Philosophy as Dialogue 9780674287594

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PHILOSOPHY A S DI A LO G UE

PHILOSOPHY as DIALOGUE HIL ARY PUTNAM Edited by

M A RIO DE C A RO and

DAVID M AC A RTHUR

T H E B E L K N A P P R E S S O F H A RVA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts London, ­England 2022

 Copyright © 2022 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing Jacket photograph: Michael Duva Jacket design: Annamarie McMahon Why 9780674287600 (EPUB) 9780674287594 (PDF) Credits on pages 347–349 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN: 978-0-674-28135-6 (alk. paper)

 This book is dedicated to our ­children, Gaia, Tullia, Thea, Gal, and Eno

Contents

Editors’ Introduction. Hilary Putnam: Dialogical Phi­los­o­pher

1

PART I.  LANGUAGE AND LOGIC L ANGUAGE, MEANING, AND REFERENCE

1. Wilfrid Sellars: On Meaning and Rules (1974)

11

2. Gareth Evans: On Reference (1983)

22

4. Akeel Bilgrami: On Meaning and Belief (1993)

36

3. Noam Chomsky: Scientism and Explaining Language (1993) 5. Axel Mueller: On Quine and Putnam on Analyticity (2013) 6. Tyler Burge: On Thought and Language (2015) LOGIC

7. George Boolos: On Logical Truths (1994)

8. Charles Travis: On Mind-­Independence and Quantum Logic

(2001, 2002)

27 45 49

63 66

PART II.  REALISM AND ANTIREALISM CONCEPTUAL REL ATIVITY

9. Donald Davidson: On Conceptual Relativism (1987)

83

viii Contents

10. Jennifer Case: On Conceptual Pluralism and Conceptual

Relativity (2001)

INTERNAL REALISM

11. David L. Anderson: On Internal Realism (1993)

93

101

12. Richard W. Miller: On Perception and Internal Realism

(1993) 113

13. Simon Blackburn: On Internal Realism (1994)

14. Michael Dummett: On Realism and Idealism (1994) EMPIRICISM AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

15. Ian Hacking: On Philosophy of Science (1984)

16. Rudolf Carnap (Thomas Ricketts): On Empiricism and

Conventionalism (1994)

17. David Albert: On Quantum Mechanics (2013)

120 138

147 152 154

PHILOSOPHY OF PERCEPTION

18. Ned Block: On the Qualitative Character of Experience

(2013) 158

19. John McDowell: On Perception (2013)

161

PART III.  PR AGMATISM AND SKEPTICISM PR AGMATISM

20. Cornel West: On Deweyan and Prophetic Pragmatism (2001) 21. Robert Brandom: On Pragmatism (2002)

22. Ruth Anna Putnam: On Pragmatism (2013) SKEPTICISM AND REL ATIVISM

23. Crispin Wright: On the Brain-­in-­a-­Vat (1994)

24. Joseph Margolis: On Relativism and Pluralism (2006)

177 202 213

216 223

Contents

ix

PART IV.  MOR ALITY, POLITICS, AND RELIGION MOR AL PHILOSOPHY

25. Martha Nussbaum: On Moral Rules and The Golden Bowl

(1983) 239

26. David Wiggins: On Semantic Externalism (1994)

248

28. David Copp: On Morality and Mathe­matics (2006)

265

27. Jürgen Habermas: On Moral Philosophy (2002) 29. Mark Timmons: On Morality (2006) PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS AND RELIGION

30. Elizabeth Anscombe and Cora Diamond: On Religion (1997) 31. Richard Rorty: On Po­liti­cal Hope (1998) 32. Franz Rosenzweig: On Religion (2016)

251 271

281 284 286

PART V.  PUTNAM’S PHILOSOPHICAL FORBEARS TEXTUAL INTERPRETATION

33. Ludwig Wittgenstein (Juliet Floyd): On the Tractatus (1998) 34. Burton Dreben: On Quine and Wittgenstein (2000) 35. W. V. O. Quine: On Quine’s Radicality (2002) MAJOR PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES

36. 12 Philosophers—­a nd Their Influence on Me (2008)

299 306 319

327

Credits

347

Index

351

PHILOSOPHY A S DI A LO G UE

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Hilary Putnam: Dialogical Phi­los­o­pher

T

he first philosophical writings in the Western world had ­either a poetic form (Parmenides and Empedocles) or an aphoristic one (Heraclitus and Democritus), but the literary genre that established philosophy as a recognizable discipline was the dialogue. More specifically, Plato’s roughly thirty Dialogues provided an exemplary model of one of the most impor­ tant literary genres of philosophy—as evidenced by its use in antiquity ­(Cicero, Augustine), the ­Middle Ages (Augustine, Boethius, Abelard, Anselm, Ockham), the early modern age (Giordano Bruno, Galileo), up to the heart of modern philosophy (Leibniz, Berkeley, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume). Philosophical dialogue traditionally has several distinctive features: its to-­a nd-­f ro, back-­a nd-­forth movement is enjoyable for the reader; it helps to circumvent censorship, given the distance between the author and the literary voice(s) extolling heterodox views; it makes it pos­si­ble for authors to take dif­fer­ent stances regarding the issues ­under discussion without falling into inconsistencies and contradictions; and it makes allowance for fallibility and skepticism in our imperfect attempts to scale the heights of philosophical understanding.1 It is worth noting that, while

1. Leo Strauss, “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Social Research 8, no. 4 (1941): 488–504; Vittorio Hösle, Philosophical Dialogues: A Poetics and a Hermeneutics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012); Franco Trabattoni, Dialogo, in Forme letterarie della filosofia, ed. P. D’Angelo (Rome: Carocci, 2012), 105–124.

1

2 Editors’ Introduction

the first two features have only stylistic and pragmatic relevance, the last two are metaphilosophically significant. The point of view they express, which is especially clear in Plato’s Socratic dialogues, is that philosophical investigation is an intersubjective activity, based on the dialectic of dif­ fer­ent points of view, the joint product of dif­fer­ent interlocutors, with no guarantee (and ­little likelihood) that the interchange ­will yield an ultimate “answer” to the issues u ­ nder discussion. The view b ­ ehind this is that philosophical questions are intrinsically multifaceted and inexhaustible, and philosophical “answers” are fallible, partial, and provisional. Consequently, phi­los­o­phers should never assume that they have reached the final truth on a topic of philosophical interest and should always be open to alternative viewpoints. In a word, the metaphilosophical view implied ­here is that philosophy, at its best, is intrinsically dialogical. In the last c­ ouple of centuries, however, philosophical dialogues have gone out of fashion. Thus, despite some sporadic exceptions (including Santayana, Murdoch, Lakatos, and, more recently, Perry, Williamson, and Singer), it is only fair to highlight “the pre­sent scholarly neglect of the dialogue form.”2 This fall into desuetude is largely the result of the triumph of the treatise—­the main alternative literary philosophical genre, whose roots trace back to Aristotle. This form of philosophical writing has its shorter con­temporary versions, the journal article and the chapter in an edited volume—­both of which are responses to the pressures of professional philosophy and the exigencies of academic publishing. The primary difference between the philosophical dialogue and the philosophical treatise is that the latter has a monological form. In this format phi­los­o­phers are ­under considerable pressure to pre­sent their views as if ­these ­were the one and only truth and to stick to ­these views regardless of w ­ hether anybody ­else agrees with or objects to them. In fact, in the philosophical world, changing one’s own mind is considered a questionable t­ hing to do; and changing one’s mind a lot is met with opprobrium. Phi­los­o­phers are supposed, one might say, to incarnate their own unalterable set of views and forever ­a fter defend them against all a­ ctual or imaginary objections. 2. Brooks A. Sommerville, “Review of Hallvard Fossheim, Vigdis Songe-­Møller, and Knut Ågotnes (eds.), Philosophy as Drama: Plato’s Thinking through Dialogue,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, August  3, 2020, https://­ndpr​.­nd​.­edu​/­news​/­philosophy​-­a s​-­drama​ -­platos​-­thinking​-­through​-­dialogue​/­.

