Difference between revisions of "Anarchopedia:en:point of view"

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Point of view, often abbreviated POV, is a subjective stance or perspective on a given topic.

linguistic view

In linguistics, it is the 'position', in some sense, of the 'subject' of a sentence. For instance, to say "the dog is green" is to say that someone has observed something, identified it as "the dog," whichever dog that is, and compared it to the memory of the spectrum "green", and decided it is close enough to "the same" to use the word "is" to describe the relationship. All of these decisions are part of the point of view. Usually point of view is described as:

• First person, i.e. "Seeing that the dog is green, I decide to wash it."
• Second person, i.e. "You say the dog is green? Can I believe that?"
• Third person, i.e. "Joey and Tom agreed that the dog is green."

A neutral point of view involves trying to assign all statements to a third person authority, i.e. "A says B about C." The Wikipedia tries to employ this point of view. But it does not solve all problems. It requires one to appeal often to credentialism and perhaps professionalism, e.g. "Professor A said, on the record, B about the scientific view of C". Without a vast array of agreements that constitute a systemic bias of its own, there is no real way to adhere to this 'neutral' view, and many simply disregard it. The Meta-Wikipedia often debates the problems arising from this strategy.

Natural point of view, as in the idea of natural law, is often the result of choosing a particular science, e.g. particle physics or ecology, or even economics as expressed in biology ("food chains" etc.) and deciding that all of reality can be evaluated from it. Buddhism and Taoism idealize the approach to such a point of view, but admit it is hard or impossible to achieve, and definitely impossible to reliably communicate to a human being. Accordingly claiming this point of view can be a power grab, e.g. the many claims to have found a Biological Basis of Morality.

Multiple point of view is the compromise, but necessitates what is called (often disdainfully) "politics as usual": the division of participants into factions if only to agree on vocabulary and etiquette and at least some simple view of ethics and morals, if not the formal method for evaluating and quantifying ethicality and morality of human actions long sought in vain by philosophers and theologians.

In addition to these 'spatial' variations, there are also 'temporal' or 'tense' variations in point of view. In English there is a past tense ("saw the dog"), present tense ("see the dog"), future perfect ("will see the dog") and future imperfect ("might see the dog", "could see the dog", "may see the dog"). In French there are separate tenses for backfilling facts incidental to the action (e.g. Bush adminstration claims to care about finding any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) and for actually advancing the action (e.g. Bush administration desire to discover any new dangerous technology they think may be more advanced than their own). In Japanese there is sensitivity to the status of the speaker and listener. These differences in linguistic tense imply a point of view, suspectibility or immunity to certain propaganda techniques, e.g. one might expect the Japanese to fall more often for credentialism or at least not challenge views presented with credentials, while one might expect the French not to accept, e.g. the "logic of war" when presented as obvious rationalization for an already-made decision.

Alfred Korcybski in his General Semantics theory pointed out that the verb "to be" hides a great many divergences in point of view, and that the terms becomes, remains and equals were far more exact and placed one more exactly in a temporal frame. One was less likely to make easy-to-abuse claims for-all-time, i.e. a dogma.

Literary view

In literature, the point of view, or viewpoint (see perspective for the more general and visual sense of this term), expresses the related experience of the narrator - not that of the author. Authors expressly cannot, in fiction, insert or inject their own voice, as this challenges the suspension of disbelief. Texts encourage the reader to identify with the narrator, not with the author.

Literary narration can occur from the first-person, second-person or third-person point of view. In a novel, first-person commonly appears: I saw ... We did.... In self-help or business writing, the second person (addressing "you") predominates: you must..., thou shalt.... In an encyclopedia or textbook narrators often work in the third-person (that happened..., the king died.... For additional vagueness, imprecision and detachment, some writers employ the passive voice (it is said that the president was compelled to be heard....

The ability to use viewpoint effectively provides one measure of someone's writing ability. The writing markschemes used for National Curriculum assessments in England reflect this: they encourage the awarding of marks for the use of viewpoint as part of a wider judgement regarding the composition and effect of the text.

usage in wikis

When the abbreviation "POV" is used in wiki rhetoric when talking about an article, it usually means that the article has perceived bias. That is, the author has inserted what is overtly their own view, rather than citing authorities or evidence as a neutral point of view would advise. This however is itself a subjective determination, and the serious problems that arise when it is enforced by a small clique have become obvious on Wikipedia and other large public wikis. Among other things, there is no consistent standard of evidence required of popular vs. unpopular views.

The other conceptions of point of view above are also sometimes mentioned, along with culture biases such as the UKPOV or USPOV or EPOV, implying a UK-centric, US-centric, or English-speaking-world-centric view, respectively.

For recommendations on avoiding a personal point of view when editing pages, see how to edit pages. For recommendations on avoiding political or other biaes, see political dispute, terminology dispute, identity dispute.

References

• Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Point_of_view" and the Disinfopedia article "Point_of_view", both used under the GNU Free Documentation License - this article includes the whole contents of both as of March 11, 2004.