It is widely recognized that scientific theories are often associated with strictly inconsistent models, but there is little agreement concerning the epistemic consequences. Some argue that model inconsistency supports a strong perspectivism, according to which claims serving as interpretations of models are inevitably and irreducibly perspectival. Others argue that in at least some cases, inconsistent models can be unified as approximations to a theory with which they are associated, thus undermining this kind of perspectivism. I examine the arguments (...) for perspectivism, and contend that its strong form is defeasible in principle, not merely in special cases. The argument rests on the plausibility of scientific knowledge concerning non-perspectival, dispositional facts about modelled systems. This forms the basis of a novel suggestion regarding how to understand the knowledge these models afford, in terms of a contrastive theory of what-questions. (shrink)

Perspectivists hold that what you ought to do is determined by your perspective, that is, your epistemic position. Objectivists hold that what you ought to do is determined by the facts irrespective of your perspective. This paper explores an influential argument for perspectivism which appeals to the thought that the normative is action guiding. The crucial premise of the argument is that you ought to φ only if you are able to φ for the reasons which determine that you (...) ought to φ. We show that this premise can be understood in different ways. On one reading, it provides no support for perspectivism. On another reading, the premise lacks support. So, the argument fails. An important upshot of the paper is that the objectivist can embrace the thought about guidance. (shrink)

This edited collection is the first of its kind to explore the view called perspectivism in philosophy of science. The book brings together an array of essays that reflect on the methodological promises and scientific challenges of perspectivism in a variety of fields such as physics, biology, cognitive neuroscience, and cancer research, just as a few examples. What are the advantages of using a plurality of perspectives in a given scientific field and for interdisciplinary research? Can different perspectives (...) be integrated? What is the relation between perspectivism, pluralism, and pragmatism? These ten new essays by top scholars in the field offer a polyphonic journey towards understanding the view called ‘perspectivism’ and its relevance to science. (shrink)

Social media is a key player in contemporary political, cultural and ethical debates. Given much of online engagement is characterised by impulsive and emotive responses, and social media platforms encourage a form of sensationalism that promotes epistemic vices, this paper explores whether there is space online for moral responses. This paper defends the need for moral engagement with online information and others, using an attitude entitled ‘critical perspectivism’. Critical perspectivism sees a moral agent adopt a critical eye, supplemented (...) by a caring disposition, when engaging with interactive digital media and the stories of others that are technologically mediated. Such an ethical attitude is required given our globally connected, technological world features new versions of recognisable challenges to democracy and the reasonableness of citizens. There is a vital role for educationalists to play in teaching and making space and time for students to practice being critically perspectival. (shrink)

My response to Joel Katzav’s original article looks at potentially competing claims about perspectivism, psychology, and our understanding of concrete experience. De Laguna offers an early example of pluralism when conceiving of psychology, biology, physiology, and other sciences as essentially different perspectives abstracted from our experience of the world. Each science serves as a single perspective on experience, one that may shed light on our experience and behaviour from a particular standpoint, but does not represent ‘the real’ over and (...) above all perspectives. While remaining generally consistent throughout her career, I argue de Laguna’s exploration and endorsement of behaviourism—especially as it concerns emotion and affect—pushes her a bit closer to reductionism than originally intended. I explore this issue not by simply pointing out the potential inconsistency in her work, but by focusing on whether perspectivism makes sense in light of redundancies and complications between theoretical perspectives. (shrink)

Big data biology—bioinformatics, computational biology, systems biology (including ‘omics’), and synthetic biology—raises a number of issues for the philosophy of science. This article deals with several such: Is data-intensive biology a new kind of science, presumably post-reductionistic? To what extent is big data biology data-driven? Can data ‘speak for themselves?’ I discuss these issues by way of a reflection on Carl Woese’s worry that “a society that permits biology to become an engineering discipline, that allows that science to slip into (...) the role of changing the living world without trying to understand it, is a danger to itself.” And I argue that scientific perspectivism, a philosophical stance represented prominently by Giere, Van Fraassen, and Wimsatt, according to which science cannot as a matter of principle transcend our human perspective, provides the best resources currently at our disposal to tackle many of the philosophical issues implied in the modeling of complex, multilevel/multiscale phenomena. (shrink)

Many people assume that the claims of scientists are objective truths. But historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science have long argued that scientific claims reflect the particular historical, cultural, and social context in which those claims were made. The nature of scientific knowledge is not absolute because it is influenced by the practice and perspective of human agents. Scientific Perspectivism argues that the acts of observing and theorizing are both perspectival, and this nature makes scientific knowledge contingent, as Thomas (...) Kuhn theorized forty years ago. Using the example of color vision in humans to illustrate how his theory of “perspectivism” works, Ronald N. Giere argues that colors do not actually exist in objects; rather, color is the result of an interaction between aspects of the world and the human visual system. Giere extends this argument into a general interpretation of human perception and, more controversially, to scientific observation, conjecturing that the output of scientific instruments is perspectival. Furthermore, complex scientific principles—such as Maxwell’s equations describing the behavior of both the electric and magnetic fields—make no claims about the world, but models based on those principles can be used to make claims about specific aspects of the world. Offering a solution to the most contentious debate in the philosophy of science over the past thirty years, Scientific Perspectivism will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of science. (shrink)

