Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from...

It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It...

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than...

We do not see things as they are, nor do we even see them as we are, but only as we believe our story to have been.

Action triggers reaction. An object somehow responds when we observe it.We just assume that we do objective. In fact, unconsciously we only want to see some parts of the object which do not evoke the...

There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter—an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn’t feel trustworthy. Sometimes it’s a quote or incident that’s too perfect —a feeling I always had when...

One journalist complemented another that his article on a dispute, “had made both sides see themselves as they are.

Objectivity, in this sense, means that a person’s statements about the world can be trusted if they are submitted to established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community. Facts here are not aspects of the...

…there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role...

You can’t do clear observation if you ain’t in the field.You can’t be a pure observer if you’re now in the field.

Extreme nationalism objectifies and dehumanizes those from other countries.

It is precisely this refusal of the Cartesian paradigm that characterizes Radical Orthodoxy, which seeks to reanimate the account of knowledge offered by Augustine and Aquinas. On this ancient-medieval-properly-postmodern model, we rightly give up pretensions...

There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and trying to make sense of them. Dim, shaky, weak, static-y little signals that only hint at the complexity...

But into the first decades of the twentieth century, even at the New York Times, it was uncommon for journalists to see a sharp divide between facts and values. Yet the belief in objectivity is...