June 10, 2003

bias as pre-judgement

There has been a lot made of media bias in the political world of late in Australia; particularly the bias of the liberal media. By bias the conservative politicians pretty much mean liberal journalists imposing their pinko prejudices on the facts. Bias is bad because it is prejudice. Bias should not be there.

We should get rid of our prejudices. Or rather, the conservative politicians are saying that pinko journalists should dump their subjective prejudices whilst commenting about the news. And there things stand in the public debate---apart from left-liberals pointing out the prejudices of conservative politicians and journalists. Stalemate. Public reason is, and should be, factual.

This text by Martin Krygier opens things up around basis as prejudice. It takes us forward by rethinking the way we conceptualize prejudice by introducing Gadamer's idea of prejudice as pre-judgement.

Krygier puts it this way:

"Their thinking goes like this: existing values, cultures, traditions, institutions, practices, give us help. They embody pre-formed responses to recurrent problems and circumstances. They enable some things and disable others. They are embedded in everyday ways of thinking, behaving, valuing and, yes, prejudices. They are depositories of congealed knowledge, meaning, value and, on occasion, wisdom. They are familiar and, if we are lucky, they are good. Those who deny or ignore them are bound to get a lot of things wrong."

Why is this so? Because:

"We all begin our reasoning some time, some place. We are all situated beings, our understandings flowing from within the traditions and the prejudices of our time and place. Other times, other places, other prejudices - never no prejudice."

As Krygier says (good and bad) prejudices are a part of who we are as social beings:

"There is simply no way around it. Prejudices inform our every reasoning with latent knowledge and meaning, with the topics we are concerned with, the questions we ask, the answers we are likely to find satisfactory, the horizons within which we reason."

That means our interpretations of texts (eg., historical ones) are also prejudiced, even though we interpret these texts from within a tradition of interpretation. Hence there is little point in appealing to the good intentions and fine beliefs of the historical actors----as Keith Windshuttle does in relation to the white settlers, the Aborigines and frontier violence. There is no guarantee of objectivity in the settler's intentions because they are social beings situated in history and therefore their understanding of historical events is a prejudiced one. And the settler texts used by contemporary historians as evidence for their narratives are prejudiced.

So what can be done about it?

Krygier does get the ball rolling on this. He does so by distinguishes between being reflexive and non-reflective about our prejudices. He says:

"So are we all bigots? I don't think so. I think it is the way the bigot believes that matters. The person "blinded by prejudice" doesn't merely prejudge, as we all do; doesn't rely only on things other than reason, as we all do; doesn't even only think badly of people without sufficient evidence. Most of us do that, too. He does so in a way that is not reflexive about his prejudices. He has no wish, or no ability, to take any distance from them, to try to uncover them, to interrogate them, to confront them with experience, dialogue, criticism, and revision.

He is incapable of what I call "rooted reflexiveness". Such a posture acknowledges that we never start nowhere, but recommends that we always be open to finishing somewhere else."

And there he leaves it. But how do we go about interrogating our prejudices them, and confronting them with experience, dialogue, criticism, and revision?How do we learn to become reflexive?

The strength of Gadamer is that he provides an answer in terms of the dialogic structure of understanding. It is based on the Socratic conception of in which the participants (includingSocrates) come at the end of the conversation to a position that represents a significant advance over the position each maintained at the begining. Each of us begins with certain views, assumptions, prejudices but in confronting the opposing views, assumptions and prejudices of the other participants or opponents we have to reconsider and develop our own. The process of conversation is one of confrontation, integration and appropriation as we learn to take account of the opinions of others and attempt to show what is right or wrong with the opinions and arguments of our opponents.

A proper public conversation involves the transformation of the initial position of all the discussion participants, rather than achieving consensus through acquiescing with someone else's position/opinion or submitting to a traditional (political) authority.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 10, 2003 12:59 AM | TrackBack
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