Navigating Massimi’s Perspectival Garden with Inferential Forking Paths

ABSTRACT

In this review article, I situate Michela Massimi’s 2022 Perspectival Realism book in the broader state of the art of the contemporary philosophy of science by examining critically its contribution to the perspectival realism debate. Setting up a new agenda of philosophical problems for the perspectival realist, Massimi’s book is the most comprehensive assessment of perspectival realism since the publication of Giere’s 2006 Scientific Perspectivism (the starting point of the debate). The author carries out a scrupulous analysis of the historical, epistemological, and metaphysical foundations of perspectival realism—while she engages critically with the existing literature, she does so by giving a generous homage to the previous contributions to the state of the art (the works of Giere, Morrison, van Fraassen and others). However, I raise a batterie of questions about Massimi’s (perspectival) commitments, to bring into question the reach and the ambitions of her global project, specifically the rising tension between her modest epistemological beliefs in a plurality of culturally and historically situated perspectives and her ambitious metaphysical commitments towards a primitivist view about laws of nature.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to a generous anonymous reviewer for reading drafts of the current paper and to Markus Schrenk, for giving insightful comments on it, and esp. for his friendly supportiveness. Also, I thank the audience at the SOPhiA Conference 2022 Edition for raising critical points about my assessment of Massimi’s variety of perspectival realism. This article is an immediate outcome of my Ph.D. project which is generously financially supported by Heinrich-Boell-Stiftung, to whom my kind thanks go.

Notes

1 I mean esp. Ronald Giere (2006), van Fraassen (2008), Paul Teller (2011), all of which set the premises of the literature on perspectivism.

2 The page-references between parentheses are to Michela Massimi’s book.

3 For the present purposes, I leave the reference to Humeanism as an open alternative to Massimi’s law primitivism, that I will unfold in the future work. However, I attempt to show briefly that Massimi’s treatment of Humeanism leaves it untouched, and contemporary formulations of Humeanism can very well secure the metaphysical foundations of perspectival realism.