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R. LANIER ANDERSON TRUTH AND OBJECTIVITY IN PERSPECTIVISM * ABSTRACT. I investigate the consequences of Nietzsche’s perspectivism for notions of truth and objectivity, and show how the metaphor of visual perspective motivates an epistemology that avoids self-referential difficulties. Perspectivism’s claim that every view is only one view, applied to itself, is often supposed to preclude the perspectivist’s ability to offer reasons for her epistemology. Nietzsche’s arguments for perspectivism depend on “internal reasons”, which have force not only in their own perspective, but also within the standards of alternative perspectives. Internal reasons allow a perspectivist argument against dogmatism without presupposing aperspectival criteria for theory choice. Nietzsche also offers “internal” conceptions of truth and objectivity which reduce them to a matter of meeting our epistemic standards. This view has pluralistic implications, which conflict with common sense, but it is nevertheless consistent and plausible. Nietzsche’s position is similar to Putnam’s recent internalism, and this is due to their common Kantian heritage. Recent years have seen numerous attempts to dissolve the realism/anti- realism debate. Hilary Putnam’s “internal realism” is among the most intriguing of these attempts to map a middle way between a strong form of realism and wholesale relativism. 1 Putnam distinguishes internal realism from a view he labels “metaphysical realism”, according to which the world is made up of a fixed totality of determinate, theory-independent objects, and there is a single true description of that world, whether we can discover it or not. This strong realism is problematic due to “the phenom- enon . . . of conceptual relativity” (Putnam 1990, x). Conceptual relativity arises because our theorizing, especially at more abstract levels, depends on the concepts we use to think about the world, and these concepts “cut the world up” in some one particular way. The world itself, considered independently of these concepts, does not determine any one way of “cut- ting things up”, and different schemes of concepts fill this role in different ways, producing various solutions for our highest level theoretical prob- lems and the questions of ontology that go along with them. Putnam thus definitively rejects the metaphysical realism he found tempting earlier in his career. 2 Given “conceptual relativity” there cannot be a single true de- scription of a completely independent reality, as the metaphysical realist insists, because the world does not determine answers to basic ontolog- ical questions independently of our variable conceptual assumptions. We Synthese 115: 1–32, 1998. © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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Page 1: Lanier Anderson [2006] Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism

R. LANIER ANDERSON

TRUTH AND OBJECTIVITY IN PERSPECTIVISM∗

ABSTRACT. I investigate the consequences of Nietzsche’s perspectivism for notionsof truth and objectivity, and show how the metaphor of visual perspective motivates anepistemology that avoids self-referential difficulties. Perspectivism’s claim that every viewis only one view, applied to itself, is often supposed to preclude the perspectivist’s abilityto offer reasons for her epistemology. Nietzsche’s arguments for perspectivism depend on“internal reasons”, which have force not only in their own perspective, but alsowithinthe standards of alternative perspectives. Internal reasons allow a perspectivist argumentagainst dogmatism without presupposing aperspectival criteria for theory choice. Nietzschealso offers “internal” conceptions of truth and objectivity which reduce them to a matterof meeting our epistemic standards. This view has pluralistic implications, which conflictwith common sense, but it is nevertheless consistent and plausible. Nietzsche’s position issimilar to Putnam’s recent internalism, and this is due to their common Kantian heritage.

Recent years have seen numerous attempts to dissolve the realism/anti-realism debate. Hilary Putnam’s “internal realism” is among the mostintriguing of these attempts to map a middle way between a strong form ofrealism and wholesale relativism.1 Putnam distinguishes internal realismfrom a view he labels “metaphysical realism”, according to which theworld is made up of a fixed totality of determinate, theory-independentobjects, and there is a single true description of that world, whether we candiscover it or not. This strong realism is problematic due to “the phenom-enon . . . of conceptual relativity” (Putnam 1990, x). Conceptual relativityarises because our theorizing, especially at more abstract levels, dependson the concepts we use to think about the world, and these concepts “cutthe world up” in some one particular way. The world itself, consideredindependently of these concepts, does not determine any one way of “cut-ting things up”, and different schemes of concepts fill this role in differentways, producing various solutions for our highest level theoretical prob-lems and the questions of ontology that go along with them. Putnam thusdefinitively rejects the metaphysical realism he found tempting earlier inhis career.2 Given “conceptual relativity” there cannot be a single true de-scription of a completely independent reality, as the metaphysical realistinsists, because the world does not determine answers to basic ontolog-ical questions independently of our variable conceptual assumptions. We

Synthese115: 1–32, 1998.© 1998Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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therefore have no way to conceive of a completely determinateandtheory-independent world: any determinate conception of the world captures onlythe world as already understoodthrough the offices of some particularconcepts. The very notion of an “absolute conception of the world”,3 andwith it metaphysical realism itself, turn out to be incoherent.

This rejection of metaphysical realism crucially depends on the notionof a conceptual scheme, or perspective. Metaphysical realism is incoherentbecause it tries to consider the world in independence from the limited per-spective of any actual theory about it, and even from the preconditions ofour theoretical practices in general. Putnam was not the first to exploit thisconnection between the notion of perspective and the rejection of a strongform of realism. The idea goes back at least to Nietzsche, whose entireepistemology travels under the name perspectivism. As I will argue in whatfollows, Nietzsche’s perspectivism, like internal realism, attempts to carveout a middle way between strong realism and wholesale relativism. An ex-ploration of Nietzsche’s notion of perspective therefore promises to give usa clearer picture of the philosophical implications and the historical rootsof attempts to secure this middle road. In particular, I will argue that tak-ing the metaphor of perspective seriously will force substantial revisionsin our ordinary conceptions of truth and objectivity, and that these revi-sions are demanded by a project – shared by Nietzsche and Putnam – fortransforming and extending certain broadly Kantian ideas in epistemology.

1. THE METAPHOR OF PERSPECTIVE

Nietzsche’s appeal to “perspective” in epistemology depends on a visualmetaphor that is supposed to capture certain limitations on our knowledgeclaims. Just as my visual perspective makes the world appear to me in aparticular way, so cognitive perspectives are a “humancontribution” ([GS]§ 57)4 reality, which give the world a certain “look” for us. We know thingsonly from the ‘points of view’ these perspectives define. In this section, Iwill discuss the parallels Nietzsche finds between vision and cognition,and also one difference that remains.

It is important to note from the outset that Nietzsche’s notion of aperspective is somewhat loose. He provides no precise individuation condi-tions for determining exactly when a disagreement amounts to a differenceof perspective, and when it is merely a difference of theory within a sharedperspective. For Nietzsche, this is an interpretive question that must beanswered on a case by case basis, by appeal to the details of the particulardisagreement. It makes no sense to attempt a precise enumeration of Niet-

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zschean perspectives, or to provide necessary and sufficient conditions forsomething’s being a perspective.

Still, Nietzsche does provide a loose working idea of what perspec-tives are, and how they function. Nietzsche conceives of perspectivesalong broadly Kantian lines: they organize our experience, or “simplifythe manifold” ([BGE] § 230), in accordance with “a scheme . . . positedby ourselves” ([WP] § 516). Such schemes are composed of our basicconcepts, among which Nietzsche often lists the very categories (e.g., cau-sation, substance) and distinctions (e.g., form/content) that Kant identifiedas integral to the organizing conceptual structure we impose onto the worldof experience (see, [BGE] §§ 21 and 34, [TI] III, § 2, [TI] III, § 5, [GS] §§110 and 121, and [WP] §§ 497, 516, and 574).5 Nietzsche is no orthodoxKantian, however. According to him, we adopt our particular organizingconcepts not because they are transcendental preconditions for any experi-ence, but because of their contingent (and potentially variable) relation toour needs, interests, and values (see [GM] III, § 12, and [TI] VI, §§ 5 and7).

Nietzsche turns to the visual metaphor of perspective to express thisconviction that our concepts and values shape the way things appear tous in cognition generally, because such influence emerges prominently inthe visual case. For example, even from the samevisual perspective, thefamous duck/rabbit line drawing can be seen either as a duck, or as a rabbit,depending on the more generalcognitiveperspective of the viewer. We caneven experience reversible “Gestalt switches”, through which what firstappeared as a duck, later appears to be a rabbit, and now a duck again. It isnot that the drawing itself is ambiguous. Rather,our perceptionis subjectto the influence of two incompatible ways of seeing that govern our overallexperience of the drawing, which does not look like some cross betweena duck and a rabbit, but rather appearsclearly to be a duck, orclearlyto be a rabbit, depending on which conceptual mind set is employed bythe viewer (i.e., whether she sees the drawing under the concept ‘duck’ orunder the concept ‘rabbit’). Value laden conceptual schemes exert a similarinfluence on the way we see things. For example, Bruner and Goodmanfound that children from poor backgrounds overestimate the size of coinsto a greater degree than children whose families are financially well off,and also that the degree of overestimation increases with thevalue (notthe size) of the coin, except between the quarter and the half dollar, whichBruner and Goodman write (in 1947) is “almost too valuable [to a childof ten] to be real” (Bruner and Goodman 1947, 39).6 They conclude thatthe visual experience of money, at least in the dimension of perceivedsize, is significantly influenced by its importance within the scheme of

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values which orders a child’s life. Nietzsche’s perspectivism suggests thateffects of this sort are analogous to the more general influence of cognitiveperspectives on experience, mediated through concepts. Concepts drawconnections among objects or experiences of a given type; the concept‘duck’, for example, links all the ducks, and the concept ‘substance’ linksthe substances. To organize experience through the use of a given concept,therefore, is to place objects into a particular grouping, and thereby to bringto light particular aspects of those objects. When we move from relativelysimple visual concepts to comprehensive concepts like ‘space’ and ‘cause’,which establish the fundamental relations linking objects in our experi-ence, the potential significance of conceptual differences is magnified. Adifference in such basic organizing concepts would result in a fundamentaldifference in apprehension of the world, i.e., in a difference of perspectives,in Nietzsche’s sense.

