The onlife manifestoâthe onlife initiative

Philosophy

The deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their uptake by society radically affect the human condition, insofar as it modifies our relationships to ourselves, to others and to the world. The ever-increasing pervasiveness of ICTs shakes established reference frameworks through the following transformations 1 : i. the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality; ii. the blurring of the distinctions between human, machine and nature; iii. the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance; and iv. the shift from the primacy of entities to the primacy of interactions.

The Onlife Manifesto The Onlife Initiative The Onlife Initiative () Preface The deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their uptake by society radically affect the human condition, insofar as it modifies our relationships to ourselves, to others and to the world. The ever-increasing pervasiveness of ICTs shakes established reference frameworks through the following transformations1: i. the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality; ii. the blurring of the distinctions between human, machine and nature; iii. the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance; and iv. the shift from the primacy of entities to the primacy of interactions. The world is grasped by human minds through concepts: perception is necessarily mediated by concepts, as if they were the interfaces through which reality is experienced and interpreted. Concepts provide an understanding of surrounding realities and a means by which to apprehend them. However, the current conceptual toolbox is not fitted to address new ICT-related challenges and leads to negative projections about the future: we fear and reject what we fail to make sense of and give meaning to. In order to acknowledge such inadequacy and explore alternative conceptualisations, a group of 15 scholars in anthropology, cognitive science, computer science, engineering, law, neuroscience, philosophy, political science, psychology and sociology, instigated the Onlife Initiative, a collective thought exercise to explore the policy-relevant consequences of those changes. This concept reengineering exercise seeks to inspire reflection on what happens to us and to re-envisage the future with greater confidence. This Manifesto aims to launch an open debate on the impacts of the computational era on public spaces, politics and societal expectations toward policymaking in the Digital Agenda for Europe's remit. More broadly, this Manifesto aims to start 1 Those transformations are fully described in the Onlife Initiative Background document available on https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/onlife-initiative. L. Floridi (ed.), The Onlife Manifesto, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-04093-6_2, © The Author(s) 2015 The Onlife Initiative8 a reflection on the way in which a hyperconnected world calls for rethinking the referential frameworks on which policies are built. This is only a beginning... 1 Game Over for Modernity? Ideas that hinder policy making's ability to tackle the challenges of a hyperconnected era § 1.1 Philosophy and literature have long challenged and revised some foundational assumptions of modernity. However, the political, social, legal, scientific and economic concepts and the related narratives underlying policymaking are still deeply anchored in questionable assumptions of modernity. Modernity has indeed-for some or many-been an enjoyable journey, and it has borne multiple and great fruits in all walks of life. It has also had its downsides. Independently of these debates, it is our view that the constraints and affordances of the computational era profoundly challenge some of modernity's assumptions. § 1.2 Modernity has been the time of a strained relationship between humans and nature, characterised by the human quest to crack nature's secrets while at the same time considering nature as a passive endless reservoir. Progress was the central utopia, coupled with the quest for an omniscient and omnipotent posture2. Developments in scientific knowledge (thermodynamics, electromagnetism, chemistry, physiology...) brought about an endless list of new artefacts in all sectors of life. Despite the deep connection between artefacts and nature, an alleged divide between technological artefacts and nature continues to be assumed. The development and deployment of ICTs have contributed enormously to blurring this distinction, to the extent that continuing to use it as if it were still operational is illusory and becomes counterproductive. § 1.3 Rationality and disembodied reason were the specifically modern attributes of humans, making them distinct from animals. As a result, ethics was a matter of rational and disembodied autonomous subjects, rather than a matter of social beings. And responsibility for the effects brought about by technological artefacts was attributed to their designer, producer, retailer or user. ICTs challenge these assumptions by calling for notions of distributed responsibility. § 1.4 Finally, modern worldviews and political organisations were pervaded by mechanical metaphors: forces, causation and, above all, control had a primary importance. Hierarchical patterns were key models for social order. Political organisations were represented by Westphalian States, exerting sovereign powers within their territory. Within such States, legislative, executive and judiciary powers were deemed to balance each other and protect against the risk of power abuse. By enabling multi-agent systems and opening new possibilities for direct democracy, ICTs destabilize and call for rethinking the worldviews and metaphors underlying modern political structures. 2 By posture, we mean the dual notion of stance and posing, or, in other words, of occupying a position and being seen occupying it. The Onlife Manifesto 9 2 In the Corner of Frankenstein and Big Brother Fears and risks in a hyperconnected era § 2.1 It is noteworthy that Cartesian doubt, and related suspicions about what is perceived through human senses, have led to an ever-increasing reliance on control in all its forms. In modernity, knowledge and power are deeply linked to establishing and maintaining control. Control is both sought and resented. Fears and risks can also be perceived in terms of control: too much of it-at the expense of freedom-or lack of it-at the expense of security and sustainability. Paradoxically, in these times of economic, financial, political, and environmental crisis, it is hard to identify who has control of what, when, and within which scope. Responsibilities and liabilities are hard to allocate clearly and endorse unambiguously. Distributed and entangled responsibilities may wrongly be understood as a license to act irresponsibly; these conditions may further tempt business and governmental leaders to postpone difficult decisions and thereby lead to loss of trust. § 2.2 Experiencing freedom, equality and otherness in public spheres becomes problematic in a context of increasingly mediated identities and calculated interactions such as profiling, targeted advertising, or price discrimination. The quality of public spheres is further undermined by increasing social control through mutual or lateral surveillance ( souveillance), which is not necessarily better than "big brother" surveillance, as increasingly cyberbullying shows. § 2.3 The abundance of information may also result in cognitive overload, distraction, and amnesia (the forgetful present). New forms of systemic vulnerabilities arise from the increasing reliance on informational infrastructures. Power games in online spheres can lead to undesirable consequences, including disempowering people, through data manipulation. The repartition of power and responsibility among public authorities, corporate agents, and citizens should be balanced more fairly. 3 Dualism is Dead! Long Live Dualities! Grasping the challenges § 3.1 Throughout our collective endeavour, a question kept coming back to the front stage: "what does it mean to be human in a hyperconnected era?" This foundational question cannot receive a single definitive answer, but addressing it has proven useful for approaching the challenges of our times. We think that handling these challenges can best be done by privileging dual pairs over oppositional dichotomies. The Onlife Initiative10 3.1 Control and Complexity § 3.2 In the onlife-world, artefacts have ceased to be mere machines simply operating according to human instructions. They can change states in autonomous ways and can do so by digging into the exponentially growing wealth of data, made increasingly available, accessible and processable by fast-developing and ever more pervasive ICTs. Data are recorded, stored, computed and fed back in all forms of machines, applications, and devices in novel ways, creating endless opportunities for adaptive and personalised environments. Filters of many kinds continue to erode the illusion of an objective, unbiased perception of reality, while at the same time they open new spaces for human interactions and new knowledge practices. § 3.3 Yet, it is precisely at the moment when an omniscience/omnipotence posture could be perceived as attainable that it becomes obvious that it is a chimera, or at least an ever-moving target. The fact that the environment is pervaded by information flows and processes does not make it an omniscient/omnipotent environment. Rather, it calls for new forms of thinking and doing at multiple levels, in order to address issues such as ownership, responsibility, privacy, and self-determination. § 3.4 To some extent, complexity can be seen as another name for contingency. Far from giving up on responsibility in complex systems, we believe that there is a need to re-evaluate received notions of individual and collective responsibility. The very complexity and entanglement of artefacts and humans invite us to rethink the notion of responsibility in such distributed socio-technical systems. § 3.5 Friedrich Hayek's classical distinction between kosmos and taxis, i.e., evolution vs. construction, draws a line between (supposedly natural) spontaneous orders and human (political and technological) planning. Now that artefacts taken globally have come to escape human control, even though they originated in human hands, biological and evolutionary metaphors can also apply to them. The ensuing loss of control is not necessarily dramatic. Attempts to recover control in a compulsive and unreflexive manner are an illusory challenge and are doomed to fail. Hence, the complexity of interactions and density of information flows are no longer reducible to taxis alone. Therefore, interventions from different agents in these emerging socio-technical systems require learning to distinguish what is to be considered as kosmos-like, i.e., as a given environment following its evolutional pattern, and what is to be considered as taxis-like, i.e., within reach of a construction responding effectively to human intentions and/or purposes. 3.2 Public and Private § 3.6 The distinction between public and private has often been grasped in spatial and oppositional terms: the home versus the agora, the private company versus the public institution, the private collection vs. the public library, and so forth. The deployment of ICTs has escalated the blurring of the distinction when expressed in spatial and dualistic terms. The Internet is an important extension of the public The Onlife Manifesto 11 space, even when operated and owned by private actors. The notions of fragmented publics, of third spaces, and of commons, and the increased focus on use at the expense of ownership all challenge our current understanding of the public-private distinction. § 3.7 Nevertheless, we consider this distinction between private and public to be more relevant than ever. Today, the private is associated with intimacy, autonomy, and shelter from the public gaze, while the public is seen as the realm of exposure, transparency and accountability. This may suggest that duty and control are on the side of the public, and freedom is on the side of the private. This view blinds us to the shortcomings of the private and to the affordances of the public, where the latter are also constituents of a good life. § 3.8 We believe that everybody needs both shelter from the public gaze and exposure. The public sphere should foster a range of interactions and engagements that incorporate an empowering opacity of the self, the need for self-expression, the performance of identity, the chance to reinvent oneself, as well as the generosity of deliberate forgetfulness. 