Weak perspectivism is different from strong absolutism

Perspectivism Anand Rangarajan 09.03.2006 permalink

I've been reading ”Nietzsche's Perspectivism” by Steven D. Hales and Rex Welshon lately. Tremendous book. Especially for people caught in a naiive relativist trap - y'know where “It's all relative anyway” said in a vague, unfocused tone for maximum effect. The effect in this case being the throbbing of a particular vein on my forehead followed by the vein threatening a walkout.

First, Hales and Welshon formulate a version of strong perspectivism which is (approximately)“Every statement is true in some perspective and untrue in another.”Still somewhat vague. Hales and Welshon's notes unpack this asFor all x, there exists a y and there exists a z such that P(x) implies [R(y) and R(z) and T(x,y) and the negation of T(x,z)]where P is a one place predicate “is a statement”, R is a one place predicate “is a perspective” and T is a two place predicate “is true in.”If strong perspectivism is true in all perspectives, then there exists a statement that has the same truth value in all perspectives, namely, the strong perspectivism statement above. Big problem since that would mean that strong perspectivism is absolutely true. Oops.

Hales and Welshon, after carefully diagnosing this problem, go on to formulate a version of weak perspectivism which is (approximately)“There is at least one statement such that there is some perspective in which it is true and some perspective in which it is untrue.”Hales and Welshon's notes unpack this asThere exists an x and there exists a y and there exists a z such that P(x) and R(y) and R(z) and T(x,y) and the negation of T(x,z) is true.

Weak perspectivism is different from strong absolutism. The authors go on to point out that weak absolutism (the negation of strong perspectivism above) and weak perspectivism are consistent. That is, they can co-exist happily since weak absolutism implies that there could be statements which have the same truth value in all perspectives and weak perspectivism implies that there is at least one statement that has different truth values in some perspectives.Great stuff, right? There's a lot more. Check it out. Tagged with: perspectivism, Nietzsche, weak, strong, absolutism, relativism