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Perspective: Some specific point of view
or what is seen from it, often used metaphorically as in "that is so
- from your perspective". The notion of perspective is
useful, as in a sense all knowledge is personal,
even if this knowledge, as any system of verbalized beliefs, can be
shared and made intersubjectively agreed
upon.
But the term "perspective" is also often used vaguely, imprecisely and
misleadingly, and as if the fact that your perspective is different from
mine, which is different from his and hers also, and holds vice-versa in
each case, would establish that there is no
truth, or only relative and personal truth.
This is a confusion, as indeed can be seen from the everyday notion
of perspective, in which - say - you and I see a landscape from our personal
points of view: Commonsensically and realistically, the landscape is
there, you and I are there, and our perspectives are there, in our
minds, indeed coordinated with our positions with respect to the
landscape, but undoubtedly indeed personal besides being about something
there that can be seen, in principle, by many, for many reasons, for
many purposes, from many perspectives. And all of these perspectives are
modes of representing.
Next, in a logical sense, it may be said
that a perspective can be articulated as some sort of axiom
system or system of assumptions, and that human beings, having the gift
of language, can share these systems and investigate their logical
properties, and their agreements and differences, and indeed can also
try to find out, based on intersubjectively accessible empirical
evidence, whose perspective is more true, or more adequate, or more
useful for some purpose, or better formulated.
And in so far as the personal side of a perspective is or may be
important, this can be articulated in terms of a
logic of propositional
attitudes.
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