Nietzsche’s visual metaphor is infelicitous in one respect, however.There is a sense in which all visual perspectives are compatible, whereason Nietzsche’s view, not all cognitive perspectives are. In vision, opticsprovides rules which enable us to infer from the properties of an object toits perspectival appearance, and even from the appearance back to the ac-tual properties, given appropriate additional information from visual cues.There are of course various points of view on any visible object, and theobject appears differently from each of them, but these appearances differin just the ways the perspective rules would lead us to expect, enablingus to translate from one perspective to another. Traditional appeals to themetaphor of perspective, e.g., in Leibniz,7 assumed that cognitive perspec-tives were mutually consistent in just this way, and that there were lawsof epistemic ‘optics’ enabling us to infer from the appearances of thingsto the way they really are. The possibility of these inferences is bound upwith central ideas of metaphysical realism, e.g., the notion of a unique,determinate world of things in themselves, and the idea of a “God’s eyepoint of view” revealing the world’s nature. The whole point of Nietzsche’sperspectivism, however, is to deny the coherence of these ideas, so in hisview, there must be a serious disanalogy between cognitive and visualperspectives.

This compatibility of alternative visual perspectives depends on two el-ements: (1) a notion of objects independent from their visual appearances,and (2) the laws of geometrical optics. Without the notion of an indepen-dent object, the various perspectives are not alternative descriptions of thesame thing. Without the laws, there are no rules for making translationsbetween visual appearances and the actual properties of objects, or fromone appearance to another. These two elements are closely interrelated.

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Given our visual appearances and a description of the object, the laws ofperspective can be calculated. Given the appearances and the laws, alongwith additional information derived from visual cues, we can subtract theinfluence of perspective and infer to the properties of the independentobject.

Nietzsche denies the coherence of these interrelated notions when theyare extended from the visual to the cognitive case. He insists that wehave no justification for the posit of things in themselves, and denies thatthere are any laws of epistemic perspective describing the relation of ourperspectives to things in themselves, in the way the laws of geometricaloptics describe the perspectival relation of the visual system to its objects.If the influence of cognitive perspectives is perfectly general, as Nietzscheinsists,8 then there is simply no standpoint from which such a precise ‘op-tics’ of cognition might be developed. We investigate vision by checkingits representations against results obtained from other sensory modali-ties and from sciences like physics, physiology, and evolutionary biology,which help us understand the operation, construction, and developmentof the visual system. More importantly, our interpretation of visual repre-sentations depends on information drawn from outside the representationsthemselves. “Top down” processing provides us with previously gatheredinformation about a perceived object’s properties (e.g., size, position, andrigidity), and physiological visual cues like stereopsis, convergence, andaccommodation help us to determine its distance from the eye. In the caseof cognitive perspectives, by contrast, our situation affords us no broaderstandpoint from which we might ‘see’ how perspectives themselves work.All our information about the world has already been informed by our per-spective. Developing laws of perspective for cognition, therefore, wouldbe like trying to work out optics on the basis of the visual appearancesalone, without any independent information about the real properties ofthe objects, derived from visual cues or other sensory modalities. Such aproject is hopeless.

Despite this disanalogy, though, Nietzsche’s visual metaphor remainsan informative way to bring out other features of our cognitive perspec-tives. For example, the potential variety of points of view from whichwe might see an object corresponds to the variety of conceptual construc-tions people can use to organize their experience, and the different ‘looks’of an object associated with visual points of view suggest the differentappearances of the world arising from conceptual relativity.

The idea of perspective in painting provides further insight into thekind of limitation perspective places on our representation of the world.Alberti’s seminal treatment of one-point perspective, for example, empha-

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sizes the arbitrariness of the point of view around which the perspectiveconstruction is generated: he advises the painter to locate the centric pointof her construction just “where it seems best” (Alberti 1966, 56). The onlyconsiderations which speak in favor of one point over another are those ofproportionality and aesthetic value. Nietzsche similarly insists that we canchoose among cognitive perspectives only on the basis of our values andpurposes. In neither case are these pragmatic criteria sufficiently strong torequirethe adoption of some one point of view over all others.

Moreover, in painting as in the cognitive case, perspectives are holisticsystems. A perspective painting works by representing therelationsamongobjects. Alberti cites a painting by Timantes which depicts a giganticsleeping cyclops, whose size is captured through its juxtaposition withseveral satyrs shown in the act of measuring its thumb. The size of thepainted cyclops itself (i.e., its scale) is irrelevant: within the perspectiverepresentation it is the relations between the cyclops and the satyrs, andnot their size properties considered in isolation, that matter.9 Similarly,our cognitive perspectives determine only relations among the objects theyposit, and not the properties of mutually independent things in themselves.

This parallel is deep, and shows that the disanalogy between visual andcognitive perspectives discussed above conceals, as its flip side, a deeperpoint of analogy. There are no unique answers to questions of ontologyand individuation under perspectivism10 for the same reasons that Timan-tes’ representationby itself does not provide any determinate answer toquestions about the size of the figures it depicts. The kind of outsideknowledge (about the normal size of satyrs) which helps us to understandthe painting is absent in the cognitive case due to the global influence ofperspective, but this disanalogy should not obscure the deeper similarity inwhat the perspectival representationsthemselvescan accomplish in eachcase. Without the frame of reference given by outside knowledge, Timan-tes’ representation could not tell us how large the cyclops really is, just asno perspectival cognitive representation can reveal the properties of thingsas they are in themselves. A picture may be worth a thousand words,but without substantial background knowledge about the sort of thingsit represents, it resists even rudimentary interpretation. The influence ofperspective on our cognitive representations is limiting precisely becausethis aperspectival background knowledge is lacking.

All of the points of analogy I have mentioned can be traced back toa common underlying idea. The visual metaphor highlights the subjectivecontribution to our experience of the world. The potential variety of per-spectives and the element of arbitrariness involved in the choice of anyone arise from the many conditions we may be in as knowers. Perspectives

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are holistic systems of interpretation because the properties of objects inrepresentation depend on the relations of the represented object to the rep-resenter, as well as to other represented things. The function of the visualmetaphor, then, is to emphasize the subjectivity of the influence of perspec-tive. This is why Nietzsche traces the failings of previous epistemology toits “presupposition that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential” tothings ([WP] § 560).

It is important, however, not to overplay the relativistic consequencesof this view. To return to the metaphor, while it may be true that all of thevisual perspectives on a thing are equally perspectives, it does not followthat they are all equally good. Quite obviously, in fact, some are better thanothers, which is why people are willing to stand in line and pay premiumprices to get good seats for theater and sporting events. Naturally, the valueof different perspectives depends on our purposes in adopting them: forviewing very small objects suspended in some collection of water, it isuseful to get close to it, perhaps even artificially close through the use ofa microscope, but for seeing the shape of a lake, one wants to be far away.Nietzsche affirms just this sort of relativity to our purposes and values inthe case of cognitive perspectives. Precisely this point, however, presup-poses that perspectives actually have relative value, and thus that they arenot all equally good.

This visual metaphor is supposed to lead us to a theory of epistemology,and even with the qualification I just mentioned, the theory’s appeal tosubjectivity raises troubling philosophical problems. In particular, thereare notorious self-referential difficulties which plague any attempt to givean argument for perspectivism, and I now turn to them.

2. PERSPECTIVE DIFFERENCES AND SELF-REFUTATION

The subjectivity claim implicit in the visual metaphor derives its sugges-tiveness from the idea that a perspective’s influence on our beliefs placesa real restriction on their status as knowledge claims. Perspectivism in-sists that our beliefs do not capture the way things really are, but onlyhow they appear from some perspective. Perspectivism itself,qua the-ory of epistemology, must be subject to these same limitations, on painof being a straightforward counterexample to its own thesis. This status,however, raises serious questions about perspectivism’s internal stabilityas an account of knowledge. Given that perspectivism is only one view(by its own standards), it seems that the perspectivist cannot offer anyprincipled theoretical grounds for preferring her epistemology over itsdogmatic competitors. The competing metaphysical realists insist that a

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belief or theory can be true only if it corresponds to things as they are inthemselves, and this will also apply to a theory of epistemology. Thus, forthem, only a theory that claims to represent truly the unique state of thingswith human cognition can be taken seriously as a candidate for acceptancein epistemology. The perspectivist cannot offer any such claim, on pain ofcontradicting her own view. Apparently, then, perspectivism prevents itsadherents from offering any reasons in its defense which would be accept-able to their main opponents. Given this, and supposing they have sufficientimagination to place themselves in the dogmatists’ shoes, perspectivistscannot even convince themselves by non-questionbegging reasons that per-spectivism is right. The position seems hopelessly unstable: it is a theory ofknowledge which apparently undermines any reasons capable of justifyingits own claim to be knowledge.11

The incompatibility of cognitive perspectives is the source of this self-referential difficulty. In the most extreme cases, perspectives may havedifferences in their standards of rationality and theory choice which makethem not simplyincompatible, but incommensurableworld views, in thesense that they cannot be measured by any common standard, and nonon-questionbegging reasons are available to decide between them. Thispossibility has generated charges that perspectivism is a form of wholesalerelativism. If perspectives are incommensurable, the reasoning goes, thenthe choice of a perspective is not determined by reasons or arguments, andit follows that the perspectivist cannot provide any reasons in defense ofher choice. Because perspectivism is a theory of epistemology, problemsof this sort are especially likely to arise in defendingit: precisely the ap-propriate standards of justification and theory choice are at stake in thiscase.

