Diseño de alcantarillados según RIDAA 2009

argues that Kant is caught within the philosophical tradition that thinks that empirical knowledge is deficient and captures only ‘appearances’ whilst conceptual knowledge refers to the ‘real’ world. With Kant’s Copernican turn, however, comes the realisation that concepts do not hook onto ‘reality’ directly and that concepts, in conjunction with the senses, give us knowledge of the objects of the empirical world. Despite this realisation, however, Kant, according to Nietzsche, retains the rationalist idea of the thing-in-itself and attributes to it greater merit than the world of the senses, thus further instantiating a two-world view, which now, however, carries with it sceptical implications.

Kant’s distinction between the thing-in-itself and appearances as a dis- tinction between the ‘real’ and the merely ‘apparent’ world consequently gives rise, according to Nietzsche, to the further distinction between truth-in-itself and truth merely ‘for us’. Truth-in-itself is a correspond- ence idea whereby reality is said to confer truth on our epistemic claims. Truth ‘for us’, however, is said to be merely perspectival, divorced from how things are in themselves. Thus Nietzsche contends that with Kant metaphysical independence and epistemic inaccessibility go hand in hand. It is metaphysical realism combined with this additional epistemic premise that Nietzsche rejects; he rejects the view that reality is consti- tuted such that its ultimate nature is both non-empirical and inaccessible to beings whose mode of cognition is sensual and perspectival.

Nietzsche’s main contention with metaphysical realism thus centres on the issue of the dissociation of truth and justification. Truth comprises, for the metaphysical realist in general, a correspondence between the way the world is in itself and our epistemic and normative assertions. With the demise of the cognitivist version, however, and its metamorphosis into the

non-cognitivist version we witness what may be termed a decoupling15

of truth and justification whereby our experience of the empirical world as the only world available to us and the justification of our epistemic claims are denied the title ‘truth’. Thus according to this version, truth- in-itself and our actual practices of justification are radically divorced. In such a case we witness what Nietzsche terms a severing of theory from

practice.16 _{In theory, the non-cognitivist metaphysical realist adopts an}

extra-perspectival approach to the question of truth. However, in prac- tice, given the cognitive inaccessibility of truth-in-itself, the non-cognitive metaphysical realist operates with possible falsehoods and illusions in the guise of beliefs that are lacking in epistemic worth. Nietzsche aims to over- come this underlying extra-perspectival and anti-empirical approach.

If Nietzsche is to succeed in this he must satisfy a number of demands. First, he must overcome the non-cognitivist version of metaphysical

Nietzsche’s Perspectival Theory of Knowledge 59

realism by recoupling truth and justification. He does this by adopting a contextualist argument claiming that our practices of justification deter- mine truth. Second, if Nietzsche is to succeed in recoupling truth and justification he must also overcome the two-world view of metaphysical realism. In particular, he must overcome the anti-empirical tendency of this dualism. This anti-empirical tendency is evident in the insistence that the empirical arena of our lived experience cannot be an arena of truth but only of practical beliefs of doubtful epistemic status. If Nietzsche is to recouple truth and justification he must establish that the empirical arena of our lived experience is conducive to truth and not radically divorced from it. In sum, if truth is not to be divorced from justification, we must rid ourselves of the thing-in-itself.

The remainder of this chapter sets about demonstrating the manner in which Nietzsche meets the above demands. By examining Nietzsche’s perspectivism and empiricism, we see that he adopts an internal realist response, arguing that our knowledge is immersed in the empirical world rather than divorced from it.

NIETZSCHE’S PERSPECTIVISM

The notion of perspective permeates the entire corpus of Nietzsche’s writings, although its meaning is often rather fluid, operating on different occasions as a social, historical, epistemic and biological thesis. Appealing to a visual metaphor, he defines a cognitive perspective as influencing the ‘look’ or appearance of things, arguing that our perspectives comprise a

specifically ‘human contribution’ to how things appear.17 _{Moreover, he}

often identifies cognitive perspectives with the Kantian categories such

as causality and substance but with an important difference.18 _Whereas

the Kantian categories are constitutive extra-historical conditions of the possibility and limitation of our knowledge to appearances, Nietzsche argues that our perspectives are regulative tools of inquiry rooted in our

interests and values.19

Nietzsche’s perspectivism emerges in the context of his complaint that

‘Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers’.20 _He

argues that philosophy has traditionally ignored the fact that our social institutions, values and ways of thinking in general have developed over time in favour of the idea of a timeless rational human essence:

many, without being aware of it, even take the most recent manifestation of man, such as has arisen under the impress of certain religions, even certain political events, as the fixed form from which one has to start out. They will not learn that man has become, that the faculty of knowledge has become;