User talk:A.Z./The reduction of NPOV to verifiability

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[edit] Discussion

(Not sure where you wanted responses, so I'll put mine here.) I think that is sometimes true, when making a factual statement, like "10 years from now, the national debt will have doubled". However, there are also moral judgments, which aren't just unverifiable facts, but an entirely different thing, like "cats are better than dogs". If you defined "better" in some specific way, like "costs less to feed", then it would be a factual claim that could be verified. But, as is, there is no way to prove which is "better". StuRat 06:14, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

I would say that it is unverifiable that "better" means "costs less to feed". It is a POV and it is unverifiable.

If you write "cats are better than dogs", what you are saying is actually that "cats cost less to feed than dogs and pets that cost less to feed are better". And that last assertion is unverifiable. I don't think that the fact that the sentence doesn't explicitly put it that way means that it isn't making the statement.

The moral judgement that you talk about is not that cats cost less to feed: this information could be verifiable, and the sentence would still be unverifiable. The moral judgement is merely that pets that cost less to feed are better. If you actually expanded the sentence into the sentence "cats cost less to feed and pets that cost less to feed are better", then the unverifiability of what the statement is supposed to mean would be quite clear.

However, any other meaning that that specific sentence could have, even if verifiable, would not be understood by who reads it, because there is not a single agreed upon way to understand what "better" means when it comes to comparing pets, not to understand what better means in any other case. That word is devoid of meaning. Better could mean "better to own", "better for the environment (since it eats less)", "better because it doesn't bite you", "increases total amount happiness", whatever.

If someone wrote in an article the sentence "cats are better than dogs", the first reason to revert it would be that no-one could understand what the sentence is supposed to mean.

If the author then made it clear what the sentence is supposed to mean, he would have written, for example, "it's better to own cats than dogs because cats cost less to feed and more people who own pets that cost less to feed say that they are happy with their pets than people who have pets that cost more to feed". Now the unverifiability would be pretty clear, and that would be the second reason to revert the edit yet again. You would not be able to verify that "more people who own pets that cost less to feed say that they are happy with their pets than people who have pets that cost more to feed".

Anyway, StuRat, your example was a really hard one to deal with. I think it had so many more issues to deal with (such as the word "better") that the reduction of its POV to unverifiability became really hard to recognize, though I expect that I made it clear that the POV (although really hard to find amidst so much information) could be reduced to an unverifiable fact. Maybe you want to think about a few more examples of expressions of POV --different examples-- so we can discuss them.

My theory is that POVs are but a subset of the group of unverifiable statements and, therefore, they can be eliminated from Wikipedia based on the unverifiability policy. E.g., the statment "the planet furthest away from earth is red" is unverifiable. Nonetheless, no one holds the belief that it is true: it's no one's point of view. Another unverifiable fact is that "Hitler intended to kill all Jews ever since he was a little boy". However, there are people who hold this belief.

There are obviously more complicated cases, in which the real statement that fully reveals the POV (and the unverifiability) will be hard to find, amidst loads of other information, both explicit and implicit.

One example of implicit information is when some information is not in the article at all. For example, in the article about Winston Churchill, there's no information about the color of the shoes that he wore in december 12, 1940. Even if this particular information were verifiable, it would not be in the article. That means that it is not important, although this is only implied. One could use to their advantage this fact and express their POV by simply taking away the information that they think is unimportant, even though it is unverifiable that this information is not important, and even though it is verifiable that this information is actually important. One could in the article about homosexuality omit the fact that homosexuality is not a disease. That would be a way to express their point of view by implicitly stating "the information that homosexuality is not a disease is not important" ←POV. They just erased a verifiable information from Wikipedia, i.e., the information that the fact that homosexuality is not a disease is one of the many verifiable assertions and, inside the group of verifiable assertions, also an important one (and the fact that it is an important one is verifiable: that's why the POV is merely an unverifiable implicit statement).

And I do know that it's a theory and it may be completely wrong. Though I think it does make a lot of sense. A.Z. 03:56, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Here's another example. A POV which isn't based on a fact is "chocolate tastes better than vanilla". A related, possibly verifiable fact, is that "most people prefer the taste of chocolate to that of vanilla". Of course, any taste test to establish this would really only be comparing one particular chocolate recipe with one for vanilla, so a certain amount of supposition is required to extend this to the general statement. Perhaps "more people buy chocolate ice cream each year than vanilla" would be a fact that could most easily be verified. StuRat 02:43, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

I would assume that a person that said "chocolate tastes better than vanilla" would actually mean "chocolate gives me more pleasure when I eat it than vanilla". If the same sentence were written in an encyclopedia article, then everyone reading it would assume that it actually means something like "most people prefer the taste of chocolate to that of vanilla", but, most probably, "a huge majority of people prefer the taste of chocolate to vanilla". Both statements can either be said to be verifiable or not, because they are based on facts.