Potential perspectivism is the view that what an agent ought to do (believe, like, fear, … ) depends primarily on facts that are potentially available to her. I consider a challenge to this view. Potentially accessible facts do not always agglomerate over conjunction. This implies that one can fail to have relevant access to a set of facts as a whole but have access to proper subsets of it, each of which can support different incompatible responses. I argue that (...) potential perspectivism has no unproblematic answer to the question of what the agent ought to do (believe, like, fear, … ) in such circumstances. (shrink)

In this paper, I support the perspectivist reading of the Platonic dialogues. The dialogues assert an objective truth toward which we are meant to strive, and yet acknowledge that we as seekers of this truth are always partial in what we grasp of its nature. They are written in a way to encourage the development of philosophical practice in their readers, where “philosophical” means not only having an epistemic state in between the total possession of truth and its absence, but (...) also growing in selfknowledge as being that kind of a being. I take up three particular qualities of the dialogue: they are multilayered, multivocal, and mimetic. Devices such as Platonic irony, multiple characters’ voices, and a reformulated notion of mimesis that encourages the development of rationality and autonomy are central to Platonic rhetoric and philosophy. (shrink)

The epistemic poverty objection is commonly levelled by externalists against deontological conceptions of epistemic justification. This is that an “oughts” based account of epistemic justification together with “ought” implies “can” must lead us to hold to be justified, epistemic agents who are objectively not truth-conducive cognizers. The epistemic poverty objection has led to a common response from deontologists, namely to embrace accounts of bounded rationality—subjective, practical or regulative accounts rather than objective, absolute or theoretical accounts. But the bounds deontological epistemologists (...) and their opponents entertain rarely include cultural limitations. This paper considers neo-Vygotskian arguments that we must consider such cultural limits in defending deontologism, and thus that any deontologically motivated perspectivism must be in part a cultural perspectivism. The dangers of strong relativism are flagged and an attempt is made to steer a.. (shrink)

Perspectivism is often understood as a conception according to which subjective conditions inevitably affect our knowledge and, therefore, we are never confronted with reality and facts but only with interpretations. Hence, subjectivism and anti-realism are usually associated with perspectivism. The thesis of this paper is that, especially in the case of the sciences, perspectivism can be better understood as an appreciation of the cognitive attitude that consists in considering reality only from a certain ‘point of view’, in (...) a way that can avoid subjectivism. Whereas the way of conceiving a notion is strictly subjective, the way of using it is open to intersubjective agreement, based on the practice of operations whose nature is neither mental nor linguistic. Therefore, intersubjectivity is possible within perspectivism. Perspectivism can also help understand the notion of ‘scientific objects’ in a referential sense: they are those ‘things’ that become ‘objects’ of a certain science by being investigated from the ‘point of view’ of that science. They are ‘clipped out’ of things by means of standardized operations which turn out to be the same as those granting intersubjectivity. Therefore this ‘strong’ sense of objectivity, which is clearly realist, coincides with the ‘weak’ one. The notion of truth appears fully legitimate in the case of the sciences, being clearly defined for the regional ontology of each one of them and, since this truth can be extended in an analogical sense to the theories elaborated in each science, it follows that are real also the unobservable entities postulated by those theories. (shrink)

In current debates, many philosophers of science have sympathies for the project of introducing a new approach to the scientific realism debate that forges a middle way between traditional forms of scientific realism and anti-realism. One promising approach is perspectivism. Although different proponents of perspectivism differ in their respective characterizations of perspectivism, the common idea is that scientific knowledge is necessarily partial and incomplete. Perspectivism is a new position in current debates but it does have its (...) forerunners. Figures that are typically mentioned in this context include Dewey, Feyerabend, Leibniz, Kant, Kuhn, and Putnam. Interestingly, to my knowledge, there exists no work that discusses similarities to the phenomenological tradition. This is surprising because here one can find systematically similar ideas and even a very similar terminology. It is startling because early modern physics was noticeably influenced by phenomenological ideas. And it is unfortunate because the analysis of perspectival approaches in the phenomenological tradition can help us to achieve a more nuanced understanding of different forms of perspectivism. The main objective of this paper is to show that in the phenomenological tradition one finds a well-elaborated philosophy of science that shares important similarities with current versions of perspectivism. Engaging with the phenomenological tradition is also of systematic value since it helps us to gain a better understanding of the distinctive claims of perspectivism and to distinguish various grades of perspectivism. (shrink)

