Perspectivism (also called perspectivalism) is the epistemological principle that perception of and knowledge of something are always bound to the interpretive perspectives of those observing it. While perspectivism regard all perspectives and interpretations as being of equal truth or value, it holds that no one has access to an absolute view of the world cut off from perspective. Perspectivism may be regarded as an early form of epistemological pluralism, though in some accounts includes treatment of value theory,
Early forms of perspectivism have been identified in the philosophies of Protagoras, Michel de Montaigne, and Gottfried Leibniz. However, its first major statement is considered to be Friedrich Nietzsche's development of the concept in the 19th century, influenced by Gustav Teichmüller's use of the term some years prior. For Nietzsche, perspectivism takes the form of a realist antimetaphysics while rejecting both the correspondence theory of truth and the notion that the truth-value of a belief always constitutes its ultimate worth-value. Lacewing Michael adds that although perspectivism doesn't accede to an objective view of the world that is detached from our subjectivity, our assessment of reality can still approach "objectivity" subjectively and asymptotically. Nehamas also describes how perspectivism does not prohibit someone from holding some interpretations to be definitively true. It only alerts us that we cannot objectively determine the truth from outside our perspective. The idea that perspectivism is an absolutely true thesis, is called weak perspectivism by Brian Lightbody. The basic practice of comparing contradictory perspectives to one another may also be considered one such form of perspectivism , as may the entire philosophical problem of how true knowledge is to penetrate one's perspectival limitations.
Precursors and early developments
In Western languages, scholars have found perspectivism in the philosophies of Heraclitus ( – ), Protagoras ( – ), Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592 CE), and Gottfried Leibniz In Asian languages, scholars have found perspectivism in Buddhist, Jain, and Daoist texts. Anthropologists have found a kind of perspectivism in the thinking of some indigenous peoples. Some theologians believe John Calvin interpreted various scriptures in a perspectivist manner.
Ancient Greek philosophy
The Western origins of perspectivism can be found in the pre-Socratic philosophies of Heraclitus and Protagoras. The antiperspectivism of Plato made him a central target of critique for later perspectival philosophers such as Nietzsche.|author=Michel de Montaigne|title="Of Cannibals"|source=Essais (1595), trans. J. M. Cohen
Nietzsche
In his works, Nietzsche makes a number of statements on perspective which at times contrast each other throughout the development of his philosophy. Nietzsche's begins by challenging the underlying notions of 'viewing from nowhere', 'viewing from everywhere', and 'viewing without interpreting' as being absurdities. Instead, all is attached to some perspective, and all viewers are limited in some sense to the perspectives at their command. In The Genealogy of Morals he writes:
In this, Nietzsche takes a contextualist approach which rejects any God's-eye view of the world. This has been further linked to his notion of the death of God and the dangers of a resulting relativism. However, Nietzsche's perspectivism itself stands in sharp contrast to any such relativism.</p>|author=Friedrich Nietzsche|source=The Will to Power, §481 (1883–1888), transl. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale
While Nietzsche does not plainly reject truth and objectivity, he does reject the notions of truth, facts, and objectivity. While his perspectivism presents a number of challenges regarding the nature of truth, its more controversial element lies in its questioning of the of truth.
Truth and Language
One of the earliest examples of Nietzsche’s perspectivist thinking occurs in the 1873 essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Infused with a tone of heavy skepticism, the essay explores the arbitrary anthropogenic nature of truth and its connection to an inconstant language. Knowledge of the world, and by extension Truth, is mere illusion, according to Nietzsche, born of variable circumstances, self-deception, and biological nature:<blockquote>…[Humans] will always exchange truths for illusions. What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say ‘the stone is hard,’ as if ‘hard’ were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation!</blockquote>Here Nietzsche is fulminating about the inherent flaw of so-called objectivity. “Subjective stimulation” equates to an individually biased experience, not unlike Montaigne’s abovementioned psychological biases. Of course, it’s worth noting Nietzsche targets his critique on the quality (hardness) and not the object (stone), for when speaking of subjectivity, is it not easier to question how something feels as opposed to what it is?
Nonetheless, humans’ reliance on language to express truths automatically compromises the stability of those truths, for language itself is in flux, born of circumstances that differ from time to time, place to place, people to people. Famously, Nietzsche writes:<blockquote>What then is truth? A moveable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. and Karl Jaspers. Ortega's perspectivism, replaced his previous position that "man is completely social". His reversal is prominent in his work Verdad y perspectiva ("Truth and perspective"), where he explained that "each man has a mission of truth" and that what he sees of reality no other eye sees. He explained:<blockquote>From different positions two people see the same surroundings. However, they do not see the same thing. Their different positions mean that the surroundings are organized in a different way: what is in the foreground for one may be in the background for another. Furthermore, as things are hidden one behind another, each person will see something that the other may not.</blockquote>Ortega also maintained that perspective is perfected by the multiplication of its viewpoints. He noted that war transpires due to the lack of perspective and failure to see the larger contexts of the actions among nations. In this discourse, he highlighted the role of "circumstance" in finding out the truth since it allows us to understand realities beyond ourselves. and philosophy of science, particularly under the early influence of Ronald Giere, Jay Rosenberg, Ernest Sosa, and others. This contemporary form of perspectivism, also known as scientific perspectivism<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA-->, is more narrowly focused than prior forms—centering on the perspectival limitations of scientific models, theories, observations, and focused interest, while remaining more compatible for example with Kantian philosophy and correspondence theories of truth. Furthermore, scientific perspecitivism has come to address a number of scientific fields such as physics, biology, cognitive neuroscience, and medicine, as well as interdisciplinarity and philosophy of time.