Talk:Cultural bias

Untitled
I rewrote the first paragraph to make it borth more accurate and less biased.

I removed the "example' concerning anthropology. A clever and amusing anecdote, it nevertheless was not an example of cultural bias; it was merely an example of cultural difference.  As a matter of fact, in its local (i.e. the way anthropologists use this anecdote) context the anecdote is about overcoming cultural bias.

I also removed silly phrases that are inappropriate to an enecyclopedia, like "But wait...", SR

Light switch and cultural bias
Is true the "most western countries" turn the light switch on when up? I would refute that. It may be true in the US but that is the only case I know of. Dddo we have cultural bias here?? Alan Liefting 04:31, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * It's true in CanadaWilyD 18:23, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
 * It's not true in Australia, here the up position is off.
 * Not true in the UK, nor (as far as I remember) in other European countries I have visited (France, Germany). TomH 20:56, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I changed it by adding information from the light switch article. A classic case of cultural bias. The guy who wrote the article is so unknowledgeable about other cultures that he thought that the US standard represented the entire Western world! At least I learnt something. Now I know where the peculiar Japanese light switches that turn on by flicking them up originally came from.


 * User:Bathrobe 18 March 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.104.161.144 (talk) 22:14, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

attack on Western philosphy
''"Philosophically, people trained in Western reasoning habitually assume that accumulation of independent evidence constitutes proof of an event's occurrence, even if no person saw the event.

''Western scientific reasoning is even more generous. It assumes that independent evidence can prove theories, indicate the existence of invisible objects, and validate new forms of logic. Further, in some sense, these theories, objects and logic are only conditionally true, and can cease to be simply from a change in recorded human experience.''


 * Experiment and observation can only DISPROVE theories. Any "theory" that cannot be disproved by experiment or observation is not science. e.g. "intelligent design".

At the same time, scientific reasoning discards entire classes of explanations without consulting evidence, such as the assumption that supernatural beings cannot affect physical experiments."''

I would submit that the above is POV and off-topic. Its topic of discussion is not what is commonly understood by the term "cultural bias". It also displays towards scientific methodology what is at best a profound lack of understanding and at worst a wilful hostility.

On specific points: -

" . . . habitually assume . . ."; - POV and at the very least unproven, if not completely inaccurate;

" . . . even more generous." - POV. The rest of the paragraph shows an inability to distinguish between epistemology and ontology.

" . . . supernatural beings . . ." - inconsistent: one cannot disparage "invisible objects" and then accept this as a reasonable argument.

It is a pity this attack on scientific method does not apply to itself the rigour of its target:

"I would teach the world that scientists start by trying very hard to disprove what they hope is true. When they fail, they have a good reason for believing what they hope is true, and can even convince others of its truth. A scientist always acknowledges the possibility of error, and is less likely to be mistaken than one who always claims to be right." - Adam Hoare

I would agree that these tenous generalizations about western thought have no purpose in an article on cultural bias. I think the view that "Western Thought" equates on the whole with "Secular Rationalism" is clearly unsupportable; the comments on the scientific method belie a common misunderstanding. Although I'm not sure it bears arguing out here, science does not discard the "entire class of [supernatural] explanations without consulting evidence". The scientific method discards no evidence, and is mute on the subject of supernatural beings. Hypothetically, they may "affect physical experiments", but this hypothesis is by virtue untestable and unprovable (and, of course, un-disprovable). So, though I'm afraid I don't have much to put up in its place, I'm trimming out this part on the whole. Also, apologies for poor formatting on this post --Jaurisova6 14:13, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

attack on Western philosphy 2
I just confirm what Jaurisova6 has written, with a slight thing to add, science has considered supernatural effects. In 17th and 18th century there where efforts to measure the weight of the soul, by measuring the wight of people shortly before and after dying, an extreme case had someone dying while weighed. The result was, that the weight of a person does not change while dying. There have been since 100 years repeated experiments to find evidence of paranormal activity, all that was found could also be perfectly explained by fraud and measurement errors. At the same time, scientific reasoning discards entire classes of explanations without consulting evidence, such as the assumption that supernatural beings cannot affect physical experiments."'' This is simply wrong, science has consulted evidence before discarding gods, souls and psi powers - the evidence indicates, there are no such things. Nobody is killed by lightning strikes, because he does blasphemy against Zeus.
 * Though I agree that the sentence should probably be removed or reworded so as not to sound like an attack on science, it is true in that anything that is "supernatural" is by definition not "natural" and thus, not scientific. Science isn't concerned with such things.  As to the question of whether ghosts and other such things exists, it is incorrect to say science discards these explanations without consulting evidence - there have been attempts, but the evidence simply doesn't exist. Tzepish 19:43, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Passages I deleted
I deleted the following:

In brief, any normative belief of a human being seems to be caused by culture, and thus can be reasonably isolated as a cultural bias. - (weasel words and Blank slate POV)

As one might expect, the effects on philosophy are profound, and not merely limited to ethics.

