andy-k wrote:
>I've looked up 'perspectivism' and it seems to
> amount to a denial of absolute truth, but I'm not
> sure how this engages with the view I'm attempting
> to put over.
"A denial of absolute truth" is missing why we'd would arrive at that
conclusion as the result of taking into account the perspectival nature
of perception and conception. And most definitions surely spin around
Nietzche. I'm referring to a broader version (or need for it) that could
subsume most or all of the best stuff generated by perspectival thought,
including aspects of scientific perspectivism. See brief review of an
example of SP at
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/196167.ctl
On one hand, I really don't like using the term *perspectivism* because
it gets associated with narrow baggage, but OTH it's about the only one
I've found that comes nearest to summing-up the conditional dependencies
of perception / conception in a single expression.
>I guess that if one conceives of a domain of "things
> in themselves" (metaphysical realism) as "absolute
> truth" (or "true reality") then the connection is
> established.
"Perspectivism rejects objectivism as impossible, and claims that there
are no objective evaluations which transcend cultural formations or
subjective designations. . . . . Perspectivism says that there can be
radically different and incommensurable conceptual schemes (ultimate
ways of looking at the world) or perspectives, one of which we must
(consciously or unconsciously) adopt, but none of which is more correct
than its rivals."
But some objective models are more privileged than others according to
their effectiveness in a context or their usefulness abroad (our
informal "common-sense" model, for instance). If, say, a perspectivist
descended movement (postmodernism?) doesn't recognize the privileged
status of western cultural outlooks and practices, that's simply an
error that doesn't jibe with the most powerful societies (voodoo games
don't deserve the privileges of science games even if both don't capture
a nonconstructed reality).
This part of a common definition of perspectivism I could agree with
minus reservations, because such debates plainly continue over the
centuries: "This leads to constant reassessment of rules (i.e., those of
philosophy, the scientific method, etc.) according to the circumstances
of individual perspectives. *Truth* is thus formalized as a whole that
is created by integrating different vantage points together."
>I'm certainly not arguing *against* the view of a
> "noumenal domain that might exist independent of
> human perceptions/conceptions", nor *against* the
> view that such a domain that might consist of
> "things in themselves", but rather *for* a
> consideration of the view that such a domain
> *needn't* consist of "things in themselves". Your
> term "things for each other" certainly does engage
> with these ideas (particularly with Whitehead's
> notion of "mutual immanence").
I guess a single process engaging in *universal steps* rather than lots
of mingled processes (transpiring at different rates) could diminish
belief that objects or their properties literally affect each other. As
in causal relations and interactions. We'd still need the idea that
objects influence each other for explanatory and predictive purposes,
but it would be unnecessary to promote further than that. Like events
exhibited in the scenes of a movie film, the supposed interactions
between objects would be the result of predetermined synchrony (or brute
synchrony if the movie analogy resembles a block-universe too much). No
mystery then as to how a nonconscious matter-object or the nonconscious
fields associated with it could know there was other matter/fields
bordering it to affect or be affected by, since the positions of
everything would be nomologically orchestrated over time by the sequence
of whole frames (universal nows).
posted by Ecce
