GODOY - ANDERSON (Truth and Objectiviy in Perspectivism) - KW Nietzsche PDF

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.
2 R. LANIER ANDERSON
therefore have no way to conceive of a completely determinate and theory-

independent world: any determinate conception of the world captures only
the world as already understood through the offices of some particular
concepts. The very notion of an “absolute conception of the world”,3 and
with it metaphysical realism itself, turn out to be incoherent.
This rejection of metaphysical realism crucially depends on the notion
of a conceptual scheme, or perspective. Metaphysical realism is incoherent
because it tries to consider the world in independence from the limited per-
spective of any actual theory about it, and even from the preconditions of
our theoretical practices in general. Putnam was not the first to exploit this
connection between the notion of perspective and the rejection of a strong
form of realism. The idea goes back at least to Nietzsche, whose entire
epistemology travels under the name perspectivism. As I will argue in what
follows, Nietzsche’s perspectivism, like internal realism, attempts to carve
out a middle way between strong realism and wholesale relativism. An ex-
ploration of Nietzsche’s notion of perspective therefore promises to give us
a clearer picture of the philosophical implications and the historical roots
of attempts to secure this middle road. In particular, I will argue that tak-
ing the metaphor of perspective seriously will force substantial revisions
in our ordinary conceptions of truth and objectivity, and that these revi-
sions are demanded by a project – shared by Nietzsche and Putnam – for
transforming and extending certain broadly Kantian ideas in epistemology.
1. THE METAPHOR OF PERSPECTIVE
Nietzsche’s appeal to “perspective” in epistemology depends on a visual

metaphor that is supposed to capture certain limitations on our knowledge
claims. Just as my visual perspective makes the world appear to me in a
particular way, so cognitive perspectives are a “human contribution” ([GS]
§ 57)4 reality, which give the world a certain “look” for us. We know things
only from the ‘points of view’ these perspectives define. In this section, I
will 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 a
perspective is somewhat loose. He provides no precise individuation condi-
tions for determining exactly when a disagreement amounts to a difference
of perspective, and when it is merely a difference of theory within a shared
perspective. For Nietzsche, this is an interpretive question that must be
answered on a case by case basis, by appeal to the details of the particular
disagreement. It makes no sense to attempt a precise enumeration of Niet-
TRUTH AND OBJECTIVITY IN PERSPECTIVISM 3
zschean perspectives, or to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for

something’s being a perspective.
Still, Nietzsche does provide a loose working idea of what perspec-
tives are, and how they function. Nietzsche conceives of perspectives
along broadly Kantian lines: they organize our experience, or “simplify
the manifold” ([BGE] § 230), in accordance with “a scheme . . . posited
by ourselves” ([WP] § 516). Such schemes are composed of our basic
concepts, among which Nietzsche often lists the very categories (e.g., cau-
sation, substance) and distinctions (e.g., form/content) that Kant identified
as integral to the organizing conceptual structure we impose onto the world
of 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 orthodox
Kantian, however. According to him, we adopt our particular organizing
concepts not because they are transcendental preconditions for any experi-
ence, but because of their contingent (and potentially variable) relation to
our needs, interests, and values (see [GM] III, § 12, and [TI] VI, §§ 5 and
7).
Nietzsche turns to the visual metaphor of perspective to express this
conviction that our concepts and values shape the way things appear to
us in cognition generally, because such influence emerges prominently in
the visual case. For example, even from the same visual perspective, the
famous duck/rabbit line drawing can be seen either as a duck, or as a rabbit,
depending on the more general cognitive perspective of the viewer. We can
even experience reversible “Gestalt switches”, through which what first
appeared as a duck, later appears to be a rabbit, and now a duck again. It is
not that the drawing itself is ambiguous. Rather, our perception is subject
to the influence of two incompatible ways of seeing that govern our overall
experience of the drawing, which does not look like some cross between
a duck and a rabbit, but rather appears clearly to be a duck, or clearly
to be a rabbit, depending on which conceptual mind set is employed by
the viewer (i.e., whether she sees the drawing under the concept ‘duck’ or
under the concept ‘rabbit’). Value laden conceptual schemes exert a similar
influence on the way we see things. For example, Bruner and Goodman
found that children from poor backgrounds overestimate the size of coins
to a greater degree than children whose families are financially well off,
and also that the degree of overestimation increases with the value (not
the size) of the coin, except between the quarter and the half dollar, which
Bruner and Goodman write (in 1947) is “almost too valuable [to a child
of ten] to be real” (Bruner and Goodman 1947, 39).6 They conclude that
the visual experience of money, at least in the dimension of perceived
size, is significantly influenced by its importance within the scheme of
values which orders a child’s life. Nietzsche’s perspectivism suggests that

effects of this sort are analogous to the more general influence of cognitive
perspectives on experience, mediated through concepts. Concepts draw
connections among objects or experiences of a given type; the concept
‘duck’, for example, links all the ducks, and the concept ‘substance’ links
the substances. To organize experience through the use of a given concept,
therefore, is to place objects into a particular grouping, and thereby to bring
to light particular aspects of those objects. When we move from relatively
simple 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. A
difference in such basic organizing concepts would result in a fundamental
difference 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, whereas
on Nietzsche’s view, not all cognitive perspectives are. In vision, optics
provides rules which enable us to infer from the properties of an object to
its 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 the
object appears differently from each of them, but these appearances differ
in just the ways the perspective rules would lead us to expect, enabling
us to translate from one perspective to another. Traditional appeals to the
metaphor of perspective, e.g., in Leibniz,7 assumed that cognitive perspec-
tives were mutually consistent in just this way, and that there were laws
of epistemic ‘optics’ enabling us to infer from the appearances of things
to the way they really are. The possibility of these inferences is bound up
with 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 eye
point of view” revealing the world’s nature. The whole point of Nietzsche’s
perspectivism, however, is to deny the coherence of these ideas, so in his
view, there must be a serious disanalogy between cognitive and visual
perspectives.
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 the
same thing. Without the laws, there are no rules for making translations
between visual appearances and the actual properties of objects, or from
one appearance to another. These two elements are closely interrelated.
Given our visual appearances and a description of the object, the laws of
perspective can be calculated. Given the appearances and the laws, along
with additional information derived from visual cues, we can subtract the
influence of perspective and infer to the properties of the independent
object.
Nietzsche denies the coherence of these interrelated notions when they
are extended from the visual to the cognitive case. He insists that we
have no justification for the posit of things in themselves, and denies that
there are any laws of epistemic perspective describing the relation of our
perspectives to things in themselves, in the way the laws of geometrical
optics describe the perspectival relation of the visual system to its objects.
If the influence of cognitive perspectives is perfectly general, as Nietzsche
insists,8 then there is simply no standpoint from which such a precise ‘op-
tics’ of cognition might be developed. We investigate vision by checking
its 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 development
of the visual system. More importantly, our interpretation of visual repre-
sentations depends on information drawn from outside the representations
themselves. “Top down” processing provides us with previously gathered
information about a perceived object’s properties (e.g., size, position, and
rigidity), and physiological visual cues like stereopsis, convergence, and
accommodation help us to determine its distance from the eye. In the case
of cognitive perspectives, by contrast, our situation affords us no broader
standpoint 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, would
be like trying to work out optics on the basis of the visual appearances
alone, without any independent information about the real properties of
the objects, derived from visual cues or other sensory modalities. Such a
project is hopeless.
Despite this disanalogy, though, Nietzsche’s visual metaphor remains
an informative way to bring out other features of our cognitive perspec-
tives. For example, the potential variety of points of view from which
we 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 different
appearances of the world arising from conceptual relativity.
The idea of perspective in painting provides further insight into the
kind of limitation perspective places on our representation of the world.
Alberti’s seminal treatment of one-point perspective, for example, empha-
sizes the arbitrariness of the point of view around which the perspective
construction is generated: he advises the painter to locate the centric point
of her construction just “where it seems best” (Alberti 1966, 56). The only
considerations which speak in favor of one point over another are those of
proportionality and aesthetic value. Nietzsche similarly insists that we can
choose among cognitive perspectives only on the basis of our values and
purposes. In neither case are these pragmatic criteria sufficiently strong to
require the adoption of some one point of view over all others.
Moreover, in painting as in the cognitive case, perspectives are holistic
systems. A perspective painting works by representing the relations among
objects. Alberti cites a painting by Timantes which depicts a gigantic
sleeping cyclops, whose size is captured through its juxtaposition with
several satyrs shown in the act of measuring its thumb. The size of the
painted cyclops itself (i.e., its scale) is irrelevant: within the perspective
representation it is the relations between the cyclops and the satyrs, and
not their size properties considered in isolation, that matter.9 Similarly,
our cognitive perspectives determine only relations among the objects they
posit, and not the properties of mutually independent things in themselves.
This parallel is deep, and shows that the disanalogy between visual and
cognitive perspectives discussed above conceals, as its flip side, a deeper
point of analogy. There are no unique answers to questions of ontology
and individuation under perspectivism10 for the same reasons that Timan-
tes’ representation by itself does not provide any determinate answer to
questions about the size of the figures it depicts. The kind of outside
knowledge (about the normal size of satyrs) which helps us to understand
the painting is absent in the cognitive case due to the global influence of
perspective, but this disanalogy should not obscure the deeper similarity in
what the perspectival representations themselves can accomplish in each
case. Without the frame of reference given by outside knowledge, Timan-
tes’ representation could not tell us how large the cyclops really is, just as
no perspectival cognitive representation can reveal the properties of things
as they are in themselves. A picture may be worth a thousand words,
but without substantial background knowledge about the sort of things
it represents, it resists even rudimentary interpretation. The influence of
perspective on our cognitive representations is limiting precisely because
this aperspectival background knowledge is lacking.
All of the points of analogy I have mentioned can be traced back to
a common underlying idea. The visual metaphor highlights the subjective
contribution to our experience of the world. The potential variety of per-
spectives and the element of arbitrariness involved in the choice of any
one arise from the many conditions we may be in as knowers. Perspectives
are holistic systems of interpretation because the properties of objects in

