Scientific thought prides itself on its escape from perspective.
The ambition is not merely to correct for bias, but to remove viewpoint altogether — to describe the world as it is, independent of where it is described from. This ambition has been extraordinarily successful. It has given us invariant laws, reproducible experiments, and shared standards of evidence.
It has also produced a persistent discomfort with perspective itself.
Perspective as Contamination
Within scientific explanation, perspective is rarely treated as constitutive. It is treated as a problem to be managed.
Measurements must be corrected for observer effects. Coordinates must be transformed away. Frames of reference must be rendered interchangeable. Subjective contributions must be bracketed.
Perspective is tolerated only insofar as it can be eliminated.
When it cannot, it is reclassified — as error, bias, ignorance, or limitation of access.
The Quiet Assumption
Underlying this intolerance is a quiet assumption: that perspective is a feature of our relation to the world, not a feature of how the world becomes available at all.
The world, on this view, is already fully there. Perspective merely obscures or distorts it.
Scientific progress, accordingly, is imagined as a gradual thinning of perspective — an approach to a view from nowhere.
This image is powerful. It is also historically specific.
When Perspective Refuses to Leave
Certain domains resist this thinning.
Quantum phenomena cannot be described without specifying an experimental arrangement. Biological traits make no sense outside ecological and developmental contexts. Thermodynamic quantities depend on coarse-graining. Neural signals acquire significance only within functional frames.
The response is rarely to accept this fact. It is to relocate perspective somewhere safer.
Strategies of Removal
When perspective cannot be eliminated, scientific thought typically deploys one of several strategies:
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treat it as epistemic rather than ontological
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confine it to measurement rather than reality
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distribute it across many observers or systems
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internalise it into models or agents
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defer it to deeper levels of description
Each strategy preserves the ideal of perspective-free reality — even as it admits perspective back in through a side door.
Why This Matters
The intolerance of perspective is not merely methodological. It is ontological.
It expresses a commitment to the idea that reality must be describable independently of how it is construed. When this commitment is threatened, explanation becomes compensatory.
Limits of description are redescribed as limits of knowledge. Dependence on context is reframed as lack of precision. Constitutive cuts are treated as unfortunate intrusions.
The world is protected — but at a cost.
Perspective as Constitutive
Relational ontology does not deny the achievements of perspective-neutral description. It denies their universality.
Perspective is not a viewpoint on a pre-given world. It is a condition under which phenomena become available at all.
To say this is not to collapse science into subjectivity. It is to recognise that description does not merely record reality — it participates in its articulation.
The Cost of Intolerance
When perspective is treated as contamination, scientific thought is forced into increasingly elaborate repairs:
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deeper structures to carry determinacy
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broader ensembles to absorb indeterminacy
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abstract invariants to mask contextual dependence
These repairs work. But they also teach us what cannot be said.
What remains unsayable is not chaos, but becoming.
What This Post Refuses to Do
This post does not argue that science should abandon objectivity, nor that all descriptions are equally valid. It does not propose perspectivism as a doctrine.
It names an intolerance.
It notices how often scientific explanation strains to avoid admitting that perspective is not merely a limitation on knowledge, but a constituent of reality’s articulation.
Looking Ahead
The posts that follow will trace related intolerances:
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the intolerance of incompleteness
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the intolerance of non-identity
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the intolerance of genuine novelty
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the intolerance of constraint without cause
Each is distinct. None is independent.
But perspective is the place where they first become visible.
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