The Fair Witness
When I was young and impressionable I was impressed by many books. A major influence was Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land'. I took a lot of my core values from that book. I yearned for the magic of it to be true. I yearned to be part of a commune that had no internal need of money but that had a jar of money by the door for those who needed to go outside.
One of the ideas that became core was the idea of a Fair Witness. A central character was Anne who was a trained and professional fair witness. Her testimony was much stronger in court than an eye witness. If she observed something her profession was to present her observations free of any assumptions - what Anne said she observed became legal fact.
Anne was the unbiased observer. If asked what color is yonder house she'd say "white on the side I see". Heinlein was demonstrating an observer with no assumptions.
One of the myths about science is that science is an unbiased observer of reality. It's a claim for science made by those who oppose science. Of course science has assumptions. One of my own core assumptions is that reality exists and that I can learn about it.
One might say that learning is the cognitive process of improving our biases. When anne said "white on the side I see" she was actually making many assumptions about the patches of color she was actually perceiving like "house" or "side". And Anne could learn by walking around to see what the house looked like from different points of view.
Though impossible, we might take the fair witness idea in an aspirational sense, a goal to strive for. Perhaps I can distinguish between science and fiction that way. Fiction doesn't aspire to be unbiased; fiction has other goals. I read the 'news' a lot and hope that my information sources are at least aspiring to unbiased reporting. I don't think it's hopeless.
One way to cope with the unavoidable bias in both ourselves and our information sources is to look at the same information from many points of view. The more points of view, the more reality can peep through. Samuel Johnson demonstrated the reality of a stone by experiencing it by kicking it as well as by seeing it.
When I was a kid my school had a newfangled thing - a public address system that would broadcast audio to every classroom. Each morning the PA would present a program that was called "current events". That program was not presented as stories with bias. It presented what was objectively happening. Current events had a fair witness perspective.
By the time I was editting a student newspaper in college I'd learned that the news was not objective. The local newspaper even had a current events page that covered 'objective' things like car accidents or plane crashes. Editorials took up as much space and letters to the editor took up more space.
One of the ways I evaluate news stories now is whether they piss me off or not. Stories that don't align with my biases are annoyingly false. The closest I get to right wing media is scanning the headlines on Fox. I know that there is a whole spectrum of news articles that I basically can't read even though I should, so I have experience of their bias.
I like Wikipedia. It's an encyclopedia written and edited by amateurs. All the articles go through a fairly intensive process of evaluation to winnow out bias and inaccuracy. Wiki comes close to being a fair witness for many things.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.