Project Card

According to a natural way of thinking, objective reality is independent from us – independent from our thought and talk. Hence, when we have knowledge of it, it allows for a description whose truth does not depend on our perspectives. Nonetheless, we are familiar with the phenomenon that the truth-value of some of our claims, on the face of it perfectly apt to represent how things objectively are, essentially varies depending on our perspectives.

Thus, the statement "Dinosaurs last roamed the earth 60 million years ago", true when uttered now, would not have been true if it had been uttered, say, 10 million years ago; the claim "Time is running slower for Pollux, because he's travelling at 99% of the speed of light" might be true uttered relative to some reference frame but not others; “Lentils are tasty” and, more controversially, “Gay marriage is acceptable” are also perhaps true only when made relative to particular gustative or moral perspectives; and, to provide a totally commonplace example, the claim “I am hungry” is true when uttered by some agents at some times, but not when uttered by others, or by the same agent at a different time. How can this variation in truth-value be reconciled with our conception of facts as being perspective-independent? Are not those perspectives from which the truth-value of claims like these essentially depends also an aspect of objective reality? Our project aims to contribute to the field of research aiming at its core to answer questions like these. These issues have been studied in depth in contemporary philosophy by researchers working on only some of the crucial cases for understanding the perspectival character of our thought, and their work has provided important results. However, while the complexity and diversity of the phenomena makes understandable the piecemeal approach that so far has been taken, we think that a unified attack is needed, for which the exploiting of synergies and complementarities and the collaborative efforts that a CONSOLIDER project allows are mandatory.

More information: http://www.ub.edu/persp/

Research Groupin Analytic Philosophy

PERSP - Philosophy of Perspectival Thoughts and Facts

Principal Investigator

All researchers

Summary

Publications

El dominio de lo mental en la filosofía de Williamson

Semántica y ontología de mundos posibles

"About Concerns "

Attitudinal Cognitive Phenomenology and the Horizon of Possibilities.

Variedades del escepticismo y del anti-escepticismo

"Relativism 2: Semantic Content"

"Moral Relativism "

"Propositionen "

"Relativism 1: Representational Content"

'Expressing Disagreement'

'Return of the Living Dead: Reply to Braddon-Mitchell'

'Presentism without Presentness'

'Fallibility and Trust'

'In Defense of Ockhamism'

‘What Could Vague Objects Possibly Be?’

'Audience in Context'

"Should we be Pluralists about Truth?"

"The Conversational Role of Centered Contents "

‘Rigid vs Flexible Response-Dependent Properties’

Contingentism about Individuals and Higher-Order Necessitism

Purposes of Reasoning and (a New Vindication of) Moore’s Proof of an External World

'Living on the Brink, or Welcome Back, Growing Block!'

'Realism and Anti-Realism'

'Determinism, Open Future, and Branching Time'

'What does it Take to Enter into the Circumstance?'

Filosofia da Linguagem

Empirical Data and the Theory of Reference

Los propósitos de razonar, ilustrados con el argumento externista anti-escéptico de Putnam

La prueba de Putnam contra el escepticismo radical: dos reinterpretaciones basadas en el autoconocimiento

'Radical Scepticism without Epistemic Closure'

'In Defence of Ockhamism'

"Global Relativism and Self-Refutation "

'No-No. Paradox and Consistency'

General Terms, Rigidity and the Trivialization Problem

Modest Skepticism and Question Begging Proper

'European Functionalism'

As Time Goes By

'Eternal Facts in an Ageing Universe'

General Terms as Designators: A Defence of the View

Invariantism versus Relativism about Truth

El debate entre externistas e internistas sobre la racionalidad inferencial

Possible Worlds: Structure and Stuff

Non-committal Causal Explanations.

Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy