By this point in the series, several familiar anchors have been quietly re‑ordered.
Experience no longer begins with objects. Action no longer issues from agents. Meaning no longer depends on representation. The self no longer requires a core.
At this stage, a final concern often surfaces — sometimes explicitly, sometimes only as a lingering unease:
If all of this is so, what becomes of reality itself?
This worry usually takes a particular form. If there are no things, no agents, no representations, and no inner cores, then surely reality must be slipping away into perspective, construction, or mere appearance.
This post addresses that worry by questioning one last assumption: that reality requires a view from nowhere.
Why the View from Nowhere Feels Necessary
The idea of a view from nowhere promises neutrality.
It offers a picture of the world as it is independently of any perspective, interest, or situation. From this imagined vantage point, disagreements can be adjudicated, appearances corrected, and truth secured.
Science is often invoked here, not because scientists actually occupy such a view, but because science is taken to aim at it.
The trouble is that the view from nowhere is not merely unattainable. It is incoherent.
Perspectives Are Not Distortions
A perspective is often treated as a limitation — a partial or biased access to a world that is fully formed elsewhere.
But consider what a perspective actually does. It organises relevance. It brings some distinctions into focus and lets others recede. It enables coordinated action, communication, and correction.
Without perspective, nothing would show up as anything at all.
The mistake is to treat perspective as a veil placed over reality, rather than as one of the ways reality becomes structured.
Constraint Without Independence
At this point, a familiar accusation arises: relativism.
If reality depends on construal, does anything constrain what can be said or done? Are all perspectives equally valid?
The answer is no — and the reason is simple. Construal is not free invention. It is constrained by material conditions, by shared practices, by histories of coordination, and by the consequences of action.
A bridge either supports weight or it does not. A prediction either holds up under use or it does not. A description either enables effective coordination or it does not.
These constraints do not require a world standing entirely apart from perspective. They operate within perspective, across many of them.
Objectivity Reframed
On this view, objectivity is not achieved by escaping perspective, but by aligning perspectives.
Scientific objectivity, for example, consists in building practices that allow results to travel — across instruments, observers, laboratories, and times. What matters is not that measurements reflect a view from nowhere, but that they can be re‑actualised under specified conditions.
Objectivity is thus a property of coordination, not of detachment.
This is why disagreement does not imply that one side is simply cut off from reality. Disagreements often reflect different construals operating under different constraints, aims, or levels of resolution.
Reality as What Pushes Back
If reality is not what appears when perspective is removed, what is it?
A useful answer is this: reality is what resists unconstrained construal.
It is what pushes back when expectations fail, when actions misfire, when coordination breaks down. This resistance is not encountered outside experience or practice; it is encountered in them.
Reality, in other words, is not hidden behind appearances. It is encountered precisely where appearances stop working.
What Becomes Visible
When the view from nowhere is relinquished, several features of reality come into focus:
Reality is shared, but not perspective‑free.
Truth is practical, not pictorial.
Error is instructive, not merely negative.
Knowledge grows by re‑cutting, not by approximation to an absolute.
Most importantly, the long‑standing opposition between realism and anti‑realism loses its force. Both assume that reality must either stand entirely apart from construal or collapse into it.
Neither option is required.
A World That Holds
To say that there is no view from nowhere is not to say that the world is unstable or negotiable at will.
It is to say that stability arises through durable patterns of coordination — patterns that can be challenged, refined, and sometimes broken, but not simply wished away.
The world holds, not because it is independent of all perspective, but because perspectives themselves are constrained by how things go.
Closing the Series
Across these posts, a consistent re‑ordering has been at work.
What looked like foundations — objects, agents, representations, cores, and absolute viewpoints — have been revealed as outcomes of relational organisation.
Nothing essential has been lost.
What has been gained is a way of seeing that dissolves familiar philosophical knots while remaining fully answerable to experience, action, meaning, selfhood, and reality.
If there is a single thread running through the series, it is this:
Reality does not require us to step outside it in order to take it seriously.
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