Editors’ Introduction

3

Despite never writing philosophical dialogues, Hilary Putnam’s way of ­ oing philosophy is much closer to the dialogical than to the monological d idea of philosophy. In his view, philosophy has its home in conversation— or, to be more precise, in a certain kind of critical or reflective conversation. As one commentator remarks, “The crucial ­thing about a conversation is that no-­one involved . . . ​c an know exactly where it w ­ ill go.”3 That’s doubly true in philosophy insofar as the conversations of philosophy are, in a sense, endless. Put other­w ise, philosophy distinguishes itself from ordinary empirical inquiry by considering tantalizing but unanswerable— or, more cautiously, not satisfyingly answerable—­questions that become pressing when we reflect on ourselves and our h ­ uman lives together: about, say, real­ity and fantasy, meaning and mind, justice and beauty. Philosophy, according to Putnam’s dialogical methodology, begins in ­actual or ­imagined conversation with absent friends and colleagues or the unknown dead. As Michel Montaigne wrote, “­Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, other­w ise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight ­limited to the length of our own noses.” 4 Putnam’s ­free and unfettered dialogues with his contemporaries (and some of the classics) reveal the stimulus and excitement of responding to the philosophical provocation of another.5 In t­ hese exchanges we see a first-­rate phi­los­o­pher at his best: nimble, excited, dissatisfied, curious, creative—­a nd always alive to the allure and power of ways of thinking he has left ­behind and might return to again (in which case, the same but dif­fer­ent). If t­ here is a theme, it is that Putnam in dialogue is often taken out of himself into an uncomfortable region from which he improvises a way back to himself, but now almost inevitably a somewhat dif­fer­ent self. Thinking anew, and thus becoming new, requires,

3. Ross Gibson, Conversation Proj­ect (blog), June  18, 2008, http://­w ww​.­rossgibson​ .­com​.­au​/­rossgibson​.­com​.­au​/S ­ ample​_ ­​_­Conversations​_ ­P t1​.­html. 4. Montaigne: The Essays (1603), trans. John Florio, ed. Adolphe Cohn (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1907), 135. 5. Unlike most analytic phi­los­o­phers, Putnam continuously confronted his views with the g­ reat thinkers of the past, including Aristotle, Hume, Kant, James, Dewey, Peirce, Wittgenstein, and his logical positivist teachers, Carnap, Reichenbach and Quine (an honorary positivist in Putnam’s view).

4 Editors’ Introduction

and is given a power­ful impetus by, the stimulus of ­others (including other versions of himself!). Putnam’s dialogical method in philosophy reveals itself in many ways. Not infrequently, it was the stimulus of other thinkers that precipitated his (in)famous changes of mind. Putnam never considered his views fi­nally settled and constantly tried to challenge them, very often with the help of the views of agonistic phi­los­o­phers. Philosophy, as he envisions it, is a collective activity conducted in a fallibilistic and demo­cratic spirit. And unlike most other con­temporary masters of analytic philosophy, Putnam frequently coauthored articles and books with his wife, Ruth Anna, as well as with colleagues and friends—­another proof of his zest for discussion and for putting his own ideas into fruitful exchange with o ­ thers.6 In this book we have selected thirty-­five of the best—­that is, the most philosophically in­ter­est­ing—of Hilary Putnam’s replies and responses to his philosophical contemporaries over the period from 1974 to 2016. We have also included a paper in which Putnam discusses twelve impor­tant influences on his philosophical outlook. Vari­ous replies and responses have been omitted from this collection, however, for a number of reasons: some are too short, ­others repeat well-­known points or simply correct local misreadings, and o ­ thers are largely autobiographical. ­There are some impor­tant omissions that are worth noting. Our general rule is not to reprint anything from the many relatively easy to find volumes of Putnam’s collected papers, which include review articles and response papers.7 So, for instance, the paper “Kripkean Realism and Wittgenstein’s Realism” is not reprinted ­because it is taken from a larger paper, “Was Wittgenstein ­Really an Antirealist about Mathe­matics?,” which appears in the collection we edited titled Philosophy in an Age of 6. The list of the coauthors of Putnam’s work is unusually long, including David  Z. ­ lbert, Paul Benacerraf, George Boolos, Richard Boyd, James Conant, Martin Davis, Mario A De Caro, Burton Dreben, Herbert  B. Enderton, Juliet Floyd, Michael Friedman, Gustav Hensel, Hilla Jacobson, Kenneth Laine Ketner, George Kreisel, Stephen Leeds, David Luckham, Joan D. Lukas, Martha Nussbaum, Paul Oppenheim, Marian Boykan Pour-­El, Ruth Anna Putnam, Julia Robinson, Richard Rorty, Raymond Smullyan, Joseph S. Ullian, and Vivian Walsh. 7. Note that we did not include any materials from the recently published “Library of Living Phi­los­op ­ hers” volume devoted to Hilary Putnam’s philosophy, The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. R.  E. Auxier, D.  R. Anderson, and L.  E. Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 2015).

Editors’ Introduction

5

Science (2012, chapter 23). The one exception to our rule is the chapter on Davidson, originally titled “Truth and Convention,” which was published in Putnam’s Realism with a ­Human Face (1990). This seemed a crucial inclusion on the ground that Davidson was one of the phi­los­o­phers against whom Putnam defined himself. One regret is that we could not publish more responses to female phi­ los­o­phers (although six are included). We do not want to conjecture about the c­ auses of this disparity. But we do want to note with regret that Putnam did not find an opportunity to write more extensively about some female phi­los­o­phers whose influence he frequently mentioned informally or in discussion (e.g., Elizabeth Anscombe, Cora Diamond, and Juliet Floyd). And Iris Murdoch, whose moral philosophy Putnam esteemed, is mentioned only very briefly in passing in the Nussbaum chapter. We have divided the chapters into five parts. The first four engage with a major area of philosophy to which Putnam made an original contribution: “Language and Logic”; “Realism and Antirealism”; “Pragmatism and Skepticism”; and “Morality, Politics, and Religion.” The last part, “Putnam’s Philosophical Forbears,” focuses on the major philosophical influences on Putnam’s philosophical development. The parts are further divided on thematic grounds into subsections, which are in chronological order. From this time line we can discern that Putnam’s capacity for fruitful dialogical engagements was undiminished, and perhaps even increased, over time b ­ ecause most of ­these papers ­were published ­a fter the watershed year of 1990, when Putnam gave up the internal realism he had held for the previous fifteen years or so. Interestingly, too, we can see that Putnam continued to defend his previous commitment to internal realism ­ fter giving it up. The constant refrom unjust criticisms for many years a frain that Putnam “changes his mind” tends to overlook the philosophical insights that his abandoned views retain. Presenting the papers in chronological order also helps the reader to get a sense of how Putnam’s views on a certain issue changed or evolved over time. For example, first suggesting and then denying that conceptual relativity is a kind of idealism; or first denying and then accepting that the mind can have accurate repre­sen­t a­tions without language; or shifting away from theism (i.e., faith in a super­natural entity) ­toward the idea of God as a “­human projection.” We become aware that Putnam is always in dialogue with his former selves. For instance, what Putnam says about

