A Fragmented World: A New Philosophical Approach to Perspectival Facts

Often, an object can appear in incompatible ways across different conditions of observation none of which is privileged (call these perspectives). For instance, from equally good perspectives, things may be observed to have conflicting colours, tastes, temperatures, and can even seem to have different constant velocities, shapes, or rest masses, to name just a few properties. The current paradigm holds that, in such cases, the incompatible ways that things appear across perspectives are not genuine ways that things are out there, but merely ways things seem to observers under the relevant conditions. The proposed project explores a novel understanding of perspectival facts, one that allows the world to be as we experience it to be across perspectives by allowing the world to exhibit a fragmented structure. The incompatible facts that we observe across perspectives are understood as failing to obtain together, even though they obtain together with other facts. The project is two-pronged, developing (1) the conceptual and logical foundations of a fully general version of the metaphysical theory, and (2) defending novel applications of the theory, to philosophical debates concerning colours, parts and wholes, and essential properties. Fragmentalism offers the first philosophical view that takes perspectival facts to be genuinely real. The aim is to place this novel view on a stable conceptual footing and to demonstrate how it might enable us to offer new solutions to long-standing philosophical problems. By changing the way in which we understand perspectival facts, the project offers a new way of understanding the world of everyday experience and its conflict with fundamental sciences. The project also offers a new approach to the unification of different sciences as well as new solutions to old puzzles in metaphysics.