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The notion of perspectives is deliberately intended to be broad enough to include this embedding contextualisation. A perspective is a cluster concept that includes a range of contexts: the way data is presented to us as meso- level creatures, the level of empirical precision of observations and experiments, the empirical domain a model applies to, the boundary of the target system, a set of parametrisations and abstractions to allow the definition of modally connectible variables, a framework for partitioning “raw” observational data into sets and elements of systems into “natural” kinds and universal classes. The notion of perspectives is hard wired into the way our brains process the world and the theoretical frameworks used to explain it. The traditional intuition that part of the methodology of science is to avoid humans being the measure of all things and to sit outside our viewpoint should be understood not as science finding a view from nowhere, a perspectiveless ideal, but as science providing a multiplicity of

perspectives. The “compound eye” of science allows us to go beyond the innate coarse grained way the world appears to us as sense data, but what it never shows us is a view without a perspective. It does allow us to compare perspectives and look for consistencies, overlaps and bridges between them, and give us a picture of aspects of the whole. This scientific perspectivism is an outgrowth from, but also a means to circumvent, the perspectivism forced on us by our epistemic limitations.

There is a dialectic at work: perspectives facilitate the construction of models and making modal connections in them. In turn these models are empirically constrained by having to represent the modal structures of the world. A bad perspective will make a very limited number of modal connections that can track onto the world correctly, it will apply to too small an empirical domain to be interesting or useful. Useful perspectives track surrealistically, or realistically, onto the world. In some cases we will be able to say why the surrealism holds, how it comes to be that the world appears as if a fiction exists, in other cases the surrealism will be brute, at least for now. That does not render a model that uses those facts unexplanatory, any more than a causal explanation which cannot provide a full causal regression to the big bang is unexplanatory. Structural contextualisation is important. What is meant by saying the world surreally looks as if entity X exists is that when that entity and its properties are put into a theoretical structure such as a model, the whole of that model is quasi-explanatory. That is, X as embedded in structure Y produces a modal topology which is empirically adequate relative to the domain Z.

This perspectivism presents a new way of restating the intuition that during theory change a new entity in a new theory plays the same causal role as an entity which has been abandoned in the superseded theory. Of course I do not want to say that it plays a causal role, but in these cases we can say that the new entity may be identifiable as playing a similar role in the structure of a model in one perspective as another entity in a different model. The new entity in its relation to its model allows an analogous modal topology to be expressed. The conservation of properties is explicated in terms of the necessary features the overall model needs to capture new modal information, whilst preserving the modal information of the previous explanation.

Bokulich's notion of the openness of classical and quantum mechanics provides an interesting addendum to the view of theory change presented in

the partial structures account. Here, theory change involves the preservation of elements from the old theory into the new theory, no old theory is ever scrapped entirely.216 _{Bokulich's treatment of quantum chaos}

suggests that we can go further and say that when new elements are discovered in an old theory they can then be incorporated into the new theory in a hybridised set of models. This chimes well with the view of theory change as presented in the partial structures account:

Bluntly put, we never loose the best of what we have, and this can be mirrored within our account of what might be called the Principle of the Absolute Nature of Pragmatic Truth: Once a theory has been shown to be pragmatically true in a certain domain, it remains pragmatically true, within that domain, for all time. It is this, of course, which lies behind the justification for continuing to use Newtonian mechanics within certain limits. (Da Costa and French 2003 p. 82)

The same is true for quasi-explanation, once a theory/model is quasi- explanatory it remains so despite other newer explanations coming along. Moreover, the modal topology it provides is preserved. The modal structure of the surreal world is accrued through the progress of science, constraining aspects of what the true ontological structure can be.