6 Editors’ Introduction

supernaturalism in 2016 (in the response to Rosenzweig) can be understood as a criticism of what he said about the same issue in 1994 (in the response to Blackburn). We can also see that ­there are ideas or commitments that Putnam never changed his mind about (such as conceptual relativity, and scientific realism)—­but even in ­these cases t­ here is a dialogical dimension as the expression of t­ hese views becomes clearer in Putnam’s response to criticism. Each chapter carries a title in the following format: interlocutor’s name, primary topic, and year published. We would like to acknowledge the friendship, encouragement, and editorial wisdom of Joseph Pomp and Lindsay Waters at Harvard University Press. Lindsay also deserves special credit as the driving force behind the publication of most of Putnam’s later writings at Harvard University Press. We are grateful for the editorial assistance of Joy Deng and Jacob McDowell, and for Rory Torrens’s work in compiling the index.

PA RT I

LAN G UAG E AN D LO GI C

Putnam speaks of his teaching practice as one of showing students the activity of philosophizing rather than spoon-­feeding “answers” to philosophical prob­ lems, which is a reminder that Putnam has never claimed that ­there is a last word or final “solution” to any deep prob­lem of philosophy. In this book we see this same activity of philosophizing in his replies and responses to his contemporaries, an activity that Putnam sees as “inseparable from criticism and rethinking.” In t­ hese prefaces to the five parts into which we have divided the chapters, we ­shall not attempt to summarize Putnam’s views or the views of his interlocutors or to place them in the history of twentieth-­century philosophy; nor s­ hall we provide our own critical reaction to them. The main aim of t­ hese several introductory remarks is to give a sense of how Putnam’s dialogical method works. In ­these remarks we ­w ill note where one (or more) of Putnam’s conversational partners sheds light on an aspect of Putnam’s philosophy—­ whether through provocation, collaboration, objection, invitation, initiation, and so on—by adding his or her name in brackets. In par­tic­u­lar, we wish to expand upon what Putnam refers to as “criticism” and “rethinking” in his dialogical engagements with his contemporaries, his teachers, and the mighty dead. ○ ​○ ​○

One overarching theme in this first section is the way in which, in considering language philosophically, Putnam is sensitive to ­actual linguistic practice—an

8

Language and Logic

adumbration of his ­later adoption of a pragmatist orientation, inspired by his wife, Ruth Anna Putnam—­built primarily on the work of William James and John Dewey. The adoption of a practical point of view in philosophy shows up, for example, in his characterization of the asymmetrical authority relation that exists between science and the everyday, as manifested by the division of linguistic l­ abor (e.g., when we defer to experts in order to distinguish elms and beeches, or gold from vari­ous gold-­colored alloys, when this is not something we could achieve on our own [Wilfrid Sellars]). Another theme in this section is the way in which, in dialogue with his contemporaries, Putnam often shares his vision of how to go about philosophy; so the discussion rarely proceeds without adverting, often explic­itly, to ­matters of philosophical methodology. Although he was arguably the most proficient technical phi­los­o­pher of his day—he was part of a team of mathematicians that solved Hilbert’s tenth prob­lem—­Putnam wants a non-­esoteric philosophy that is not simply a display of relentless technicality for a specialized academic audience [Gareth Evans]—­a charge that has been frequently leveled at analytic philosophy, with some justice. As Putnam sees it, a key task for phi­los­o­phers is to offer “mild rational reconstructions” of our practice. This is the spirit in which Putnam offers his meaning vector theory of natu­ral kind terms, which reconstructs the meaning of such terms on the basis of vari­ous practice-­based constraints such as consistency with what is captured in a dictionary as well as fitting translation practice (e.g., that elm in En­glish means the same as Ulme in German [Akeel Bilgrami]). In the same spirit Putnam refers to “good interpretative practice” in arriving at his views of reference stability through theory change as in the case of the term “electron” in the early twentieth ­century. One implication of this is that science does not discover the intrinsic joints of real­ity that our concepts have to track. “Nature does not dictate concepts to us”: concepts are interest-­and perspective-­relative, including the dif­fer­ent perspectives of the sensitive linguist and the experimental scientist [Noam Chomsky]. Similarly, on the basis that the term “logic” has traditionally been used to mean a canon of deduction, Putnam proposes that logic, properly so called, is that fragment of second-­order logic that contains universal quantifications of valid first-­ order formulas [George Boolos]. Also noteworthy in this section are Putnam’s vari­ous ways of demonstrating what “criticism and rethinking” come to. Criticism requires intellectual taste capable of discerning pregnant ideas that one “­w ill think about for a long time,” such as the idea of logic as an idealized model of how a part of



