PART I
PERSPECTIVITY
What is perspectivity?
The meaning of perspective used herein is, a specific point of view in understanding things or events (one of a number of definitions in Webster's New World Dictionary). Hence, perspectivity is the mind-set for framing one's point of view.
In philosophy this mind-set is called metaphysics. In traditional approaches to philosophy such perspectives were regarded as essentials, the foundation of thinking. Modern approaches regard such perspectives as postulates (tentative premises), without reifying (concretizing) any of them. The approach used herein will be the modern one. There are three categories used in perspectivity: (1.) epistemology - how we know about reality; (2.) ontology - what reality consists of; and (3.) kineology - how reality changes. Each category contains three concepts.
How is perspectivity used?
Within each category, there is usually a blend of the three concepts involved in knowing something. In any particular instance, one of the concepts is likely to account for a larger proportion of a person's perspective than the other two, although the blend may shift between different people, circumstances, and occasions. Furthermore, the individual blends are, more often than not, implicit rather than explicit.
A person can begin by examining one's recent judgments in retrospect, and with practice it is eventually possible to be more deliberate in "managing" one's perspective. Why? Because, as Einstein said, what we believe determines what we see, and NOT visa versa. People who are unaware that what they believe determines what they see, often assume that they are simply observing "reality" for what it is. This is both naive and inaccurate. Most human perceptions are labeled, and this labeling is governed by "the perspective" we bring to each situation. As the Torah stated some 2,500 years ago, "We see things not as they are, but as we are."
Some phenomena have a "substantial" physical component (for instance, rocks, machines, animals, plants, etc.) and the terms and concepts which we use to label them are just convenient signs for reference. Other phenomena are either symbolic social entities (contracts, conventions, institutions, etc.), or symbolic scientific creations (the concepts of gravitation, entropy, systems, energy, etc.). In all cases though, conceptual thinking uses the labels, and labels are based on perspectives. We always know more than we can say, but even knowing is largely conceptual.
References
John Searle
THE CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL REALITY
The Free Press, New York, 1997
James W. Davis
TERMS OF INQUIRY
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2005