The interpretation that you are giving is that the taste of chocolate is a property of the object itself, and therefore the sentence "chocolate tastes better than vanilla" would be a description of the properties of chocolate. However, to say "tastes better", you must first define, either explicitly or implicitly, to whom it tastes better, since it's obvious that the pleasure given by the eating of an object is not an inherent property of that object, but rather a combination of its properties with the way that a subject interprets those properties: what I mean is: it is a subjective sentence, that of yours, so, for it to make any sense, you must also describe the subject: when you turn the subject (either one person or the "huge majority of people") into another object, then the sentence will be objective, as in: "a huge majority of people claim to feel more pleasure when they eat chocolate than when they eat vanilla". A.Z. 02:51, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Since everyone in the world and everyone who reads Wikipedia knows that the taste of something depends both on the object and on the subject, then everyone in the world will assume that the sentence means one of those two assertions that I wrote in the first paragraph. Since those assertions are based on facts, they could be included or excluded based on the verifiability policy.

It is the meaning of things that matter, the actual thing that people think that the sentences mean, not the infinite variety of meanings that the same set of words could have, but no-one would assume it to have. A.Z. 02:58, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

To further clarify things, imagine that someone writes in the article about dead animals that "dead animals smell really bad". This would most probably not mean that the smell of dead animals is an inherent property of them. Nor would it mean, for instance, that flies think that dead animals smell bad. In order to communicate, we must make some assumptions. In this case, the assumption is that the sentence means something like "a huge majority of people claim to be disgusted by the smell of dead animals". There are many other assumptions, of course. For instance, another assumption would be "people claim what they really feel: they are not all lying about their impressions on the smell of bad animals". Wikipedia is filled with sentences that require assumptions, lots of assumptions. I don't intend to make assumptions not necessary: all I'm doing is to reduce every assertion that expresses a point of view to merely an unverifiable assertion. However, the assertion that expresses a point of view must actually mean something!

If someone actually wrote the sentence "chocolate has an inherently good taste", that would just be unverifiable as well, since it is verifiable that good taste or bad taste is not an inherent property of any object. A.Z. 03:44, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] More discussion

Also, I don't believe Hitler wanted to murder all Jews when he was a child. His early attitude towards Jews was fairly neutral. His attitude changed when he was exposed to anti-Semitic influences during his 20's. At least this was the impression I got from reading Mein Kampf. StuRat 02:53, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

OK. It was merely a totally random example. A.Z. 02:55, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Also, your chocolate/vanilla analogy is a poor one. There is some evidence that chocolate has an inherent gustatory attractiveness in humans - for reasons not fully understood. Therefore, at a fundamental level chocolate does taste better, because there is a genetic feedback mechanism that promotes that positive response to tasting chocolate, but not vanilla (see Chocolate#Pleasure of consuming. Rockpocket 08:24, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

What you seem to be saying is "Humans have more pleasure eating chocolate than eating vanilla because of a genetic feedback mechanism that is not fully understood." What does that have to do with the analogy? Why would that make the analogy a poor one? A.Z. 17:15, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Because "good taste" is simply the brain's interpretation of that mechanism. Therefore, by an objective standard, chocolate does taste better to humans. That is not a POV statement, from a biologic perspective, it is a neutral fact. You would be much less ambiguous if you used something like mint and vanilla for your analogy. Rockpocket 17:59, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Yet there are many people who prefer vanilla over chocolate, so the mechanism you describe is weak and/or absent in many people. StuRat 18:39, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

OK, so the assertion is verifiable, if people that read it understand it the same way you do; if they understand taste the same way you do, etc. This is interesting, but it doesn't really concern the subject of this essay. A.Z. 19:22, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, in the more general use of he word taste then your essay makes sense to me. Rockpocket 20:11, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Preference is not the same as taste. Preference is a higher order brain function than sensory gustation. For example, if preference did not exist and chocolate did taste better, one would always choose chocolate in experimental system where you offered a human chocolate or vanilla every hour for a week. However, because there is a higher order function that integrates other modalities to the gustatory system, if you carried out that experiment, almost all humans would select vanilla before too long, even though - at the primary sensory level - it was taste inferior. So there are lots of reasons people may choose to eat vanilla over chocolate, but they do not automatically tell you anything about the response to taste.

Anyway, I was just suggesting an alternative analogy would better, because chocolate is extremely unusual in that it appears to have these properties and thus is the few foods where there we can make an objective measure of taste. I don't wish to hijack A.Z. essay, so feel free to ignore it, also feel free to remove these comment from your essay if you wish. Rockpocket 18:55, 12 May 2007 (UTC)