narratives or theories we clothe them with to connect each of these discrete data points together.

But the good news is that, yes, we all function from our own beliefs, but most of our beliefs overlap, and I'm including axioms here. So we all have a basic same sense of justice (as proportionately getting what you deserve, and even if you don't define it this way you're still inclined toward this definition in praxis without defining it as such), of goodness, of other basic philosophical instinctive beliefs or axioms (external world, existence of other selves, etc.), and other fundamental elements. The question then becomes how we organize these elements in reasonable ways.

So the real problem isn't a matter of coming from different perspectives, but, knowing that most of our differences in perspective reflect different combinations and shufflings of the aforementioned more basic beliefs and axioms, reasoning correctly with these different basic beliefs and axioms.

It's nowhere near as hopeless as the postmodernists would lead us to believe.