Perspectives And Purposes

[DocWatts]

Greetings! It's been a hot minute since I've posted on the Intellectual Stuff forums, but I thought I might share some of what I've been working on for the philosophy book I'm writing, 7 Provisional Truths. The section below is an introduction to a chapter on perspective-taking - what perspectives are, their limitations, and how to use them as tools for meaning-making.

The aim in this chapter is to develop a form of perspectival pluralism which manages to thread a pragmatic 'middle way' between rigid absolutism and paralyzing relativism, without being a lukewarm attempt to split the difference between two played-out extremes.

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Perspectives are like sketches of a house, drawn from different angles and for different purposes. Just as a dreamy watercolor painting and an architectural blueprint reveal different aspects of the same building, perspectives derive their value from what you're trying to accomplish.

Perspectives And Purposes

At this juncture in our journey, we ascend from the corridors of context and into the panorama of perspective. The insights we've been gathering so far form a coherent methodology with a name: Enactivism.

Its purpose is to help us navigate ambiguity without getting lost in it, by charting a flexible 'middle way' between rigid certainty and paralyzing skepticism. No lukewarm compromise between extremes, Enactivism forges a third path where meaning is enacted through our lived interactions with the world - yet no less 'real' in its lived significance.

A guiding meridian of this framework is that our situated position within Reality isn't an obstacle to overcome, but a condition to be embraced. It's these situated positions, also known as perspectives, that will be our focus here - along with the assessments we attach to them. The pivotal insight: these assessments are never neutral or purpose-free. They have everything to do with where we stand in relation to the world.

Purpose directs perception, but not all purposes are created equal. And critically, this doesn't mean that a perspective is worthwhile just because it helps us achieve some instrumental aim. The purposes that underlie our perspectives are themselves subject to ethical scrutiny (a subject we’ll be returning to when we discuss Malicious Perspectives later-on).

Which brings us to our thesis: all perspectives are partial. 'Partial' means localized, limited, and incomplete - inevitable consequences of having a perspective at all, rather than a God's-eye view. Any vantage point we occupy is necessarily a 'view from somewhere', not a view of 'everything, everywhere, across all time'. A trite point? Perhaps - until we find ourselves in an argument over something that matters to us, and our vantage point morphs into an all-seeing eye with a 360-degree view of Reality.

While the lenses we view the world through both reveal and distort, that doesn't mean they're all created equal. Some are serviceable enough for general use, some excel only for highly specialized tasks, and some are so distorted that we're better off discarding them entirely.

But how do we separate the functional from the defective if these lenses can be swapped out, but not left behind entirely? If the only way to evaluate a perspective is from within another perspective, does that doom us to a hall of mirrors with no way out? Not at all.

While a sweeping view of the full mosaic has been a holy grail for philosophers, the everyday mug that we actually drink from need not be so grandiose. Our lenses don't need to be flawless to provide a reliable view - they just need to be 'good enough' for the task they're applied to. In a messy Reality where control is an illusion and complete information is a pipe dream, it's practicality rather than perfection that's sublime.

The House of Perspectives

Envision a group of professionals from different fields descending upon a house to represent it through their specialized lenses:

• The artists set up their easels from different vantage points, and get to work in their chosen mediums
• The photographer searches for angles that showcase elegant landscaping while avoiding unsightly power lines
• The architect updates schematics for the addition of an enclosed patio
• The historian writes about how the house fits into the neighborhood's shifting cultural landscape
• The city inspector notes code violations that are invisible to the untrained eye, but compromise the building's safety

Each of these perspectives reveals something vital about the house, but none are exhaustive. A dreamy watercolor painting doesn’t reveal the house’s structural flaws. Detailed schematics tell us nothing of what it’s like to live in the house. Photographs for a real estate website don’t convey its cultural significance within the neighborhood.

The mistake comes from thinking of partiality as a 'flaw' to be overcome by painting on a bigger canvas or drafting more detailed schematics. Even if we archived this collection of viewpoints into an oversized scrapbook, the composite would still reflect our particular interests and priorities. No matter how meticulous our curation, how diverse our contributions, the house will always be more exhaustive than our attempts to catalogue it.

The takeaway? Partiality isn't a failure to be rectified but a condition to be understood. It's the inevitable consequence of having a perspective at all - a viewpoint rather than an everything-point.

Breaking Free from False Dichotomies

Human psychology being the engine for meaning-making that it is, we feel an almost gravitational pull toward certainty and closure. When this quintessential desire collides with the messy complexity of the real world, however, our sensemaking can get trapped between a rock and hard place. 

On one end, we may mistake our partial sketch for the complete picture, insisting that we occupy a privileged vantage point rather than a situated position with unavoidable blind spots. On the other, we may retreat into a cynical relativism where the sketches blur into a murky blot of subjective opinions, none more reliable than another.  Or, with no means of escape in sight, we might attempt to split the difference - settling into an indecisive middle ground that offers neither the conviction of the former nor the humility of the latter.

The solution to this dilemma is as deceptively profound as it is frustratingly straightforward. When we pause to consider how we got ourselves into this situation in the first place, it becomes unmistakably clear that we’ve been wedged within a false dichotomy. The rock and the hard place that once seemed immutable begin to reveal themselves as constructed facades, assembled upon a foundation of emotionally intuitive assumptions that feels solid enough - if you don’t probe it for cracks.

And lest you mistake this epistemic hygiene for some dramatic revelation about a hidden Reality behind appearances - there’s no red or blue pills to be found here, and your tour guide is no Morpheus. Instead, it’s just the mundane mechanics of social learning, combined with the everyday discomfort that accompanies ambiguity.

The sensemaking trap we'll be stepping out of is twofold. The first misconception is an either/or fallacy. Either our viewpoints are valid insofar as they correspond to an inferred mind-independent Reality, or else they’re merely subjective constructions with no truth beyond our individual preferences and social agreements.

The second misconception follows from the first: the assumption that there's an 'out there' and an 'in here' - as though the knowing subject and the world they inhabit can be cleanly separated. The takeaway isn't some New-Age pseudo-profundity that 'you are the whole universe'. It's that the relationship between 'mind and world' is highly porous - less like a brick wall, and more like a permeable membrane where the boundaries are fluid and constant exchange is the norm.

The alternative we'll be exploring is that perspectives can be better or worse than one another, but not in the way that a yardstick measures against a fixed standard. Instead, perspectives are purpose-bound - useful or inhibitory to the degree that they shed light on whatever it is that we're trying to understand. Not a God's-eye view, and not just a matter of whim, but a situated disclosure that reveals aspects of the world in relation to our concerns.

This path leads not to a flattening relativism where all lenses are equally valid, but toward a rigorous pluralism where multiple viewpoints overlap to reveal complementary truths.

Edited Wednesday at 09:47 PM by DocWatts