Adopting the stage metaphor suggested in Brown’s review, and treating Scientific perspectivism as a play in five acts, I respond to his review as a playwright might respond to a generally favorable review. Taking the reader behind the stage door, I discuss the playwright’s intentions for each act, paying special attention to the expected audience for the play as a whole. The result, therefore, supplements the review from the standpoint of the playwright. It also provides answers to some of (...) the reviewer’s questions.Keywords: Matthew Brown; Scientific perspectivism. (shrink)

Historians and sociologists of psychiatry often claim that psychiatric diagnoses are discontinuous. That is, a particular diagnoses will be described in one way in one era and described quite differently in a different era. Historians and sociologists often draw epistemic consequences from such discontinuities, claiming that truth is pluralistic, provisional and historicised. These arguments do not readily fit in with how analytical philosophers of science approach scientific realism. I show how the pessimistic meta induction does not capture the point which (...) historians and sociologists are making but scientific perspectivism seems to capture their point much better. I then highlight conceptual innovations which scientific perspectivists add. They demarcate between truth and objective reality, they specify which type of truth they endorse and they put down constraints on possible truths. This blocks an anything goes relativism which historians and sociologists can be in danger of falling into. I highlight my argument by discussing a discontinuous episode in the history of autism. I discuss three aspects of this discontinuity and show how scientific perspectivism can portray each aspect as non-trivially true. My argument shows that we can be scientific realists about autism even if we can formulate notions of autism in quite different ways. (shrink)

A perspectivist theory is usually taken to mean that (1) our knowledge of the world is inevitably shaped by our particular perspectives, (2) any one of these perspectives is as good as any other, and (3) any claims to objective or authoritative knowledge are consequently without ground. Recent scholarship on Nietzsche, however, has challenged the prevalent view that the philosopher holds (2) and (3), arguing instead that his perspectivism aims at attaining a greater level of objectivity. In this essay, (...) I attempt a structurally similar reinterpretation of Zhuangzi’s perspectivism. I argue that while the Chinese thinker sees all knowledge as perspective-dependent, he thinks that some perspectives are broader and more accurate than others. He utilizes shifts in perspective precisely in order to attain these superior perspectives, which constitute what he calls da zhi 大知, or “greater knowledge.” Whereas Nietzsche sees his perspectivism as methodologically continuous with the sciences, Zhuangzi’s “greater knowledge” has the goal of ensuring our survival and well-being in the everyday world. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s perspectivism is a philosophical methodology for achieving various epistemic goods. Furthermore, perspectives as he conceives them relate primarily to agents’ motivational and evaluative sets. In order to shed light on this methodology, I approach it from two angles. First, I employ the digital humanities methodology pioneered recently in my recent and ongoing research to further elucidate the concept of perspectivism. Second, I explore some of the rhetorical tropes that Nietzsche uses to reorient his audience’s perspective. These include (...) engaging the audience’s emotions, apostrophic address to the reader, and what I’ve elsewhere called ‘Nietzschean summoning’. Each of these methods tugs at the affects and values of the audience, positioning them to notice, find salient, and be disposed to act in relation to certain (aspects of) things while ignoring, finding less salient, and being disposed to neglect (aspects of) other things. This suggests that, for Nietzsche, perspectivism may have less to do with cognition than the painterly metaphor of a visual perspective suggests. Instead, I’ll argue that for Nietzsche, perspectivism relates primarily to agents’ motivational and evaluative set. (shrink)

The special theory of relativity holds significant interest for scientific perspectivists. In this paper, I distinguish between two related meanings of “perspectival,” and argue that reference frames are perspectives, provided that perspectival means “being conditional” rather than “being partial.” Frame-dependent properties such as length, time duration, and simultaneity, are not partially measured in a reference frame, but their measurements are conditional on the choice of frame. I also discuss whether the constancy of the speed of light depends on perspectival factors (...) such as the idealized definition of the speed of light in a perfect vacuum and the Einstein synchronization convention. Furthermore, I argue for the view that the constancy of its speed is a robust property of light according to the conditions of currently acceptable experimental setups pertaining to special relativity, and conclude that this view supports perspectivism. (shrink)

In this paper, I address a prominent realist challenge recently raised by Anjan Chakravartty (2010) against scientific perspectivism. I offer a response to the challenge, by rethinking scientific perspectivism as a view on how we form scientific knowledge, as opposed to a view about what sort of objects we have scientific knowledge of. My response follows Ernest Sosa’s perspectivism in epistemology by drawing a distinction between truth and justification for our knowledge claims. With this distinction in place, (...) I pledge to defend scientific perspectivism as a promising alternative to both objectivist realism and relativism. (shrink)

The paper examines the view that Nietzsche's perspectivism about practical judgments, understood as a form of internalism about practical reasons, implies that any legitimate criticism of judgments emanating from a foreign perspective must be in terms that are internal to this perspective. Insofar as it is thought to be motivated by certain general theoretical strictures of perspectivism, this view is incoherent. The paper argues that, on the contrary Nietzsche's recourse to a strategy of internal criticism is motivated by (...) his own particular commitment to preserving the freedom of spirit of his interlocutors. The paper concludes with a discussion of how freedom of spirit is preserved by internal criticism, and how the nature of freedom of spirit affects the particular form such criticism will assume. (shrink)

