A big part of the point of NPOV is that if you don't agree with postmodernists like Lyotard (quoted below), you can write carefully and clearly, striving for neutrality as best you can manage, and be satisfied that the result is useful.
And if you are in agreement with Lyotard, and regard the pursuit of knowledge as a language game, you can still play. "If there are no rules, there is no game"... and the game we are playing is NPOV.
Carl Beckhorn wrote:
On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 07:47:58PM -0400, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Essentially the same logic applies to your above statement. "Neutral point-of-view" is not a point-of-view, it is the absence of any point-of-view.
I don't think there is much support in contempory critical theory for the idea that a writer can write without presenting a point of view, or that a reader can read without a point of view. Trying to pretend that we have no point of view will only make us blind to our own viewpoint.
- Carl
--
It is useful to make the following three observations about language games. The first is that their rules do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players (which is not to say that the players invent the rules). The second is that if there are no rules, there is no game, that even an infinitesimal modification of one rule alters the nature of the game, that a “move” or utterance that does not satisfy the rules does not belong to the game they define. The third remark is suggested by what has just been said: every utterance should be thought of as a “move” in a game.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition
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