4 Proposals to Better Serve Policies Conceptual Shifts with Policy-relevant Consequences for a Good Onlife Governance 4.1 The Relational Self § 4.1 It is one of the paradoxes of modernity that it offers two contradictory accounts of what the self is about. On the one hand, in the political realm, the self is deemed to be free, and "free" is frequently understood as being autonomous, disembodied, rational, well-informed and disconnected: an individual and atomistic self. On the other hand, in scientific terms, the self is an object of enquiry among others and, in this respect, is deemed to be fully analysable and predictable. By focusing on causes, incentives, or disincentives in an instrumental perspective, this form of knowledge often aims at influencing and controlling behaviours, on individual and collective levels. Hence, there is a constant oscillation between a political representation of the self, as rational, disembodied, autonomous and disconnected, on the one hand, and a scientific representation of the self, as heteronomous, and resulting from multifactorial contexts fully explainable by the range of scientific disciplines (social, natural and technological). § 4.2 We believe that it is time to affirm, in political terms, that our selves are both free and social, i.e., that freedom does not occur in a vacuum, but in a space of affordances and constraints: together with freedom, our selves derive from and aspire to relationships and interactions with other selves, technological artefacts, and the rest of nature. As such, human beings are "free with elasticity", to borrow The Onlife Initiative12 an economic notion. The contextual nature of human freedom accounts both for the social character of human existence, and the openness of human behaviours that remain to some extent stubbornly unpredictable. Shaping policies in the remit of the Onlife experience means resisting the assumption of a rational disembodied self, and instead stabilising a political conception of the self as an inherently relational free self. 4.2 Becoming a Digitally Literate Society § 4.3 The utopia of omniscience and omnipotence often entails an instrumental attitude towards the other, and a compulsion to transgress boundaries and limits. These two attitudes are serious hurdles for thinking and experiencing public spheres in the form of plurality, where others cannot be reduced to instruments, and where selfrestraint and respect are required. Policies must build upon a critical investigation of how human affairs and political structures are deeply mediated by technologies. Endorsing responsibility in a hyperconnected reality requires acknowledging how our actions, perceptions, intentions, morality, even corporality are interwoven with technologies in general, and ICTs in particular. The development of a critical relation to technologies should not aim at finding a transcendental place outside these mediations, but rather at an immanent understanding of how technologies shape us as humans, while we humans critically shape technologies. § 4.4 We have found it useful to think of re-evaluating these received notions and developing new forms of practices and interactions in situ in the following phrase: "building the raft while swimming". 4.3 Caring for Our Attentional Capabilities § 4.5 The abundance of information, including "big data" developments, induce major shifts in conceptual and practical terms. Earlier notions of rationality presumed that accumulating hard-won information and knowledge would lead to better understanding and thereby control. The encyclopaedic ideal is still around, and the focus remains primarily on adapting our cognitive capacities by expanding them in hopes of keeping up with an ever-growing infosphere. But this endless expansion is becoming ever less meaningful and less efficient in describing our daily experiences. § 4.6 We believe that societies must protect, cherish and nurture humans' attentional capabilities. This does not mean giving up searching for improvements: that shall always be useful. Rather, we assert that attentional capabilities are a finite, precious and rare asset. In the digital economy, attention is approached as a commodity to be exchanged on the market place, or to be channelled in work processes. But this instrumental approach to attention neglects the social and political dimensions of it, i.e., the fact that the ability and the right to focus our own attention is a critical and necessary condition for autonomy, responsibility, reflexivity, plurality, engaged The Onlife Manifesto 13 presence, and a sense of meaning. To the same extent that organs should not be exchanged on the market place, our attentional capabilities deserve protective treatment. Respect for attention should be linked to fundamental rights such as privacy and bodily integrity, as attentional capability is an inherent element of the relational self for the role it plays in the development of language, empathy, and collaboration. We believe that, in addition to offering informed choices, the default settings and other designed aspects of our technologies should respect and protect attentional capabilities. § 4.7 In short, we assert that more collective attention should be paid to attention itself as a inherent human attribute that conditions the flourishing of human interactions and the capabilities to engage in meaningful action in the onlife experience. This Manifesto is only a beginning... Open Access This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.


Privacy During the Pandemic and Beyond

Philosophy

This paper is an overview about the state of privacy and power shifts during the pandemic, and the privacy challenges ahead.

that people were more comfortable sharing more, and that Facebook was merely reflecting the current social norms. The more people shared online, the more personal data tech companies could collect, the more they could personalise ads and content, the more they could influence users' behaviour, the more users engaged, the more ads they could sell. Then came the privacy scandals. Almost every week for the past few years, privacy has been a major news headline. Data breach after data breach, cases of data collected without consent, legal and illegal data misuses. Users' passwords getting published, people being extorted, data brokers using people's most sensitive information (that they were rape victims, that they were impotent, that they were AIDS patients) to sell their profiles to the highest bidder. Perhaps the pinnacle of the privacy disasters saga was the 107 Forum Almost every week for the past few years, privacy has been a major news headline – data breach after data breach During the past two decades, privacy has been a fierce battle ground. At the beginning of the century, newly founded tech companies like Google started the fight by establishing a novel business model based on surveillance. Our personal data became the golden nuggets of the digital era. But it would be years before ordinary citizens realised the deal they had struck when they had "agreed" to indecipherable, extensive, and constantly changing terms of service. Once we realised the extent to which our data was being collected and analysed, it seemed like it was too late to recall it, and many public voices declared the death of privacy. Recovering privacy seemed all the more impossible given governments' support of corporate surveillance. The data economy became a way to enhance the information capabilities of intelligence agencies, which were looking to increase their power after the trauma of the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in the United States in 2001. From the start, the surveillance economy has sprung from and been sustained by cooperation between corporations and governments. Tech companies were only too happy to echo the discourse on the death of privacy. It was a narrative that was good for business. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg suggested that privacy social norms had "evolved", Privacy During the Pandemic and Beyond Carissa Véliz on privacy challenges in a changed world Forum 108 Cambridge Analytica data scandal, revealed in 2018. The British data firm had used the personal data of over 87 million users to build psychographic profiles of voters around the world in order to design personalised political propaganda and sway elections. Cambridge Analytica helped both the Trump presidential campaign in the United States and the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. Citizens responded to the privacy scandals with what has been described as a "techlash". Tech companies whose business model depends on surveillance were no longer perceived as the good guys in hoodies who were here to make our world a better place. They were data predators that were jeopardising, not only individuals' privacy and security, but also democracy itself. Regulators turned their attention towards privacy, implementing the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and discussing a possible federal law in the United States, among other regulatory initiatives. Privacy turned out to be far from dead. Then came the pandemic. Power shifts The coronavirus pandemic has aggravated power asymmetries that were being challenged before the world went into lockdown. Before the pandemic, resistance was building against tech companies' hegemony. Against, for instance, terms of agreement that do not give users meaningful options and can change at any time. The pandemic, however, gave tech companies new leverage. From the time tech companies like Facebook and Google became big tech, the option of not using them has been somewhat of a fiction. Tech enthusiasts have pointed out time and again that if users are unhappy about these services, they should simply opt-out of them. There are two main reasons why opting-out is not a meaningful alternative. First, the cost of not using services that have become as necessary as utilities is inordinately high, both personally and professionally. Not using Facebook can mean losing hundreds of relationships, and missing out on crucial professional opportunities. Not using Google can amount to a competitive disadvantage -from getting lost in an unfamiliar city on the way to a job interview, to not having access to research tools such as Google Scholar that are being used by one's colleagues. When a platform becomes as dominant as Facebook and Google are, asking someone not to use it amounts to asking them to exclude themselves from being full participants in their society. Second, even if you try your best to avoid Facebook and Google, they're unavoidable. Google ads, and their trackers, for instance, are plastered throughout most of the internet. Facebook has a shadow profile on you even if you've never had an account with them. Your sacrifice ends up feeling useless. Before the pandemic, however, there was more of an option to resist using tech services -even if there was a high cost to pay, and even if one were still tracked by The pandemic has made technology even more pervasive 109 Privacy During the Pandemic and Beyond them to a certain extent. During lockdown, that narrow possibility became even narrower, and any illusion of voluntariness in the use of technology has vanished. For most people who have had to endure lockdown, the pandemic has made technology even