I like the outside view a lot and mostly have nice things to say about it. But that wouldn’t make a very interesting comment, so instead I’ll say something about its shortcomings.
There is a sense in which the outside view doesn’t exist. By this I mean any view must be the view from somewhere in the observable universe and thus is always an inside view of what we can experience. The only outside view in this sense is the one that’s impossible to take because physical constraints prohibit us from getting to a vantage point where we could see it, although we can make theoretical approximations of what those views might be like (cf. Tegmark).
Luckily this is not much of a practical concern since the outside view we usually want is one outside a particular local context, such as the view from outside a social group or individual decision rather than the view from outside your lifeworld. And even the view from outside the lifeworld turns out to be, even if theoretically impossible, practically possible up to the limit of our bounded ability to construct an ontology of our lifeworld.
I’m surprised that you jump to “the outside view doesn’t exist in full purity” and not the more obvious shortcoming of “one has to use inside-view models to slot objects into reference classes before one can apply reference-class reasoning, hence the outside view always contains the inside view as a critical step.”
I like the outside view a lot and mostly have nice things to say about it. But that wouldn’t make a very interesting comment, so instead I’ll say something about its shortcomings.
There is a sense in which the outside view doesn’t exist. By this I mean any view must be the view from somewhere in the observable universe and thus is always an inside view of what we can experience. The only outside view in this sense is the one that’s impossible to take because physical constraints prohibit us from getting to a vantage point where we could see it, although we can make theoretical approximations of what those views might be like (cf. Tegmark).
Luckily this is not much of a practical concern since the outside view we usually want is one outside a particular local context, such as the view from outside a social group or individual decision rather than the view from outside your lifeworld. And even the view from outside the lifeworld turns out to be, even if theoretically impossible, practically possible up to the limit of our bounded ability to construct an ontology of our lifeworld.
I’m surprised that you jump to “the outside view doesn’t exist in full purity” and not the more obvious shortcoming of “one has to use inside-view models to slot objects into reference classes before one can apply reference-class reasoning, hence the outside view always contains the inside view as a critical step.”