Nietzsche’s view that all knowledge is proper to some particular, par-tial perspective rules out any single, overarching system of reason capableof guaranteeinga priori that every difference between incompatible per-spectives must be resolvable by rational means. Whether or not there areincommensurable perspectives must therefore be an empirical question,and in at least some cases, Nietzsche does conclude that alternative per-spectives are incommensurable. His critique of Christianity, for example,appeals to the values of spiritual autonomy12 and of psychological integrityand health, which the Christian ascetic ideal allegedly compromises byturning people against themselves, demanding that they treat themselvesas sinners. There is no suggestion, however, that every Christian sharesNietzsche’s values, or is even capable of attaining the integrity and self-satisfaction they hold up as ideal.13 On the contrary, Nietzsche goes sofar as to suggest that most peopleought to be Christians, since this is

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the best they can do for themselves: “the ideas of the herd should rulein the herd” ([WP] § 287; see also [GM] III, §§ 11, 13–16). Accordingto Nietzsche himself, such people have no reason to (and would be bestadvised not to) hold the values in terms of which he criticizes Christianity,and therefore he must assume that his arguments would hold no force forthem. Their perspective and his are incommensurable. Nietzsche’s critiqueof Christian moral values is directed not against this incommensurableperspective, but rather against the related perspective of those Christiansor Deists who, like Kant or Rousseau, do hold the values of autonomy,integrity, and self-realization that Nietzsche thinks are undermined by theChristian morality. Thus, the critique of Christianity presupposes both thatsome alternative perspectives are incommensurable, and also that at leastsome other opposed perspectives share sufficient overlapping values toavoid radical incommensurability.

This example suggests an argumentative strategy which can avoid theself-referential difficulty I sketched above. Nietzsche’s willingness to offera critique of Christianity designed to persuade at least some Christiansindicates that his perspectivism is not meant to entail wholesale relativism.His understanding of conceptual schemes, unlike the one Davidson at-tacks as incoherent,14 does not assume that they are mutually isolated,self-sufficient wholes, between which no translation, understanding, orevaluation of relative merit would make sense.15 On the contrary, for Niet-zsche, perspectives often overlap with one another, as his overlaps withKant’s, or Rousseau’s. In fact, Nietzsche must assume that this sort ofoverlap is common: otherwise it would make no sense for him to demandthat a single individual “employ avarietyof perspectives . . . in the serviceof knowledge” ([GM] III, § 12).

Not only is there often overlap among perspectives, but as we sawabove, the visual metaphor itself encourages the idea that some ways oforganizing experience are better than others, and this raises the questionof what makes for a better interpretation among cognitive perspectives. Ofcourse, perspectivism implies that there will not always be a clear way ofdeciding this question, but in at least some cases overarching values areshared across incompatible perspectives, and this enables us to evaluatetheir relative merits. Many different perspectives, for example, share epis-temic values like simplicity, plausibility, and empirical adequacy, in termsof which we evaluate our theories and interpretations. Some standards ofthis sort, e.g., the ideal of internal coherence in a system of interpretation,are so minimal, and so central to our notions of effective organizationof experience, that they are shared very broadly. Such shared standardsenable us to generate arguments in one perspective that will be recognized

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as reasons from within another. That is, they can afford one perspectivethe resources to give “internal reasons” against another, reasons that haveforce not only in the perspective within which they were developed, butalso within the alternative perspective.16

To deploy this strategy in defense of perspectivism, Nietzsche needs in-ternal reasons showing that its conceptual foundations can provide a betterinterpretation of our cognitive practices than the views he saw as the chiefalternatives, viz., metaphysical realism, and Kant’s transcendental ideal-ism. Perspectivism offers such a reason by arguing that a concept crucialto both alternative views, the concept of a thing in itself, is incoherent. Themetaphysical realist17 conceives of the world as made up of completelydeterminate and independent objects, i.e., of things in themselves, andKant’s view also depends on the concept of a thing in itself, since heunderstands the world of appearances (i.e., the world we can know) interms of its distinction from a world of things in themselves. This conceptinvolves both self-subsistence and complete determinateness. That is, athing in itself would have to be both independent in its being from otherthings (and thus also mind- and theory-independent), and fully determinatewith respect to its properties; for every possible property, F, a thing in itselfmust either have the property (be F), or have its opposite (be not-F).18 Thismeans that things in themselves could be adequately represented only by afully specific conceptual description of the intellect,19 which is why Kantcalls them “objects of the pure understanding” (A 264/B 320).

I see Nietzsche’s skepticism about this concept20 as arising from oneof the major results of Kant’s critique of previous metaphysics. Kantshowed that we have no power of “real use” of the intellect, or intellec-tual intuition, that would allow us to grasp the essences of “objects of theunderstanding”.21 An intellectual intuition would be a direct representationof its object, which presented it immediately and in its full detail, the wayour sensoryintuitionsdo, but which at the same time explicitly articulatedtheconceptualstructure (essence) of the object. (This second requirementallows us to saywhat the thing is, and connect our knowledge of it toother knowledge.) As Kant suggests, it is easy to imagine how an infi-nite intellect (God) could simultaneously accomplish both these cognitivetasks.22 As a pure intellect, God would know things via concepts (and thusin their connections with other things), but because His intellect is one withHis power and His will, God’s act of conceiving the object of knowledgewould at the same time bring it into existence. Thus, God could guaranteethe completeness of His concept of the thing, because the content of Hisconcept itself determines the thing’s features. In this way, an infinite intel-lect’s conceptsrepresent things in their radical particularity, just the way

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our sensoryintuitions do. Once we consider how God’s intellect wouldaccomplish this task, however, it becomes apparent that we have no suchpower. Our intellect is not creative. Kant concludes that, for us, a thing initself can only be a completely unknowable “something in general” (B307,cf. A 252, A 256/B 312).

In fact, this argument points beyond Kant’s own conclusion aboutunknowability, toward a deep tension between the requirements for rep-resenting a thing in itself, and the basic powers of representation that areavailable to us. It thereby brings into question not just the power to knowa thing in itself, but also the more general ability even to represent orconceive a thing in itself as such. Our concepts and intuitions combine torepresent objects of experience, but cannot represent things in themselves,because our finite intellect cannot produce complete conceptual descrip-tions capable of fully exhausting the highly particular content that is givenin sensation, by virtue of its immediate relation to the object. This lack ofcompleteness is a deep and serious limitation. It means that any conceptualrepresentation of an object will represent aselectionof some part of theintuitive (sensory) content. Our concept of the object itself depends on thisselection, and thus takes on structure from our way of selecting. To thisextent, the individuation of the object so conceived is theory-dependent,and this object, therefore, is no thing in itself. We may imagine that theobject as we conceive it approximates a fully determinate, independentthing, but without intellectual intuition we could never justifiably concludethat it really has such an underlying, fully determinate structure, and istherefore a thing in itself. Our finite cognitive abilities could never producea complete conceptual description to validate the claim.

Thus, ultimately the unknowability of things in themselves pointed outby Kant indicates deeper problems with the coherence of the very idea ofa thing in itself. This is so because the unknowability arises not from somecontingent deficiency or incompleteness in our experience or theorizingto date, but from general and inevitable limitations on our cognitive re-sources and representational capacities. In attempting to conceive of thingsin themselves, we outstrip the legitimate realm of our concepts, and stopmaking sense altogether. As Kant himself puts the point, “in the case ofthe noumenon, there the entire use, indeedeven all significanceof thecategories completely ceases” (B 308, my emphasis). But, as Nietzschepoints out, if our cognition has no meaningful application to things inthemselves, then it also has no way to make sense of Kant’s own purporteddistinction between them and the things we do know: “we do not ‘know’nearly enough to be entitled to any such distinction. We simply lack anyorgan for knowledge, for ‘truth’ ” ([GS] 354). That is, we lack any power

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of intellectual intuition that could represent things in themselves as distinctfrom the objects of our knowledge. The objects we know are not bothfully determinate and fully independent like things in themselves, and ourcognitive powers do not allow us to appeal to any such things.

As I noted, Kant himself did not conclude from his rejection of in-tellectual intuition that the notion of a thing in itself is incoherent (see,e.g., A 254/B 310). There are two other ways, besides direct representa-tion through intellectual intuition, that we might seem justified at least ininferring to the existence of things in themselves. First, we might inferto the thing in itself as the cause of our phenomenal experience, or ofthe world of appearance. Following an argument first advanced explicitlyby Schopenhauer, Nietzsche insists that we cannot coherently conceive ofthings in themselves as the transcendent cause of experience, because, asKant showed, the justified application of the category of cause is limitedto the realm of experience.23

Kant, however, had proposed a second way to spell out the distinc-tion between things in themselves and appearances: he posited things inthemselves as the transcendental “correlate” of our cognitive faculties (A250), which he interprets as conditions providing theform of any possibleexperience. Because the operation of these faculties is a transcendentalprecondition of experience, they cannot draw thematter, or content, theyorganize from within experience: on the contrary, experience is first pos-sible only once this material has already been organized by our faculties.Consequently, anything required for this organizing operation, includingthe “matter of experience” (A 223/B 270; cf. A 20/B 34, A 143/B 182, A167/B 209) that our faculties organize, must be logically prior to experi-ence. This "matter" must therefore have a transcendent source, outside theempirical realm, viz., things in themselves. Of course, on Kant’s view wecan only know things as they appear, once our cognitive faculties have in-fluenced them, so all we know about the transcendent things in themselvesis that they exist. Nonetheless, we are forced to posit them as an artifact ofany transcendental theory of experience, and such a theory thereby entitlesus to the thing-in-itself/appearance distinction.

