How do we go about even communicating if this is true though?

Well, I DON'T think epistemic nihilism should make us believe that all beliefs and opinions are equally valid and true and worthy of respect though.

Yes, there is no position of objectivity outside of our own perspective from which to judge other perspectives, but if we assert that all perspectives are equal, all that's doing is trying to assume that very non-existent objective perspective, just doing something different with it — assigning equal "objective" weight to every perspective.

Instead we can indeed judge other perspectives we just have to remember that we're doing it from our own point of epistemic situatedness not from an objective point of view, and work with that.

We can dismiss other perspectives if they simply don't explain our experiences in a way that's satisfying to us, or if we want to convince other people we can try to show them how their perspective is inconsistent or incomplete even on its own terms, or even with respect to the experiences that they have had — including their experiences of interacting with people that have different experiences than they do! We can try to build common understandings based on shared experiences.

We can also learn how people with radically different experiences have learned to understand them and build out a perspective for ourselves that's way there and more complete because it can encompass other experiences. Because sometimes having a perspective that rigidly excludes others' experiences (and interpretations of those experiences), especially when we don't share knowledge of those experiences directly, will be incapable of actually explaining why those people act the way they do — and so actually fail as perspectives on their own terms!

That's why for instance all those transphobic interpretations of trans experience as fetishes or deceptions or delusions or mental illnesses, with their accompanying interpretations of what transition actually does for us, all wrong even on their own terms because they can't actually explain what trans people report and how we act even from within their own framework.

And this perspective isn't itself doesn't fall victim to its own epistemic nihilist trap because it isn't actually it's own perspective in the sense that I'm talking about. All it's doing is showing how any epistemic discourse that's based on the ideas of objective truth and justified true belief and stuff like that fails even on its own terms to actually achieve that objectivity. So it's working within the terms of every non epidemic nihilist perspective to undermine them with their own tools it's not a separate perspective with its own separate definitions of truth and objectivity. And this is exactly what I mean by taking the tools of enlightenment rationality and critically applying them to the tools themselves.

#epistemology #perspectivism #nietzche #eogism #trans