Читать книгу Educational Explanations - Christopher Winch - Страница 19

An alternative approach might be to accept that there are multiple perspectives on a single reality but to maintain that they each offer a distinctive perspective on it, and that the underlying reality may never be known by human investigators. On the face of it, this looks like a similar stance to the one recommended above. However, it is situated in the wrong place, where truth is interpreted as ‘correspondence with reality’ – a doctrine that we have had cause to reject as an explanation of what truth is or what truth-telling practices amount to. It also leads to unacceptable consequences that lead it to collapse back into a multiple realities position.

How can this be? Different perspectives on reality will yield different accounts of that reality. In favourable situations these perspectives will be complementary and will build into a more coherent, multi-dimensional account of the underlying reality. But this benign scenario will, more often than not, fail to apply. To take two examples, A considers a practice to be witchcraft, B considers it to be bad science. C sees as practice to be nothing more than training, D considers it to have an educational element. Neither pair can both be right. If one of each pair is wrong, then perspectivalism does not work. If both of each pair is right, then according to perspectival realism each of both pairs has access to different realities, so we are back once more with multiple realities.

Nevertheless, the insight that there will be different perspectives on the same phenomena cannot be ignored without the danger of losing much of the insight that systematic enquiry can give us. The question is, ‘How to best understand multiple perspectives in a fruitful way?’