Perspectivism Theory

The claim that “it is all subjective” is almost commonplace among individuals in the 21st century. This claim reinforces the assumption that one's knowledge is self-reflexive; that is, it both affects one's perceptions and talk and is affected by one's perceptions and talk. This is generally talked about as the “problem of knowledge” or the “epistemic problem” and is referenced by the question “how do you know what you know?” Often, beliefs are informed by family, friends, science, religion, social connections, and education level, among other things; ultimately, much of what is accepted as knowledge is based on a person's perception about what exists and about what is deemed “true.” Often disagreements between people are explained as the differences between their individual perspectives. The theoretical names of this problem include, among other names, perspectivism theory, a term that encompasses multiple philosophical and theoretical concepts.

The rubric of perspectivism theory can be divided into two different epistemological camps: radical perspectivism and perspective realism. Radical perspectivism presumes that either there is nothing “out there” or that the only thing that matters is one's individually constructed meaning of what may or may not be “out there.” Radical perspectivism assumes that meaning, reality, and knowledge are constructed through language and that they have no correspondence to anything that may exist apart from the knower. The Greek sophists introduced radical perspectivism into ancient [Page 613]philosophy, and Frederick Nietzsche popularized it for contemporary philosophy. Robert Scott (1967, 1976) and Barry Brummett (1976) introduced radical perspectivism into the study of human communication with their discussions about rhetoricas-epistemic and the concept of intersubjectivism. The ancient sophists and Nietzsche argue that humans are essentially solipsistic and cannot know anything other than what is experienced and known in their own head.

Perspective realism, on the other hand, assumes that a knowable reality exists apart from the knower but that humans have a finite understanding of and differing views about that reality. Thus, differences exist because people have differing perspectives on reality, rather than that people have different realities. This may sound like semantic games, but the difference between the two statements is significant because the differences are still held together by what is deemed the common ground of the actual but never fully knowable reality. Perspective realism was introduced into ancient philosophy, it can be argued, by Isocrates and Aristotle and has been explained to a modernist audience by Evander Bradley McGilvary (1956). This concept was adapted to the study of communication by Richard Cherwitz and James W. Hikins (1986) when they introduced rhetorical perspectivism and philosophical realism to the study of human symbolic interaction. Cherwitz and Hikins incorporated McGilvary's ideas when they contended that differences in knowledge are analogous to the differences that two people would give when they describe the same mountain from two different sides. They are seeing the same physical object but describing it in two different ways because each has a perspective that is limited by the geographical view of the same object. Another example of perspective realism is Kenneth Burke's concept of “terministic screens.” Burke (1966) argued that the language humans use helps them to both explain what is experienced and to determine what will be experienced. Burke does not go as far as the radical perspectivists to argue against the existence of a reality that is external to the knower, but he does contend that our “observations” are as much a result of the particular terminology in which the observations were made as they are of the object observed. Thus, we are affected as much by the language we use as by an external reality.

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