Nietzsche blocks this move by rejecting Kant’s transcendental accountof our cognitive faculties. He replaces Kant’s transcendental argumentswith a naturalistic interpretation of cognition, under which none of ourconcepts are preconditions of the possibility of experience.24 If our facul-ties do not transcend experience, then there is no need to posit transcendentobjects to provide the data on which they work. We are left with no justifi-cation for the posit of things in themselves, and no way to make clear sense

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of the thing-in-itself/appearance distinction. It is a pseudo-distinction,based on a concept of the thing in itself that was only apparently coherent.

To sum up, Nietzsche’s claim here is not just that there are no things inthemselves, but that the very notion of such a thing is incoherent. Althoughthere are no unicorns, we can very well distinguish between the concepts‘unicorn’ and ‘horse’. The lack of a referent for one term does not indicateany conceptual problem, and if we ever came across a unicorn, we wouldhave no trouble employing the “unicorn/horse distinction”. By contrast, theproblem with the thing-in-itself/appearance distinction arises from generallimitations on our conceptual resources. Nietzsche’s thought is not simplythat there are no things in themselves, but rather that no matter what hap-pened in the future course of experience and theorizing, our cognitive andconceptual resources would never justify us in making any claims aboutsuch things or inferences to their existence. That is, given our cognitivesituation, we cannot make any sense of the notion of a thing in itself.

This result leaves us in a position to make an argument for perspec-tivism, and against its metaphysical realist and transcendentalist alterna-tives. Since the latter views crucially and explicitly depend on the notion ofthe thing in itself absent in perspectivism, and since that notion is incoher-ent, perspectivism is the better theory. Its superiority has nothing to do witha purported correspondence to the way things really are (in themselves)with our cognition, and therefore this argument is not a counterexample tothe perspectivist tenet that any claim to such correspondence is incoher-ent. Rather, perspectivism is supposed to be better because the conceptualresources it brings to bear on the problem of interpreting our cognitivepractices are coherent, while the alternatives are not.

This strategy is exactly what we should expect from a perspectivist. Itis a special case of the general claim that one perspective is better than an-other because its conceptual system is better at organizing our experience.This reasoning does not beg the question by presupposing perspectivism’sstandards for what counts as a good argument. Kantians and metaphysicalrealists share Nietzsche’s commitment to coherence as a minimum stan-dard for the acceptability of a theory. Therefore, if these arguments aboutthe thing in itself are good, then perspectivism is a better account than itsalternatives even on their own terms. This argument counts as an internalreason against those views.

On the reading I am presenting, Nietzsche’s detailed treatments ofthe naturalistic origin of certain concepts (e.g., cause), of the origin andvalue of certain perspectives (e.g., Christianity), and so on, remain merelyperspectival. Perspectivism commits Nietzsche to the belief that there areother interpretations of these phenomena, and if someone produces a better

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one than his, he will have to accept it. This does not mean, however, thatsome version of metaphysical realism or transcendental idealism may turnout to be as good a theory as perspectivism. For those of us who share thecognitive value of internal coherence, the essential dependence of theseviews on the incoherent notion of the thing in itself is enough to rulethem out. A worthwhile potential alternative epistemology will proceedunder broadly perspectivist presuppositions: it will not conceive of ourknowledge as making claims about things in themselves, and it will notprovide a transcendental interpretation of our cognitive practices.

3. TRUTH, OBJECTIVITY, AND PERSPECTIVISM

I now turn to some philosophical implications of this argument. In par-ticular, perspectivism as I have described it demands alterations in ourtraditional notions of truth and objectivity. Typically, we think of truthas a relation of correspondence between our beliefs or theories and somemind- and theory-independent objects. I call this an “external” concep-tion of truth, because it determines what is true by a standard outside ourtheoretical practices, viz., how things really are.

This external conception nicely captures the ordinary notion of truth weuse in daily life and theorizing. We routinely think of truth as unique andbivalent, and in terms of correspondence to independent objects. Either it’sraining outside, or it isn’t (bivalence); if it is, then ‘It’s raining out’ – orsomething equivalent – is the only true description of the precipitation con-ditions in the vicinity (uniqueness); this truth depends on how the world is,regardless of my concepts and beliefs (independence); and my belief is trueiff it matches or captures how the world really is (correspondence).25 Thesefeatures clearly suggest the externalist understanding of truth, and they alsofit quite nicely with metaphysical realism: bivalence and uniqueness reflectthe determinateness of things in themselves, and correspondence and in-dependence capture their ontological self-sufficiency. Thus, if Nietzsche isright that the notion of completely mind- and theory-independent objectsis incoherent, then we cannot remain content with our ordinary externalistideas about truth.

Nietzsche depends on an alternative, “internal” conception of truth.26

Rather than treating truth as a relation to external objects completely in-dependent from our cognitive practices, an internalist thinks of truth as amatter of satisfying norms and standards drawn from within the circle ofour cognitive practices. Such internal standards (e.g., simplicity, plausibil-ity, methodological rigor, etc.) determine which perspectives and beliefsare cognitively superior to others, and Nietzsche’s own claims to truth rest

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heavily on appeals to these norms. For example, when Nietzsche offersto reveal the “palpable truth” that “almost everything we call ‘higher cul-ture’ is based on the spiritualization ofcruelty” ([BGE] § 229), what heactuallydoesis to interpret a number of cultural phenomena (e.g., tragedy,asceticism, spasms of conscience, the drive for knowledge, etc.) as man-ifestations of cruelty, and then claim that these interpretations are betterthan the “overly enthusiastic” alternatives because they are “hardened inthe discipline of science” and follow the “inclination of the seeker af-ter knowledge who insists on profundity, multiplicity, and thoroughness”([BGE] § 230). Nietzsche’s claims to truth thus amount to appeals to ourstandards of rational acceptability.

Perspectivism is not the only version of internalism. Even though Kantdoes not reject the coherence of the thing in itself altogether, he does insistthat things in themselves cannot serve as the standard for semantic eval-uation of our beliefs. On his view, our knowledge claims are not aboutthings in themselves, but pertain rather to the objects of appearance. Whatcounts as true is in part a function of how our cognitive activity structuresappearances, and in this limited sense, Kant is an internalist.

At the same time, Kant’s view can capture many of our externalist in-tuitions. For Kant, the structure of our cognitive faculties is necessary, andthe interaction of this structure with determinate things in themselves pro-duces a unique world of appearances, which serves as the standard againstwhich the truth of our beliefs can be evaluated. Thus, even though Kant’sinternalism compromises the radical independence of truth from our cog-nitive situation, his view can reinterpret and save the other features of thecommon sense conception of truth. Truth is still bivalent: a belief eithercaptures how things are in the world of appearance, or not. Truth can stillbe understood as correspondence of a sort, albeit correspondence to semi-independent objects of appearance, and not to things in themselves. Mostimportantly, truth is still unique: there is only one world of appearance,and the truth describes the unique state of that world.

These results are not available to Nietzsche, because he rejects bothKant’s transcendental interpretation of our cognitive capabilities and hisappeal to the thing in itself. While alternative perspectivesmayshare cog-nitive standards that enable us to resolve disputes by appeal to internalreasons, Nietzsche can offer no guarantee (transcendental or otherwise)that they will.27 Since differences of perspective might not admit of aclear determination of relative merit, the process of inquiry is not likelyto produce a single best theory. Nietzsche’s internalism implies that thereis no coherent notion of truth independent of this process, and as a result,

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we are left with the prospect of alternative and incompatible truths, relativeto different and incommensurable perspectives.

Nietzsche fully embraces this pluralism, even though it compromisesthe uniqueness of truth, and trivializes the sense in which truth iscorrespondence:28 “There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx haseyes and consequently there are many kinds of ‘truths’ ” ([WP] § 540).He acknowledges the counterintuitive character of this view when he con-cludes that “consequently there is no truth” ([WP] § 540), but the thoughtbehind this falsification claim is just that our common sense, externalistideas about truth are bound up with the incoherent philosophical notion ofthe thing in itself.29 In Nietzsche’s view, these common sense intuitionsabout truth must be abandoned along with that notion.

Nietzsche’s rejection of these common sense intuitions about truthraises concerns about the plausibility of a perspectivist account of ourcognitive practices. What is distinctive about theoretical investigation, asopposed to other kinds of language games, is precisely that the attempt toget things right constrains an investigator’s remarks about the world. Thetruth about things can constrain inquiry in this way because of its assumedrelation to the unique, independent world, but Nietzsche abandons thisfeature of truth. This worry is related to the concern that Nietzsche’s claimsabout the perspective relativity of truth collapse into wholesale relativism.In the absence of the unique truth as a standard against which we canmeasure our beliefs, it seems that every theory will be as good as anyother, and inquiry starts to look less like investigation and more like merestorytelling.

Nietzsche also rejects the bivalence of truth, as indicated by his peculiarbut persistent usage of the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ in the comparativeand superlative degrees.30 For him, judgments are not simply true or false,but can be “truer” or “falser”. He recommends this general usage andconnects it to perspectivism in a passage that raises yet a further mystery:

there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective estimates and appearances;and if . . . one wanted to abolish the “apparent world” altogether . . . nothing would be leftof your “truth” either. Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essentialopposition of “true” and “false”? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and,as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance – different “values”, touse the language of painters? ([BGE] § 34)

This passage is mysterious because, as we saw, Nietzsche’s exploitationof the metaphor of perspective crucially turns on the claim thatall ourapprehension of the world is “apparent”, in the sense of being conditionedby a perspective. How, then, could it ever be more or less true or apparent,as the quoted passage insists it is?

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Attention to the Kantian flavor of this section can both resolve thismystery, and also point the way toward an understanding of Nietzsche’snotion of truth that avoids wholesale relativism. At the outset of [BGE] §34, Nietzsche traces the world’s “apparentness” to the influence of con-cepts like space and time, strongly suggesting a problematic of Kantianprovenance.31 This indicates that a belief is “more apparent” if it is moretied to the subjective “humancontribution” ([GS] § 57) to experience, i.e.,if it is more dependent on a perspective’s way of organizing experience.Following this reasoning, a theory will be truer (less apparent) if it ismore independent of perspective. As we saw, however, the influence ofperspective is completely general, and no belief is literally freer from per-spective than any other. Therefore, this relative independence can only beunderstood as a matter of the breadth of the class of perspectives withinwhich a belief demands acceptance. The more extensive this class, themore independent the belief is from any particular perspective. Beliefsand theories demand broader acceptance precisely by meeting epistemicstandards which are shared across perspectives. Thus, according to Niet-zsche’s system of “degrees of apparentness”, beliefs are truer when theyare more strongly supported by the epistemic standards we use to evaluateand choose among theories and perspectives, and truth itself should be un-derstood as a matter of meeting the epistemic standards governing theorychoice.

These epistemic standards allow us to evaluate the relative merits ofcompeting interpretations, and taken together, they function as criteria ofobjectivity. They seek to ensure that our theorizing is guided by objective(albeit internal) reasons, rather than subjective caprice, and where suchstandards are shared across perspectives, they allow these internal reasonsto influence our choice of perspective. Even though perspectivism blocksany guarantee that such reasons can resolve every dispute, the possibility ofgiving them in at least some cases saves perspectivist epistemology fromthe charge of wholesale relativism, since it provides a specific sense inwhich some perspectives are better than others. Nietzsche’s internalismtherefore gives us a working notion of truth: theories which meet ourepistemic standards relatively well are true(r).

This internal account of truth depends on a notion of objectivity thatmust itself differ from the traditional conception. Perspectivism impliesthat our conceptual resources are always situated within some particularconditions of life, and thus that no absolute objectivity or completely neu-tral point of view is available to us. In what sense, then, can our beliefs beobjective?

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Nietzsche’s solution to this problem is to treat objectivity as a require-ment that we take various alternative perspectives seriously. In the ThirdEssay of theGenealogy, he characterizes objectivity

not as “contemplation without interest” (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the abilityto controlone’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ avarietyof perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge. ([GM] III,§ 12)

The idea is that different perspectives reveal different aspects of things,and that the pursuit of objectivity is just the attempt to broaden one’sperspective by using others to take account of aspects of the world ob-scured by one’s own. While we can only occupy one perspective at a time,Nietzsche insists that our objectivity will be enhanced by changing per-spectives: “themoreaffects we allow to speak about one thing, themoreeyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more completewill our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’, be” ([GM] III, § 12).Our ultimate cognitive goal, which may or may not be reached in givencases, is an overarching philosophical interpretation that brings as muchunity as possible to this “variety”.32 What objectivity demands, however, isthat this quest for unity be always constrained by “that sublime inclinationof the seeker after knowledge who insists on . . .multiplicity” ([BGE] §230, my emphasis). The idea that more perspectives will generate a bet-ter apprehension of the world is thus motivated by the classical ideal ofperfection, made dominant in German philosophy by Leibniz, of maximalvariety, unified by the greatest compossible order.33 In extending this idealinto epistemology, Nietzsche again follows the lead of Kant, for whom theregulative use of theoretical reason “serves to provide these concepts [ofthe understanding] with the greatest unity alongside the greatest extension”(A 644/B 672).

Whether full theoretical unification is ultimately possible or not, a“varietyof perspectives” is necessary for objectivity because of the idea re-vealed already in our discussion of perspective in painting: the limitationsof perspective can be overcome only by appeal to information drawn fromoutsidea perspective representation itself. Absolute objectivity is denied usbecause we have no source of completely aperspectival information aboutthe world. Nevertheless, the information made available through a “varietyof perspectives” outside the one to which we are (currently) more or lessbeholden, can reveal the limitations of our own perspective, and point ourway along the incremental road toward better ones.

Some examples will clarify Nietzsche’s idea. Consider a patient suffer-ing from a persistent clinical depression that enters remission in responseto treatment, only to recur at intervals. In one such case, remissions

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were produced first by talk therapy, later by drug therapy, and still laterby a combination of the two, when drugs alone proved no longer effec-tive. Doctors were able to produce satisfactory clinical results in this caseprecisely because they were willing to take up two different perspectivestoward the illness: (1) a mentalistic perspective in which the illness was es-sentially a function of the patient’s conscious (or subconscious) emotionallife, and (2) a radically different physiological perspective under whichthe disease was an imbalance in the biochemistry of the brain. At least onthe surface, these two perspectives are incompatible: they hold fundamen-tally different commitments about what the illnessis in the first instance.While we may hope for a theoretical breakthrough which would enable usto understand how these two perspectives might be unified into a singlebroader model of psychological life, it is an empirical question whetherthis broader perspective will in fact emerge. Meanwhile, even withoutthe wanted meta-perspective, going back and forth between the two in-compatible perspectives contributes to our knowledge about depression, asmanifested in the clinical results.

A similar conclusion is suggested by the case of textual interpretation,which requires that we remain sensitive to the possibility of conceptualdifferences between our world view and that of the text. At times, thedivergent uses of words can indicate deep differences between concep-tual orderings of the world. Take, for example, Kant’s use of the words‘Physiologie’ and ‘Psychologie’. Translation of these terms by the Eng-lish ‘physiology’ and ‘psychology’ fails to capture Kant’s full meaning,because Kant understandsPhysiologieas the general science of nature(physis), which includesboth the science of “corporeal nature” and thescience of “thinking nature”, or ‘Psychologie’ as its branches(A 846/B874), whereas the twentieth century English reader is likely to take the“physiological” and the “psychological” as incompatible perspectives,in the manner suggested by the preceding example. Good interpretivepractice here approaches Kant’s meaning by tracing the evolution of con-ceptions of physiology and psychology through eighteenth and nineteenthcentury German philosophy and science, and attending to changes in theuse of relevant terms, as reflected in dictionaries from the period. Under-standing these other, more recent historical perspectives on the relationsof physiology and psychology provides a more illuminating standpoint,from which Kant’s usage can be grasped in its difference from our own.Historical investigations into the pre-Kantian period likewise enhance un-derstanding, enabling us to see Kant’s concepts in light of the ones thatpreceded them. The importance of this kind of movement through the tradi-tion surrounding a text is clearly indicated by the failures of understanding

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to which we are condemned when confronted by artifacts from cultures(e.g., ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia) with which we have lost the kind ofcultural and conceptual continuity we can establish with Kant. Here again,then, we have a case in which our knowledge of an object (Kant’s text) isenhanced by our ability to assume a variety of perspectives on it, and in thiscase, too, the utility of these perspectives for knowledge does not dependon their compatibility, or reducibility to a single overarching perspective.

Nietzsche pursues precisely this sort of methodology in theGeneal-ogy of Morals, when he traces the evolution in our moral concepts like‘guilt’ and ‘good’ through the radically different meanings they have hadin different moral perspectives. In fact, the perspective relativity of themeanings of our words and practices is what makes genealogy necessaryin the first place. The absence of a single “God’s eye view” transcendingand subsuming all perspectives makes it impossible to fix such meaningsdefinitely and once and for all: “all concepts in which an entire process issemiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no historyis definable” ([GM] II, § 13). In the absence of a privileged point of view,then, the best understanding of moral phenomena we can aspire to willderive from tracing the history of our moral concepts, and evaluating thevarious perspectives within which they function in the light of one another.

Of course, this program to “employ avariety of perspectives in theservice of knowledge" must be carried out under the understanding thatsome perspectives are better than others, and that internal reasons mightshow that some perspectives are simply wrong. Therefore, when we ap-peal to any given perspective as a candidate for broadening our previousview, we must be guided by an evaluation (in the light of our epistemicstandards) of its value for knowledge. Still, because aperspectival accessto the things themselves is impossible, the multiplicity of the perspectivesavailable to us is crucial to this cognitive strategy. We can never appre-hend things independently of all perspective, but we can pursue greaterobjectivity precisely by playing perspectives off against one another, usingeach to produce arguments and insights which expose the limitations andpresuppositions of the others.34

By contrast with Nietzsche’s program, a Hegelian might insist that thesevarious perspectives are all ultimately compatible, that in the end they willall be reconciled in a single broadest perspective by the complete historicalself-understanding of Spirit in the moment of Absolute Knowing. Niet-zsche, of course, denies that any sucha priori guarantee of total successin our cognitive enterprise is available. For him, it is an empirical questionwhether any two perspectives useful for knowledge can be reconciled in asingle, broader perspective; we can only try it and see. Moreover, no matter

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how much breadth we achieve in any particular perspective, we will neverbe justified in concluding that the path of inquiry is now closed. Not onlyis more experience possible, but other perspectives might throw what wehave already accomplished into a new and more problematic light: “theworld has become ’infinite’ for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannotreject the possibility thatit may include infinite interpretations” ([GS] §374).