The growing diffusion of perspectivism within the debate on information system ontologies [ISOs] does not correspond to a thorough analysis of what perspectivism specifically consists of. This paper aims to fill this void. First, I show what supporting perspectivism in information system ontologies [PISO] means in terms of (minimal) claims and implications; then I argue that the definitions of ISO implicitly assume PISO’s (minimal) claims or, in other words, that ISOs presuppose and maintain PISO. Section 2 presents (...) the main definitions of ISO. Section 3 specifies what claims are common to all perspectivists in ISO. Sects. 4–7 analyze the implications of those claims. Section 8 explores the chance of multiple perspectivisms within ISOs’ domain. Finally, Sects. 9–10 assume that, if PISO’s (minimal) claims and (their) implications can be inferred from ISO’s definitions, then ISOs are perspectivist, or PISO’s minimal claims are assumptions underlying ISOs. (shrink)

This chapter explores perspectivism in the American Pragmatist tradition. On the one hand, the thematization of perspectivism in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science can benefit from resources in the American Pragmatist philosophical tradition. On the other hand, the Pragmatists have interesting and innovative, pluralistic views that can be illuminated through the lens of perspectivism. I pursue this inquiry primarily through examining relevant sources from the Pragmatist tradition. I will illustrate productive engagements between pragmatism and perspectivism (...) in three areas: in the pragmatists’ fallibilistic theories of inquiry and truth, in their pluralistic metaphysics, and in their views on cultural pluralism. While there are some potential sticking points between pragmatism and perspectivism, particularly around the visual metaphor of perspective, these philosophical approaches nonetheless have much to learn from each other. Perspectivism is in danger of falling between the horns of pernicious relativism and a platitudinous view of the limits of human perception and cognition. The pragmatists accounts of truth and reality open the possibility of a more thoroughgoing perspectivism. I will follow this thread through Charles S. Peirce’s, William James’, and John Dewey’s theories of inquiry and truth, Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics, James’ radical pluralism, Dewey’s cultural naturalism, Richard Rorty’s anti-essentialism, Jane Addams’ standpoint epistemology, W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of race consciousness, Horace Kallen’s and Alain LeRoy Locke’s cultural pluralism, and Mary Parker Follett’s account of pluralistic integration. (shrink)

According to ontological perspectivism, there can be, in principle, multiple and alternative perspectives on the world that can be sliced, systematized, and conceptualized in different ways. Surely, such an ontological position has many categorial implications, which may vary depending on different disciplinary contexts. This paper explores parts of these implications in the realm of geography. In particular, it aims at discussing the ontological categories that one might use to describe the geographical world in an overarching perspective – that is, (...) the perspective that puts toether all the partial views coming from the different branches of the geographical investigation. We will see that if the overarching perspective is expected to include all the views on the geographical world, then such a perspective should be all-embracing in terms of contents and categories. This means that the overarching perspective might also comprehend inconsistencies that derive from how the various partial perspectives conceptualize differently the geographical world. (shrink)

According to perspectivism about moral obligation, our obligations are affected by our epistemic circumstances. But how exactly should this claim be understood? On Zimmerman’s “Prospective View”, perspectivism is spelled out as the thesis that an option is obligatory if and only if it maximizes what Zimmerman calls “prospective value”, which is in turn determined by the agent’s present evidence. In this article, I raise two objections to this approach. Firstly, I argue that spelling out the difference between (...) class='Hi'>perspectivism and anti-perspectivism in terms of value creates a number of problems that can be avoided by an account that proceeds in terms of reasons. Secondly, I argue that Zimmerman focuses on the wrong body of evidence, and that this commits him to an implausible solution to the problem that perspectivists face with regard to advice from better-informed sources. (shrink)

A thorough appreciation of the Whiteheadian subjectivist principle necessitates both a doctrine of panexperientialism as well as a metaphysical perspectivism. Employing a dialectical analysis of these two, this article argues that reality—as understood by the Whiteheadian term “actual world”—is largely misunderstood. Far from representing a singular concrete world, reality is multiplicitous and subject-dependent. As a result of this and the core tenet of process metaphysics—that all existents can be understood as event—it is argued that human language, as its own (...) species of event, interacts with reality in the same way all other events do, and as such must be considered genuinely ontologically creative. (shrink)