more pervasive and inevitable. Being online and using videoconferencing apps became necessary for any and all social interaction beyond the walls of our homes. Key workers had to risk their lives by continuing to work outside their homes. Everyone else had to use online tools to get an education, work, interact with family, get medical attention, enjoy some much-needed entertainment, and more. Thus, some of the techlash has been watered down by a combination of feeling grateful that we have technology that can allow us to stay in touch with others even while in lockdown, and resignation that boycotting tech seems less of an option than ever. Big tech's stocks have been consistently on the rise during the pandemic, in correlation with their accumulated power. Dependence on smartphones and tech platforms is widespread. It's not only citizens depending on gadgets and apps to continue their studies or perform their jobs. Even businesses, universities, health services, and governments depend on these platforms to carry out their everyday functions. These institutions do not have platforms of their own. Government and diplomatic meetings around the world are being carried out on platforms such as Zoom and Teams. Universities cannot fully guarantee the privacy of their students because they do not control the platforms they use. Often, governments cannot be certain of the confidentiality of their meetings for the same reason. There are, however, a few avenues of resistance and sources of friction that are proving crucial to protect privacy in these challenging times. Avenues of resistance Although resisting tech during lockdown is extremely hard, confinement could not last forever. There was an urgent economic need to resume more productive lifestyles as soon as possible. Once analogue life resumes its course, the possibilities for avoiding particular apps or technologies multiply. Soon after lockdown began, governments around the world proposed a variety of contact-tracing apps as a possible solution to emerge from confinement in a safer way. Tech companies were quick to jump at the opportunity, offering their services to support this effort. But the distrust cultivated by years of misuses of data had taken its toll. Citizens, privacy experts, and concerned organisations sounded their alarms. Having learnt from the experience after 9/11, political commentators warned about "temporary" measures becoming entrenched. Enlisting experts' support was important because, unless governments were willing to try their luck at making the use of these apps mandatory -risking The choice between centralised and decentralised apps became the arena of the latest privacy feud 110 Forum contact with someone who has been diagnosed with Covid-19. The choice between centralised and decentralised apps became the arena of the latest privacy feud. Apple and Google teamed up to build an API (application programming interface) to support decentralised contact-tracing apps, which meant that centralised apps were not going to work properly on iPhones and Androids. Given that the vast majority of people who have smartphones have one or the other brand, the UK was forced to change their approach to a decentralised app. For citizens, the good news was that the tech giants protected their privacy better than might have been expected, given the track record of a company like Google. The bad news was that this power struggle made it obvious how big tech companies have more power than governments, and are often treated as if they were governments themselves. Tech users around the world are at the mercy of undemocratic and largely unaccountable corporations. It's great when they protect our privacy, but it's extremely bad news when they don't, and Google's business model still depends on personal data. That we have to trust the good will of giant corporations for our right to privacy to be respected is far from ideal. The first avenue of resistance, then, came about as a result of the need to secure trust from the population in the post-lockdown world. One of the positive effects of the techlash before the pandemic hit was sabotage or rebellion from the population – they had to secure citizens' cooperation and trust. People have to download and use the app for it to work. Had governments and tech companies been more trustworthy with personal data in the past two decades, cooperation for the sake of public health could have been much more successful. But experts had doubts about how useful such contact-tracing apps would be in the first place, given the difference between electronic "contacts" and infections. Apps allow for false positives, when two people seem to be in contact from the point of view of their phones but in fact are separated by a wall. Apps also invite false negatives, as they cannot record infections contracted from contaminated surfaces or from a contact between people who didn't have their phones on them, or who had too fleeting a contact to be recorded as such by the app. That apps were receiving so much attention – as opposed to efforts to produce more protective equipment, sanitising products, etc. – was questionable. There were also doubts about how much data was necessary for an app to be useful. The United Kingdom's National Health Service, for instance, first championed a centralised approach according to which data would be sent to a centralised database from which networks of relationships and contacts could be gleaned. In contrast, decentralised apps are designed to process data in people's phones. Although the latter approach is less informative to health authorities (e.g. they cannot know who is suspected of infection, or who has been in contact with whom), it is much more protective of privacy, and equally effective at alerting people who might have been in Privacy can sell Privacy During the Pandemic and Beyond 111 © Sean Last Forum 112 Our personal data should not be the kind of thing that can be bought, sold, or used against us government surveillance. From that point of view, it is a good sign when there is disagreement between big tech and governments, as in the case of the debate between centralised and decentralised contact-tracing apps. The coronavirus pandemic, however, has brought new alliances between tech companies and governments that are concerning. Tech billionaire and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has argued for "unprecedented partnerships between government and industry". Palantir, the controversial CIA-backed company that collaborated in the United States' surveillance programme, is now involved with both the United Kingdom's National Health Service and the United States' Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The NHS gave Palantir all kinds of data about patients, employees, and members of the public, from contact information to details of gender, race, work, physical and mental health conditions, political and religious affiliation, and past criminal offences. Palantir first charged the NHS just £1 for its services – in return, Palantir was granted intellectual property rights and access to valuable data to train their models. The company later secured a £1 million contract with the NHS for a coronavirus "data store". Prominent among the many privacy the proliferation of privacy-friendly (or friendlier) alternatives, which is the second resource for resistance. Privacy is something that can sell, an edge that can give a company competitive advantage. The more privacy the competition offers, the more other businesses are willing to cave to public pressures that call for more privacy. End-to-end encryption, for instance, is slowly becoming an expected standard of cybersecurity. When it was revealed that Zoom did not offer end-to-end encryption despite claiming it did, the scandal led to the company promising such encryption. Zoom then announced it would only offer the added security to paid accounts. The public criticism quickly made the company commit to end-to-end encryption for all users. Privacy-friendly tech empowers netizens first, by protecting their personal data; second, by providing meaningful options to dominant and privacy-unfriendly tech; and third, by pushing big tech towards offering more privacy protections to remain competitive. But as long as big tech remains as dominant as it is today, privacy-friendly alternatives will not be able to compete on an equal footing on account of network effects (everyone wants to be in the most popular platform because that is where everyone else is), and decades of big tech having hoarded personal data (which helps platforms sell personalised ads and have more accurate algorithms), among other factors. Challenges ahead When tech companies and governments form a unified surveillance front, citizens are overpowered – they cannot count on governments to protect them from companies nor on companies to protect them from 113 Privacy During the Pandemic and Beyond away anonymity, is particularly dangerous to our privacy. At the time of writing, there are protests on both sides of the Atlantic over racial injustice. Can protestors be sure that they are protesting anonymously, given how common facial recognition has become? Can they be sure that participating (peacefully and legally) in a demonstration will not make them vulnerable to being targeted by the police? What about all the footage from our innumerable video calls? Can we be sure that facial recognition is not being used on those? Our privacy should not be a bargaining chip. Our personal data should not be the kind of thing that can be bought, sold, or used against us by institutions that are supposed to be our data custodians. Institutions that violate people's privacy should face serious enough consequences that they regret having done so. There is a long way ahead of us in making governments and corporations accountable in matters of privacy. But that institutions found resistance to data grabs even during the worst of times, when we were a captive audience made vulnerable by the pandemic, gives us reason for optimism. Carissa Véliz is an incoming associate professor in philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford and author of Privacy Is Power (Bantam Press, 2020). challenges citizens face in the wake of the pandemic, then, are corporate data deals with governments that might solidify widespread surveillance as a condition to access basic services and opportunities. One of the things we lose when our privacy is jeopardised is autonomy – our ability to self-govern, both as individuals and as democracies. An important contribution of medical ethics was giving more autonomy to patients. As the deal between the NHS and Palantir shows (another infamous similar deal was between the NHS and DeepMind in 2016), patients' autonomy is being compromised by breaches in confidentiality. NHS patients are not being asked for the consent to transfer their data to corporations that are not health professionals and do not have patients' best interests as their main objective. The loss of autonomy in the medical context is happening in society more generally as a result of ubiquitous surveillance. Privacy is important because the lack of it gives others power over us. If corporations and governments know who we are, what we fear, what we desire, whom we sleep next to, what motivates us, they can more easily influence our behaviour, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal illustrates. They can also discriminate against us – for our gender, race, genetic makeup, medical history, or ideas – without us ever knowing about it. And they can use our data to build tools that can later oppress us. Companies such as Clearview AI, for example, have used the photographs that we have shared online to train their facial recognition algorithms, often without our knowledge or consent. Facial recognition, along with other technologies that strip


Nietzscheâs Epistemic Perspectivism

Philosophy

Nietzsche offers a positive epistemology, and those who interpret him as a skeptic or a mere pragmatist are mistaken. Instead he supports what he calls per- spectivism. This is a familiar take on Nietzsche, as perspectivism has been analyzed by many previous interpreters. The present paper presents a sketch of the textually best supported and logically most consistent treatment of perspectivism as a first- order epistemic theory. Whatâs original in the present paper is an argument that Nietzsche also offers a second-order methodological perspectivism aimed at enhancing understanding, an epistemic state distinct from knowledge. Just as Descartes considers and rejects radical skepticism while at the same time adopting methodological skepticism, one could consistently reject perspectivism as a theory of knowledge while accepting it as contributing to our understanding. It is argued that Nietzscheâs perspectivism is in fact two-tiered: knowledge is perspectival because truth itself is, and in addition there is a methodological perspectivism in which distinct ways of knowing are utilized to produce understanding. A review of the manner in which understanding is conceptualized in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science serves to illuminate how Nietzsche was tackling these ideas.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Crețu, M. Massimi (eds.), Knowledge from a Human Point of View, Synthese Library 416, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27041-4_2 Chapter 2 Nietzsche's Epistemic Perspectivism Steven D. Hales Abstract Nietzsche offers a positive epistemology, and those who interpret him as a skeptic or a mere pragmatist are mistaken. Instead he supports what he calls perspectivism. This is a familiar take on Nietzsche, as perspectivism has been analyzed by many previous interpreters. The present paper presents a sketch of the textually best supported and logically most consistent treatment of perspectivism as a firstorder epistemic theory. What's original in the present paper is an argument that Nietzsche also offers a second-order methodological perspectivism aimed at enhancing understanding, an epistemic state distinct from knowledge. Just as Descartes considers and rejects radical skepticism while at the same time adopting methodological skepticism, one could consistently reject perspectivism as a theory of knowledge while accepting it as contributing to our understanding. It is argued that Nietzsche's perspectivism is in fact two-tiered: knowledge is perspectival because truth itself is, and in addition there is a methodological perspectivism in which distinct ways of knowing are utilized to produce understanding. A review of the manner in which understanding is conceptualized in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science serves to illuminate how Nietzsche was tackling these ideas. Keywords Nietzsche * Perspectivism * Understanding * Knowledge 2.1 Introduction In this paper I will argue that Nietzsche offers a positive epistemology, and that those who interpret him as a sceptic or a mere pragmatist are mistaken. Instead he supports what he calls perspectivism. So far this is not a new take on Nietzsche, as perspectivism has been analyzed by many previous interpreters. I present a sketch of what I think is textually best supported and logically most consistent treatment of perspectivism as a first-order epistemic theory. What is new in the present paper is S. D. Hales (*) Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University, Bloomsburg, PA, USA e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com 20 an argument that Nietzsche also offers a second-order methodological perspectivism aimed at enhancing understanding, an epistemic state distinct from knowledge. One could consistently reject perspectivism as a theory of knowledge while accepting it as contributing to our understanding. In fact, I believe he accepts both. One thing Nietzsche loves is the hyperbolic smackdown followed by (partly) walking it back. He uses this tactic on practically every topic he touches. In Beyond Good and Evil (BGE 108) and Twilight of the Idols (TI VII:1) Nietzsche declares that there are no moral facts whatsoever and then goes on to enunciate formulas for greatness and recipes for virtue (Ecce Homo II:10; AC 11).1 He denounces philosophers' obsession with the will (BGE 19) and then promotes the will to power. Nietzsche's audacious decrees are usually meant to shock the reader out of a complacent conformity to traditional dogmas. By artificially turning up the contrast, he casts rival ideas into high relief and highlights the alternative ideas that he is proposing. Nietzsche is fond of dismantling philosophical structures, taking their components and re-using them in new ways. He says as much in Assorted Opinions and Maxims (AOM 201): "The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say, that that building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material." Of course, Nietzsche's own positive views are famously hard to pin down, since he approaches "deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again" (The Gay Science 381). The matter of his epistemic perspectivism is no exception, as he touches on it, moves on, and then returns to it many pages or even books later. 1 HATH = Human, All Too Human, ed. and trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984; original edition: 1878). AOM = Assorted Opinions and Maxims, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; original edition: 1879) D = Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982; original edition: 1881). GS = The Gay Science, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974; original edition: 1882). Z = Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Penguin, 1954; original edition: 1885). BGE = Beyond Good and Evil, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966; original edition: 1886). GM = On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967; original edition: 1887). AC = The Antichrist, ed. and trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Viking Penguin, 1968; original edition: 1895). TI = The Twilight of the Idols, ed. and trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Viking Penguin, 1968; original edition: 1889). EH = Ecce Homo, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967; original edition: 1908). WP = The Will to Power, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). S. D. Hales 21 Nietzsche's blitzkrieg is not as successful a rhetorical strategy as he might have hoped. It is far too easy to latch onto some portion of his work and treat it as a synecdoche that represents the whole. The result is a secondary literature that contains only pockets of agreement and little satisfactory unification. Nietzsche worried a good bit about being misunderstood (GM III 1, AOM 137, EH preface 1), while also impishly admitting that "I obviously do everything to be 'hard to understand' myself!" (BGE 27). It's hard to tell what sort of readers Nietzsche was hoping for, since he certainly had no optimism that philosophers were going to figure it all out. As he puts it in The Gay Science (§333), "Conscious thinking, especially that of the philosopher, is the least vigorous and therefore also the relatively mildest and calmest form of thinking; and thus precisely philosophers are most apt to be led astray about the nature of knowledge."2 2.2 The Skeptical and Pragmatic Interpretations In practice, the result is that when Nietzsche writes things like "the biggest fable of all is the fable of knowledge" (The Will to Power 555); "delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation" (GS 107); "there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths" (Human, All Too Human 2), or when he repeatedly hammers against the sensibility of Kantian things-in-themselves that could be the objects of knowledge, as he does in the fourth chapter of Twilight of the Idols, many readers assume that he is an epistemological skeptic. Babette Babich, for example, writes, "Nietzsche contends that knowledge - even as a limited perspective - is impossible" (Babich 1994, 80). R.J. Hollingdale concurs. He claims that according to Nietzsche, "[i]n the sense in which philosophers are accustomed to use the word ... there is no knowledge" (Hollingdale 1973, 131). Jean Granier also agrees that for Nietzsche "the traditional concept of knowledge appears as a pseudo-concept" (Granier 1977, 192). Alan Schrift thinks that Nietzsche rejects epistemology entirely as a result of his skepticism: "[he] does not provide a theory at all; it is a rhetorical strategy that offers an alternative to the traditional epistemological conception of knowledge as the possession of some stable, eternal 'entities', whether these be considered 'truths', 'facts', 'meanings', 'propositions', or whatever .... Nietzsche views these 'entities' as beyond the limits of human comprehension, and ... he concludes that we are surely incapable of 'knowing' them" (Schrift 1990, 145). Peter Poellner sees Nietzsche as part of a Cartesian skeptical tradition, where "even if we were able to rationally justify a thought ... we would have no good reason to regard it as true" (Poellner 1995, 63). Willard Mittelman sums up the skeptical interpretation: "for Nietzsche knowledge of the world is impossible" (Mittelman 1984, 8). 2 As Socrates asked Theaetetus, "do you fancy it is a small matter to discover the nature of knowledge? Is it not one of the hardest questions?" Theaetetus 148.c. 2 Nietzsche's Epistemic Perspectivism 22 Jessica Berry offers a subtle analysis of Nietzsche as belonging to the Pyrrhonian skeptical tradition, something quite distinct from the more common readings of him as a Cartesian skeptic. For ancient skeptics like Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, the peace of mind they termed ataraxia was to be achieved through suspending judgment about everything that is less than self-evident. Arguments can be mounted for and against any propositions, making them uncertain and inconclusive, leaving the inquirer indefinitely indecisive and unsure what to believe. For the Pyrrhonian skeptic, that is the proper frame of mind. Berry holds that Nietzsche's perspectivism is primarily epistemic - he recognizes a variety of perspectives as equipollent, which leads to the Pyrrhonian suspension of judgment and a rejection of dogmatic views that take one perspective as superior to another. Perspectivism as a doctrine or positive position of any kind would be just another sort of dogmatism on her reading (Berry 2011, chapter 4). It is puzzling that those who regard Nietzsche as a skeptic not only skip over his criticisms of skepticism, but somehow miss the occasions when he walks his more extreme claims about knowledge back. In BGE 208 Nietzsche remarks that "when a philosopher suggests these days that he is not a skeptic ... everybody is annoyed". Why are they annoyed? Is it because skepticism is so clearly right that only retrograde, dogmatic troglodytes still claim to have knowledge? No, skeptics are "delicate" and "timid"; they suffer from "nervous exhaustion" and "sickliness." Skepticism, Nietzsche claims, is a fashionable decadence, a soporific sedative; "entertaining no hypotheses at all might well be part of good taste". In other words, the rejection of skepticism is a social faux pas in fashionably effete circles, whereas the claim of knowledge - that is dangerous, an explosive rumbling in the distance. In the same section Nietzsche equates objective knowledge with dressed-up skepticism, which he regards as mere epistemic trendiness. But he is not dismissing knowledge; in the same breath that he denounces skepticism, Nietzsche rejects absolutism as a kindred crime. Skepticism and absolutism are opposite sides of the same devalued coin. Nietzsche does not sentence knowledge - in some sense of the term - to the gallows. Consider that "no honey is sweeter than that of knowledge" (HATH 292) and his assertion that "whoever seriously wants to become free ... his will desires nothing more urgently than knowledge and the means to it - that is, the enduring condition in which he is best able to engage in knowledge" (HATH 288). He also connects knowledge with both pleasure and happiness: "Why is knowledge, the element of researchers and philosophers, linked to pleasure? First and foremost, because by it we gain awareness of our power ... Second, because, as we gain knowledge, we surpass older ideas and their representatives, become victors, or at least believe ourselves to be. Third, because any new knowledge, however small, makes us feel superior to everyone and unique in understanding this matter correctly" (HATH 252). Likewise, happiness is positively undesirable without knowledge: "our drive for knowledge has become too strong for us to be able to want happiness without knowledge ... Knowledge has in us been transformed into a passion which shrinks at no sacrifice and at bottom fears nothing but its own extinction" (Daybreak 429). Nor is the happiness provided by knowledge cheap or S. D. Hales 23 ephemeral: rather, "the happiness of the man of knowledge enhances the beauty of the world and makes all that exists sunnier; knowledge casts its beauty not only over things but in the long run into things ..." (D 550). The quotations in the preceding paragraph are from Human, All Too Human and Daybreak, two of Nietzsche's earlier works, and those enamored of the idea that Nietzsche's thought progressed through distinct phases (like Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter) might be inclined to regard those passages as examples of an early, "positivistic" phase, rather than of his mature thinking. It is true that Nietzsche did change his mind about some topics. Richard Wagner is the most obvious, where the hagiography of The Birth of Tragedy gave way to the vitriol of Nietzsche Contra Wagner and The Case of Wagner. However, a close examination of Nietzsche's writings from throughout his life demonstrates that he displays continuing respect for knowledge. Even in The Gay Science, the source of much of Nietzsche's epistemological critique, he characterizes himself as a lover of knowledge (GS 14), a seeker of knowledge (GS 380), and as someone greedy for knowledge (GS 242, 249). The most famous announcement of The Gay Science, the death of God, is taken to be a welcome epistemic harbinger; now that God is dead, "all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never been such an 'open sea'" (GS 343). Nietzsche is clear in The Gay Science (§324) that this is cause for rejoicing: "and knowledge itself ... for me it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play. 'Life as a means to knowledge' - with this principle in one's heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily too." In Thus Spoke Zarathustra one finds Zarathustra saying "With knowledge the body purifies itself; making experiments with knowledge it elevates itself; in the lover of knowledge all instincts become holy; in the elevated, the soul becomes gay" (Z I:22.2). In the first section of the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche writes that the treasure for "we men of knowledge" is "where the beehives of knowledge are". This sort of praise for knowledge continued to the end of his productive life. In The Antichrist (48, see also 49) he criticizes Christianity on the grounds that it opposes science and knowledge, characterizing knowledge as "emancipation from the priest"; and in Ecce Homo ("The Birth of Tragedy": 2) he writes, "Knowledge, saying Yes to reality, is just as necessary for the strong as cowardice and the flight from reality - as the 'ideal' is for the weak, who are inspired by weakness". So Nietzsche has some kind of positive attitude towards and program regarding knowledge and a program. But what is it? Beyond Good and Evil opens with him questioning the value of truth, and why its pursuit should be seen as the highest value. "Knowledge for its own sake" is a form of unexamined moralizing (BGE 63). Nietzsche often writes about the practicality of beliefs as a distinct virtue from their truth. Consider The Gay Science 354: "we simply lack any organ for knowledge, for 'truth': we 'know' (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species ...". In the same passage, Nietzsche goes so far as to speculate about conditions in which we would be so severely mistaken about what is useful for us that it would cause human extinction. In The Will to Power (493) 2 Nietzsche's Epistemic Perspectivism 24 he writes that "truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live", and suggests in WP (515) that our goal is "not 'to know' but to schematize - to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require". In BGE 4 he writes, "the falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection ... the question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, speciespreserving, perhaps even species-cultivating". We need to recognize untruth as a condition of life (BGE 4). It is not surprising that these sorts of passages led some interpreters to conclude that Nietzsche was a pragmatist, where knowledge just consists in accepting those doctrines that are helpful or productive for our lives. Arthur Danto led the way, writing "Nietzsche ... advanced a pragmatic criterion of truth" (Danto 1965, 72), and he was followed by Reudiger Grimm, who writes, "the criterion to be met by any of these perspectival 'errors' [that Nietzsche discusses] is not one of veracity, but rather one of utility. In point of usefulness there is a great deal of difference between interpretations ..." (Grimm 1977, 70). More recently, Tsarina Doyle interprets Nietzsche as defending internal realism, a view that Hilary Putnam regarded as the heir to the American pragmatist tradition (Doyle 2009, chapter 2). Neil Sinhababu is even more explicit: "Nietzschean pragmatism is the view that one should believe whatever best promotes life, even things that are untrue ..." (Sinhababu 2017, 56). 2.3 Nietzsche's First-Order Perspectivism Nietzsche's pragmatist interpreters have a case to be made, but like the skeptics' reading, it is incomplete, as we will see. Probably the most popular analysis of his epistemology is that he defends perspectivism, a sort of relativism about truth and knowledge that has tendrils throughout his work. Perspectivism in contemporary philosophy of science has to do with human limitations and focused interest. For example, we see colors only along a very narrow band of electromagnetic radiation, which restricts our connection to the external world. In addition, our scientific theories often aim to model the world only at some interest-relative scale, as we see moving from atomic physics to chemistry to biology. Scientific perspectivism of this sort is arguably a realist theory. Nietzsche's perspectivism is broader and less focused. For him, perspectivism is not one precisely defined doctrine, but a cluster of related ideas about the subjectivity of truth, anti-realist metaphysics, a bundle theory of objects, the revaluation of values and the creation of one's own virtues, and the role of varying interpretations in knowledge (Hales and Welshon 2000). It is the latter that I will focus on here. Recall that in HATH 2 Nietzsche writes that "there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths". The gripping thing about this passage is that Nietzsche is plainly not denying the existence of truth, but the existence of absolute truths or eternal facts. He elaborates on this theme in The Genealogy of Morals (III:12), which is worth quoting at length: S. D. Hales 25 Let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a 'pure, willless , painless, timeless knowing subject'; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as 'pure reason', 'absolute spirituality', 'knowledge in itself': these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity' be. Plato and Kant are the obvious targets of Nietzsche's criticisms. Plato's forms were the ideal, self-instantiating paradigms of concepts, the perfect examples of rightness, beauty, and goodness (Parmenides 130b). Our apprehension of those ideas through the muddled testimony of the senses is inadequate for true knowledge, and it is only by recollection of the forms prior to birth that we can properly grasp them. Kant's doctrine of things-in-themselves similarly posits unmediated objects that exist in a noumenal realm beyond the ken of human apprehension, and our knowledge of those things (such as it is) occurs only after filtering through the categories of experience. In both cases the "real world" is unattainable, the God's-eye view tantalizingly out of reach. Human knowledge is a pale simulacrum of true contact with reality. For Nietzsche, Plato and Kant were united by their otherworldliness - both the metaphysical view that reality is something beyond or other than the empirical world of sensation and the epistemological view that we see that world through a glass, darkly. "Pure reason" Nietzsche dismisses as a falsification of the senses, a means of telling ourselves that the true nature of the world is fixed and unchanging. He accuses philosophers of conceptual idolatry, dehistoricizing our categories and concepts and treating them as unalterably eternal. Kant's pure concepts of the understanding and Plato's ideal forms he regards as examples of this "rude fetishism" (TI, "'Reason' in Philosophy" 5). Nietzsche regards modern Christianity, with its belief in an eternal afterlife beyond our earthly experience and an abstract notion of an immutable God, as of a piece with the metaphysics of Plato and Kant (cf. AC 16–19). It is this epistemology of the other - somehow more authentic or genuine - world offered by Christianity, Plato, and Kant that Nietzsche wishes to declare, at last, a myth (TI IV). Instead of absolute truths and impartially objective knowledge of a supraempirical world, Nietzsche offers a vision of partial, fragmentary, perspectival knowledge. His regular praise of Heraclitus's acceptance of flux and becoming instead of the Platonic longing for an unchanging invisible world suggests the epistemology Nietzsche supports. We are not prevented from ideal cognition by our this-worldly empirical limitations; Nietzsche wants to abolish the apparent world/ real world dichotomy altogether. Rather, the very nature of truth, and therefore our knowledge of those truths, is in some way dependent on perspective. Nothing is true outside or independent of perspectives; the idea of extra-perspectival knowledge is too redolent of those Kantian or Platonic epistemologies that Nietzsche has already dismissed. As he comments in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (III:11.2), "'This is my way; 2 Nietzsche's Epistemic Perspectivism 26 where is yours?'