Still, even for Nietzsche the synthesis of opposing views into everbroader, ever more coherent perspectives remains a regulative ideal inknowledge, as it is in life: “Precisely this shall be calledgreatness: beingcapable of being as manifold as whole, as ample as full” ([BGE] § 212).Thus, Nietzsche’s notion of objectivity is intimately bound up with thecharacterization of truth I gave above. There, the proposal was to replacethe strict opposition of ‘true’ and ‘false’ with a system of “degrees of ap-parentness”, under which beliefs are less apparent, or truer, just when theydemand acceptance across a broader class of perspectives by satisfyingshared epistemic standards. This is just to be more objective, in the presentsense.

This notion of objectivity is internal to our perspectival cognitive prac-tices, since it depends on the epistemic standards which guide thosepractices. At the same time, however, it provides a horizon against whichwe can evaluate the correctness of our beliefs. Though we never escape thelimitation of perspective altogether, the pursuit of objectivity will makeour theories relatively truer, and our perspectives broader and less idio-syncratic, and thus, the remaining relativity of truth to our perspectivesdoes not amount to wholesale relativism. Through the operation of ourepistemic standards and the practice of giving internal reasons, we havecriteria for evaluating the relative merit of our interpretations. Investigatorspursue theories and interpretations which measure up to these standards,and to that extent get things right. Despite the fact that this view never getsus knowledge of how things are in themselves, it is still, as Putnam put it,“all the realism we want or need” (Putnam 1978, 130) to understand ourtheorizing.

4. PLURALISM AND THE KANTIAN LEGACY OF INTERNALISM

As the last quotation suggests, there are interesting similarities betweenNietzsche’s and Putnam’s versions of internalism. Most obviously, bothinsist on a deep connection between truth and the epistemic standards weuse to evaluate theories. They reject the idea that we can coherently con-strue theorizing as an attempt to get at the nature of independent things in

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themselves, and instead they understand our cognitive activity as a matterof improving our theories’ ability to meet standards internal to that activity.Perhaps the deepest point of similarity, however, is the common Kantianheritage to which both perspectivism and internal realism trace their roots.

This is not to say that either Nietzsche or Putnam is an orthodox neo-Kantian. Both reject Kant’s appeal to a determinate world of things inthemselves, and they also abandon Kant’s transcendental interpretation ofour cognitive powers. The above discussion of the metaphor of perspectiveshowed that these two ideas – of a single necessary conceptual schemeand of a determinate and wholly independent world – are interrelated bythe very logic of perspective. It is therefore no surprise that Nietzsche andPutnam reject both, in their attempts to articulate a non-transcendentalpicture in which reality is neither wholly mind-independent, nor whollymind-dependent.

Despite these departures from the orthodox Kantian fold, however, thestructure of these internalist epistemologies reveals strong Kantian influ-ence. We saw that Nietzsche understands perspectives along Kantian lines,as schemes of concepts that give the world a certain appearance becauseof the way they organize experience. Putnam explicitly acknowledges thathis “indebtedness to Kant is very large” (Putnam 1990, 3), and his debttraces much the same path as Nietzsche’s. Putnam, too, follows Kant’sdenial that we have any power of intellectual intuition of essences,35 andinsists that this rejection implies the ultimate incoherence of the notion ofthings in themselves. In addition, Putnam conceives of experience alongKantian lines as the joint product of our conceptual contribution and thecontribution of the outside world: “the mind and the world jointly makeup the mind and the world” (Putnam 1981, xi). The structural similaritiesbetween perspectivism and internal realism thus arise because Nietzscheand Putnam extend and modify Kant’s approach to epistemology in sim-ilar ways: they take up Kant’s insight that we can make no sense of ourcognitive practices independently of the concepts and epistemic standardswhich guide those practices, but they abandon his transcendental approachto cognition in favor of more naturalistic, empirical accounts which haveneither need of nor place for transcendent things in themselves.

There are important differences between Nietzsche’s and Putnam’s re-spective positions, however. We saw above that perspectivism commitsNietzsche to a thoroughgoing pluralism, raising the possibility of alter-native truths proper to incompatible perspectives. Putnam resists this idea,even though his insistence on conceptual relativity seems to have simi-lar implications. His arguments for an internal conception of truth oftenappeal to examples in which our theoretical standards do not decide be-

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tween competing accounts, and these cases are supposed to show that wecannot make any sense of the idea that one account is nonetheless cor-rect because it “corresponds” to a completely theory-independent world.36

To the extent they are successful, these examples suggest the same sortof pluralism we found in Nietzsche. Putnam often balks at this result,however. In papers like “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” (Putnam 1975), hemanifests a deep concern to deny the incommensurability of competingtheories, andReason, Truth, and History(1981) explicitly sets out to blockincommensurability claims by opening up some space between truth andrational acceptability. There Putnam identifies truth withidealizedrationalacceptability (not with rational acceptabilitysimpliciter), and he implicitlyassumes that inquiry will tend toward a unique ideal theory, thereby avoid-ing both pluralism about truth, and the attendant possibility of alternative,incommensurable, true theories. In later statements of his position,37 talkof the ideal theory has faded into the background as Putnam has cometo hang his internal realism more clearly on the notion of conceptual rel-ativity. Nevertheless, as recently as his “Reply” (Putnam 1992) to GaryEbbs’s “Realism and Rational Inquiry” (Ebbs 1992), Putnam is clearlyuncomfortable with the apparent pluralistic implications of this view. Heremarks that the alternative descriptions of any given set of data to whichconceptual relativity commits him are “virtually notational variants” (Put-nam 1992, 356), thereby minimizing any sense in which they are genuinelyalternativeaccounts.

The frank acceptance of pluralism found in Nietzsche has two impor-tant advantages for the kind of internalist views we have been considering.First, it reveals the philosophically interesting and challenging implica-tions of transforming Kantian epistemology to eliminate the thing in itself.In Kant, the transcendental status of our conceptual scheme guarantees thatthe world of experience will have a univocal character despite its subjectivecomponent. Precisely this “transcendentalism”, however, commits Kant tothe thing in itself, because it requires that our conceptual apparatus and its“matter” be logically prior to experience. Once we abandon a transcenden-tal justification of cognition in favor of some empirical derivation of ourbasic concepts, we no longer need to posit things in themselves, but wealso lose the necessity of any one conceptual apparatus. Experience maytherefore be constituted in different ways. Since internalists refuse to takeany independent, external standard as the measure of our perspectives, theyare left without any absolute measure, independent of the cognitive valuesand standards proper to those perspectives themselves. That is, they can nolonger appeal to any one overarching, neutral procedure for adjudicatingall competing cognitive claims. But this is just to acknowledge the possi-

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bility of competing claims that cannot be adjudicated, i.e., to be a pluralist.This position may force us to forfeit some of our common sense ideasabout the uniqueness of truth, but that is just the challenge internalism islaying before us.

Second, embracing pluralism also clarifies the nature of disputes be-tween competing accounts of the world. When Putnam treats alternativeconceptual descriptions of phenomena as “virtually notational variants”,he threatens to efface whatever conceptual issue is at stake between them.Of course, alternative descriptions of equal empirical adequacy do not havedifferent empirical consequences, but to conclude from this that they aremerely“notational variants” is to equate every cognitively significant the-oretical difference with a difference in empirical consequences. That is,it is to fall back on precisely the verificationism that Putnam is at suchpains to reject. The deep insight ofReason, Truth, and History– an in-sight Putnam shares with Nietzsche – is that there can be real differencesof opinion, differences that are worth arguing about, even where thereis no precisely specifiable decision procedure or ‘criterion’ of rationalitysufficient to settle them.38

At the same time, Putnam’s rejection of verificationism does indicatea different kind of problem with the stronger reductionist view. If truthweremerelyconfirmation, as the verificationist would have it, it would beimpossible to explain the truth value of many routine historical claims forwhich evidence is now lost. Putnam cites the example of Lizzie Borden.Though it may now be impossible definitively to confirm or to disconfirmthe charge that she killed her parents, this accidental absence of evidencein no way compromises the truth value of the charge. Either Lizzie Bordenadministered the notorious “forty whacks”, or not. It seems likely, how-ever, that we will never be in a position to have any belief one way orthe other which meets high standards of rational acceptability. Thus, truthcannot simply be a matter of rational acceptability.

Unlike Putnam, Nietzsche is insensitive to these difficulties. It seems tome, however, that the internalist solution for such cases must take us oncemore back to Kant, indicating the depth to which later internalism remainsindebted to its Kantian origins. Our confidence that historical claims havetruth values derives not from the metaphysical assumption that the world initself is fully determinate, but rather from an idea ofpossiblejustification,based on the epistemological similarity of historical claims for which wehave evidence, and those where it is lacking. Presently unprovable claimslike “Lizzie Borden killed her parents” are knowable by the same generalmeans as historical claims we can prove, or, for that matter, as a wholeraft of everyday claims about the world. Thus, we think “Lizzie Borden

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killed her parents” has a truth value because it (or its negation)would berationally acceptable for somepossibleknower with our cognitive powers,standards, and values, provided only that she were suitably placed in timeand space (say, in the house at the time of the murders).39 Such examplesdo not demonstrate any radical disconnect between truth and our epistemicstandards and practices, but rather serve to indicate the continuing and deepdependence of truth (and of internalist accounts of it) on a Kantian-styleanalysis of the conditions under which knowledge is possible for creatureslike us.