Discussions about perspectivism in the current philosophical literature often focus on questions concerning perspectival modeling or the compatibility between perspectivism and realism. In this paper, I propose to extend the debate on perspectivism by taking into account the social dimension of scientific perspectives. Scientific perspectives are always adopted and advocated for by individual scientists and groups of scientists with different epistemic affinities. I describe an example of a current and ongoing controversy in the field of epigenetics in (...) order to illustrate that diverging scientific perspectives on open scientific questions are often not fully explained by empirical underdetermination or diverging theoretical approaches alone. Opposing perspectives frequently arise from differences in systems of practice and the scientific socializations of the involved scientists, including differences in training, experimental skills, and epistemic priorities. The paper ends with a discussion of the important epistemic function of perspectives in scientific discovery. Ultimately, perspectivism is described as a valid philosophical position that explains how scientific knowledge is generated in situations of empirical underdetermination and why trust in science can be justified even in the absence of a community consensus. (shrink)

“Philosophical perspectivism” is surely one of Nietzsche's most important insights regarding the limits of human knowledge. However, the perspectivist thesis combined with a minimal realist metaphysical position produces what Brian Leiter calls the 'Received View': an epistemologically incoherent misinterpretation of Nietzsche which pervades the secondary literature. In order to salvage the thesis of perspectivism, Leiter argues that we must commit Nietzsche to an anti-realist metaphysical position. I argue that Leiter's proposed solution is (1) epistemically weak, and (2) inconsistent (...) with much of Nietzsche's views on truth, knowledge and the psychological make-up of human beings. I argue that we need to abandon the scheme/content distinction on which both the Received View and Leiter's anti-realist construal of perspectivism are predicated and instead construe perspectives as environments of power. (shrink)

In this reply, I defend my views on Nietzsche's “falsification thesis” and his perspectivism against Maudemarie Clark's recent criticisms, which appeared in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49.1. I begin by amplifying my interpretation of Gay Science 110 and 111, which, I argue, show that the falsification thesis is absent from The Gay Science. I then turn to perspectivism and argue that, contrary to Clark's claims, perspectivism never involves the falsification of the views to which it applies. (...) It is therefore unnecessary to apply perspectivism, as Clark does, only to value-imbued viewpoints and not to empirical knowledge or the natural sciences. Perspectivism, as Nietzsche, I believe, makes clear, applies to every aspect of human knowledge. (shrink)

This book is an inquiry into the philosophical concern with truth as one joint subject in philosophy of language and metaphysics and presents a theory of truth, substantive perspectivism (SP). Emphasizing our basic pre-theoretic understanding of truth (i.e., what is captured by the axiomatic thesis of truth that the nature of truth consists in capturing the way things are), and in the deflationism vs. substantivism debate background, SP argues for the substantive nature of non-linguistic truth and its notion’s indispensable (...) substantive explanatory role, both of which are not only intrinsically beyond what the linguistic function of the truth predicate can tell but are fundamentally related to the raison d’être of the truth predicate. Taking a holistic approach, SP endeavors to do justice to various reasonable perspectives, which are somehow contained in many competing accounts of truth, through a coordinate system: SP interprets such perspectives as distinct but related perspective-elaboration principles that distinctively (regarding distinct dimensions of the truth concern and/or for the sake of distinct purposes) elaborate, but are also unified by, the truth axiom thesis. To look at the issue from a broader vision, the book also takes a cross-tradition approach exploring the relationship between Daoist thinking of truth and thinking about truth in analytic philosophy.This book will enhance our systematic understanding of the issue through its holistic approach, broaden our vision on the issue via its cross-tradition approach, and enrich the conceptual and explanatory resources in treating the issue. (shrink)

In this paper, I support the perspectivist reading of the Platonic dialogues. The dialogues assert an objective truth toward which we are meant to strive, and yet acknowledge that we as seekers of this truth are always partial in what we grasp of its nature. They are written in a way to encourage the development of philosophical practice in their readers, where “philosophical” means not only having an epistemic state in between the total possession of truth and its absence, but (...) also growing in selfknowledge as being that kind of a being. I take up three particular qualities of the dialogue: they are multilayered, multivocal, and mimetic. Devices such as Platonic irony, multiple characters’ voices, and a reformulated notion of mimesis that encourages the development of rationality and autonomy are central to Platonic rhetoric and philosophy. (shrink)

Perspectivism in Science Perspectivism, or perspectival realism, has been discussed in philosophy for many centuries, but as a view about science, it is a twenty-first-century topic. Although it has taken many forms and even though there is no agreed definition, perspectivism at its heart uses a visual metaphor to help us understand the scope and … Continue reading Perspectivism in Science →.