representation depend on the relations of the represented object to the rep-
resenter, as well as to other represented things. The function of the visual
metaphor, then, is to emphasize the subjectivity of the influence of perspec-
tive. This is why Nietzsche traces the failings of previous epistemology to
its “presupposition that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential” to
things ([WP] § 560).
It is important, however, not to overplay the relativistic consequences
of this view. To return to the metaphor, while it may be true that all of the
visual perspectives on a thing are equally perspectives, it does not follow
that they are all equally good. Quite obviously, in fact, some are better than
others, which is why people are willing to stand in line and pay premium
prices to get good seats for theater and sporting events. Naturally, the value
of different perspectives depends on our purposes in adopting them: for
viewing very small objects suspended in some collection of water, it is
useful to get close to it, perhaps even artificially close through the use of
a 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 in
the case of cognitive perspectives. Precisely this point, however, presup-
poses that perspectives actually have relative value, and thus that they are
not 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 to
subjectivity raises troubling philosophical problems. In particular, there
are notorious self-referential difficulties which plague any attempt to give
an 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 places
a real restriction on their status as knowledge claims. Perspectivism in-
sists that our beliefs do not capture the way things really are, but only
how they appear from some perspective. Perspectivism itself, qua the-
ory of epistemology, must be subject to these same limitations, on pain
of being a straightforward counterexample to its own thesis. This status,
however, raises serious questions about perspectivism’s internal stability
as an account of knowledge. Given that perspectivism is only one view
(by its own standards), it seems that the perspectivist cannot offer any
principled theoretical grounds for preferring her epistemology over its
dogmatic competitors. The competing metaphysical realists insist that a
belief or theory can be true only if it corresponds to things as they are in

themselves, and this will also apply to a theory of epistemology. Thus, for
them, only a theory that claims to represent truly the unique state of things
with human cognition can be taken seriously as a candidate for acceptance
in epistemology. The perspectivist cannot offer any such claim, on pain of
contradicting her own view. Apparently, then, perspectivism prevents its
adherents from offering any reasons in its defense which would be accept-
able to their main opponents. Given this, and supposing they have sufficient
imagination to place themselves in the dogmatists’ shoes, perspectivists
cannot even convince themselves by non-questionbegging reasons that per-
spectivism is right. The position seems hopelessly unstable: it is a theory of
knowledge which apparently undermines any reasons capable of justifying
its 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 have
differences in their standards of rationality and theory choice which make
them not simply incompatible, but incommensurable world views, in the
sense that they cannot be measured by any common standard, and no
non-questionbegging reasons are available to decide between them. This
possibility has generated charges that perspectivism is a form of wholesale
relativism. If perspectives are incommensurable, the reasoning goes, then
the choice of a perspective is not determined by reasons or arguments, and
it follows that the perspectivist cannot provide any reasons in defense of
her choice. Because perspectivism is a theory of epistemology, problems
of this sort are especially likely to arise in defending it: precisely the ap-
propriate standards of justification and theory choice are at stake in this
case.
Nietzsche’s view that all knowledge is proper to some particular, par-
tial perspective rules out any single, overarching system of reason capable
of guaranteeing a priori that every difference between incompatible per-
spectives must be resolvable by rational means. Whether or not there are
incommensurable 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 integrity
and health, which the Christian ascetic ideal allegedly compromises by
turning people against themselves, demanding that they treat themselves
as sinners. There is no suggestion, however, that every Christian shares
Nietzsche’s values, or is even capable of attaining the integrity and self-
satisfaction they hold up as ideal.13 On the contrary, Nietzsche goes so
far as to suggest that most people ought to be Christians, since this is
the best they can do for themselves: “the ideas of the herd should rule
in the herd” ([WP] § 287; see also [GM] III, §§ 11, 13–16). According
to Nietzsche himself, such people have no reason to (and would be best
advised not to) hold the values in terms of which he criticizes Christianity,
and therefore he must assume that his arguments would hold no force for
them. Their perspective and his are incommensurable. Nietzsche’s critique
of Christian moral values is directed not against this incommensurable
perspective, but rather against the related perspective of those Christians
or Deists who, like Kant or Rousseau, do hold the values of autonomy,
integrity, and self-realization that Nietzsche thinks are undermined by the
Christian morality. Thus, the critique of Christianity presupposes both that
some alternative perspectives are incommensurable, and also that at least
some other opposed perspectives share sufficient overlapping values to
avoid radical incommensurability.
This example suggests an argumentative strategy which can avoid the
self-referential difficulty I sketched above. Nietzsche’s willingness to offer
a critique of Christianity designed to persuade at least some Christians
indicates 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, or
evaluation of relative merit would make sense.15 On the contrary, for Niet-
zsche, perspectives often overlap with one another, as his overlaps with
Kant’s, or Rousseau’s. In fact, Nietzsche must assume that this sort of
overlap is common: otherwise it would make no sense for him to demand
that a single individual “employ a variety of perspectives . . . in the service
of knowledge” ([GM] III, § 12).
Not only is there often overlap among perspectives, but as we saw
above, the visual metaphor itself encourages the idea that some ways of
organizing experience are better than others, and this raises the question
of what makes for a better interpretation among cognitive perspectives. Of
course, perspectivism implies that there will not always be a clear way of
deciding this question, but in at least some cases overarching values are
shared across incompatible perspectives, and this enables us to evaluate
their relative merits. Many different perspectives, for example, share epis-
temic values like simplicity, plausibility, and empirical adequacy, in terms
of which we evaluate our theories and interpretations. Some standards of
this sort, e.g., the ideal of internal coherence in a system of interpretation,
are so minimal, and so central to our notions of effective organization
of experience, that they are shared very broadly. Such shared standards
enable us to generate arguments in one perspective that will be recognized
as reasons from within another. That is, they can afford one perspective
the resources to give “internal reasons” against another, reasons that have
force not only in the perspective within which they were developed, but
also 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 better
interpretation of our cognitive practices than the views he saw as the chief
alternatives, viz., metaphysical realism, and Kant’s transcendental ideal-
ism. Perspectivism offers such a reason by arguing that a concept crucial
to both alternative views, the concept of a thing in itself, is incoherent. The
metaphysical realist17 conceives of the world as made up of completely
determinate and independent objects, i.e., of things in themselves, and
Kant’s view also depends on the concept of a thing in itself, since he
understands the world of appearances (i.e., the world we can know) in
terms of its distinction from a world of things in themselves. This concept
involves both self-subsistence and complete determinateness. That is, a
thing in itself would have to be both independent in its being from other
things (and thus also mind- and theory-independent), and fully determinate
with respect to its properties; for every possible property, F, a thing in itself
must either have the property (be F), or have its opposite (be not-F).18 This
means that things in themselves could be adequately represented only by a
fully specific conceptual description of the intellect,19 which is why Kant
calls them “objects of the pure understanding” (A 264/B 320).
I see Nietzsche’s skepticism about this concept20 as arising from one
of the major results of Kant’s critique of previous metaphysics. Kant
showed 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 the
understanding”.21 An intellectual intuition would be a direct representation
of its object, which presented it immediately and in its full detail, the way
our sensory intuitions do, but which at the same time explicitly articulated
the conceptual structure (essence) of the object. (This second requirement
allows us to say what the thing is, and connect our knowledge of it to
other knowledge.) As Kant suggests, it is easy to imagine how an infi-
nite intellect (God) could simultaneously accomplish both these cognitive
tasks.22 As a pure intellect, God would know things via concepts (and thus
in their connections with other things), but because His intellect is one with
His power and His will, God’s act of conceiving the object of knowledge
would at the same time bring it into existence. Thus, God could guarantee
the completeness of His concept of the thing, because the content of His
concept itself determines the thing’s features. In this way, an infinite intel-
lect’s concepts represent things in their radical particularity, just the way
our sensory intuitions do. Once we consider how God’s intellect would
accomplish this task, however, it becomes apparent that we have no such
power. Our intellect is not creative. Kant concludes that, for us, a thing in
itself 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 about
unknowability, toward a deep tension between the requirements for rep-
resenting a thing in itself, and the basic powers of representation that are
available to us. It thereby brings into question not just the power to know
a thing in itself, but also the more general ability even to represent or
conceive a thing in itself as such. Our concepts and intuitions combine to
represent 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 given
in sensation, by virtue of its immediate relation to the object. This lack of
completeness is a deep and serious limitation. It means that any conceptual
representation of an object will represent a selection of some part of the
intuitive (sensory) content. Our concept of the object itself depends on this
selection, and thus takes on structure from our way of selecting. To this
extent, the individuation of the object so conceived is theory-dependent,
and this object, therefore, is no thing in itself. We may imagine that the
object as we conceive it approximates a fully determinate, independent
thing, but without intellectual intuition we could never justifiably conclude
that it really has such an underlying, fully determinate structure, and is
therefore a thing in itself. Our finite cognitive abilities could never produce
a complete conceptual description to validate the claim.
Thus, ultimately the unknowability of things in themselves pointed out
by Kant indicates deeper problems with the coherence of the very idea of
a thing in itself. This is so because the unknowability arises not from some
contingent deficiency or incompleteness in our experience or theorizing
to date, but from general and inevitable limitations on our cognitive re-
sources and representational capacities. In attempting to conceive of things
in themselves, we outstrip the legitimate realm of our concepts, and stop
making sense altogether. As Kant himself puts the point, “in the case of
the noumenon, there the entire use, indeed even all significance of the
categories completely ceases” (B 308, my emphasis). But, as Nietzsche
points out, if our cognition has no meaningful application to things in
themselves, then it also has no way to make sense of Kant’s own purported
distinction between them and the things we do know: “we do not ‘know’
nearly enough to be entitled to any such distinction. We simply lack any
organ for knowledge, for ‘truth’ ” ([GS] 354). That is, we lack any power
of intellectual intuition that could represent things in themselves as distinct

from the objects of our knowledge. The objects we know are not both
fully determinate and fully independent like things in themselves, and our
cognitive 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 in
inferring to the existence of things in themselves. First, we might infer
to the thing in itself as the cause of our phenomenal experience, or of
the world of appearance. Following an argument first advanced explicitly
by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche insists that we cannot coherently conceive of
things in themselves as the transcendent cause of experience, because, as
Kant showed, the justified application of the category of cause is limited
to 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 in
themselves as the transcendental “correlate” of our cognitive faculties (A
250), which he interprets as conditions providing the form of any possible
experience. Because the operation of these faculties is a transcendental
precondition of experience, they cannot draw the matter, or content, they
organize 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, including
the “matter of experience” (A 223/B 270; cf. A 20/B 34, A 143/B 182, A
167/B 209) that our faculties organize, must be logically prior to experi-
ence. This "matter" must therefore have a transcendent source, outside the
empirical realm, viz., things in themselves. Of course, on Kant’s view we
can only know things as they appear, once our cognitive faculties have in-
fluenced them, so all we know about the transcendent things in themselves
is that they exist. Nonetheless, we are forced to posit them as an artifact of
any transcendental theory of experience, and such a theory thereby entitles
us to the thing-in-itself/appearance distinction.
Nietzsche blocks this move by rejecting Kant’s transcendental account
of our cognitive faculties. He replaces Kant’s transcendental arguments
with a naturalistic interpretation of cognition, under which none of our
concepts are preconditions of the possibility of experience.24 If our facul-
ties do not transcend experience, then there is no need to posit transcendent
objects 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
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 in
themselves, but that the very notion of such a thing is incoherent. Although
there are no unicorns, we can very well distinguish between the concepts
‘unicorn’ and ‘horse’. The lack of a referent for one term does not indicate
any conceptual problem, and if we ever came across a unicorn, we would
have no trouble employing the “unicorn/horse distinction”. By contrast, the
problem with the thing-in-itself/appearance distinction arises from general
limitations on our conceptual resources. Nietzsche’s thought is not simply
that there are no things in themselves, but rather that no matter what hap-
pened in the future course of experience and theorizing, our cognitive and
conceptual resources would never justify us in making any claims about
such things or inferences to their existence. That is, given our cognitive
situation, 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 of
the thing in itself absent in perspectivism, and since that notion is incoher-
ent, perspectivism is the better theory. Its superiority has nothing to do with
a purported correspondence to the way things really are (in themselves)
with our cognition, and therefore this argument is not a counterexample to
the perspectivist tenet that any claim to such correspondence is incoher-
ent. Rather, perspectivism is supposed to be better because the conceptual
resources it brings to bear on the problem of interpreting our cognitive
practices are coherent, while the alternatives are not.
This strategy is exactly what we should expect from a perspectivist. It
is 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’s
standards for what counts as a good argument. Kantians and metaphysical
realists share Nietzsche’s commitment to coherence as a minimum stan-
dard for the acceptability of a theory. Therefore, if these arguments about
the thing in itself are good, then perspectivism is a better account than its
alternatives even on their own terms. This argument counts as an internal
reason against those views.
On the reading I am presenting, Nietzsche’s detailed treatments of
the naturalistic origin of certain concepts (e.g., cause), of the origin and
value of certain perspectives (e.g., Christianity), and so on, remain merely
perspectival. Perspectivism commits Nietzsche to the belief that there are
other interpretations of these phenomena, and if someone produces a better
one than his, he will have to accept it. This does not mean, however, that
some version of metaphysical realism or transcendental idealism may turn
out to be as good a theory as perspectivism. For those of us who share the
cognitive value of internal coherence, the essential dependence of these
views on the incoherent notion of the thing in itself is enough to rule
them out. A worthwhile potential alternative epistemology will proceed
under broadly perspectivist presuppositions: it will not conceive of our
knowledge as making claims about things in themselves, and it will not
provide 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 our
traditional notions of truth and objectivity. Typically, we think of truth
as a relation of correspondence between our beliefs or theories and some
mind- and theory-independent objects. I call this an “external” concep-
tion of truth, because it determines what is true by a standard outside our
theoretical practices, viz., how things really are.
This external conception nicely captures the ordinary notion of truth we
use in daily life and theorizing. We routinely think of truth as unique and
bivalent, and in terms of correspondence to independent objects. Either it’s
raining outside, or it isn’t (bivalence); if it is, then ‘It’s raining out’ – or
something 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 true
iff it matches or captures how the world really is (correspondence).25 These
features clearly suggest the externalist understanding of truth, and they also
fit quite nicely with metaphysical realism: bivalence and uniqueness reflect
the determinateness of things in themselves, and correspondence and in-
dependence capture their ontological self-sufficiency. Thus, if Nietzsche is
right that the notion of completely mind- and theory-independent objects
is incoherent, then we cannot remain content with our ordinary externalist
ideas 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 a
matter of satisfying norms and standards drawn from within the circle of
our cognitive practices. Such internal standards (e.g., simplicity, plausibil-
ity, methodological rigor, etc.) determine which perspectives and beliefs
are cognitively superior to others, and Nietzsche’s own claims to truth rest
heavily on appeals to these norms. For example, when Nietzsche offers

to reveal the “palpable truth” that “almost everything we call ‘higher cul-
ture’ is based on the spiritualization of cruelty” ([BGE] § 229), what he
actually does is 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 better
than the “overly enthusiastic” alternatives because they are “hardened in
the 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 our
standards of rational acceptability.
Perspectivism is not the only version of internalism. Even though Kant
does not reject the coherence of the thing in itself altogether, he does insist
that things in themselves cannot serve as the standard for semantic eval-
uation of our beliefs. On his view, our knowledge claims are not about
things in themselves, but pertain rather to the objects of appearance. What
counts as true is in part a function of how our cognitive activity structures
appearances, 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, and
the interaction of this structure with determinate things in themselves pro-
duces a unique world of appearances, which serves as the standard against
which the truth of our beliefs can be evaluated. Thus, even though Kant’s
internalism compromises the radical independence of truth from our cog-
nitive situation, his view can reinterpret and save the other features of the
common sense conception of truth. Truth is still bivalent: a belief either
captures how things are in the world of appearance, or not. Truth can still
be understood as correspondence of a sort, albeit correspondence to semi-
independent objects of appearance, and not to things in themselves. Most
importantly, 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 both
Kant’s transcendental interpretation of our cognitive capabilities and his
appeal to the thing in itself. While alternative perspectives may share cog-
nitive standards that enable us to resolve disputes by appeal to internal
reasons, Nietzsche can offer no guarantee (transcendental or otherwise)
that they will.27 Since differences of perspective might not admit of a
clear determination of relative merit, the process of inquiry is not likely
to produce a single best theory. Nietzsche’s internalism implies that there
is no coherent notion of truth independent of this process, and as a result,
we are left with the prospect of alternative and incompatible truths, relative
to different and incommensurable perspectives.
Nietzsche fully embraces this pluralism, even though it compromises
the uniqueness of truth, and trivializes the sense in which truth is
correspondence:28 “There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has
eyes 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 thought
behind this falsification claim is just that our common sense, externalist
ideas about truth are bound up with the incoherent philosophical notion of
the thing in itself.29 In Nietzsche’s view, these common sense intuitions
about truth must be abandoned along with that notion.
Nietzsche’s rejection of these common sense intuitions about truth
raises concerns about the plausibility of a perspectivist account of our
cognitive practices. What is distinctive about theoretical investigation, as
opposed to other kinds of language games, is precisely that the attempt to
get things right constrains an investigator’s remarks about the world. The
truth about things can constrain inquiry in this way because of its assumed
relation to the unique, independent world, but Nietzsche abandons this
feature of truth. This worry is related to the concern that Nietzsche’s claims
about the perspective relativity of truth collapse into wholesale relativism.
In the absence of the unique truth as a standard against which we can
measure our beliefs, it seems that every theory will be as good as any
other, and inquiry starts to look less like investigation and more like mere
storytelling.
Nietzsche also rejects the bivalence of truth, as indicated by his peculiar
but persistent usage of the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ in the comparative
and superlative degrees.30 For him, judgments are not simply true or false,
but can be “truer” or “falser”. He recommends this general usage and
connects 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 left
of your “truth” either. Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential
opposition 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”, to
use the language of painters? ([BGE] § 34)
This passage is mysterious because, as we saw, Nietzsche’s exploitation

of the metaphor of perspective crucially turns on the claim that all our
apprehension of the world is “apparent”, in the sense of being conditioned
by a perspective. How, then, could it ever be more or less true or apparent,
as the quoted passage insists it is?
Attention to the Kantian flavor of this section can both resolve this
mystery, and also point the way toward an understanding of Nietzsche’s
notion 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 Kantian
provenance.31 This indicates that a belief is “more apparent” if it is more
tied to the subjective “human contribution” ([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 is
more independent of perspective. As we saw, however, the influence of
perspective is completely general, and no belief is literally freer from per-
spective than any other. Therefore, this relative independence can only be
understood as a matter of the breadth of the class of perspectives within
which a belief demands acceptance. The more extensive this class, the
more independent the belief is from any particular perspective. Beliefs
and theories demand broader acceptance precisely by meeting epistemic
standards which are shared across perspectives. Thus, according to Niet-
zsche’s system of “degrees of apparentness”, beliefs are truer when they
are more strongly supported by the epistemic standards we use to evaluate
and choose among theories and perspectives, and truth itself should be un-
derstood as a matter of meeting the epistemic standards governing theory
choice.
These epistemic standards allow us to evaluate the relative merits of
competing interpretations, and taken together, they function as criteria of
objectivity. They seek to ensure that our theorizing is guided by objective
(albeit internal) reasons, rather than subjective caprice, and where such
standards are shared across perspectives, they allow these internal reasons
to influence our choice of perspective. Even though perspectivism blocks
any guarantee that such reasons can resolve every dispute, the possibility of
giving them in at least some cases saves perspectivist epistemology from
the charge of wholesale relativism, since it provides a specific sense in
which some perspectives are better than others. Nietzsche’s internalism
therefore gives us a working notion of truth: theories which meet our
epistemic standards relatively well are true(r).
This internal account of truth depends on a notion of objectivity that
must itself differ from the traditional conception. Perspectivism implies
that our conceptual resources are always situated within some particular
conditions 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 be
objective?
Nietzsche’s solution to this problem is to treat objectivity as a require-

ment that we take various alternative perspectives seriously. In the Third
Essay of the Genealogy, he characterizes objectivity
not as “contemplation without interest” (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the ability
to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a
variety of 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’s
perspective 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: “the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more
eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete
will our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’, be” ([GM] III, § 12).
Our ultimate cognitive goal, which may or may not be reached in given
cases, is an overarching philosophical interpretation that brings as much
unity as possible to this “variety”.32 What objectivity demands, however, is
that this quest for unity be always constrained by “that sublime inclination
of 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 of
perfection, made dominant in German philosophy by Leibniz, of maximal
variety, unified by the greatest compossible order.33 In extending this ideal
into epistemology, Nietzsche again follows the lead of Kant, for whom the
regulative use of theoretical reason “serves to provide these concepts [of
the understanding] with the greatest unity alongside the greatest extension”
(A 644/B 672).
Whether full theoretical unification is ultimately possible or not, a
“variety of perspectives” is necessary for objectivity because of the idea re-
vealed already in our discussion of perspective in painting: the limitations
of perspective can be overcome only by appeal to information drawn from
outside a perspective representation itself. Absolute objectivity is denied us
because we have no source of completely aperspectival information about
the world. Nevertheless, the information made available through a “variety
of perspectives” outside the one to which we are (currently) more or less
beholden, can reveal the limitations of our own perspective, and point our
way 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 response
to treatment, only to recur at intervals. In one such case, remissions
were produced first by talk therapy, later by drug therapy, and still later
by a combination of the two, when drugs alone proved no longer effec-
tive. Doctors were able to produce satisfactory clinical results in this case
precisely because they were willing to take up two different perspectives
toward the illness: (1) a mentalistic perspective in which the illness was es-
sentially a function of the patient’s conscious (or subconscious) emotional
life, and (2) a radically different physiological perspective under which
the disease was an imbalance in the biochemistry of the brain. At least on
the surface, these two perspectives are incompatible: they hold fundamen-
tally different commitments about what the illness is in the first instance.
While we may hope for a theoretical breakthrough which would enable us
to understand how these two perspectives might be unified into a single
broader model of psychological life, it is an empirical question whether
this broader perspective will in fact emerge. Meanwhile, even without
the wanted meta-perspective, going back and forth between the two in-
compatible perspectives contributes to our knowledge about depression, as
manifested 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 conceptual
differences between our world view and that of the text. At times, the
divergent 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 understands Physiologie as the general science of nature
(physis), which includes both the science of “corporeal nature” and the
science of “thinking nature”, or ‘Psychologie’ as its branches (A 846/B
874), 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 interpretive
practice here approaches Kant’s meaning by tracing the evolution of con-
ceptions of physiology and psychology through eighteenth and nineteenth
century German philosophy and science, and attending to changes in the
use of relevant terms, as reflected in dictionaries from the period. Under-
standing these other, more recent historical perspectives on the relations
of 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 that
preceded them. The importance of this kind of movement through the tradi-
tion surrounding a text is clearly indicated by the failures of understanding
to which we are condemned when confronted by artifacts from cultures

(e.g., ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia) with which we have lost the kind of
cultural 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) is
enhanced by our ability to assume a variety of perspectives on it, and in this
case, too, the utility of these perspectives for knowledge does not depend
on their compatibility, or reducibility to a single overarching perspective.
Nietzsche pursues precisely this sort of methodology in the Geneal-
ogy of Morals, when he traces the evolution in our moral concepts like
‘guilt’ and ‘good’ through the radically different meanings they have had
in different moral perspectives. In fact, the perspective relativity of the
meanings of our words and practices is what makes genealogy necessary
in the first place. The absence of a single “God’s eye view” transcending
and subsuming all perspectives makes it impossible to fix such meanings
definitely and once and for all: “all concepts in which an entire process is
semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history
is definable” ([GM] II, § 13). In the absence of a privileged point of view,
then, the best understanding of moral phenomena we can aspire to will
derive from tracing the history of our moral concepts, and evaluating the
various perspectives within which they function in the light of one another.
Of course, this program to “employ a variety of perspectives in the
service of knowledge" must be carried out under the understanding that
some perspectives are better than others, and that internal reasons might
show that some perspectives are simply wrong. Therefore, when we ap-
peal to any given perspective as a candidate for broadening our previous
view, we must be guided by an evaluation (in the light of our epistemic
standards) of its value for knowledge. Still, because aperspectival access
to the things themselves is impossible, the multiplicity of the perspectives
available to us is crucial to this cognitive strategy. We can never appre-
hend things independently of all perspective, but we can pursue greater
objectivity precisely by playing perspectives off against one another, using
each to produce arguments and insights which expose the limitations and
presuppositions of the others.34
By contrast with Nietzsche’s program, a Hegelian might insist that these
various perspectives are all ultimately compatible, that in the end they will
all be reconciled in a single broadest perspective by the complete historical
self-understanding of Spirit in the moment of Absolute Knowing. Niet-
zsche, of course, denies that any such a priori guarantee of total success
in our cognitive enterprise is available. For him, it is an empirical question
whether any two perspectives useful for knowledge can be reconciled in a
single, broader perspective; we can only try it and see. Moreover, no matter
how much breadth we achieve in any particular perspective, we will never

be justified in concluding that the path of inquiry is now closed. Not only
is more experience possible, but other perspectives might throw what we
have already accomplished into a new and more problematic light: “the
world has become ’infinite’ for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot
reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations” ([GS] §
374).
Still, even for Nietzsche the synthesis of opposing views into ever
broader, ever more coherent perspectives remains a regulative ideal in
knowledge, as it is in life: “Precisely this shall be called greatness: being
capable of being as manifold as whole, as ample as full” ([BGE] § 212).
Thus, Nietzsche’s notion of objectivity is intimately bound up with the
characterization of truth I gave above. There, the proposal was to replace
the strict opposition of ‘true’ and ‘false’ with a system of “degrees of ap-
parentness”, under which beliefs are less apparent, or truer, just when they
demand acceptance across a broader class of perspectives by satisfying
shared epistemic standards. This is just to be more objective, in the present
sense.
This notion of objectivity is internal to our perspectival cognitive prac-
tices, since it depends on the epistemic standards which guide those
practices. At the same time, however, it provides a horizon against which
we can evaluate the correctness of our beliefs. Though we never escape the
limitation of perspective altogether, the pursuit of objectivity will make
our theories relatively truer, and our perspectives broader and less idio-
syncratic, and thus, the remaining relativity of truth to our perspectives
does not amount to wholesale relativism. Through the operation of our
epistemic standards and the practice of giving internal reasons, we have
criteria for evaluating the relative merit of our interpretations. Investigators
pursue theories and interpretations which measure up to these standards,
and to that extent get things right. Despite the fact that this view never gets
us 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 our
theorizing.
4. PLURALISM AND THE KANTIAN LEGACY OF INTERNALISM
As the last quotation suggests, there are interesting similarities between

Nietzsche’s and Putnam’s versions of internalism. Most obviously, both
insist on a deep connection between truth and the epistemic standards we
use 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
themselves, and instead they understand our cognitive activity as a matter

of improving our theories’ ability to meet standards internal to that activity.
Perhaps the deepest point of similarity, however, is the common Kantian
heritage 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 in
themselves, and they also abandon Kant’s transcendental interpretation of
our cognitive powers. The above discussion of the metaphor of perspective
showed that these two ideas – of a single necessary conceptual scheme
and of a determinate and wholly independent world – are interrelated by
the very logic of perspective. It is therefore no surprise that Nietzsche and
Putnam reject both, in their attempts to articulate a non-transcendental
picture in which reality is neither wholly mind-independent, nor wholly
mind-dependent.
Despite these departures from the orthodox Kantian fold, however, the
structure 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 because
of the way they organize experience. Putnam explicitly acknowledges that
his “indebtedness to Kant is very large” (Putnam 1990, 3), and his debt
traces much the same path as Nietzsche’s. Putnam, too, follows Kant’s
denial that we have any power of intellectual intuition of essences,35 and
insists that this rejection implies the ultimate incoherence of the notion of
things in themselves. In addition, Putnam conceives of experience along
Kantian lines as the joint product of our conceptual contribution and the
contribution of the outside world: “the mind and the world jointly make
up the mind and the world” (Putnam 1981, xi). The structural similarities
between perspectivism and internal realism thus arise because Nietzsche
and 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 our
cognitive practices independently of the concepts and epistemic standards
which guide those practices, but they abandon his transcendental approach
to cognition in favor of more naturalistic, empirical accounts which have
neither 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 commits
Nietzsche 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 often
appeal to examples in which our theoretical standards do not decide be-
tween competing accounts, and these cases are supposed to show that we
cannot 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 sort
of pluralism we found in Nietzsche. Putnam often balks at this result,
however. In papers like “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” (Putnam 1975), he
manifests a deep concern to deny the incommensurability of competing
theories, and Reason, Truth, and History (1981) explicitly sets out to block
incommensurability claims by opening up some space between truth and
rational acceptability. There Putnam identifies truth with idealized rational
acceptability (not with rational acceptability simpliciter), and he implicitly
assumes 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 talk
of the ideal theory has faded into the background as Putnam has come
to hang his internal realism more clearly on the notion of conceptual rel-
ativity. Nevertheless, as recently as his “Reply” (Putnam 1992) to Gary
Ebbs’s “Realism and Rational Inquiry” (Ebbs 1992), Putnam is clearly
uncomfortable with the apparent pluralistic implications of this view. He
remarks that the alternative descriptions of any given set of data to which
conceptual relativity commits him are “virtually notational variants” (Put-
nam 1992, 356), thereby minimizing any sense in which they are genuinely
alternative accounts.
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 that
the world of experience will have a univocal character despite its subjective
component. Precisely this “transcendentalism”, however, commits Kant to
the 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 our
basic concepts, we no longer need to posit things in themselves, but we
also lose the necessity of any one conceptual apparatus. Experience may
therefore be constituted in different ways. Since internalists refuse to take
any independent, external standard as the measure of our perspectives, they
are left without any absolute measure, independent of the cognitive values
and standards proper to those perspectives themselves. That is, they can no
longer appeal to any one overarching, neutral procedure for adjudicating
all competing cognitive claims. But this is just to acknowledge the possi-
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 ideas
about the uniqueness of truth, but that is just the challenge internalism is
laying before us.
Second, embracing pluralism also clarifies the nature of disputes be-
tween competing accounts of the world. When Putnam treats alternative
conceptual 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 have
different empirical consequences, but to conclude from this that they are
merely “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 such
pains to reject. The deep insight of Reason, Truth, and History – an in-
sight Putnam shares with Nietzsche – is that there can be real differences
of opinion, differences that are worth arguing about, even where there
is no precisely specifiable decision procedure or ‘criterion’ of rationality
sufficient to settle them.38
At the same time, Putnam’s rejection of verificationism does indicate
a different kind of problem with the stronger reductionist view. If truth
were merely confirmation, as the verificationist would have it, it would be
impossible to explain the truth value of many routine historical claims for
which evidence is now lost. Putnam cites the example of Lizzie Borden.
Though it may now be impossible definitively to confirm or to disconfirm
the charge that she killed her parents, this accidental absence of evidence
in no way compromises the truth value of the charge. Either Lizzie Borden
administered 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 or
the other which meets high standards of rational acceptability. Thus, truth
cannot simply be a matter of rational acceptability.
Unlike Putnam, Nietzsche is insensitive to these difficulties. It seems to
me, however, that the internalist solution for such cases must take us once
more back to Kant, indicating the depth to which later internalism remains
indebted to its Kantian origins. Our confidence that historical claims have
truth values derives not from the metaphysical assumption that the world in
itself is fully determinate, but rather from an idea of possible justification,
based on the epistemological similarity of historical claims for which we
have evidence, and those where it is lacking. Presently unprovable claims
like “Lizzie Borden killed her parents” are knowable by the same general
means as historical claims we can prove, or, for that matter, as a whole
raft of everyday claims about the world. Thus, we think “Lizzie Borden
killed her parents” has a truth value because it (or its negation) would be
rationally acceptable for some possible knower with our cognitive powers,
standards, and values, provided only that she were suitably placed in time
and space (say, in the house at the time of the murders).39 Such examples
do not demonstrate any radical disconnect between truth and our epistemic
standards and practices, but rather serve to indicate the continuing and deep
dependence of truth (and of internalist accounts of it) on a Kantian-style
analysis of the conditions under which knowledge is possible for creatures
like us.
5. CONCLUSION
The kind of pluralism I have attributed to both perspectivism and internal

realism is not immediately intuitive. It does not live up to our common
sense ideas that there is one world ‘out there’, and that true beliefs must
capture its unique nature. This, however, is precisely the measure of per-
spectivism’s philosophical interest. Putnam writes that “the problems of
philosophy attain the form in which they are of real interest only with the
work of Kant” (Putnam 1990, 3). To the extent that we follow Putnam’s
commitment to a broadly Kantian approach to epistemology, and also (like
virtually all of Kant’s followers) find Kant’s own treatment of the thing in
itself unacceptable, we, too, must come to grips with the pluralistic im-
plications of perspectivism. The structural similarity between Nietzsche’s
and Putnam’s respective attempts to work out a coherent anti-metaphysical
realist position only indicates the depth and force of the considerations that
push any such internalism toward pluralism.
A pluralist internalism paints a picture of cognition in which the world
acquires sufficiently determinate structure to answer our theoretical ques-
tions only once it is organized, in one way or another, by our theoretical
activity. This theoretical activity posits objects of our knowledge in the
service of its attempts to organize experience. Because experience by itself
does not entail a unique set of theoretical posits, pragmatic considerations
about the effectiveness of various approaches to organizing experience
gain some scope to influence the structure of the theoretical world, and this
is one important source of the pragmatist streak in post-Kantian philoso-
phers like Putnam and Nietzsche. At the same time, our theoretical activity
works to organize experience of the real world, and is subject to evaluation
in 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.
In conclusion, I want to suggest that despite its violations of common

sense intuitions, this internalism provides a better interpretation of our cog-
nitive practices than a traditional externalist account. Take an investigator
who claims that her theory or interpretation is ‘true’. Does she mean that
her results correspond to theory-independent things? She has no faculty of
intellectual intuition which would give her direct access to the nature of
things in themselves. Thus, even if common sense leads her to think of her
truth claim in terms of correspondence with such objects, she could have
no direct evidence that such a correspondence obtains. If this is what truth
claims amount to, then they can never be justified.
Our investigators truth claim is not based on some kind of comparison
between the theory and independently described objects. Her conception
of what the relevant objects are is given by the theory itself: again, this is
just what it is to believe the theory. The truth claim is really based on her
interpretation’s satisfaction of various epistemic standards, and its ability
to produce internal reasons demonstrating its superiority to alternatives.
Perspectivism takes this result at face value, on the idea that the actual
basis of truth claims is a good indication of what they amount to. If this
leads to a conception of truth at odds with our ordinary intuitions, that
only reveals the extent to which common sense externalism is infected by
metaphysical realist presuppositions that are out of step with the role truth
claims actually play in theorizing.
NOTES
∗ This paper has benefitted from helpful comments on earlier versions by Alexander
Nehamas, Gary Hatfield, Akeel Bilgrami, Paul Guyer, Bernard Reginster, Fred Dretske,
Dagfinn Føllesdal, Chris Bobonich, Alison Simmons, and Tom Blackburn. Thanks also to
Philosophy 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 British
Columbia, 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 continuity
between 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 convinced
that Putnam always limited his aims to producing what Ebbs might call an interpretive
understanding of our intellectual practices surrounding reference, rather than attempting to
produce a “scientific theory of reference”. See Ebbs (1992, 20–22).
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, motion
and rest, form and content” ([GS] § 121). I defend this Kantian reading of perspectivism
in Anderson (1996), and at greater length in some work in progress, which focuses on
Beyond Good and Evil, in particular. As I discuss below, Putnam’s thought shares this
broadly Kantian structure.
6 See also Rosenthal (1968), which found that the Bruner and Goodman results could be
duplicated only in part, and emphasizes that other (non-socio-economic) factors are also
important in size perception of coins. The differences in the results of these two studies lie
beyond the scope of this paper.
7 The locus classicus is Leibniz’s ‘Monadology’, § 57: “Just as the same city viewed from
different sides appears to be different and to be, as it were, multiplied in perspectives, so
the 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 points
of view of each monad” (Leibniz 1969, 648). The pre-established harmony instated by God
guarantees that the ideas of each monad, which constitute its “universe”, reflect, however
confusedly, the one metaphysically real universe He has established, as it is seen from that
monad’s perspective.
8 “There is only a perspective seeing; only a perspective ‘knowing’,” ([GM] III, § 12).
9 Alberti (1966, 55). The painter may even change the scale of her measuring instruments
in relation to her model during her work on the same painting, as long as she respects the
relations of the depicted objects within each scale. Alberti suggests that the painter employ
a veil with a grid marked on it, so that, by viewing her model through the cloth, she can
measure the relative sizes and shapes of its parts (Alberti 1966, 68 ff.). The painter can
vary the distance between her eye and the measuring device at will (e.g., to make the
size of a particular appearance fit exactly between two marks of the grid), so long as the
relative proportions among the parts are maintained when transferring the measurement to
the drawing.
10 Nietzsche conceives of a thing as the “sum of its effects” ([WP] § 551). This implies that
the individuation conditions of each object depend on those of all the others: if one thing
were different, it would have different effects on the other things, and since these things in
turn are nothing but sums of effects, they would also be different things. On this view, any
given system of effects can be parsed into things in different ways. Thus “things” do not
have determinate, unique, or atomistic individuation conditions. See Nehamas (1985, ch.
3).
11 On my reading, perspectivism is first and foremost an epistemological doctrine, and the
self-referential difficulty I have just sketched is one proper to an epistemological view. The
question is whether, given perspectivism, it is possible for us to know that perspectivism
itself is correct, and if not, what grounds we could have for believing it. This self-referential
difficulty 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 more
than to his perspectivism per se. Nietzsche’s epistemology does have implications for
our conception of truth (see Section III, below), but the self-referential worries raised by
Nietzsche’s notion of truth have been well described elsewhere, most extensively in Clark
(1990). In Anderson (1996) I discuss Clark’s interpretation, and offer a resolution for the
truth 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’s
statements about the importance of these values.
14 See Davidson (1984).
15 Nehamas (1983) also emphasizes that Nietzsche’s perspectives are not mutually
isolated.
16 I am indebted to Akeel Bilgrami both for suggesting the use of the term “internal
reasons”, which is inspired by the work of Bernard Williams, and also for pressing me to
hang 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 characterize
the 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 rationalist
realists who concerned Nietzsche, the two versions of realism are quite similar. The 20th
c. realist’s world is a fixed totality of determinate theory-independent objects, just as the
rationalist’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 of
a 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 first Critique appear in the
text 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 Guyer
generously 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 from
the Antinomy at A 506–7/B 535–6. There Kant concludes from his two arguments (1) that
the world as a whole is not finite, and (2) that it is not infinite, that the world cannot be a
thing in itself. This follows only if a thing in itself must have exactly one of each pair of
opposite predicates.
19 That is, things in themselves, or traditional substances, admit of description by what
Leibniz called a “complete, or perfect concept” (Leibniz 1969, 268), which implies all the
specific concepts attributable to the thing, and therefore also implies that all other concepts
do 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 between
the “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 the Critique of Pure Reason, however, (and
especially 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, suggesting
that the merely regulative uses of reason (see A 642–668/B 671–696) might be seen as a
different, more limited kind of “real use”.) Gary Hatfield has pointed out that this is one
of 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
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 the
mind, 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 point
at [WP] § 553. See also [GS] § 357, where Nietzsche praises Kant’s effort to “delimit the
realm in which this concept [causality] makes sense”, and then adds that “to this day we
are not done with this fixing of limits”. The stricter limits within which Nietzsche wants to
constrain 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 synthetic a priori knowledge in mathematics
and pure natural science. Nietzsche denies that we have any such synthetic and a priori
knowledge (see [BGE] § 11). He then substitutes a naturalistic account of the origin of
our conceptual resources, based on reflections drawn from evolutionary theory and moral
psychology. I discuss Nietzsche’s argument for this point in detail in some work in progress
dealing with Nietzsche’s account of perspectivism in Beyond 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, but
Nietzsche must have some workable notion of truth, since he routinely makes truth claims
on behalf of his own views (see, e.g., [BGE] § 202 and [GM] I, § 1). In addition, there is
compelling textual evidence that Nietzsche implicitly depends on two different notions of
truth. Occasionally, he makes both particular truth claims and blanket statements that all
our 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, he
makes remarks on cruelty which, he claims, reveal some “palpable truths [that] remain
unspoken for centuries” ([BGE] § 229). If this section is to meet minimum standards
of internal consistency, Nietzsche must be using the semantic terms ‘true’ and ‘false’ in
different senses when, on the one hand, he implies that all our beliefs are false, and on
the other, claims that certain beliefs are palpably true. In Anderson (1996) I extend such a
distinction, proposed in more elaborate form by Schacht (1983), into a general resolution
of the self-referential paradoxes surrounding Nietzsche’s notion of truth.
27 In this respect the interpretation of perspectivism offered here differs markedly from
that developed by Hales and Welshon (1994) who argue that (at least) perspectivism itself
and 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 the
self-referential paradoxes surrounding perspectivism strikes me as deeply unsatisfying.
Exempting perspectivism itself from the general claim that all knowledge is perspecti-
val seems ad hoc, and numerous Nietzschean remarks about logic strongly suggest that
he thinks the validity of logic is limited by the influence of perspective. I cite only one
such claim: “Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand
valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of
life. . . . such estimates might be, in spite of their regulative importance for us, nevertheless
mere foreground estimates . . . ” ([BGE] § 3).
28 True theories still correspond to the world in a sense, but only because we have no
coherent 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 what
the 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 in
Anderson (1996).
30 See, e.g., [GM] I, § 3 and [BGE] § 4.
31 Nietzsche begins by acknowledging the force of the Kantian-inspired philosophy of
some of his contemporaries, which insists that “the erroneousness of the world in which
we think we live is the surest and firmest fact that we can lay eyes on”, but he can accept
such a philosophy only in a qualified way: “whoever takes this world, along with space,
time, form, movement, to be falsely inferred – anyone like that would at least have ample
reason to learn to be suspicious at long last of all thinking”, including that thinking which
leads us to the conclusion that our knowledge is of a “false” or “apparent” world opposed
to 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” of
things in themselves. (All quotations from [BGE] § 34.)
32 For example, Nietzsche writes that “the conscience of method demands . . . [that we]
not . . . assume several kinds of causality until the experiment of making do with a single
one has been pushed to its utmost limit” ([BGE] § 36).
33 See, e.g., Leibniz’s ‘Monadology’, § 58: “This is the means of obtaining the greatest
variety possible, but with the greatest possible order; that is to say, this is the means of
attaining as much perfection as possible” (Leibniz 1969, 648).
34 Longino (1990) has recently suggested a similar view, under which the objectivity of
scientific communities crucially depends on the availability of multiple points of view
from which both new and dominant approaches and theories may be subjected to criti-
cism. Unlike Longino, Nietzsche insists that even individual investigators (as opposed to
communities) 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) and
the 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 “cognitive
capacities”, which may be contingently limited in ways such as those Putnam’s example
suggests.
REFERENCES
Works by Nietzsche
For Nietzsche’s German, I have used Nietzsche 1980ff. I have made use of the following
translations, cited by abbreviations. Date of first publication appears at the end of the
references. Parenthetical citations in the text refer to Nietzsche’s section numbers, which
are 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
(1967) (1911).
Works by other authors
Alberti, L. B.: 1966 On Painting, trans. J. R. Spencer, Yale University Press, New Haven,
CT.
Anderson, R. L.: 1996 ‘Overcoming Charity: The Case of Maudemarie Clark’s Nietzsche
on Truth and Philosophy’, Nietzsche-Studien 25, 307–341.
Bruner, J. S. and Goodman, C. C.: 1947 ‘Value and Need as Organizing Factors in
Perception’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 42, 33–44.
Clark, M.: 1990 Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cam-
bridge.
Davidson, D.: 1984 ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, in Inquiries into Truth
and Interpretation, Clarendon, Oxford.
Ebbs, G.: 1992 ‘Realism and Rational Inquiry’, Philosophical Topics 20(1), 1–33.
Hales, S. and Welshon, R.: 1994 ‘Truth, Paradox, and Nietzschean Perspectivism’, History
of Philosophy Quarterly 11, 101–119.
Hatfield, G.: 1990 The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from
Kant to Helmholtz, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Hatfield, G.: 1997 ‘The Workings of the Intellect: Mind and Psychology’, in P. Easton
(ed.), Logic and the Workings of the Mind: The Logic of Ideas and Faculty Psychology
in Early Modern Philosophy, North American Kant Society.
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).
Kant, I.: 1992 Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, trans. and ed. D. Walford and R.
Meerbote, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Leibniz, G. W.: 1969 Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2nd ed., trans. and ed. L. E.
Loemker, D. Reidel, Dordrecht.
Leibniz, G. W.: 1973 in G. H. R. Parkinson (ed.), Philosophical Writings, trans. M. Morris
and G. H. R. Parkinson, Dent, London.
Longino, H.: 1990 Science as Social Knowledge, Princeton University Press, Princeton,
NJ.
Nehamas, A.: 1983 ‘Immanent and Transcendent Perspectivism in Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-
Studien 12, 473–490.
Nehamas, A.: 1985 Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
MA.
Putnam, H.: 1975 ‘The Meaning of “Meaning” ’, in Mind, Language, and Reality:
Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 215–271.
Putnam, H.: 1978 ‘Realism and Reason’, in Meaning and the Moral Sciences, Routledge
and Kegan Paul, London, pp. 123–140.
Putnam, H.: 1981 Reason, Truth, and History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Putnam, H.: 1987 The Many Faces of Realism, Open Court, LaSalle, IL.
Putnam, H.: 1988 Representation and Reality, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Putnam, H.: 1990 Realism with a Human Face, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Putnam, H.: 1992 ‘Reply to Gary Ebbs’, Philosophical Topics 20(1), 348–358.
Rorty, R.: 1972 ‘The World Well Lost’, Journal of Philosophy 69, 649–665.
Rorty, R.: 1993 ‘Putnam and the Relativist Menace’, The Journal of Philosophy 90, 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 General
Psychology 78, 85–103.
Schacht, R.: 1983 Nietzsche, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
Schopenhauer, A.: 1969 The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. P. J. Payne, Dover,
New York.
Williams, B.: 1981 ‘Internal and External Reasons’, in Moral Luck, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, pp. 101–113.
Williams, B.: 1985 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Department of Philosophy
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2155
USA

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TRUTH AND OBJECTIVITY IN PERSPECTIVISM∗

ABSTRACT. I investigate the consequences of Nietzsche’s perspectivism for notions

Recent years have seen numerous attempts to dissolve the realism/anti-

Synthese 115: 1–32, 1998.

therefore have no way to conceive of a completely determinate and theory-

1. THE METAPHOR OF PERSPECTIVE

Nietzsche’s appeal to “perspective” in epistemology depends on a visual

zschean perspectives, or to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for

values which orders a child’s life. Nietzsche’s perspectivism suggests that

are holistic systems of interpretation because the properties of objects in

2. PERSPECTIVE DIFFERENCES AND SELF - REFUTATION

belief or theory can be true only if it corresponds to things as they are in

of intellectual intuition that could represent things in themselves as distinct

of the thing-in-itself/appearance distinction. It is a pseudo-distinction,

3. TRUTH , OBJECTIVITY, AND PERSPECTIVISM

I now turn to some philosophical implications of this argument. In par-

heavily on appeals to these norms. For example, when Nietzsche offers

This passage is mysterious because, as we saw, Nietzsche’s exploitation

Nietzsche’s solution to this problem is to treat objectivity as a require-

The idea is that different perspectives reveal different aspects of things,

to which we are condemned when confronted by artifacts from cultures

how much breadth we achieve in any particular perspective, we will never

4. PLURALISM AND THE KANTIAN LEGACY OF INTERNALISM

As the last quotation suggests, there are interesting similarities between

themselves, and instead they understand our cognitive activity as a matter

bility of competing claims that cannot be adjudicated, i.e., to be a pluralist.

The kind of pluralism I have attributed to both perspectivism and internal

In conclusion, I want to suggest that despite its violations of common

Nietzsche, F. W.: 1980ff. Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, G. Colli and M. Montinari

Works by other authors

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