Bias and Rhetoric

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Here is an issue that has bothered me quite a deal as of late. Normally this applies to political discussions, and would lead me to post this in the Social Science area, but both politics and rhetoric have a long history of philosophical investigation lent towards them. In addition, some of the underpinnings I have observed in relation to the issue of bias are clearly philosophical in nature. That stated, I post this here so as to engender, hopefully, a more informed style of debate.

First I suppose I should supply some definition of bias. While I think the term specific enough to denote a certain idea, it sounds nice, and I have a bias towards nice sounding things. Bias, here, means a predisposition towards claims, arguments, and evidence one finds personally favorable, or one supports/adopts for subjective reasons.

If we ignore all those pesky monists for a moment, and assume a world in which there are both subjects and objects, a dualistic world, Bias is a result of one subject’s attempts to possess understanding of all other subjects and objects in said world. In such a world, there is a separation between subject and object that can never be overcome. Because, if the subject could become the object or could the object become the subject, there is no object which it is wholly its own. Thus nothing is absolutely valid as nothing is absolutely contingent upon any unique thing. Bias, in a dualistic world, occurs when a subject attempts complete understanding of other subjects and objects because said subject cannot completely know another thing without, in some way, being either omniscient or becoming that other thing.

In logic, this world or universe would be considered the domain of discourse. It is in this world/universe that certain particulars are identified, classified, and then submitted into arguments. It is important to remember that in logic, truth is championed less than validity. One can blithely assume the truth value of any X simply in an attempt to discover if an entire argument that makes use of X is valid or not.

Rhetoric, however, is not overly concerned with validity. My best understanding of rhetoric is that it is a tool employed to get people to act in a certain way. Here, rhetoricians operate with certain, usually unstated, assumptions. First is that he or she is capable of knowing the truth of whatever he or she might be speaking, and that he or she is capable is able to communicate this truth to an audience. Secondly, rhetoricians assume that subjective truth and objective truth happen to coincide in those instances upon which they speak. This is to say, “I know X is true because X is true”, or, conversely, “X is true because I know it is true.” Both ignore the obvious, that truth is made contingent upon the separation between subject and object, ergo such truth is not absolute. Such truth, being not absolute, is conditional, and warrants closer examination.

Bias, then, is accepting claims as fact without closer examination. Closer examination involves at least a modicum of a positive relationship between the claim and objective fact. While such a relationship can never be complete, in cases involving serious issues, the standard should be set rather highly. At least so far as to urge people to act one way or another.

There is another aspect to bias, however, that plays a role in debate. Its steady and continued growth in certain areas of society may be likened to a cancer of the mind. This is when one party disqualifies the claims of another party by no further means than stating that the party making the claim is, biased.

As I have written, bias exists in every case where one subject examines any other subject or object. Bias is a manifest necessity from the divide between subject and object. At the precise moment one perceives a difference between one’s self and any other object, one asserts a relational bias within the world that says, in effect, ‘I am this and that is that.’ The further one seeks to understand ‘the other’ one may diminish the degree of bias, but also, decrease the amount of bias one is cognizant of.

Thus, when one identifies with a particular political belief, party, leader, one tends to ignore the amount of bias given toward that political belief, party, leader. In contrast, opposing political beliefs, parties, leaders, and their supporters seem overly biased in their self identification, and their identification of facts the original identifier would like to ignore.

Thus claims of bias, compounded with rhetoric and one’s own personal bias exacerbates tensions and polarizes political parties. Rather than agree on certain principles as needed for a particular society to function, avenues for possible agreement are destroyed.

Who profits by this? Why the rhetorician… the sophist… the cog in whichever political machine that harps upon bias as being sufficient to ignore an opposing claim. As stated above, the truth of any claim requires a closer examination, at least closer than a dismissal via bias.

But then again, perhaps I am simply biased towards being ubiased.

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Hi GateControlTheory,

The good of the country/society should always come first.

The wise politician would do this of course, but they are much more interested in their own self serving interests than the interests of the country they supposedly govern.

Politics isn’t the only place that bias is extremely evident…it is probably the most dangerous though.

Ock.

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:smiley: I thought it had… If I get time, I’ll respond in a bit more detail but I think when a person makes a claim like the one we disagreed on – Pope Pius XII’s and his supposed nazi links – he/she has to look at lots of evidence (within reason) and anayse the facts as a forensic investigator would.

For instance, where did this statement come from? Does this person or group have a motive for attacking the reputation of their target? Are there other possible senarios yet to be explored? etc.

To do anything else is betraying your own bias or its extremely naive.

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It is interesting how the term “bias” itself had a pejorative connotation. The word hints of corruption. There is an implicit assumption that one is obligated to avoid bias whenever possible. Yet it fails to acknowledge the ubiquity of bias. Everyone has some bias. It is more a question of how much you have.