Philosophically, people trained in Western reasoning habitually assume that accumulation of independent evidence constitutes proof of an event's occurrence, even if no person saw the event. - (Does any culture not do this?)

''Western scientific reasoning is even more generous. It assumes that independent evidence can prove theories, indicate the existence of invisible objects, and validate new forms of logic. Further, in some sense, these theories, objects and logic are only conditionally true, and can cease to be simply from a change in recorded human experience.''

At the same time, scientific reasoning discards entire classes of explanations without consulting evidence, such as the assumption that supernatural beings cannot affect physical experiments.

Now note that these assumptions can be denied, and when they are denied, large amounts of science and logic fail, taking much of our knowledge with them. - (Anthromorphizing science, with significant anti-science bias.)

''Significantly to a philosopher, none of these skeptical denials require one to be skeptical of logic or language. Thus, these forms of skepticism do not clearly invalidate themselves as a direct denial of the validity of logic or language would. This means that they might be formally valid.''

''Wittgenstein had a more practical way of classifying cultural biases. He believed the critical thing was whether we would coerce the cultural biases by locking up or medicating people who defied them. That is, whether people who violated the norms were "crazy." He considered cultural biases of this sort to be much more strongly held, perhaps grounded in human biology or physical reality in some way.'' - (Really hard to understand. This needs more context to connect it to the rest of the article.)

Kla'quot Sound 04:58, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

November 2007
I tried to resolve this amicably by informing you of my objections before reverting. I do not appreciate having my changes to other articles reverted out of spite.


 * This edit of yours is a rambling, incoherent mess. Gwen Gale 05:35, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I fail to see how it is incoherent. Most of my edit was focused on straightening out the blatant POV in this article. The article assumed throughout that cultural bias exists, and greatly over-represented several claims - for example that the natural sciences exhibit cultural bias, or that the laws of logic are a form of cultural bias. It is not a matter of controversy whether the natural sciences exhibit cultural bias. It is uncontroversially accept that they do not except by a very small number of individuals who aren't taken particularly seriously. My other additions were a quote which I thought was a good example of someone who thinks natural sciences exhibit cultural bias, and the section on self-refutation which I thought was relevant as it is a point which is often made. I would also like to delete the "examples" section because it has absolutely no relevance to the rest of the article. As far as I can tell, it is about how light-switch companies fail to tailor their products to a foreign market. Misodoctakleidist 05:54, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

More Serious Opening Quote
Why not put a more reasonable quote displaying someone who believes "cultural bias" exists in the natural sciences, such as that by philosophers of science whose works are actually considered by other philosophers -- e.g. paul feyerabend. The quote in the beginning is frankly absurd and not representative of any epistemology or sociology which considers "bias" in the knowledge production of the sciences. I'll peruse Against Method for a relevant example, and I'll post it here for review... DivisionByZer0 (talk) 07:44, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Source or Delete
"Is e=mc2 a sexed equation?...Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest"

This, along with the article as a whole, needs to be either adequately sourced or it needs to be deleted. Considering that the above quote is either a rhetorical device on the part of the author (if ironic in its original context, which the article doesn't present) or is just fatuous gibberish (if sincere in its original context, which, again, the article doesn't present) it either needs to be sourced (and its context elucidated) or removed. Until then this article serves no purpose other than to assault my mind. Someone should mark this for deletion unless these issues are corrected. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.133.223.84 (talk) 19:59, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

It isn't just countries in the southern hemisphere that identify north as being northerly- the whole world in fact observes that orientation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Burkina (talk • contribs) 03:38, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

what
"Linguistic and ethnic groups often do not share these notational assumptions. Notational and operative assumptions can change control systems if the users implement, fom a different culture than the designers, funnel interpretations from their original world view. Safety-critical systems, according to Seidner (pp. 5-7), become responses to threats of control. Through the emergence of majority and minority categories in society, cultural biases ensue." I'm having difficulty understanding the latter half of this paragraph. It might just be that I am tired, but could someone perhaps explain it a little? Faulty (talk) 09:25, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Article Should Define Culture Bias not Debate Whether Or Not It Exists!
The article starts off with "The alleged problem of cultural bias...". So is it questionable that culture bias EVER occurs as a problem? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.121.235.227 (talk) 06:43, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

cultural bias is when you look at a cultur different then your own, and find it wierd or not normal. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.143.51.192 (talk) 22:43, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Reversion
I am reverting this article to the state it was in in April 2015, prior to a series of edits by User:MariamPogos. These edits were clearly made in good faith, but have just made the article worse. Some of the added material is about blatant prejudice (which isn't at all the same as cultural bias), most of the references are incomprehensible, and (how ironic) the additions are themselves culturally biased, in that they are entirely about disadvantages suffered by ethnic minorities in the U.S. I have spent some time trying to improve the prose with minor tinkering, but have come to the conclusion it just all needs to go. GrindtXX (talk) 21:22, 23 June 2015 (UTC)