Language and Logic

9

our language works [Charles Travis]. And it involves being open-­minded and exploratory, as when Putnam allows that Bilgrami’s individualistic notion of “content” (which takes account of what the speaker explic­itly knows) might be useful in psychological explanation. Criticism must be sympathetic; other­wise one cannot do justice to the position being criticized. Putnam’s discussion of analyticity and revisability in light of Quine’s famous attack on the notion of analyticity provides a fine example of this attitude [Axel Mueller]. Putnam follows Quine in his pragmatist outlook—­which, as James puts it, “turns away from bad a priori reasons, from fixed princi­ples, closed systems, and pretended absolutes”1—­but departs from him in thinking that, contra Quine, we cannot make sense of revisability or unrevisability claims across the board. So, too, fallibilism—­a nother pragmatist theme—­that is very hard to state as a doctrine; so Putnam thinks it is better conceived of as an “attitude.” Criticism involves diagnosing the source of objections, as when he traces Davidson’s refusal to endorse conceptual relativity to questionable assumptions about radical translation. In par­tic­u­lar, Davidson accepts the myth that the radical translator has one home language into which he can give truth conditions for e­ very sentence in e­ very language. The second aspect of philosophizing Putnam draws attention to is rethinking. He admits changing his mind by coming to accept that ele­ments of thought and specific understandings of t­ hings are context-­free. This is part of an ongoing conversation with Travis, whom Putnam credits with the insight that a grammatical sentence is susceptible to in­def­initely many occasion-­ sensitive understandings. Perhaps the best example of rethinking in this section is the reply to Burge, in which he reconsiders the question w ­ hether thought presupposes language. Putnam comes to accept Burge’s view that perceptual repre­sen­ta­tions refer and can be accurate or inaccurate without presupposing language [Tyler Burge]. But he does not leave the m ­ atter t­ here. The question of ­whether thought is prior to language itself requires that we have a clear idea of what we mean by “language” and “thought,” which is far from being the case. Putnam’s response to Burge also includes correspondence from Ned Block, to whom Putnam sent a draft of his reply during its composition—­a fine example of the widening circle of the conversational method at work!

1. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, ed. F. Bowers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 31.

CHAPTER 1

Wilfrid Sellars: On Meaning and Rules (1974)

P

rofessor Sellars’ paper “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” was one of the most impor­tant papers on the topic in recent de­cades. But . . . ​ Id ­ on’t share Sellars’ nominalism in general. I d ­ on’t find quantification over expressions-­cum-­functions preferable to quantification over plain old sets and properties, and I d ­ on’t think that the last paragraph of Sellars’ paper, or rather the next to the last, answers the objections to the adequacy of nominalistic formulations that have appeared in the lit­er­a­ture in the last ten years. But the general question of nominalism aside, I am pleased to join the happy chorus of ­those who ­don’t think meanings are objects. Not that one c­ ouldn’t identify them with objects, just that the identification ­w ill be even more arbitrary and unconvincing than, say, the identification of the number 1 with singleton the null set. Moreover . . . ​identification of meanings with objects can easily give an illusion of uniqueness which the linguistic facts w ­ ill fail to warrant.

