A SENSIBLE PERSPECTIVISM

Abstract

The moderate perspectivism envisaged fits naturally with a pluralist, tolerant attitude towards divergence in modes of inquiry and evaluation. The core perspectivist idea is familiar to contemporary analytical philosophers from Thomas Nagel’s claim that there is no such thing as the view from nowhere. They are marked by the sensory organisation, cognitive processing or linguistic articulation on which they rely, by the theoretical assumptions and cultural associations that they embody, or by some such contingently variable influences. The metaphor of visual perspective already points us towards the possibility of integrative reduction. The reduction of the indexical to the non-indexical serves as a model of integrative reduction, and as a model of how in principle perspectivism can be vindicated without recourse to the hypothesis of multiple vision or a multiple reality. Figurative representation may involve understatement, overstatement, insinuation, double entendre, irony, flattery or any of the many devices mapped in studies of rhetoric. Show more