5. CONCLUSION

The kind of pluralism I have attributed to both perspectivism and internalrealism is not immediately intuitive. It does not live up to our commonsense ideas that there is one world ‘out there’, and that true beliefs mustcapture its unique nature. This, however, is precisely the measure of per-spectivism’s philosophical interest. Putnam writes that “the problems ofphilosophy attain the form in which they are of real interest only with thework of Kant” (Putnam 1990, 3). To the extent that we follow Putnam’scommitment to a broadly Kantian approach to epistemology, and also (likevirtually all of Kant’s followers) find Kant’s own treatment of the thing initself unacceptable, we, too, must come to grips with the pluralistic im-plications of perspectivism. The structural similarity between Nietzsche’sand Putnam’s respective attempts to work out a coherent anti-metaphysicalrealist position only indicates the depth and force of the considerations thatpush any such internalism toward pluralism.

A pluralist internalism paints a picture of cognition in which the worldacquires sufficiently determinate structure to answer our theoretical ques-tions only once it is organized, in one way or another, by our theoreticalactivity. This theoretical activity posits objects of our knowledge in theservice of its attempts to organize experience. Because experience by itselfdoes not entail a unique set of theoretical posits, pragmatic considerationsabout the effectiveness of various approaches to organizing experiencegain some scope to influence the structure of the theoretical world, and thisis one important source of the pragmatist streak in post-Kantian philoso-phers like Putnam and Nietzsche. At the same time, our theoretical activityworks to organize experience of thereal world, and is subject to evaluationin terms of the epistemic norms that underwrite an internalist notion of ob-jectivity. Objective theories warrant our belief, and this belief is a form of(internal) realism about the objects of knowledge posited by those theories.

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In conclusion, I want to suggest that despite its violations of commonsense intuitions, this internalism provides a better interpretation of our cog-nitive practices than a traditional externalist account. Take an investigatorwho claims that her theory or interpretation is ‘true’. Does she mean thather results correspond to theory-independent things? She has no faculty ofintellectual intuition which would give her direct access to the nature ofthings in themselves. Thus, even if common sense leads her to think of hertruth claim in terms of correspondence with such objects, she could haveno direct evidence that such a correspondence obtains. If this is what truthclaims amount to, then they can never be justified.

Our investigators truth claim is not based on some kind of comparisonbetween the theory andindependentlydescribed objects. Her conceptionof what the relevant objects are is given by the theory itself: again, this isjust what it is tobelievethe theory. The truth claim is really based on herinterpretation’s satisfaction of various epistemic standards, and its abilityto produce internal reasons demonstrating its superiority to alternatives.Perspectivism takes this result at face value, on the idea that the actualbasis of truth claims is a good indication of what they amount to. If thisleads to a conception of truth at odds with our ordinary intuitions, thatonly reveals the extent to which common sense externalism is infected bymetaphysical realist presuppositions that are out of step with the role truthclaims actually play in theorizing.

NOTES

∗ This paper has benefitted from helpful comments on earlier versions by AlexanderNehamas, Gary Hatfield, Akeel Bilgrami, Paul Guyer, Bernard Reginster, Fred Dretske,Dagfinn Føllesdal, Chris Bobonich, Alison Simmons, and Tom Blackburn. Thanks also toPhilosophy Department Colloquium audiences at Barnard College/Columbia University,the College of New Jersey, Hamilton College, Haverford College, Southwestern University,Stanford University, Earlham College, Texas Tech University, and the University of BritishColumbia, and to Prof. Jody Maxmin, for assistance in researching Timantes.1 See Putnam (1978, 1987 and 1990, 3–29). Richard Rorty has made similar claims(sometimes in opposition to Putnam’s version of the position) in papers from Rorty (1972)to Rorty (1993).2 Gary Ebbs (1992) has argued that Putnam’s “internal realism” does not mark a funda-mental break with the realism of his earlier work. I follow Ebbs in seeing some continuitybetween Putnam’s later position and the concerns that motivated his examples in, e.g.,Putnam (1975), but Ebbs’s version of this point may be too strong. I am not yet convincedthat Putnam always limited his aims to producing what Ebbs might call an interpretiveunderstanding of our intellectual practices surrounding reference, rather than attempting toproduce a “scientific theory of reference”. See Ebbs (1992, 20–22).

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3 This formulation of metaphysical realism’s leading idea derives from Bernard Williams(1985).4 All citations to Nietzsche are given parenthetically in the text according to the abbre-viations listed in the references, and refer to Nietzsche’s section numbers, or, alternatively,both chapter/part and section numbers. I quote the translations listed in the references.5 One such list, for example, includes “bodies, lines, planes, cause and effect, motionand rest, form and content” ([GS] § 121). I defend this Kantian reading of perspectivismin Anderson (1996), and at greater length in some work in progress, which focuses onBeyond Good and Evil, in particular. As I discuss below, Putnam’s thought shares thisbroadly Kantian structure.6 See also Rosenthal (1968), which found that the Bruner and Goodman results could beduplicated only in part, and emphasizes that other (non-socio-economic) factors are alsoimportant in size perception of coins. The differences in the results of these two studies liebeyond the scope of this paper.7 Thelocus classicusis Leibniz’s ‘Monadology’, § 57: “Just as the same city viewed fromdifferent sides appears to be different and to be, as it were, multiplied in perspectives, sothe infinite multitude of simple substances, which seem to be so many different universes,are nevertheless only the perspectives of a single universe according to the different pointsof view of each monad” (Leibniz 1969, 648). The pre-established harmony instated by Godguarantees that the ideas of each monad, which constitute its “universe”, reflect, howeverconfusedly, the one metaphysically real universe He has established, as it is seen from thatmonad’s perspective.8 “There isonlya perspective seeing;only a perspective ‘knowing’,” ([GM] III, § 12).9 Alberti (1966, 55). The painter may even change the scale of her measuring instrumentsin relation to her model during her work on the same painting, as long as she respects therelations of the depicted objects within each scale. Alberti suggests that the painter employa veil with a grid marked on it, so that, by viewing her model through the cloth, she canmeasure the relative sizes and shapes of its parts (Alberti 1966, 68 ff.). The painter canvary the distance between her eye and the measuring device at will (e.g., to make thesize of a particular appearance fit exactly between two marks of the grid), so long as therelative proportions among the parts are maintained when transferring the measurement tothe drawing.10 Nietzsche conceives of a thing as the “sum of its effects” ([WP] § 551). This implies thatthe individuation conditions of each object depend on those of all the others: if one thingwere different, it would have different effects on the other things, and since these things inturn are nothing but sums of effects, they would also be different things. On this view, anygiven system of effects can be parsed into things in different ways. Thus “things” do nothave determinate, unique, or atomistic individuation conditions. See Nehamas (1985, ch.3).11 On my reading, perspectivism is first and foremost anepistemologicaldoctrine, and theself-referential difficulty I have just sketched is one proper to an epistemological view. Thequestion is whether, given perspectivism, it is possible for us toknow that perspectivismitself is correct, and if not, what grounds we could have for believing it. This self-referentialdifficulty is not the same as the widely discussed paradoxes of “truth perspectivism” (see,e.g., Hales and Welshon 1994), which pertain to Nietzsche’s conception of truth morethan to his perspectivismper se. Nietzsche’s epistemology does have implications forour conception of truth (see Section III, below), but the self-referential worries raised byNietzsche’s notion of truth have been well described elsewhere, most extensively in Clark

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(1990). In Anderson (1996) I discuss Clark’s interpretation, and offer a resolution for thetruth paradoxes: See note 26, below.12 Bernard Reginster has emphasized connections between spiritual freedom and Niet-zsche’s thinking about perspectivism in useful unpublished work.13 See [GS] §§ 2, 289, 290, and 299, and [BGE] §§ 212–213 for some of Nietzsche’sstatements about the importance of these values.14 See Davidson (1984).15 Nehamas (1983) also emphasizes that Nietzsche’s perspectives are not mutuallyisolated.16 I am indebted to Akeel Bilgrami both for suggesting the use of the term “internalreasons”, which is inspired by the work of Bernard Williams, and also for pressing me tohang my argument more clearly on this notion. For Williams’ different use of the notion,see Williams (1981, 101–113).17 It is no accident that I have used Putnam’s term “metaphysical realism” to characterizethe position against which Nietzsche was arguing. Although twentieth century metaphysi-cal realists no longer speak in terms of substances or things in themselves like the rationalistrealists who concerned Nietzsche, the two versions of realism are quite similar. The 20thc. realist’s world is a fixed totality of determinate theory-independent objects, just as therationalist’s world is the set of fully determinate things in themselves.18 Kant (1781, 2nd, rev. ed. 1787) suggests this way of concerning of the determinacy ofa thing in itself in terms of the applicability of one of each possible pair of opposing predi-cates at A 568/B 596. (This and subsequent references to Kant’s firstCritiqueappear in thetext and use the standard A/B form, referring to the pagination of Kant (1781) = A and Kant(1787) = B. I have followed the translation of Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, which Guyergenerously shared with me in advance of its publication by Cambridge University Press.)The same idea is also implied by Kant’s indirect argument for transcendental idealism fromthe Antinomy at A 506–7/B 535–6. There Kant concludes from his two arguments (1) thatthe world as a whole is not finite, and (2) that it is not infinite, that the world cannot be athing in itself. This follows only if a thing in itself must have exactly one of each pair ofopposite predicates.19 That is, things in themselves, or traditional substances, admit of description by whatLeibniz called a “complete, or perfect concept” (Leibniz 1969, 268), which implies all thespecific concepts attributable to the thing, and therefore also implies that all other conceptsdo not apply to it. Leibniz advances this notion of a complete concept in “First Truths”(Leibniz 1969, 268–269), “Discourse on Metaphysics”, §§ 8–9 (Leibniz 1969, 307–308),and “The Nature of Truth” (Leibniz 1973, 95).20 For Nietzschean texts rejecting the idea of the thing in itself, see [GS] § 54, [GS] § 354,and [WP] §§ 553–569.21 In his so-called “Inaugural Dissertation”, Kant makes much of the distinction betweenthe “real use” of the intellect, and its merely “logical use”. See Kant (1992), 386, 386,406 (Ak. pp. 393, 394, 411). By the time of theCritique of Pure Reason, however, (andespecially in the second edition), Kant comes to reject the possibility of such “real use”.See, e.g., B 68, B 71–72, A 51/B 75, B 135, B 138–139, and B 145. (But cf. A 299/B 355,which introduces a distinction between “logical” and “real” uses of reason, suggestingthat the merely regulative uses of reason (see A 642–668/B 671–696) might be seen as adifferent, more limited kind of “real use”.) Gary Hatfield has pointed out that this is oneof the central insights separating Kant’s mature thought from his “pre-critical” writings,and also that this rejection of any real use of the intellect was of fundamental importance

