THE IMPORTANCE OF POINT OF VIEW
The importance of point of view emerges explicitly in many settings: Plato’s cave, the anthropologist’s relativism (which need not be despairingly total), postmodern nihilism, and so forth.
Under conditions in which subjects are not able to explore and communicate freely, intersubjective differences become disagreements that are difficult to resolve. Techniques of conflict resolution that are successful under some conditions may lead only to fiasco in other circumstances, such as change in scale or change of mood. For example, sharing the commons requires civility and negotiation, and such conditions may sometimes be unattainable.From our work with the shadow box, it becomes clear experimentally that under certain conditions taking the point of view of the other (POVO) is essential for collaborative work and that some problems absolutely require the synthesis of disparate points of view (POVOSYN). But such synthesis, like all creative work, is a delicate plant and may fail if conditions change.
The classic studies of conformity by Sherif (1936) and by Asch (1952) stemmed from rather different perspectives about the truth value of beliefs. Sherif thought that the development of social norms could be readily studied in a highly ambiguous stimulus situation, notably the autokinetic effect, and that this ambiguity corresponds well to real-world conditions. Asch objected to this image of human nature as passively yielding to group pressures; he believed that if confronted with clearly discriminable and unambiguous stimuli, observers would resist conformity.
Does the epistemology of the shadow box, especially recognizing multiple solutions, mean that anything goes, that we are no further than when we started in our quest for paths to truth? I think not. Even though there are multiple solutions, at least some are always excluded. The existence of multiple solutions does not open the way to unregulated relativism. To take only one example, a stationary cube can cast a variety of shadows, depending on its orientation, but it can never cast a circular shadow. By the same token, a stationary sphere can never cast a square shadow.
The importance of point of view is concisely expressed in a remark often attributed to Isaac Newton: “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” (reported by Catherine Drinker Bowen in Merton, 1985). Merton’s book-length exploration of this aphorism is a pleasure to read. When all is said and done, a stationary sphere can never cast a square shadow.