The effort to transcended bias is advocated everywhere and perfectly achieved nowhere. The pinnacle of actually being completely unbiased is not far distant from complete indifference. Is reaching a state of being completely unbiased really the goal? I doubt it.

Too much bias influences a person to make a decision without all the messy and difficult rigorous examination of the possible evidence relevant to making that decision. This is the underlying crux of the question of bias.

To charge another with bias is an indication they the made the decision based on too heavily on bias alone. It can be a criticism of the method used to reach a decision.

In a disagreement both side have a bias toward their side. So in evaluating the disagreement we could factor out that element and see what remains to see who has the stronger or better case. If one side of the argument is only constituted of bias then it is insubstantial.

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Excellent Post X Man. :stuck_out_tongue:

I think what Bias has become is a crutch for argument. “Everytime so and so mentions President Bush, he shows his liberal media bias!” or, “You can’t believe anything on Fox News, it is all Conservative Bias!”

Often arguments are dismissed as biased without any futher examination of said arguments contentions, premises, and evidence. Such a dismissal is erroneous because, 1) every human being is biased to some degree or another. 2) Making such a statement “so and so is biased” reveals one’s own biases 3) Claims of bias typically demonstrate a patent unwillingness to examine the issue any further and 4) various pundits employ the bias argument without resorting to an actual attempt at displaying how a particular argument is wrong, factually. This results in a decrease in the level of quality in what should be very important debates.

In the United States, a democracy, debate is an essential method of assigning goals, increasing public awareness of issues, and solving problems. Fair and honest debate requires time, effort, dilligence, and dare I say it, intelligence. The claim of bias meets none of that criteria.

All the while, bias may very well be at the heart of certain arguments, this, in itself, does not invalidate that particular argument either. The assumption is that biased arguments are necessarily less honest, this is possible, but one doesn’t know this for certain until one examines the issue more closely.

KM2_33, please understand that this has been brewing in my mind for some time now. Living in the deep south while attending a University it is literally everyday I hear either in the media or directly from the mouth of someone walking by, “so and so is biased” “we need more of a liberal voice in that classroom” “Prof. So and So is biased against conservatives” and so. Mind you, me, being more of the revolutionary/classical conservative mindset, finds much of this incredibly bothersome. It is as if every issue is distilled into semantics and made utterly subjective. Nothing changes except the tone of debate.

I have seen intelligent, thoughful people advocate the purchase of a particular newspaper as to provide “balance against the bias of that other news paper”, as if objects themselves are even biased now. No, the truth is that we, each and everyon of us, has our own number of biases. Bias itself does not disqualify a claim.

For example, you could research the sources i cited in the Pope debate and possibly discover that one of them lost his entire family to the holocaust while another source was repeatedly raped by a catholic Priest while he was a child. This is all very interesting. But none of that means that what they claim is necessarily false.

You could even find that another source was paid one million dollars to make up lies about the Catholic church. This may comes as a shock to you, but even being paid to lie does not mean that what the source says is necessarily false either. Think of it this way… Thousands of years ago someone pays me to make up lies to counter the claims of supposedly knowledgable people. So, in my effort to earn my fee I go on to claim that the world is not flat, but that it is, in fact, round. I further claim that the sun is the center of the solar system, not the earth. I also claim that the planets orbit the sun in an ellipitical fashion, not in a perfect circular motion. I go even further and claim that there exists others stars(suns) further away and around some of them orbit planets as well. I had been paid to lie, to challenge official dogma. Did that necessarily mean that anything I argued was really false? Well, it was false according to official dogma. I suppose everything I said was untrue afterall. Not according to the objective universe, but according to all the subjects that supported said dogma.

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I can’t distinguish bias from impression satisfactorily, I think they are continous like everything else - bias is the kind of impression about an object, which would belong to the minority side about the same object - it’s just the wrong impression. That’s as far as defining it goes I reckon…

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The concept of conformity suffers the same misconception. The only reason I mention it here is because it does have some relevance in that bias is what conformity adheres to. I remember first reading some portions of Aristotles “Ethics” back when I was in highschool, and coming across the line which stated something like (and this is probably a mutilation of the actual quote) “the greatest men strive to conform to wisdom” At the time “conformity” was one of those words that had attained an extremely negative meaning for me, for I had never realized the actual nature of the word outside of my own youthful bias towards it.

So with that said I believe the ideal is to attempt to procure a truth which is based on the proof of facts that are not too heavily burdened by opinion. Not all bias is an indication of poor reasoning, or of giving in too readily to the assurances or opinions of one side or another. If Neitzche had been unbiased would he have written anything great?

