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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zarrock God of Evil" data-source="post: 1806171" data-attributes="member: 2025">I don't agree with this attitude Incenjucar for many reasons:1. First - what's reasonable? I see nothing unreasonable about Sean K Reynolds motivations. Is reasonable agreeing with the majority? Is it agreeing to compromise even if it means giving up principles that you know for a fact to be correct? If that's the case I would rather revert my faith to this quote:"Reasonable men try to adapt themselves to their environment. Unreasonable men try to adapt the environment to them. Thus all progress is the work of unreasonable men."Simplified, I digress, but there's nothing wrong about being unreasonable if you have good cause to be so. Agreeing for the sake of it agreeing is NOT constructive but rather the opposite.2. Sean wants people to be aware of the premises behind the work that they are reading/writing/evalueting/considering to purchase etc. That's a good thing. Collier, a recognised critical realist, once said:"a good part of the answer to the question "why philosophy" is that the alternative to philosophy is not no philosophy, but bad philosophy. The "unphilosophical person" has an unconscious philosophy, which they apply in their practice - whether of science or politics or daily life."This argument can easily be said to apply to the philosophy behind the d20 core mechanics, and all Sean seems to want is for people to become increasingly aware of this philosophy so they can evaluate the material from this perspective. If you dislike the basic philosophy, then you won't be offended by products that stray from it or fail to acknowledge it, but at least you'll be aware that the product is not in accordance with the original premise of the d20 core mechanics. What you think of that is then up to you. 3. Thirdly, every person is biased. The illusion of personal neutrality is slowly loosing its foothold even inside the most conservative scientific disciplines. Relativism, constructivism, subjectivism, anti-positivism, and  critical realism are all growing schools of thought, as is research such as action research, ethnography, etc., and ALL accept that the observer and "the observed" cannot be separated but are an inseparable whole. Validity, reliability, and other such measures of "correctness" are no longer only dependent on "proposed neutrality" but rather the ability to correctly transmit your personal bias to the reader. Only by explicitly stating your "bias" (composed of preunderstanding, perspective, personal philosophy and other things), do you allow people to fairly judge your opinions and your work. Sean is doing just that and has done it from the start, and I greatly respect that attitude. Bias has nothing to do with usefulness as long as it is not hidden because you should then be fully aware of the presuppositions of the work you evaluate. You may disagree with these presuppositions - that's your right - but it does in no way influence the validity of the material. Sorry for the long-windedness.-Zarrock</blockquote>

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