I remember well my initial reaction when Nietzsche: Life as Literature appeared in 1985.1 I was busy working on my own book on Nietzsche and I was worried that Nehamas had already said everything I wanted to say in it. We were dealing with the same problem: the apparently problematic, even paradoxical nature of Nietzsche's perspectivism and his position on truth. And our aim was the same: to show that this position was plausible, perhaps even reasonable, and at least (...) worthy of serious consideration. So I had to consider whether Nehamas's interpretation of Nietzsche's position on truth secured it against the various problems about which we were both concerned. I ultimately decided that it did not, that his book had... (shrink)

Perspectivism: A Contribution to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences advances the philosophy of perspectivism, showing how its capacity to assess competing views of a particular concept by approaching them as different 'sides' of a multi-dimensional object supports a concept of 'adequate' rather than 'absolute' truth. Presenting four case studies - of the social scientific concepts of power, equality, crime, and sex and gender - Smith demonstrates the manner in which the perspectivist approach does not take all differing (...) views of a concept to be equally good, but views all perspectives taken together as contributing towards the best that we can know about any given concept at the present time. An exposition and analysis of the means by which perspectivism allows for truth and objectivity in the social sciences, this volume will appeal to scholars of philosophy and across the social sciences with interests in questions of epistemology and research methodology. (shrink)

This article provides a survey of approaches and conceptual means elaborated in recent decades in the studies of pluralistic tendencies in Indian culture. The concepts of inclusivism, perspectivism, antologizing and polyphony are discussed in a close relation with the specific context in which they were introduced, as well as with the implicit presuppositions of the scholars who elaborated them. In particular, the interpretations of inclusivism introduced by Paul Hacker and Gerhard Oberhammer were inextricably intertwined with the views on Indian (...) religions these scholars developed. The concept of perspectivism was introduced in a philosophical context, mainly with respect to Bhartṛhari’s and Jaina philosophy. Antologizing and polyphony can be characterized as a more cautious way to conceptualize pluralistic tendencies in Indian traditional discourse, because they focus on narrative strategies that enable expressing alternative views in the frames of a single text. From a historical point of view pluralistic tendencies might be stipulated by the diverse social reality in Ancient India where heterogeneous cultural phenomena coexisted in a process of mutual reinterpretation and adaptation. Another possible presupposition of perspectivism could be the cyclic concept of time that was predominant in Indian traditional discourse. In Indian intellectual systems pluralistic practices were usually legitimized with the view that there are different levels of truth. Though instances of inclusivism can be discovered in the cultures of different regions, it was in India that inclusivism became a dominant trend in the cultural history. (shrink)

Bhartṛhari, the famous Indian linguistic philosopher (V CE) in his ‘Vākyapadīya’ discussed different doctrines on the nature of language, tending to demonstrate, that each of the doctrines is justified in a certain context and represents a certain aspect of reality. Modern scholars usually designate Bhartṛhari’s philosophy as perspectivism, though there are also disagreements with this interpretation. E.g. G. Cardona claims that Bhartṛhari’s perspectivism is generally exaggerated, and the true teaching expressed in VP is the monistic theory of the (...) “Pāṇini-darśana”. So, the concept of Bhartṛhari's perspectivism needs to be further eleborated. In this paper two characteristic features of Bhartṛhari’s perspectivism are discussed, in order to clarify the essence of his philosophical strategy: (1) Functional attitude; (2) Relative incompleteness of every single doctrine. These features elucidate the essence of Bhartṛhari's philosophical method and provide us with the key to the problem of the balance between monistic and pluralistic tendencies in the ‘Vākyapadīya’. (shrink)

In recent decades, perspectivism has developed into an epistemological research program claiming its independence. This autonomy stems from Perspectivism’s potential ability to resolve the contradictions between realist and constructivist programs. Perspectivism is based on the idea that the object depends on perspective, which constitutes any subjective attempt to cognize it. Perspectivists reconstruct and explain the factors involved in the formation of perspective, identifying the conditionality of epistemic acts, using concepts such as “position”, “point of view”, “view”, “angle”, (...) “horizon”, “focus”, “picture”, “context”, “aspect”, etc. Although these concepts are part of the perspectivist’s toolkit, their meanings and interrelation have so far been taken for granted and have not yet been critically and comprehensively analyzed. The purpose of this article is to take steps toward clarifying the conceptual basis for defending perspectivism as an epistemological program. Once consistently uncovered and correlated in a conceptual model, Perspectivist concepts can be used as a tool for a detailed analysis of theories, positions, and beliefs. The article begins with a preliminary description of the concept of perspectivism and its brief history as an epistemological program. In particular, the first modern attempts to outline perspectivist epistemology are described in the works of F. Kaulbach (1990), W. Stegmaier (2008), and M. Massimi (2017, 2020). The problem of identifying the special a priori status of perspectivist notions as a strategy for justifying the autonomy of Perspectivism is then posed. A method for demonstrating such a status, based on Kant’s transcendentalism and P. Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics, is then suggested. (shrink)

