[i习作temp] Issue157[galloper]小组第三次作业by B11 宋 [复制链接]

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发表于 2009-6-19 22:32:54 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

ISSUE 157 "There is no such thing as purely objective observation. All observation is subjective; it is always guided by the observer's expectations or desires."

Is all observation subjective and guided by the observer’s expectations or desires? I think that observation itself is objective, but when the observer is asked to describe the objects, subjective judgements are added.

Most of us make subjective judgements on the subjects we oberve based on our own experience, value, knowledge. For example, it is said that there are a thousand different Hamlet in the eyes of a thousand individuals. People see the same performance and read the same books, but they form different opinions toward Hamlet based on their own experience and beliefs. Just as no two identical leaves exist in the world, there are no two completely same people, who share the same opinions on everything. Twins who are raised together in the same family can have different characteristics. Things which are terrible in one’s eyes can be sacred in another’s opinion, since they stand on different perspectives and represent interests of different people. When Hilter launched the war fascist, he may call the decimation of other peoples as sacrifice for final success; but all the other people would treat his behavior as malicious and unforgivable.

Our subjective judgements appear when we are trying to describe the objects we observe rather than during the process we observe things. When we are looking at the same objectives, they appear as the same pattern in our brain. However, they may take different feelings to us, which lead us to choose different adjectives to express our feelings when discribe them. For example, I once read an scientific fiction; It said that an alien came to visit the earth one day, when he was asked to discribe the circumstances on the earth, he said, the most powerful living creature on the earth were automobiles, they were very strong, had loud voice and moved fast. But they were completely controlled by a parasite in them called human. Though the circumstance which discribed by the alien is totally different from the facts, we still have to admit that the picture he saw is the same as us, he just percieved in a different way.

Based on the discussion in the second paragraph, if there is unified standard which could stop us from expressing our subjective judgments when discirbing our observation, our observation could be objective. For example, in the scientific world, there are unified standards for scholars to judge the results of experiments. While doing the hypothesis testing, scholars have to accept the confidence level set by the unified standards rather than choose by themselves. Since this method avoid the scholar’s subjective judgements, observation of his experiment can be objectively accepted by the others. If unified scientific methods are taken to record our observation, then the results can be immune against our subjective judgements. That is the very reason why the same experiments need not to be done again and again to exclude the subjective factors taken by the experimenter.

In conclusion, I think that it is our description rather than our observation prevents us from being objective, purely objective observation can be formed when there is unified standard for us to describe things without adding our own feelings.