-thus I answer those who asked me 'the way'. For the way - that does not exist." There is also the testimony of The Will to Power (540), "There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes - and consequently there are many kinds of 'truths', and consequently there is no truth." One doesn't simply know or not know a claim, because claims are not true or false without being embedded in a particular perspective. Perspectives themselves are more than mere beliefs, an error that would make everyone infallible. If what's true for a person is a matter of his or her perspective, and a perspective is just his or her set of beliefs, then the believer could never be wrong. Fortunately, Nietzsche is aware of this, and makes explicit the distinction between being believed true in a perspective and being true in a perspective. In The Antichrist (23) he writes "truth and the belief that something is true: two completely diverse worlds of interest". Perspectives instead have something to do with centers of interest, or attitudes organized around a common concern: "all evaluation is made from a definite perspective: that of the preservation of the individual, a community, a race, a state, a church, a faith, a culture" (WP 259). Perspectives are both local and abstract, they are "the basic condition of all life" (BGE preface). Nietzsche is not precise about exactly what he considers to be a perspective, but they are best characterized as ways of knowing, or doxastic practices. According to William Alston, a doxastic practice is "the exercise of a system or constellation of belief-forming habits or mechanisms, each realizing a function that yields beliefs with a certain kind of content form inputs of a certain type" (Alston 1991, 155). Doxastic practices for Alston are abstract types; concrete specific practices are tokens of those types. Alston is especially interested in what makes a particular doxastic practice Christian, and states that Christian practice "takes the Bible, the ecumenical councils of the undivided church, Christian experience through the ages, Christian thought, and more generally the Christian tradition as normative sources of its overrider system" (Alston 1991, 193). Similar reasoning would apply to a scientific perspective, or an aesthetic one. A scientific doxastic practice includes something like the norms of data collection and analysis, the methods of empirical observation and testing, the assumptions and puzzles of normal science, and an epistemological commitment to wide reflective equilibrium. It is only from within, or with reference to, such perspectives that anything could be said to be true. Without a doubt, the most troublesome aspect of this reading of perspectivism is how the doctrine might be applied to itself. If the way to the truth does not exist, because there are many kinds of truths, then what shall we make of those very claims? Isn't perspectivism itself just another perspective? Isn't it supposed to be true for everyone that there are distinct interests that constitute the different perspectives? Writing in 2001, Bernard Reginster describes this paradox of perspectivism as dominating the previous 20 years of English-speaking Nietzsche scholarship (Reginster 2001), and certainly it has bothered Nietzsche's commentators going back at least to Danto. If perspectivism is a perspective, then there are perspectives in which statements are untrue only in a perspective; if perspectivism is not a S. D. Hales 27 perspective, then it is untrue that every statement is true in some perspectives and untrue in others (Danto 1965, 80). One way to salvage Nietzsche's perspectivism is the following: instead of insisting that everything is perspectival, one could aver that everything true is perspectivally true. The vital difference between the two formulations can be brought out with an analogy. Compare everything is possible to everything true is possibly true. No one except the pathologically optimistic would defend the idea that everything is possible, but everything true is possibly true is so obvious as to hardly rate a comment. Everything true is possibly true allows the possibility that there are necessary truths that are true in all worlds and it permits that some truths are merely contingent ones that are true in some worlds but false in others. Analogously, everything true is perspectivally true is compatible with there being absolute truths that are true in all perspectives while also permitting that there are merely perspectival truths that are true in some perspectives and false in others. Nietzsche is then free to argue that there are perspectives, that truth is indexed to perspectives, that there is no such thing as truth outside of or independent from perspectives, and so on. Those structural claims are true in all perspectives, without risk of self-refutation.3 2.4 Nietzsche's Second-Order Perspectivism All the discussion of perspectivism so far has been treating it as a first-order theory, where our knowledge is perspectival because truth itself is. This has been the (or at least a prominent) mainstream way to understand Nietzsche's perspectivism, and has been the way I have defended and presented it in the past. However, I think there is another way into his perspectivist thinking that has not been previously discussed in the literature and is an intriguing new lens though which we can see his work. That is to regard perspectivism not as specific theory of knowledge, or even a collection of theories, but as a strategic methodology. The right analogy here is to Descartes's discussion of skepticism. In the first Meditation, Descartes is troubled by how often he has been wrong in the past. This is especially bothersome because some areas of human inquiry - geometry, for example - seem set on firm foundations from which further facts can be rigorously derived. Ordinary empirical knowledge seems much shakier. Descartes's worries lead to two further lines of reflection: the first is doubt about the possibility of any kind of empirical knowledge, as raised in his famous skeptical arguments. The first skeptical argument is the contention that there are no detectable differences between the wakeful perception of reality and a realistic dream. Since we cannot distinguish between dreaming and reality, we cannot be sure that the testimony of our senses provides us with a window into the truth. The second 3 These ideas were first developed in (Hales and Welshon 2000). Lightbody 2010, footnote 1 writes of this view "I believe it is the only consistent perspectivist position possible." A more general discussion of approaches to self-refutation is in (Hales forthcoming). 2 Nietzsche's Epistemic Perspectivism 28 skeptical argument imagines the possibility of an evil demon "of utmost power and cunning" who devotes all of his energies to our deception. Like witnessing the world's greatest illusionist, we can never trust our experiences as representing the way the world really is. Of course, Descartes argues later in the Meditations that we do have knowledge, and that these skeptical arguments ultimately fail. Pretty much all later epistemologists have thought that it is Descartes's rebuttals that ultimately fail, but that doesn't matter here. The point is that Descartes raises skeptical concerns, takes them seriously, and finally rejects them. This sort of firstorder skepticism was one of his two lines of investigation stemming from the recognition of human fallibility. The second, which Descartes does not reject, is methodological skepticism. His methodological skepticism is contained in his proposal that "I should hold back my assent from opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable just as carefully as I do from those which are patently false" (Meditations I 18). The method of doubt does not presume that there cannot be empirical knowledge or that the dream and demon arguments have any purchase at all. Rather, it sets out an approach to further inquiries, namely the psychologically challenging attempt to suspend judgment about everything that can be doubted, until proven otherwise. Descartes rejects first-order skepticism as a positive epistemic theory while promoting skepticism as a second-order methodology. It is consistent to accept both or reject both as well-the key thing is that they are demonstrably different ideas. There are good reasons to believe that Nietzsche's perspectivism, like Descartes's skepticism, is also two-tiered. Nietzsche does present and promote perspectivism as a first-order theory or collection of philosophical theories, as discussed above (and as I defended in earlier work). But he also offers perspectivism as a second-order epistemological methodology. Why would Nietzsche want methodological perspectivism? What is the point or advantage of it? The answer is to provide and enhance understanding - of the human condition, of society, morality, religion, science, music, politics. There are not only distinct perspectival truths, but the very manner in which these domains can be understood, and the systematic approaches we can take to provide that understanding, are diverse to the point of incommensurability. Nevertheless, our understanding is broadened precisely through the recognition of that diversity. The Uruguayan poet Eduardo Galeano observed in Walking Words that "The Church says: the body is a sin. Science says: the body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The Body says: I am a fiesta" (Galeano 1995, 151). Each of these is a legitimate perspective on the body, each can generate perfectly true claims within its investigative paradigm, and still each alone is incomplete, stunted, and provincial. It is only by appreciating all of these perspectives that a richer sort of understanding can be achieved. With first-order perspectivism Nietzsche is (partly) offering a theory of knowledge in which diverse perspectives generate distinct kinds of knowledge. Second-order perspectivism is a way of taking a stance on those firstorder points of view and utilizing them to produce understanding. S. D. Hales 29 2.5 Understanding Understanding is a separate epistemic state from knowledge and has only recently received critical scrutiny. There are five ways in which epistemologists have distinguished understanding from knowledge. The first is epistemic luck. Jonathan Kvanvig has argued that while knowledge can be undermined by epistemic luck, understanding cannot be (Kvanvig 2017). For example, imagine someone who can correctly answer any question about the Comanche dominance of the southern plains in North America from 1775 to 1875. They have a good understanding of Comanche dominance even if they acquired this information in a way riddled with epistemic luck. They might have read a book on the Comanches that was filled with errors, but misremember the book in a way that corrects its mistakes. Such a scenario would typically be regarded as one in which the subject lacks knowledge due to the presence of epistemic luck, but it would still be a mistake to insist that they have no understanding of Comanche dominance.4 Some, notably Linda Zagzebski, have argued that "understanding, in contrast to [propositional knowledge] not only has internally accessible criteria, but is a state that is constituted by a state of conscious transparency. It may be possible to know without knowing one knows but it is impossible to understand without understanding one understands" (Zagzebski 2001, 246). The transparency thesis is the second claim often made on behalf of understanding. Understanding is also supposed to be valuable in a way distinct from knowledge. Duncan Pritchard has argued that one might have knowledge without it being particularly connected to any kind of cognitive achievement (Pritchard et al. 2010, 80–84). A child who accepts a true belief about dinosaurs on the basis of parental testimony might have knowledge about dinosaurs, but that knowledge is not really creditable to the child's cognitive abilities. Pritchard thinks understanding is different, that it is a genuine cognitive achievement and is an epistemically internalist notion. Like Zagzebski, Pritchard holds that if one has understanding then it should not be opaque that one has such understanding. As a result, understanding is distinctively valuable. The value of knowledge runs the risk of being swamped by the value of merely possessing the truth, but the value of understanding consists in the virtue of achievement. The transparency thesis of Zagzebski and Pritchard is dubious. People routinely do not know the things they think they know and can find out that they don't really believe the things they take themselves to believe. Studies in perceptual construction show that subjects routinely report seeing a light flash or a pinprick when told to expect one, even though there was no flash or prick. In short, our minds are far more opaque than we'd like to think, which makes it dubious that any particular 4 Pritchard, Millar, and Haddock (2010, 77–78) challenged Kvanvig on this point, arguing that understanding is subject to some but not all forms of epistemic luck. 2 Nietzsche's Epistemic Perspectivism 30 mental state like understanding should be perfectly transparent.5 Certainly Nietzsche was doubtful about our continuing overestimation of consciousness (GS 11): "By far the greatest part of