Only if you believe that people will always misreport what they see, hear or do to
meet that point of view - knowingly (lying) or subconsciously (through a wish to
see a particular end)
Which is pretty much the case.
Everybody sees what they see through the lens of their own mind. It's impossible not to. I once believed that this could be overcome,and that it was possible for people to give a truly neutral, unbiased view of a situation. No more. As a trial lawyer I've questioned too many witnesses on the stand to believe this. And the research on eyewitness testimony is becoming clearer and clearer that the mind simply doesn't function as an objective camera, seeing indepdently.
Most anybody who's been in an elementary sociology or psych class has gone through the experiment of a person or persons bursting into a room, doing something dramatic like fake shooting, and running out, then having all the class asked to write down a description of what they saw. People have the person coming in different doors, shooting once, twice, three times, times varing from seconds to minutes, dressed in green, blue, red, in one famous instance when it was a woman who came in and shot the professor three feminists in the back of the room wrote down that it was a man, and insisted even when the actor personally appeared that it had been a man and the prof was playing a game on them bringing in the wrong person pretending to be the actor.
Even if you just have people watch a film, which is clearly identical for all the observers, they will report seeing very different things, usually depending on their own point of view or experiences. Not intentionally misrepresenting, just seeing differently.
As to science, I can tell you that I almost never got the "right" answer in my science experiments, which obviously proves that the "right answer" really wasn't! <g> |