Since Nietzsche, the term “perspectivism” has been used as the name for an ill-defined epistemological position. Some have tried to find an adequate meaning for the word “perspectivism,” tacitly investing it with a set of different predicates, such as “the dependence of cognition on position,” “pluralism,” “anti-universalism,” “epistemic humility,” etc. This approach is related to two contestable attitudes: the monolateral linguistic paradigm and the metaepistemological position of multiplicity of incompatible epistemological programs. The monolateral linguistic paradigm proceeds from the (...) assumption that there is no obligatory connection between word and meaning. This makes it possible to denote logical content by any possible sign, and to explicate the sign in any number of ways. The metaepistemological position of multiplicity of incompatible epistemological programs encourages the support of artificial antagonism in the theory of cognition and the creation of “new” positions with different denotations. These attitudes can be contrasted with the method of empirical “originalist” analysis within the bilateral paradigm, as well as the theory of one epistemology and universal epistemic language. The content of the term “perspectivism” can be reconstructed by analyzing the original meanings of its individual constituent morphemes and their combination. The extremely precise and empirically provable definition of the word “perspectivism” is “the tendency to act by seeing through something”. This points to the problem of the impossibility of analytically deducing from it “the dependence of cognition on position,” “pluralism,” and other predicates. The same problem of inconsistency between the name of the epistemological position and its content is also encountered, for example, in the literature on relativism. It freely attributes a set of doctrinal beliefs to the term “relativism” without explicit linguistic signification of the predicates and blurs the difference between perspectivism and relativism. This points to the inexpediency of constructing epistemological positions on the basis of words denoting one of all possible interrelated cognitive actions, and the need to rethink epistemological practice. (shrink)

Virtue perspectivism is a bi-level epistemology according to which there are two grades of knowledge: animal and reflective. The exercise of reliable competences suffices to give us animal knowledge; but we can then use these same competences to gain a second-order assuring perspective, one through which we may appreciate those faculties as reliable and in doing so place our first-order knowledge in a competent second-order perspective. Virtue perspectivism has considerable theoretical power, especially when it comes to vindicating our (...) external world knowledge against threats of scepticism and regress. Prominent critics, however, doubt whether the view ultimately hangs together without succumbing to vicious circularity. In this paper, I am going to focus on circularity-based criticisms of virtue perspectivism raised in various places by Barry Stroud, Baron Reed and Richard Fumerton, and I will argue that virtue perspectivism can ultimately withstand each of them. (shrink)

How should emotions figure in scientific practice? I begin by distinguishing three broad answers to this question, ranging from pessimistic to optimistic. Confirmation bias and motivated numeracy lead us to cast a jaundiced eye on the role of emotions in scientific inquiry. However, reflection on the essential motivating role of emotions in geniuses makes it less clear that science should be evacuated of emotion. I then draw on Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspectivism to articulate a twenty-first century epistemology of science that (...) recognizes the necessity of emotion to inquiry but aims to manage the biases that emotions can introduce. Twenty-first century perspectivism is both social and (temporally) distal, helping it to overcome a paradox of self-critical inquiry. (shrink)

Consider the sentence “Lois knows that Superman flies, but she doesn’t know that Clark flies”. In this paper we defend a Millian contextualist semantics for propositional attitude ascriptions, according to which ordinary uses of this sentence are true but involve a mid-sentence shift in context. Absent any constraints on the relevant parameters of context sensitivity, such a semantics would be untenable: it would undermine the good standing of systematic theorizing about the propositional attitudes, trivializing many of the central questions of (...) epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of action. In response to this problem, we prove a series of tenability results. We show that, given certain constraints on the parameters of context sensitivity, there is a broad class of principles of propositional attitude psychology whose good standing follows from corresponding claims about people’s mental representations. But these constraints also have some surprising consequences: they are jointly incompatible with coarse-grained theories of propositions, and they are in tension with a natural picture of how speakers and hearers coordinate on the interpretation of attitude ascriptions. In light of these consequences we explore different ways in which the contextualist picture might be developed, and argue that our preferred way compares favorably with Fregeanism and neo-Russellianism. (shrink)

In the recent literature, it has been argued that Nietzsche’s perspectivism should not be reconstructed as an epistemological position. This article criticizes both this view and interpretations that reduce perspectivism to a theory of knowledge. It claims that “perspectivism” is also an appropriate name for Nietzsche’s meta-ethical position. The paper argues that Nietzsche should be interpreted as an anti-realist and moral skeptic. Its epistemological claim is that Nietzsche perspectivism provides a hermeneutic method that allows the human (...) animal to achieve knowledge and truth about the world. The article distinguishes between a strong metaphysical and a weak hermeneutic version of the correspondence theory of truth. It argues that Nietzsche only rejects the former: the possibility of knowledge about the essence of the world and things-in-themselves. With his perspectival hermeneutic method, Nietzsche mainly aims at knowledge and truth about objects that are human products and phenomena. (shrink)