our spirit's activity remains unconscious and unfelt" (GS 333), and he calls "the absurd overestimation of consciousness" a "tremendous blunder" (WP 529). However, there are other common theses about understanding that are very Nietzschean indeed. Knowledge is straightforwardly Boolean: either you know that p or you do not know that p. Understanding, on the other hand, comes in degrees. As Catherine Elgin writes, "A freshman has some understanding of the Athenian victory [at Marathon], while her teaching fellow has a greater understanding and her professor of military history has an even greater understanding" (Elgin 2017, 58). Or consider theories of planetary motion. Ptolemy had some understanding of the motion of the heavens - he realized that the sun, moon, stars, other planets, and Earth were in motion relative to each other, that the stars seemed not to move and that the sun and moon moved in a very regular pattern, whereas sometimes the planets seemed to loop back on their own orbits (retrograde motion) and that this needed explanation. Copernicus had a better understanding, placing the sun stationary at the center of the system instead of the Earth, but his theory was just as false as Ptolemy's, since he still believed that orbits were circular. Kepler's astronomy provided a better understanding as he replaced Copernicus's circular orbits with elliptical ones. His flawed understanding was demonstrated by Newton, who showed that because the planets exert gravitational force on each other, orbits cannot be perfectly elliptical. Newton did not get the last word in either, as relativity theory establishes that there is no absolute space from which we can measure the motion of bodies. Instead of the Sun moving around the Earth, or the Earth moving around the sun, a better understanding recognizes that there is no absolute space or absolute motion in the way Newtonian mechanics suggested. The preceding is not a tale of one false theory being supplanted by another false theory, but of increasing degrees of understanding of a complex topic. Perhaps the most distinctive and vital element of understanding is that false theories and erroneous models not only can lead to understanding, but understanding some phenomena may be impossible without them. In this way falsehood is an essential component of understanding the world. No one begins their scientific education by studying quantum mechanics and general relativity. Instead everyone starts with Newton's mechanics, his three laws of motion, and assumption of absolute space, even though all physicists reject Newton's physics and think that at best it is a special case of relativity physics. It would be a mistake to insist that studying Newton gives us no understanding of how the world works, even though his theory is, strictly speaking, false. Or take Euclidean geometry, which at most is true of ideal Platonic lines, points, and plane figures, but is not a true description of our imprecise and vaguely bounded material world. Not to mention the fact that Lobachevskian or Riemannian geometry more accurately describes spacetime. 5 On the fallibility of conscious introspection, see Schwitzgebel (2011). S. D. Hales 31 Nonetheless learning Euclidean geometry enhances one's understanding of area, volume, and angularity, and is essential to draftsmanship and the building trades. Once you see how one can understand phenomena imperfectly, or by accepting imperfect theories, examples come up everywhere. Elgin offers Boyle's Gas Law, which states that the volume and pressure of a gas in a closed container vary inversely. She points out that Boyle's Law falsely treats gas molecules as dimensionless, frictionless, perfect spheres that exhibit no intermolecular attraction (Elgin 2017, 61). Still, recognizing the relationship between gas volume and pressure was an important bit of scientific progress. In philosophy the assumption of causal determinism advances debates in action theory even though no scientist thinks it is true of the quantum world. Or take the justified-true-belief analysis of knowledge - another false theory whose long-term acceptance advanced our understanding of many topics in epistemology. A cartographic example of how false models can provide understanding is the London Underground. Compare the tangled mass of spaghetti strands that most accurately represents the topology of the tube lines to the more familiar, highly stylized map of the Underground.6 A London resident or expert may prefer the first, more accurate map, but a firsttime tourist will understand how to get around the city, grasp the general relationship of prominent locations, and navigate their way to their desired destination much better with the stylized map. It's no coincidence that it is the second map that is in all the tube stations and not the first. The spaghettistrand map is similar to the problem of model overfitting in statistics. Imagine a scatterplot of data points. One can always find an equation that draws a curve through the data that matches it perfectly, but doing so is inferior to finding the curve or line that shows the general trend of the data. Figuring out the general trend allows us to better predict future observations than essentially memorizing each piece of past information. Kvanvig (2017, 181) argues that understanding is at least quasi-factive - genuine understanding cannot be too far removed from the truth. In many cases he is right; a tube map with stations randomly scattered all over the city is no help at all, and a cosmology in which no part of the heavens moves at all gives us much less understanding of our experiences than Ptolemy. But our understanding is much improved with models that are not overfit, stylized maps, and (except in extremely specialized cases) Euclidean geometry. The mainstream literature on understanding treats it as a matter of degree and resulting from idealized models. It bears mentioning that there are recent criticisms of allowing idealizations (which perforce include falsehoods) to provide any sort of epistemic value. Sullivan and Khalifa (2019), for example, argue that if idealizations produce any epistemic value at all, it is always inferior to that yielded by more accurate models. As a result, there is no motivation to use them when a better model is available. More promising, they suggest, is a treatment of understanding that is non-epistemic, and that the proper use of idealizations is had "by flagging 6 Accurate map: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-connections-map.pdf. The familiar stylized map: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/standard-tube-map.pdf 2 Nietzsche's Epistemic Perspectivism 32 irrelevancies, explaining, structuring contrastive explanations, isolating causes, and imparting modal information", all tasks they regard as pragmatically useful, but not of epistemic value. A deep dive into these waters is beyond the scope of this paper (and Khalifa and Millson address perspectivism and truth in Chap. 6 in this collection). It is enough here to give a novel interpretation of Nietzsche as offering a rudimentary perspectival treatment of understanding that anticipates some of the contemporary discussion in epistemology and philosophy of science. The idea that methodological perspectivism aims to enhance our understanding gives a new way to interpret Nietzsche's claims about untruths being a condition of life and the epistemic value of errors. In fact, it predicts that he would say such things. If when Nietzsche discusses knowledge he is at least sometimes fumbling towards the idea of understanding, then what he says about the usefulness of errors snaps neatly into place. "Delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation", Nietzsche writes (GS 107), "we simply lack any organ for knowledge, for 'truth': we 'know' (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species..." (GS 354). In WP 503 he writes, "The entire apparatus of knowledge is an apparatus for abstraction and simplification". Perhaps the best known passage along these lines is BGE 4, in which Nietzsche writes, the falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment .... The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating ... without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live - that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life ... a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil. Those ideas sound shockingly radical, unless you read "knowledge" as "understanding" and interpret his endorsement of fictions and falsehoods as essential to life as an acknowledgment of the epistemic value of idealized models. Seen through that lens, the passages just cited become perfectly sensible. For all the reasons discussed above, our understanding of the world is improved by false models, and we understand just as much as may be useful to us. Nietzsche argues in GS 307 that when we give up former beliefs we mistakenly chalk it up to a victory for reason. Rather, it was an opinion useful for our former selves that we no longer need, like a snake shedding a skin it has outgrown. So the understanding provided by Newtonian physics to a novice student is outgrown by the mature scientist, and the navigational understanding that the London tube map provides to a tourist is ultimately surpassed when the tourist becomes a long-time resident. What we really want is "to schematize - to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require" (WP 515); that is how we make the world intelligible and useful to us. In an early fragment of a critique of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche wrote that "The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful S. D. Hales 33 than the truths of little men."7 Why are they more fruitful? Because those great errors – the erroneous yet magnificent edifices of Ptolemy, Galileo, Newton, Aristotle – all contributed to how we understand the world far more than the tedious minor truths worked out by their followers. Nietzsche's second-order epistemological methodology is that understanding is improved through the adoption of different perspectives, like recognizing that polar coordinates are trigonometric transforms of Cartesian coordinates. "Physics too is only an interpretation ... and not a world-explanation", he famously writes in BGE 14. How can physics, our most fundamental and successful science, just be an interpretation? But if instead BGE 14 is really a statement of methodological perspectivism, then it sounds downright reasonable. Physics is one tool to understand the world, one perspective of great reach and fecundity. At the same time it would be foolish to expect physics to help us understand the aesthetic dimensions of Starry Night or Mass in D-Minor. Nor are we going to settle the relative merits of deontology and consequentialism using the mathematical language of final physics. Physics isn't a world-explanation because there are so many parts of reality - art, music, love, meaning, virtue - beyond its purview. Nietzsche is not denying that science produces knowledge. He is denying that it is the lone method by which we should understand reality (GS 373–374). The idea that understanding a topic is improved by multiple standpoints is given additional support by Nietzsche's own practice. His literary style is the most diverse of any philosopher: with aphorisms, extended essays, an intellectual autobiography, a quasi-religious book with characters and action, poetry, and critical papers. All are examples of perspectival practice, addressing problems and ideas from the greatest multiplicity of approaches. If an analytic argument does not enlighten us, maybe the Songs of Prince Vogelfrei will. If brief aphorisms aren't helping us figure things out, maybe a long parable will. Couldn't make heads or tails of what he's after in the aphoristic Beyond Good and Evil? Let's try the nearly analytic essays of On the Genealogy of Morals. The great variety of tones, or voices of style, also lend support. Nietzsche can be elegiac, scornful, bombastic, ironic, witty, and seldom engages in the plodding self-seriousness of most philosophic writing. His pyrotechnics are the very opposite of Kant, whose writing Nietzsche described as something to be endured, the result of a "deformed concept-cripple" who cannot make his words dance (TI, "What the Germans Lack" §7). His verbal fireworks are meant to do more than entertain, though, each is intended in its own way to illuminate. Nietzsche's first order perspectivism is a genuine part of his thought, and something he seriously advances. But it should be seen as a component of his larger architectonic, his kaleidoscope of voices, approaches, and arguments, all aiming at the greatest understanding possible. Nietzsche did not make the distinction between knowledge and understanding, and the extent to which he muddled these concepts together helps explain the difficulty in making sense of his epistemic perspectivism. 