Department Colloquium: Professor Elisabeth Camp

"From Point of View to Perspective"

Abstract: In both ordinary speech and theoretical discourse, we often talk about 'points of view' and 'perspectives' to gesture toward ways in which agents differ in their interpretations of a common informational content.  While such perceptual language is ubiquitous and intuitive, its application to domains like religion, politics, art, and science must be significantly metaphorical.  I contrast three ways of explicating the metaphor, sketch my own view of a perspective as an open-ended disposition to notice, structure, and respond to information in an intuitive, holistic way, and identify some theoretical and practical payoffs of this analysis. 

Elisabeth Camp is a Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University.