Interperspectival Content and Physical Theory

Abstract

The book has made the case that linguistic tense and other perspectival language are used to express interperspectival contents and that such contents are needed to explain and understand a number of phenomena, ranging from human action and emotion, to perception, consciousness, normative behavior (understood broadly enough to include the behavior of computers), etc. The fact that physics may not need perspectival contents does not undermine the case for such contents. Indeed, as this chapter argues, perspectival content is critical to the practice of scientific investigation (particularly in the context of scientific experimentation), and may well need to be a component in our base-level descriptions of the world. It is further argued that perspectival contents like tense are compatible with the Special Theory of Relativity, given our theory of the expression of interperspectival contents.