7 Cited in Kaufmann (1982, 30). 2 Nietzsche's Epistemic Perspectivism 34 Once that difference is kept firmly in mind, first-order perspectivism and secondorder methodological perspectivism naturally divide and help make sense of a great deal of Nietzsche's epistemological ruminations. Acknowledgements For helpful comments on earlier versions, I am very grateful to (1) Michela Massimi and the participants in the Knowledge From a Human Point of View conference at the University of Edinburgh, especially Dave Ward, (2) Manuel Liz, Marga Vásquez, and the participants in the Points of View workshop at the Universidad de la Laguna in Tenerife, and (3) the audience at the 24th World Congress of Philosophy in Beijing. Work on this paper was supported by Research Project FFI2014-57409, Points of View, Dispositions and Time. Perspectives in a World of Dispositions (Spain). Bibliography Alston, W. P. (1991). Perceiving God: The epistemology of religious experience. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Babich, B. (1994). Nietzsche's philosophy of science. Albany: State University of New York Press. Berry, J. N. (2011). Nietzsche and the ancient skeptical tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Danto, A. (1965). Nietzsche as Philosopher. New York: Macmillan. Doyle, T. (2009). Nietzsche on epistemology and metaphysics: The world in view. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Elgin, C. Z. (2017). True enough. Cambridge: MIT Press. Galeano, E. (1995). Walking words. New York: W. W. Norton. Granier, J. (1977). Perspectivism and interpretation. In D. B. Allison (Ed.), The New Nietzsche (pp. 190–200). New York: Dell. Grimm, R. H. (1977). Nietzsche's theory of knowledge. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Hales, S. D. (forthcoming). Self-refutation. In The Routledge handbook of relativism. Martin Kusch/London: Routledge. Hales, S. D., & Welshon, R. (2000). Nietzsche's Perspectivism. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Hollingdale, R. J. (1973). Nietzsche. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kaufmann, W. (Ed.). (1982). The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Penguin. Kvanvig, J. L. (2017). Understanding. In F. D. Aquino & W. J. Abraham (Eds.), Oxford handbook on the epistemology of theology (pp. 175–190). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lightbody, B. (2010). Nietzsche, Perspectivism, anti-realism: An inconsistent triad. The European Legacy, 15(4), 425–438. Mittelman, W. (1984). Perspectivism, becoming, and truth in Nietzsche. International Studies in Philosophy, 16(2), 3–22. Poellner, P. (1995). Nietzsche and metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pritchard, D., Millar, A., & Haddock, A. (2010). The nature and value of knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reginster, B. (2001). The paradox of Perspectivism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62(1), 217–233. Schrift, A. (1990). Nietzsche and the question of interpretation. New York: Routledge. Schwitzgebel, E. (2011). Perplexities of consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press. Sinhababu, N. (2017). Nietzschean Pragmatism. The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 48(1), 56–70. Sullivan, E, & Khalifa, K. (2019). Idealizations and understanding: Much ado about nothing? Australasian Journal of Philosophy forthcoming. Zagzebski, L. (2001). Recovering understanding. In M. Steup (Ed.), Knowledge, truth, and duty: Essays on epistemic justification, responsibility, and virtue (pp. 235–252). Oxford: Oxford University Press. S. D. Hales 35 Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. 2 Nietzsche's Epistemic Perspectivism


The Limb Limps

Philosophy

HYLE – International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol. 24 (2018), 105-107. Copyright  2018 by HYLE and Thomas Vogt. Letter to the Editor The Limb Limps: A Response to Eric Scerri by Thomas Vogt I do not agree with Scerri's claim that it does not matter whether a scientist is right or wrong. In the next paragraph in his response to my book review (Vogt 2017) he acknowledges that "The new idea, theory, and so on will then be subjected to experimental tests and will either stand or fall" (Scerri 2018). Isn't that judging the theory, model, or experiment right or wrong? Scerri uses a biological analogy of the growth of a new limb and states: "My point is that one would not regard such a development as being right or wrong. What one might say is that if the limb confers an evolutionary advantage to the species then its members will continue to reproduce and flourish." If the role of "the environment in the case of biological growth is now played by the realm of experimentation", as he states then, why not judge such a development and those who created it as right or wrong? Scerri writes: "By denying that a particular scientist is right or wrong I am not denying that science as a whole might have arrived at the best possible description of the world at any particular epoch." We can describe the world today without evoking the experimentally debunked concept of 'cold fusion', but should we 'deny' that the two electrochemists Fleischmann and Pons were wrong? The important self-correcting epistemology of science relies on 'judging the limb' in the light of empirical evidence, logical or mathematical errors. It is dangerous to overburden scientific theories and models with non-empirical, metaphysical ontic biases such as beauty, harmony, simplicity, and in Scerri's case 'organic'. Scerri claims that I "fully support the standard Kuhnian line" and correctly states that I regard the 'isotope crisis' at the beginning of the 20th century as a scientific revolution. I agree with Brad Wray that changes in science can be both evolutionary and revolutionary and invoked the metaphor of 'punctuated equilibrium' in my review. In his review of Scerri's book Brad Wray (2017) also cites the 'isotope crisis' as an example of a revolutionary change of theory: Intimately tied with this discovery of the significance of atomic number as key to classifying chemical elements was the discovery of isotopes, variants of the 106 Thomas Vogt same element that had different atomic weights. Importantly, such 'things' were incompatible with the earlier way of classifying elements. That is, if elements are identified by their atomic weight, then no two samples of the same chemical elements can differ in their atomic weights. So, even though, the process by which various important discoveries that contributed to this change of theory are aptly described as evolutionary in nature, the net result is aptly described as revolutionary. To emphasize the importance of perspective when judging evolutionary and revolutionary scientific changes, Brad Wray reminds us of Kuhn's allegorical question whether the bend in the road belongs to the road leading up to it or after it. To convey a similar point I had used Bohr's statement that when we understand quantum mechanics our meaning of understanding has also changed. Many revolutionary ideas in science are put forward reluctantly and their impact grows with time as others use them and build the 'road after the bend'. Brad Wray, whom Scerri attempts to enlist for his position on evolutionary epistemology, recently wrote an article in which he unequivocally states that the 'isotope crisis' is "a classic case of a Kuhnian revolution" (Brad 2018). Despite the fact that both the periodic system and chemical elements are – as Kragh (2000) writes and Scerri re-emphasizes – "conceptually robust chemical entities" and point "to the value of retaining older theoretical notions, at least in a correspondence-like manner and up to a point", a radical redefinition of chemical elements away from Cannizzaro and Dalton's 'same mass' to Moseley, Paneth, Hevesy, and Van den Broek's 'same nuclear charge' qualifier occurred. This new paradigm disbanded with the one-to-one correspondence between atoms and chemical elements and introduced a degree of physical heterogeneity that some chemists (i.e. Fajans) at that time resisted since important quantities in thermodynamics such as entropy and specific heat depend on mass. In his article Kragh also recalls the discovery of a monoatomic gas with atomic weight near 39.8 a.u. which resulted in what Kuhn would call initially an 'anomaly' and became an 'incommensurability' as it called for abandoning either the kinetic gas theory or the period table. The 'conceptually robust' periodic table after the isotope crisis now has eight groups and the 'trouble maker' Argon turned into the 'poster child' of the new periodic table and the re-definition of a chemical element. Other 'Kuhnian anomalies' such as the positioning of Te-I and Co-Ni in the periodic table are mentioned in Wray 2017. Scerri's reading of Kragh's article, "So much for the occurrence of Kuhnian gestalt switches or anything of the kind", should be contrasted by his own writing regarding the complications assessing how many elements are missing in the mass-based periodic table (Scerri 2011, p. 80): The Limb Limps: A Response to Eric Scerri 107 This complication disappeared when the switch was made to using atomic number. Now the gaps between successive elements became perfectly regular, namely one unit of atomic number." Switch – another façon de parler I assume? In conclusion, I agree with Brad Wray (2017) that "there are significant disruptions in science, disruptions that truly warrant being described as revolutionary" and that the reconceptualization of the chemical element was such a scientific revolution despite maintaining "robust chemical concepts". Einstein's reconceptualization of mass in special and general relativity did not get rid of mass conceptually but radically distinguished it from Newton's concept. Therefore I still regard Bohr's statement that as we gain new understanding (and of course not just in quantum mechanics!) our meaning of understanding also changes as a good litmus test for a scientific revolution. We radically changed our chemical vocabulary with the concept of isotopy and did more than merely 'grow a limb'. References Kragh, H.: 2009, 'Conceptual Changes in Chemistry: The Notion of Chemical Elements, ca. 1900-1925', Studies in History and Philosophy of Physics, 31, 435450. Scerri, E.: 2018, 'Response to Tom Vogt', Hyle: International Journal of Philosophy of Chemistry, 24, 101-104. Scerri, E.R.: 2011, The Periodic table: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vogt, T.: 2017, 'Book review of Eric Scerri: A Tale of Seven Scientists and a New Philosophy of Science', Hyle: International Journal of Philosophy of Chemistry, 23, 107-109. Wray, K.B.: 2017, 'A new philosophy of science from the history of arcane natural science', Foundations of Chemistry, 19, 281-285. Wray, K.B.: 2018 'The atomic number revolution in chemistry: a Kuhnian analysis', Foundations of Chemistry, 20, 209-217. Thomas Vogt: Institute for Advanced Study, University of Durham, U.K. & NanoCenter and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of South Carolina, U.S.A.; email@example.com