2022 Thacher Lecture: Elisabeth Camp

March 25, 2022

Elisabeth Camp: Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University.

From Perceptual Point of View to Interpretive Perspective

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 abstract domains like religion, politics, art, and science must be metaphorical.  I contrast three ways of explicating the metaphor by appeal to features of visual perception; sketch my own view of an interpretive 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.