**Links to**: [[Vantagepointillism]], [[Symmetry]], [[Sameness]], [[Recursivity]], [[Entropomorfismo]], [[Perspectival anxiety]], [[Polycomputation]], [[Constraint]], [[05 Prediction]], [[Xpectator]]. >Amerindian perspectivism is an intellectual structure containing a theory of its own description by anthropology—for it is precisely another anthropology, superimposed over ours. That is exactly why perspectivism is not, pace Descola, a subtype of animism, i.e., a schema of practice whose reasons can be known only by the reason of the anthropologist. It is not a type but a concept, and the most interesting use for it consists not so much in classifying cosmologies that appear exotic to us but in counter-analyzing those anthropologies that have become far too familiar. > >Viveiros de Castro (2009) 2014, p. 78. >The dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, seems to betray an underlying paradox. Different points of view make sense, but only if there is a common coordinate system on which to plot them; yet the existence of a common system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability. What we need, it seems to me, is some idea of the considerations that set the limits to conceptual contrast. There are extreme suppositions that founder on paradox or contradiction; there are modest examples we have no trouble understanding. What determines where we cross from the merely strange or novel to the absurd? > >Donald Davidson (1973-4), “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”, p. 6. How does ethics link up with mathematics? In many ways more than one. But a simple example may be: to understand what set of unactuated states, what sense of pull, what linearity directs the orientation of a bacterium towards a different temperature than the one it is currently in, one needs to understand something about one’s own sense of orientation. Perspectives are everything, and everywhere. And they are implicated at different levels of abstraction: gradients such as temperature. Quality such as smells. Concepts such as negation. [[Ergodicity]], the returning-to-characteristic states quality of a system, can be understood as an example of stacked up perspectives, or levels of abstraction that become actuated. This is why we love to see patterns. Patterns, coarse or fine, large or small, are the evidence of repetition, repetition is the quality of reality where our perspective is instantiated by meeting another thing that is reoccurring/patterning and therefore showing itself as a perspective, to another, which grants us our sense of perspective. Mathematics is the learning of the language that communicates with the most distant of perspectives: “mere” patterns. %% [[Perspectivism notes]]