Western liberal intellectuals often find themselves in a precarious situation with regard to whether or not they should celebrate and endorse Friedrich Nietzsche as a philosopher who we should all unequivocally embrace into our Western philosophical canon. While his critique of the Western philosophical tradition and his own creative insights are unprecedented and immensely important, his blatant inegalitarianism and remarks against women are often too difficult to stomach. This paper attempts to introduce Western philosophers to Chuang Tzu, a Chinese thinker (...) who shares much of Nietzsche’s style and philosophy, but also espouses a thoroughgoing egalitarianism. It does so by comparing Nietzsche and Chuang Tzu in regard to their methods, style, and philosophical beliefs, with a particular emphasis on the naturalism and perspectivism found in each thinker’s philosophy. The hope is to provide Western liberal-minded intellectuals interested in Nietzsche and in equality with another perspective to bolster their thinking. (shrink)

Insofar as disagreement may in principle regard most of (maybe all) facets of information system ontologies’ [ISOs] debate, it may also produce a plurality of views – sometimes inconsistent with each other – on ISOs’ development and design. This paper analyzes a view that makes the recognition of – and provides a theoretical foundation for – such a plurality of views a trademark: perspectivism (on ISOs). The aim is to show what exactly endorsing perspectivism consists of, and how (...) perspectivism differs from different, competing views. Section 2 introduces the main claims of perspectivism, and remarks that perspectivism mainly deals with ISOs’ development and design. As for ISOs’ development, Sect. 3 considers domain’s partition and systematization, by distinguishing perspectivism from realism and relativism. Section 3 also shows that perspectivism implies some sort of variantism on ISOs’ representational primitives, about which perspectivism may not differ from its rivals. As for the ISOs’ design, Sect. 4 points out that despite perspectivism grants the possibility to use any procedural approach, principle, and ontological language, it is not committed to uphold that all those approaches, principles, and languages are legitimate. Finally, Sect. 5 focuses on both perspectivism’s weaknesses and (theoretical) contribution to ISOs’ debate. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to propose a way to study the role of perspectives in both the production and justification of experimental knowledge claims. My starting point for this will be Anjan Chakravartty’s claim that Ronald Giere’s perspectival account of the role of instruments in the production of such claims entails relativism in the form of irreducibly incompatible truths. This led Michela Massimi to argue that perspectivism, insofar as it wants to form a realist position, is only (...) concerned with the justification of such claims: whether they are produced reliably is, on her view, a perspective-independent fact of the matter. Following a suggestion by Giere on how scientists handle incompatible experimental results, I will then argue that Massimi’s perspectivism can be extended to also cover the production of such claims, without falling into relativism. I will elaborate this suggestion by means of Uljana Feest’s work on how scientists handle incompatible experimental results. I will argue that, if we reconceptualize perspectives as embodied and situated ways of going about in experimentation that can be made explicit through interpretation, we can obtain a fruitful understanding of the role of perspectives in both the production and justification of experimental knowledge. While this role is primarily exploratory, it can still allow for a substantial form of realism. (shrink)

Abstract:My aim in this article is to explore the role of perspectivism—roughly, the view that works of art prescribe a certain perspective—in aesthetic cognitivism and in the ethical evaluation of art, particularly as it features in the value-interaction debate. Although I am critical of perspectivism’s capacity to shoulder an artwork’s cognitive and ethical value, I find some of the arguments mounted against it, most notably those by Ted Nannicelli, misdirected, and I present several arguments against them. However, because (...) my aim is to show that both aesthetic cognitivism and ethical criticism should move beyond a concern for the perspective, I offer a different criticism of perspectivism to demonstrate how it should be modified if it is to make a more substantial contribution to the ethical evaluation of art. I conclude by providing a sketch of what I call ethically minded criticism of art, that is, one that is concerned not with a perspective that a work advances but with revealing work’s cognitive and ethical insights, that is thus better suited to promoting art’s educational and cultural value. (shrink)

The paper discusses Giere’s perspectivism in philosophy of science. Giere is certainly right in judging that, even within perspectives, the strongest possible conclusion is that some model provides a good but never perfect fit to aspects of the world, but its agency-laden “modelism” and realistic instrumentalism should be extended to a comprehensive general perspectivist and “indirect” realistic epistemology and embed it in an anthropology proper of the man as “flexible multiple human being”. Scheme-interpretations and specific perspectives are necessary for (...) any cognition in any science—natural and social, but also for everyday conceptions, modeling and practical acting as well as in philosophy and philosophy of science. (shrink)

The paper defends the idea that Jamesian pragmatism, Nietzschean perspectivism, and philosophical anthropology represent a consistent triad, for the similarities and connections between the first two positions rest in their engagement with the anthropological question. As will be argued, a) pragmatism is concerned with anthropology and that it deals with a fundamental issue of Nietzsche’s late thought; b) the problem of the type of man (der Typus Mensch) is involved in Nietzsche’s questioning the value of truth, and perspectivism (...) is an alternative view to Platonic and Christian metaphysics which arises from the same phenomenalist conception of knowledge defended by James ; c) Nietzsche’s interest in developing a philosophy that affirms the perspectival character of existence is primarily anthropological, and this is in fact the pragmatic criterion of validity that one can attribute to Nietzschean perspectivism. (shrink)