Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 04:58:09 +0100
Subject: Re: PKF: When Harry Met Sandra


John Fox wrote:

> 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.

Your example from Nietzsche is helpful.  But I still see some
problems.

You talk of how to "get to" objectivity.  The "perspectives", which we
already have, before we've got there, would then be not yet objective.
But something that is not objective cannot be objective *and*
something else, so it cannot be an example of something that's
objective and also not-value-neutral.

Or consider the case of a coin seen at an angle so that it appears
oval (though it is in fact circular).  "The coin is oval" is not
objective.  Oval is just how it appears from a particular subject's
point of view.  (We might even say the "oval" claim is "subjective".)
The objective claims are (a) "the coin is circular", and (b) "the coin
appears oval when viewed from the position occupied by that observer".

I take it that Harding has a notion of "strong objectivity".
It appears to correspond to what you've called "objectivity"
above.  I suspect that that's on the right track and that her
"strong objectivity" is similar to ordinary "objectivity"
while her "objectivity" is not what would ordinarily be 
called "objectivity" at all.

(Probably someone will object to my claim that the coin is in fact
circular.  But it shouldn't be hard to see "the coin is circular"
as true, and as distinct from "the coin appears circular from
certain points of view".  Coins *are* (roughly) circular, even
though they appear circular from some points of view and oval
from others.)  (Yes, I know that some coins, such as the UK 50p,
are not circular.)

> 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.

There are a couple of ways to understand that.  If we got rid of all
perspectival knowledge we'd be getting rid of all knowledge, because
all knowledge is perspectival.  That's one.  The other is: If we got
rid of all perspectival knowledge we'd be getting rid of all knowledge,
because we need perspectival knowledge in order to *get to* knowledge
that is not perspectival.  

> 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, especially neglected ones.  I hope that the
> analogy between this position and Nietzsche's is clear.

Where does one arrive after transcending these limitations if not
at something that is independent of the value-viewpoints?  If we're
still left with claims that true from some viewpoints and false
from others, in what way have we transcended the limitations?

-- jd
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