I’ve given up asking rhetorical questions. What’s the point?” Alexei Sayle
Where do you find an objective viewpoint or an unbiased version of events?
You don’t.
And that is not to say all people lie, or deliberately misrepresent what is happening. We need to go deeper than that to clear the ground.
What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning – Heisenburg
We see things not as they are, but as we are – Kant
In other words, people might sometimes be telling you the truth as they see it, and you will receive it according to what you are ‘tuned’ or conditioned to hear. ‘Seeing’ and ‘understanding’ are not simple terms.
We can look at the problem from various points of view, using ideas from a range of disciplines:
History and philosophy of science
Structuralism and semiotics, denotation and connotation
Genre, values and socialisation
Substructure, superstructure, ideology and art
Media analysis and story telling
Psychology
Social media analysis (post truth, fake news, media technology and fact-checking.)
In doing so we may consider ideas relevant to students of science, literature, philosophy, sociology, film, media and communication studies as well as history and politics.
First, we can try various ways to clarify how far any viewpoint is capable of being ‘objective’ then we can look at the different degrees to which accurate records of fact are applied, avoided or abused in modern political debate, atsrting with History and philosophy of science…….