3. Sometimes there may be multiple causes for one set of symptoms. And who are you to tell the reader that they should interpret something in a specific way, if there are many ways to interpret it? Moreover, you might be missing a chance to fully show the rich, colourful diversity of something's origins by attempting to explain it. In attempting to explain it, you would make it bland through black-and-white over-simplification.
This points has roots deep in philosophy. To give it a bit more context, we need to go back to Ancient Greek times: where there were different camps of thought developing as to how to interpret the world. There were the rationalists/empiricists: people who need for find the root cause for things. Then there were the skeptics: people who are able to find the root cause of things but don't close off their options for other causes - the skeptics say that there is no way we can prove what we know.
If the rationalists/empiricists were the guys that were always saying, "okay we've done that one, next!", then the skeptics were the annoying ones in the back of the room who said, "wait, but have you thought of this?" And the most annoying part: they were completely valid in saying that.
Sometimes we can't close things off. Sometimes there are many variables that can affect an outcome and there's no way of isolating which variable it is (if there is only one we can narrow it down to). On an even deeper level, how can we be completely sure that we're aware of every variable that could affect a symptom? There is no way we can prove that we're aware of everything we don't know (more on this in a later article).
If Show Don't Tell was coming from a philosopher, he'd be a Skeptic.
No comments:
Post a Comment