Causal perspectivalism∗

As objects go, foreigners are a pretty respectable bunch. They’re not figments of our collective imagination, or social constructions, or useful fictions. They’re not mind-dependent, and they don’t disappear when we don’t keep an eye on them. Our ‘folk theory’ about foreigners isn’t subject to some global error, and the term ‘foreigner’ certainly manages to refer. Some of our beliefs about foreigners are mistaken, no doubt, but only by failing to accord, case-by-case, with the objective reality to which they are certainly answerable. There are many facts still to be discovered about foreigners, such as their precise distribution in space and time. Moreover, these are matters for scientific study. And so on. In a nutshell, foreigners are as real as we are. Yet think of the discovery each of us made when, minds broadened by travel, we realised that foreigners themselves use the very same concept, but apply it to us! What we learnt (at that unsettling moment) was that the distinction between them and us, foreigners and compatriots, isn’t as objective as we’d assumed. It is a distinction drawn ‘from a perspective’—that of a local speech community, embedded in a tribal population. There are objective divisions in the world, of course, but not the asymmetric distinction that each side sees from where it stands. God sees us as Afghanis, Zimbabweans, and many things in between, perhaps, but not as locals and foreigners. So, the reality of foreigners notwithstanding, there’s a sense in which foreignness is a less objective matter than we used to think. Perspectivity of this kind raises important philosophical issues. Some are general issues: How is the relevant notion of perspective best characterised? Is it one phenomena or