At this stage I’m not sure whether I am taking a communications course or a philosophy course. Chapter two is talking about the Behavioral Scientist vs. the Rhetorician. Objective vs. Interpretive. Basically the historical Objective vs. Subjective debate. See a definition:
Subjective information is one person’s opinion. In a newspaper, the editorial section is the place for subjectivity. It can be based on fact, but it is one person’s interpretation of that fact. In this way, subjective information is also analytical.
Student research papers are usually subjective, in that the writer formulates a thesis statement and uses sources that support that thesis. Bear in mind that there is usually another equally valid viewpoint that can be supported with other sources.
Objective information reviews many points of view. It is intended to be unbiased. News reporters are supposed to be objective and report the facts of an event. Encyclopedias and other reference materials provide objective information. (Information literacy @ ODU)
Time for digressions.
Digression #1
Myself I am suspicious of the objectivity of the objective. For there is something that the objective observer forgets. See one of my favorite quotes:
Science is the discipline of causality…. Scientific causality always requires a necessity. An effect is a necessary, unavoidable, predetermined, inescapable result of a cause. … necessity is not something that can be observed as such. All that can be observed is temporal sequence. (The observer) calculates a cause, a necessity. If there were no idea of necessity, no observation would ever disclose it. The search has never been to find causality and prove that such a necessitous relationship existed among material forces and objects but simply to discover how it worked, not its existence, but the laws of its operation. (Lawrence Brown, Might of the West, P 49-50).
Their whole objective lack of bias is based on a subjective assumption of causality. From my way of thinking the divide between the two isn’t quite a clear/cut as it seems.
Digression #2
It also reminded me of a book I read by Christopher West that was interpreting Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body”. Classical Theologians would often talk of God as the “Divine Object” and discuss religion in an “objective” method. But the “Theology of the Body” had a proposition of God as the “Divine Subject” and to view it subjectively. This highlights the objective as impersonal, and the subjective as personal.
Now Synthesis
For me I think the weakness of the objective view is the attempt to remove the personal. We have a personal God, from which all personhood derives. You can never truly take the personal out.
The weakness of the subjective is when it makes reality all about the observer, with no observed. Bellly gazing.
We should never lose the person, but should always be looking outward, in fascination at the creation of our creator (tipping my hat to G.K. Chesterton here).
Anyone interested in Chapter 3? I found it fascinating — more fascinating than chapter 2 anyway….
At The Rainbow 