Tag: scientific perspectivism

Where our projects nod politely, then go their separate ways

(For the constructive exposition of Perspectival Realism—its three layers of mediation, its commitments, and its ontology without footnotes—see the main article. This piece deals with the differences by Michela Massimi’s and my versions.)

I suppose it was inevitable. You spend years muttering into your notebook about mediation, realism without bombast, the irretrievability of universality, and the peculiar way science manages to stumble forward with partial, parochial tools… and then, inevitably, you discover that someone else—Michela Massimi, in this case—has been busy constructing her own edifice a few hills over.

I arrived late to her party. Fine. But now that I’m here, let’s pour a drink and compare architecture.

Because while our buildings look similar from a distance—both labelled Perspectival Realism—they’re made from different bricks and aimed at different skylines.

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1. A Courteous Bow: We Are Not Strangers in the Same Wilderness

Massimi and I share several foundational intuitions:

• No God’s-eye view.
  She rejects the fantasy of disembodied objectivity. So do I. Reality is not a neutral theatre awaiting the Enlightenment spectator.
• Knowledge is situated.
  Her emphasis on historically embedded scientific communities echoes my own insistence that sense, cognition, and culture structure every act of knowing.
• Plural perspectives, not universal sovereignty.
  No single inferential vantage point dominates; multiple perspectives can be fruitfully interlaced.
  That’s strikingly consonant with my claim that mediation is a condition, not a defect.
• Anti-relativist without universalist delusion.
  Neither of us has patience for the “all maps are equal” caricature peddled by people who wouldn’t know a real relativist if they tripped over one in a library.

From this angle, we’re intellectual cousins—two people independently refusing Enlightenment triumphalism while refusing to surrender realism to the absolutists.

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2. The Parting of the Ways: Our Projects Are Not the Same Creature

But similarities disguise deeper divergences. Here are the important ones:

a) She’s doing epistemology; I’m doing ontology.

Massimi reconstructs realism from the inside out by examining scientific practice—models, inferences, historically evolving toolkits.

My project is more structural. Sense mediation (icons), cognitive mediation (instrumentation), and linguistic-cultural mediation (conceptual carving) are not methodological observations; they are conditions of access to reality. They’re deeper than scientific practice—they underlie it.

b) She salvages realism; I happily burn universality and build realism back from the ashes.

Massimi is rehabilitating realism’s good name.
I’m less sentimental. Realism, as a doctrine, has been caught lying too many times. I want the realism of resistance, not the realism of representation.

c) Her anchor is “modal robustness”; mine is “structured resistance through mediation.”

Massimi’s realism rests on the idea that phenomena are robust across models and contexts—they persist modally.

I agree that robustness is useful. But robustness is filtered through linguistic concepts, cognitive priors, and sensorimotor limitations. It’s a second-order indicator, not a metaphysical foothold.

Resistance—the world’s refusal to bend to belief—is deeper. It’s what enables robustness to manifest.

d) Her perspectives are model-based; mine are existential.

Massimi focuses on scientific perspectives—frameworks articulated through inferential blueprints.

My perspectivalism lives at the level of:

• what our senses can show,
• what our minds can shape,
• what our languages can articulate,
• what our cultures deem thinkable.

That’s a wider cut than scientific models.

We are working at different depths of mediation.

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3. Convergences Worth Keeping, Divergences Worth Defending

Let me put it cleanly:

• Massimi gives us a realism of models.
  A realism that emerges from the community of scientific practice, negotiated through historically situated inferential perspectives.
• I’m after a realism of resistance.
  A realism that remains intact even when models break, when languages fail, when cognitive categories run aground.
  Not the realism of what we say, but the realism of what pushes back.

Our projects are not incompatible, but they are differently motivated.

She is concerned with scientific rationality’s legitimacy.
I am concerned with the conditions of access to reality in the first place.

She patches the Enlightenment’s ship.
I point out that the ship’s hull is three layers of mediation thick, and pretend that universality is the hole in the floor.

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4. A Clean Acknowledgement: She Was Here First (Sort Of)

Yes—Massimi coined the term in this specific form, and she developed a sophisticated, rigorous scientific perspectivism that deserves respect.

But my Perspectival Realism emerged from a different genealogy:

• the insufficiency of language,
• the inescapability of conceptual carving,
• the recursive inadequacy of cognitive tools,
• the quiet, stubborn existence of a world we only ever meet askance.

Different animals. Same habitat.

So no, I’m not competing with Massimi.
And no, I’m not rebranding her work.

What I’m doing—and what this piece makes explicit—is placing my ontology in dialogue with hers. Two parallel rejections of universality. Two parallel refusals of relativism. Two parallel attempts to articulate realism without pretending we’ve escaped the conditions of being human.

If I arrived late to her race, so be it.
I’m not running for her finish line anyway.

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DISCLAIMER: This article was written or output by ChatGPT 5.1. It started as a conversation with Claude Sonnet 4.5, where I had input days of output for evaluation. One of these outputs was the post about Erasmus and the Emissary Who Forgot to Bow. A group chat ensued between me, Claude and ChatGPT.

What started as a discussion about the merits of my position, expressed in the Erasmus-influenced essay, drifted to one about Perspectival Realism. That discussion deepened on ChatGPT, as I further discussed my recent thoughts on the latter topic. I had rendered a Magic: The Gathering parody trading card as I contemplated the subject. It’s how my brain works.

All of this led me to ask ChatGPT to summarise the conversation, and, upon further discussion, I asked it to draft this article – the second of five.

1. Perspectival Realism: The First Ontology Without an Asterisk
   This article discusses what Perspectival Realism means to me and how I got to this position.
2. Why Perspectival Realism Is Not Relativism
   Further discussion prompted me to differentiate this ontology from other perspectives.
3. Arriving Late to Massimi’s Party: Perspectival Realism in Parallel 👈
   I spent another half-hour following Google search results as I wanted to see if anyone else had already been using the term, Perspectival Realism. I ended up on the Oxford publishing site. I found a 2022 book with this name, authored by Michela Massimi. They allowed me to download the book, so I asked ChatGPT to summarise our positions, specifically where we agreed and differed.
4. Against the Vat: Why Perspectival Realism Survives Every Sceptical Hypothesis
   At 0500, I returned to bed, but I woke up again at 0700, thinking about how one might differentiate between Putnam’s brain in a vat from Perspectival Realism. ChatGPT asked if I wanted that output in long-form.
5. The Constraint Interface: Toward a Nexal Ontology
   Being uncomfortable with the dichotomy between Realism and Idealism, I chatted to come up with terminology that disrupts what I consider a false dichotomy, focusing on the nexus rather than privileging one or the other. Consider this similar to the debate on sex and gender binaries.

As I mentioned at the end of the first series, I may return to this series and publish a coherent expository version more in line with my usual style. Meantime, this allows me to share my ideas unvarnished and unpolished at the same time, granting me more time to focus on other matters. Apologies to those who may disagree with the outline format. Honestly, it annoys me, but I am choosing function over form at the moment.