Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
I don't see why NPOV is so absolutely necessary.
As
you said, NPOV is impossible for textbooks.
NPOV is not impossible for textbooks. Why should it be? It's the
easiest thing in the world. I don't agree with Alex's comments on
history being necessarily POV at all -- I think that his comment
misunderstands the social evolution of consensus embodied in an NPOV
policy.
Suppose it is true that at any point in time, a history text will be
imperfect, biased in some way. Does that mean we have good reason to
celebrate this flaw? And to enshrine it? I think not. If someone
comes along to improve the text by making it neutral, that's great,
and that's what NPOV is all about.
Consider, what is the alternative? Suppose someone comes along and
finds a biased or inaccurate statement in a textbook, a statement
which puts forward a particular point of view. Now, someone clicks
on "edit this page" and changes the statement to make it neutral,
i.e. to make it so that both sides of a dispute could agree to it.
Are you suggesting that such behavior should be frowned upon? Perhaps
subject to banning? Can you imagine the result? "Jimbo, I think you
should ban Mr. Reasonable because he keeps coming in and making our
biased text less biased. We don't disagree with what he's writing,
it's actually NPOV, but we are opposed to neutrality."
Why not a creationist textbook? Sure, there's no
scientific basis
for it, but who's to judge whether scientific things are better than
religious things?
NPOV is the answer. The point is, if there is legitimate controversy,
then the text itself need take no particular stand, but rather present
the conflict in a way that all parties can agree.
IMHO DPOV would solve all of these problems, making it
so that
different textbooks could have different prestated POVs and not have
to worry about making every sentece NPOV.
Ack! This is a total misunderstanding of NPOV. There is no
requirement that we make "every sentence NPOV", as if we have to treat
the text as a series of statements rather than a flow of discussion.
It's perfectly appropriate to set a context, and then talk within that
context.
I think this is all a very misguided conversation, an attempt to solve
non-existent problems with NPOV.
--Jimbo