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in changing our understanding of the powers of the mind. See Hatfield (1990, 59, 78–79,81, 93, 127, and 213). For the broad story of how this point influenced conceptions of themind, see also Hatfield (1997).22 Kant links the notion of intellectual intuition with the infinite, divine intellect at B 68,B 72, B 135, B 139, and B 159; also cf. A256/B 311.23 See Schopenhauer’s “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy”, which appears as the Ap-pendix to Schopenhauer (1969), vol. 1. (See esp. pp. 434–437). Nietzsche echoes the pointat [WP] § 553. See also [GS] § 357, where Nietzsche praises Kant’s effort to “delimit therealm in which this concept [causality] makes sense”, and then adds that “to this day weare not done with this fixing of limits”. The stricter limits within which Nietzsche wants toconstrain causality (and other concepts) are those imposed by the influence of perspective,which rule out any causal inference to things in themselves.24 Kant justifies his move to the transcendental level of analysis by insisting that a tran-scendental account is required to explain our synthetica priori knowledge in mathematicsand pure natural science. Nietzsche denies that we have any such synthetic anda prioriknowledge (see [BGE] § 11). He then substitutes a naturalistic account of the origin ofour conceptual resources, based on reflections drawn from evolutionary theory and moralpsychology. I discuss Nietzsche’s argument for this point in detail in some work in progressdealing with Nietzsche’s account of perspectivism inBeyond Good and Evil.25 This catalogue of features of the traditional conception of truth is due to Putnam (1988,107–108).26 There are some who contend that Nietzsche rejects the notion of truth altogether, butNietzsche must havesomeworkable notion of truth, since he routinely makes truth claimson behalf of his own views (see, e.g., [BGE] § 202 and [GM] I, § 1). In addition, there iscompelling textual evidence that Nietzsche implicitly depends on two different notions oftruth. Occasionally, he makes both particular truth claims and blanket statements that allour beliefs are false within the space of the same section. For example, in [BGE] 229 Ni-etzsche claims that the “basic will of the spirit . . . strives for the apparent and superficial”,and later adds that it is responsible for systematically “retouching and falsifying the whole[world] to suit itself” ([BGE] § 230). In the very same section (i.e., 229), however, hemakes remarks on cruelty which, he claims, reveal some “palpable truths [that] remainunspoken for centuries” ([BGE] § 229). If this section is to meet minimum standardsof internal consistency, Nietzsche must be using the semantic terms ‘true’ and ‘false’ indifferent senses when, on the one hand, he implies that all our beliefs are false, and onthe other, claims that certain beliefs are palpably true. In Anderson (1996) I extend such adistinction, proposed in more elaborate form by Schacht (1983), into a general resolutionof the self-referential paradoxes surrounding Nietzsche’s notion of truth.27 In this respect the interpretation of perspectivism offered here differs markedly fromthat developed by Hales and Welshon (1994) who argue that (at least) perspectivism itselfand the laws of logic are “absolutely true” (Hales and Welshon 1994, 112) for Nietzsche,in contrast to our other claims, which are merely perspectivally true. This solution to theself-referential paradoxes surrounding perspectivism strikes me as deeply unsatisfying.Exempting perspectivism itself from the general claim that all knowledge is perspecti-val seemsad hoc, and numerous Nietzschean remarks about logic strongly suggest thathe thinks the validity of logic is limited by the influence of perspective. I cite only onesuch claim: “Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there standvaluations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of

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life. . . . such estimates might be, in spite of their regulative importance for us, neverthelessmere foreground estimates. . . ” ([BGE] § 3).28 True theories still correspond to the world in a sense, but only because we have nocoherent conception of how the world is independently of how it appears from some per-spective. Thus, the best theory (from our perspective) determines our only notion of whatthe world is like. It follows trivially that the theory corresponds to the world so understood.29 Clark (1990) argues that Nietzsche ultimately abandoned his “falsification thesis”, un-der which all our belief are false in some sense. I discuss this alternative interpretation inAnderson (1996).30 See, e.g., [GM] I, § 3 and [BGE] § 4.31 Nietzsche begins by acknowledging the force of the Kantian-inspired philosophy ofsome of his contemporaries, which insists that “theerroneousnessof the world in whichwe think we live is the surest and firmest fact that we can lay eyes on”, but he can acceptsuch a philosophy only in a qualified way: “whoever takes this world, along with space,time, form, movement, to be falselyinferred– anyone like that would at least have amplereason to learn to be suspicious at long last of all thinking”, including that thinking whichleads us to the conclusion that our knowledge is of a “false” or “apparent” world opposedto some “true” world. Nietzsche concludes, as I show in the text below, that our world is“apparent” in a sense that should no longer be thought of as opposed to a “true world” ofthings in themselves. (All quotations from [BGE] § 34.)32 For example, Nietzsche writes that “the conscience ofmethoddemands . . . [that we]not . . . assume several kinds of causality until the experiment of making do with a singleone has been pushed to its utmost limit” ([BGE] § 36).33 See, e.g., Leibniz’s ‘Monadology’, § 58: “This is the means of obtaining the greatestvariety possible, but with the greatest possible order; that is to say, this is the means ofattaining as much perfection as possible” (Leibniz 1969, 648).34 Longino (1990) has recently suggested a similar view, under which the objectivity ofscientific communities crucially depends on the availability of multiple points of viewfrom which both new and dominant approaches and theories may be subjected to criti-cism. Unlike Longino, Nietzsche insists that even individual investigators (as opposed tocommunities) must employ a variety of perspectives in order to attain objectivity.35 See Putnam (1987, 52).36 See, for instance, the example of the “straight line world” in Putnam (1978, 30–33) andthe example contrasting “Carnap’s world” and the “world of the Polish logician” in Putnam(1987, 18–21, and 32–40).37 See Putnam (1987) and Putnam (1990).38 See Putnam (1981), ch. 5. See esp. pp. 105–113 and 124–126.39 See Putnam (1992, 357). Clark (1990, ch. 2), attributes a similar view to Nietzsche,in which truth is dependent on our general “cognitive interests”, as opposed to “cognitivecapacities”, which may be contingently limited in ways such as those Putnam’s examplesuggests.

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For Nietzsche’s German, I have used Nietzsche 1980ff. I have made use of the followingtranslations, cited by abbreviations. Date of first publication appears at the end of the

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references. Parenthetical citations in the text refer to Nietzsche’s section numbers, whichare the same in all editions.

Nietzsche, F. W.: 1980ff.Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, G. Colli and M. Montinari(eds.), W. de Gruyter, Berlin.

[GS] The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage, New York (1974) (1882, 1887).[BGE] Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage, New York (1966) (1886).[GM] On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage, New York (1968)

(1887).[TI] Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Viking, New York (1954) (1888).[WPThe Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage, New York

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Ebbs, G.: 1992 ‘Realism and Rational Inquiry’,Philosophical Topics20(1), 1–33.Hales, S. and Welshon, R.: 1994 ‘Truth, Paradox, and Nietzschean Perspectivism’,History

of Philosophy Quarterly11, 101–119.Hatfield, G.: 1990The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from

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Kant, I.: 1781(A), 2nd, rev. ed. 1787 (B)Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Hartknoch, Riga.Trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1998).

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Leibniz, G. W.: 1973 in G. H. R. Parkinson (ed.),Philosophical Writings, trans. M. Morrisand G. H. R. Parkinson, Dent, London.

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Putnam, H.: 1975 ‘The Meaning of “Meaning” ’, inMind, Language, and Reality:Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 215–271.

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Putnam, H.: 1978 ‘Realism and Reason’, inMeaning and the Moral Sciences, Routledgeand Kegan Paul, London, pp. 123–140.

Putnam, H.: 1981Reason, Truth, and History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Putnam, H.: 1987The Many Faces of Realism, Open Court, LaSalle, IL.Putnam, H.: 1988Representation and Reality, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.Putnam, H.: 1990Realism with a Human Face, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.Putnam, H.: 1992 ‘Reply to Gary Ebbs’,Philosophical Topics20(1), 348–358.Rorty, R.: 1972 ‘The World Well Lost’,Journal of Philosophy69, 649–665.Rorty, R.: 1993 ‘Putnam and the Relativist Menace’,The Journal of Philosophy90, 443–

461.Rosenthal, B. G.: 1968 ‘Attitude Toward Money, Need, and Method of Presentation as

Determinants of Perception of Coins from 6 to 10 Years of Age’,The Journal of GeneralPsychology78, 85–103.

Schacht, R.: 1983Nietzsche, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.Schopenhauer, A.: 1969The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. P. J. Payne, Dover,

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Department of PhilosophyStanford UniversityStanford, CA 94305-2155USA