Perspectival Realism

Perspectival realism, also known as Scientific Perspectivism, is a position in the debate on realism – primarily for scientific knowledge, specifically the status of scientific models, theories and claims about scientific entities. It aims for a ‘middle ground’ between realism and anti-realism, maintaining that there is a mind-independent reality and that our theories and models describe this reality literally. However, it acknowledges that an all-encompassing view from nowhere (a ‘God’s eye view’) is impossible, and our means of evaluating knowledge thus cannot rely on access to mind-independent facts. Knowledge production is historically and culturally situated and thus perspectival. Instead, we must validate our knowledge by cross-perspectival or cross-model comparison, either over time (diachronically) or between cultures and scientific disciplines (synchronically). The position is relatively new as an explicit position in the realism debate, but authors build on a longer tradition of perspectivism from Leibniz, Kant, and Nietzsche. Similar ideas have also been pointed out in Kuhn, Putnam, Feyerabend and Hacking. The position took its current shape from Ronald Giere’s 2006 book. Giere, like others who have written on this view, takes scientific models to be of central concern. He argues that models represent the world through similarity relations, but always partially so (they are abstracted and idealised). Models thus pick out aspects based on the scientific community’s perspective: their background knowledge, the tools available, and the goal of their enquiry. However, Giere remains vague on the metaphysical standing of his position, and critics argue that depending on this, his view will either tip into relativism, or collapse into realism, merely with the addition that our knowledge is partial – a point which most realists will trivially agree to. This debate unfolds primarily around the question of how we should understand the existence and use of inconsistent models. Several papers and collected volumes discussing this have been published. Most noticeably, another large monograph on the topic was published by Michela Massimi in 2023. Here, Massimi argues for a different view on models that does not rely on similarity, and thus, supposedly, sidesteps the issue of inconsistency. She takes models to be modal tools that mutually constrain each other in providing what she calls ‘physical conceivability’. The point for perspectivalists is that, given our epistemic circumstances, this is really the best possible thing realism can hope for.   //   With the rising interest in perspectival realism, scholars have pointed out related positions and links to parallel traditions. Berghofer, French and others highlight similar ideas in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Karl Jaspers, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Connolly, drawing on Chinn, highlights links between Zhuangzi’s epistemic relativism and perspectivism. And Kayange has used perspectival realism as a framework for articulating the link between African philosophy and traditional Anglo-Saxon philosophy.   //   Note that items classed in this section will primarily address questions within the debate on realism and the philosophy of science. For papers on perspectivism in regard to spatial features of perception see 'The Nature of Perceptual Experience’. For papers on perspectivism in ethics see ‘Moral Realism and Antirealism’ and ‘Nietzsche: Meta-ethics’.