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Like what they say, x can’t smell x’s own stink. To recognize one’s own bias is often difficult—it is a self-replicating “evil”: If I criticize the attitude of being biased, I will tend to view myself favorably in the sense that I am not biased, hence I am biased.

I think this is a good observation, and quite true. Often, it is delivered to the masses, to a general audience who would judge the argument presented based mainly on how it sounds—if it sounds convincing, then it must be true.

Another good observation. I agree. It adds a lot to the detriment of a public debate. A party only has to point out that the other is biased/may be biased, and it gets a lot of points—it doesn’t need to provide support/proof for why there is bias. THAT would be provided by the general audience that’s more than willing to do so, often providing mere opinions rather than proof. This tactic works. A suspicion or doubt is planted in the people’s minds and voila!----it replaces a good old honest argument.

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There isn’t much problem defining bias, the problem lies in pointing out bias. The only way to do that is to take a ruler as the measure, no other knowledge gets fairer and squarer than science.

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Exactly. The criteria is not objective fact, but the number and degree to which people are impressed (to borrow Uniqur’s ‘impressions’)

Yes, opinions, impressions… these are the shadows on the walls of Plato’s Cave. In the Republic, every speaker who tackles the subject of Justice does so through some form of Bias, even Socrates, but he tempers his bias with reason.

Plato’s forms, which we may never reach completely, are objective facts as rationalized by the mind. Here bias plays no part because here are ideas free from bias.

The Sophists held that men are plastic, to be continuously molded into whatever shape suits their particular need. So too, are the minds of each individual. But this is not always true. Some ideas are impossible to influence by opinion and impressions. Those ideas, static and unchanging, would remain true even if ther were no human mind remaining to comprehend them. Thus what is objectively true is true despite whatever amount of opinion the public holds. And from that I note that the public is best served seeking objective truth, however close each individual may come to it, and not the recitation of opinion and the championing of any particular bias.

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Those metaphysical forms can’t be sensed nor varified physically, but objectivity is the previlage of physics - nothing physical enough can be classified as objective facts. Within the non-factual subjective world, we have the so called biased and non-biased opinions.

The distinguisher between the worlds of facts and opinions, is science. The distinguisher between biased opinions and non-biased opinions, is maj/minoritiness, sounds irrational? Well, in a world that lacks hard scientific objects, what better can you expect?

So the subject of metaphysics is without justification: I say they are biased, you say I’m biased, they say you’re biased… Don’t you just wana die when shit like this happens? Why I’m talking as if this kind of shit rarely happens anyway? Shit…

Nietzsche offers the opinion world with the treasure of the other world - science, so effectively, he brought the advantages from both worlds together - so we have a better chance of reaching towards whatever we want reaching to. Trying to distinguish between what’s biased and what’s not, in order to get closer to what’s wanted: is struggling behind the bars, is vain attempts without limbs, is confusion within the already doomed situation.

Nietzsche offer us: the light, the arms, and hence the breakthrough out of that world of opinions. With the torch of science, with the scientific axe, philosophy can be finally relied upon and become note worthy, useful for everyone else.

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You need science to tell you that 2 + 2 =4?

Let me break this down for you.

Dualistic world, divided into subjects and objects.
Subjects perceive. All individual perceptions are related directly to the individual perceiver.

Opinions, bias, and impressions form because no subject can absolutely and completely perceive and through perceiving completely and absolutely know an object. To do so ultimately requires that the subject become the object.

The world, (objects and other subjects) we experience through our senses may be noted as empirical.

Ideas and knowledge innate to humanity may be noted as the rational.

The scientific method combines the empirical and rational appoach to apprehend truth.

The value of this truth is never complete and absolute. Within science then there also exists a some form of bias.

Rational ideas are not contingent upon the state of the world, thus they need not be influenced the subjects perception of the objective nor the bias of other subjects. Some rational ideas are tautologous. They are true despite what impressions, opinions, and bias might say. They are, in effect, objectively true.

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You didn’t really went through my last post, otherwise you wouldn’t be repeating the same stuff rather than continuing the arguement, as I already tried to refute your metaphysical stuff. And you presented some rather useless, old and tired conventional concepts about bias, which really stayed well below my arguing about bias, opinions ect. If you try to refute me on this, then you are effectively trying to refute Nietzsche, trying to refute the scientific approach, trying to refute the absolute superiority of science. Why don’t you give that a try, and I’ll try to “break it down for you”… If you are trying refute something else, then don’t even try, simply because there is nothing else in my last post except promoting the significance of science, in relation to your original topic of bias.

btw, from your last post, especially the comment about 2 + 2 = 4, I see… guess what: bias - a truely biased statement due to the lack of information of… guess what: science.

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Well, I will certainly take that into account. :sunglasses: