RE: https://spore.social/@yoginho/115918117109281530
Still looking for weekend reading material? Why not dive into the wonderful philosophy of Bill Wimsatt?
Reading this will change the way you see the world, and your ideas of where that knowledge of reality comes from.
If someone has a positive impression of you that you happen to think unfounded - an infatuation, an overestimation of your work contribution, praise of your music skill on a night you didn’t play well - you can hold onto to what you know and still enjoy their nice experience #perspectivism
RE: https://spore.social/@yoginho/115918117109281530
Yes. Science is a social construct. But even though our knowledge will never be truly objective, or complete, we can still get a good grip on reality.
Science is the best way we've devised so far to get to terms with the large & bewildering world we live in.
It's unlike any other human way to generate knowledge.
But it's also deeply related to how any organism comes to know the world:: by acting on expectations & evaluating the consequence of our actions.
We have a new preprint out! And one that is especially dear to my heart:
"Re-Engineering Wimsatt for Limited Beings"
https://zenodo.org/records/18293424
Bill Wimsatt is possibly the most underrated philosopher of science of our times. In this paper, I attempt to translate his key ideas into a format that every scientist can understand.
Artwork by Marcus Neustetter.
Reading this paper will change the way you do science, and how you see the world, forever. I promise.
I've finished the first draft of my paper about William Wimsatt and his multi-perspectival realism.
I think every practicing scientist today should know about his philosophy. It will make you a better researcher, I guarantee. And it will help you feel more comfortable exploring the structure of a messy and imperfect world without losing track of your limitations.
part of a panel on "Disruption in the Long Eighteenth Century" at this year's UAAC-AAUC conference at York University:
https://uaac-aauc.com/conference/
#leibniz #lahontan #perspectivism #Indigenous #beaver #beavers #beaverlodge #cameraobscura #uaac #baronlahontan #monad #monadology #cosmovision
FREE community #fediscience, please BOOST!
TONIGHT
Everybody welcome, just turn up!
LIVE @UCLAnthropology and on ZOOM
🌔Tues Mar 11, 6:30pm (London UTC)🌕
Chris Knight on
'On women and jaguars: why perspectivism got it so wrong'
Across Amazonia, myths hold that in early times it was the jaguars, parrots, tapirs and other animals who first invented bows and arrows, cooking fire, ceremonial buildings, religious ceremonies and other complex cultural accomplishments. Then humans stole these things from the animals, elevating themselves above all other creatures – but at the cost of losing their former ability to engage in easy conversation with the animal world. This mythic view of our origins is the reverse of the Darwinian narrative which our own culture holds up as science.
In this talk, #ChrisKnight will introduce a recent trend in social anthropology – known as ‘perspectivism’ – and discuss whether such radically different ways of perceiving our origins and place in nature can be made to converge.
Chris will be speaking LIVE in the Daryll Forde, 2nd Floor of UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, London WC1H 0BW. Come in good time by 6:30pm before doors close please. You can also join on ZOOM ID 384 186 2174 passcode Wawilak
#Amazon #perspectivism #anthropology #ritual #animism #alterity #femaleinitiation #gender
Another example. When I fell ill with malaria, a Yukpa shaman told me that our blood was beer that mosquitoes fermented to celebrate, "just like us". Each species has a perspective with the same inner world as the human one, but for others it looks different depending on the relationship that one species [or collective] has with another. In the context of ethnology this is called “amerindian #perspectivism ”, term coined by the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
5/?
#ChrisKnight's talk on Sept 19 on
'Can Indigenous and Western perspectives see eye-to-eye? The value of two-eyed seeing'
Still time to sign in for tonight 👇👇
FREE All welcome!
Radical Anthropology's Autumn Term starts on Tues Sept 19, 18:30 BST (London time) with #ChrisKnight speaking on
"Can Indigenous and Western perspectives see eye-to-eye? The value of two-eyed seeing"
Talk is LIVE in the Daryll Forde Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, UCL Anthropology Dept, 14, Taviton St, WC1H 0BW
And on ZOOM (sign into Eventbrite, links messaged on the day)
#perspectivism #Amazon #gender #myth
Image cropped from 'Amazonian Cosmos' by Reichel-Dolmatoff, shows leaping pregnant deer, snake, bird, bat, pig in an animist Tukano conception.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/radical-anthropology-talks-tickets-707087105567
If you've got half an hour free during the day, this is a rather interesting conversation with #philosopher, or 'metaethicist', Simon Blackburn. The discussion touches on #ethics, #pragmatism, #truth, #Rorty, #Ryle, #Nietzsche, #perspectivism, and plenty more.
In one section he cites #Russell on #Bradley, which made me think of you @PeterSjostedtH
How do we go about even communicating if this is true though?
Well, I DON'T think epistemic nihilism should make us believe that all beliefs and opinions are equally valid and true and worthy of respect though.
Yes, there is no position of objectivity outside of our own perspective from which to judge other perspectives, but if we assert that all perspectives are equal, all that's doing is trying to assume that very non-existent objective perspective, just doing something different with it — assigning equal "objective" weight to every perspective.
Instead we can indeed judge other perspectives we just have to remember that we're doing it from our own point of epistemic situatedness not from an objective point of view, and work with that.
We can dismiss other perspectives if they simply don't explain our experiences in a way that's satisfying to us, or if we want to convince other people we can try to show them how their perspective is inconsistent or incomplete even on its own terms, or even with respect to the experiences that they have had — including their experiences of interacting with people that have different experiences than they do! We can try to build common understandings based on shared experiences.
We can also learn how people with radically different experiences have learned to understand them and build out a perspective for ourselves that's way there and more complete because it can encompass other experiences. Because sometimes having a perspective that rigidly excludes others' experiences (and interpretations of those experiences), especially when we don't share knowledge of those experiences directly, will be incapable of actually explaining why those people act the way they do — and so actually fail as perspectives on their own terms!
That's why for instance all those transphobic interpretations of trans experience as fetishes or deceptions or delusions or mental illnesses, with their accompanying interpretations of what transition actually does for us, all wrong even on their own terms because they can't actually explain what trans people report and how we act even from within their own framework.
And this perspective isn't itself doesn't fall victim to its own epistemic nihilist trap because it isn't actually it's own perspective in the sense that I'm talking about. All it's doing is showing how any epistemic discourse that's based on the ideas of objective truth and justified true belief and stuff like that fails even on its own terms to actually achieve that objectivity. So it's working within the terms of every non epidemic nihilist perspective to undermine them with their own tools it's not a separate perspective with its own separate definitions of truth and objectivity. And this is exactly what I mean by taking the tools of enlightenment rationality and critically applying them to the tools themselves.
#introduction for my new account
#ActuallyAutistc probably #ADHD #trans #lesbian #punk #anarchist.
Very into #PunkRock, #heavymetal, #cyberwave, #classicrock, and #progrock. My favorite artists right now are Against Me!, Bad Religion, King Crimson, Anti-Flag, Tool, Pat the Bunny, Aviators, Black Sabbath, Journey, and Essenger.
I'm deeply interested in #mutualism, #egoism, #daoism, and in general #anarchist, #anticapitalist, #antiauthoritarian social and political #philosophy, as well as #epistemology (where I'm most influenced by epistemic #nihilism, #pragmatism, #perspectivism, and #poststructuralism). I'm an atheist, but deeply sympathetic to any humanistic and non-hierarchical religion or #spirituality and want to learn more.
I'm also a #compsci major. My main interests are the #rust and #commonlisp languages, as well as classical expert system #AI, computer #graphics, game engine development, and interactive storytelling.
I will be microblogging my thoughts on all of these topics whenever they come to me and I feel the need to write them down, so be prepared!
📯 I'm hiring! 📯
Looking for a postdoc for 2 years on #Perspectivism in #NLP at the University of Turin, Italy.
More info in the post on CORPORA: https://list.elra.info/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/corpora@list.elra.info/thread/UZFHEOMECYTX3ZM2SKLAEQXVJCU3MPVM/
DM/email me for questions and more info
"Lives With Others: Climate Change and Human-Animal Relations" - Rebecca Cassidy
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145706
#anthropology #aiart #midjourney @anthropology #anthrozoology #perspectivism #appliedanthropology #climatepolitics
