Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 12:10:53 +1000 (EST)
Subject: Re: PKF: When Harry Met Sandra


In reply to Jeff Dalton:  Take the example of Nietzsche's "perspectivism",
often confused with relativism. His metaphor for knowing - seeing.  Now
we always see something only from some angle or perspective or other.
So there is a possibility of error (like Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced
concreteness") in assuming that you are seeing the "whole" truth - that
your seeing (correctly) the coin as oblong (you're seeing it side on)
entitles you to deny that the bloke who sees it as round, or oval, is seeing
it wrongly.

Still, you all have partial and not obviously reconciled "perspectives".
How do you get to objectivity? - By seeing things from _different_
 perspectives, taking them all into account, finding a speculation (it's a
flat 3-D cylinder, perhaps??) that reconciles and explains them.

So, Nietzsche says, objective knowledge is _not_ a matter of getting rid
of everything that depends on a particular perspective. It is a question of
overcoming the _limitations_ of particular perspectives - but even that
is done in a way that depends entirely on particular perspectives. If we
got rid of all perspectival knowledge we'd be getting rid of all knowledge.
(He ties this in, in a way I find slightly too kind to Kant, to Kant's
critique of
knowing things in themselves. He takes Kant to have been making much
his, Nietzsche's, point, where I think Kant was making a worse one.)

I take it that Sandra Harding proposes that all knowledge is from a
value-viewpoint and the way to transcend the limitations of this is not
to get rid of whatever is not "value-free" but to look at things from
various value-positions, especiallyneglected ones.  I hope that the
analogy between this position and Nietzsche's is clear.

(I haven't argued, here, that all knowledge _is_ from a value-standpoint;
but I hope I've given some idea of how a notion of objectivity can be
reconciled with this position, which is what was asked.)

Best Wishes,
	John Fox

School of Philosophy
La Trobe University
Bundoora, Vic 3083
Australia


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