Putnam’s reply to Wilfrid Sellars, “Meaning as Functional Classification (A Perspective on the Relation of Syntax to Semantics),” Synthese 27, no. 3 / 4 (1974): 417–437.

11

12

Language and Logic

Interpreting “A means B” as “ ‘A’ means ‘B’,” with quotes around the B, is unsatisfactory, as Wilfrid points out, ­because (a) somehow the second just says that two words are synonymous, whereas the first seems to be intended to do a ­little more than that, and (b), although he ­didn’t mention it, you run afoul of well-­k nown objections by Church. Interpreting it as “A is •B•”, where the dots turn B into what he called an illustrative sortal, is a neat solution to the prob­lem, and it does avoid taking meanings as objects of any kind. Moreover, this solution to the prob­lem does not depend on Wilfrid’s own theory of meaning, which w ­ ill be the main topic of my comment. As long as we have some theory of what it is for a word to have a par­tic­u­lar meaning, that is of what­ever facts a normal-­form description of a meaning of a word A might mention, then we can introduce a sortal •A•, for all words (where a word means something like a word plus markers indicating its sense and its dialect or idiolect) with that same normal-­form description. The prob­lem of semantics, I like to think, is not what the meaning of a word is, but what the normal-­form description of the meaning of a word should be. In summary, I’m happy with avoiding meanings, and names of meanings, if not with nominalism in general. Dot quotation is a fine device for ­doing this while avoiding Church. But it does not presuppose Professor ­Sellars’ own ideas about meaning. One last preliminary point. I’m very happy to see Sellars focus on the notion of word-­meaning. I ­don’t at all agree with Professor Davidson that word-­meaning is only accessible as a dubious extrapolation from speakers’ dispositions to use sentences. I think that doctrine has two interpretations, u ­ nder one of which it is vacuous and ­under the other of which it is false, and I rather suspect that Professor ­Davidson has in mind the interpretation that I think is false. I think that ignoring the segmentation of language . . . ​is a fundamental error and accounts for a certain air of linguistic unreality about con­temporary work in semantics. But this is not the place to discuss this issue. Incidentally, I also agree with Wilfrid’s criticism of Grice’s work. This marks my areas of agreement with Wilfrid. I have general admiration for his philosophy of mind, agreement with a restricted nominalism, nominalism with re­spect to meanings. I’m in agreement on the legitimacy and importance of the notion of word-­meaning. In the rest of this paper I want to explore one disagreement which may be productive. This is a disagreement over the conception of meaning.



Wilfrid Sellars

13

This conception, which is sketched out on pages 421–6 of Wilfrid’s paper, is the conception of meaning as determined by a battery of rules. On page 434, for example, we have the explicit statement that “f-­ness = ­g-­ness if and only if the rules for •f• are the same as the rules for •g•”, i.e. same battery of rules, same meaning. On pages 431–2 we have the statement that illustrative sortals provide a classification in terms of functions which we would find it difficult if not (practically) impossible to spell out in terms of explicit rules. Now, I take the liberty of inferring that the reason for saying “practically” was that Wilfrid holds that at least in princi­ple we could spell out the function of any word in natu­ral language by means of a battery of rules. Now, the theory that meaning is determined by a battery of rules is one which is not unattractive. I held it myself in a paper called “How Not to Talk About ‘Meaning’,” and as soon as I wrote that paper I started to worry.1 One of my examples was the natu­ral kind word “gold,” and I stuck my neck out and said the meaning of the word “gold” is a battery of rules. Then I started to think, my God, what battery of rules? Certainly this is a natu­ral candidate, this battery of rules approach. But I think it is wrong, and let me try to say why it c­ an’t be correct. The prob­lem with any theory of meaning is that ­there are two assumptions about meaning, which have been made for a c­ ouple of thousand years by both laymen and phi­los­o­phers, and which if not jointly inconsistent are at least inconsistent with the facts. T ­ here may be a pos­si­ble world in which t­ here is a language which would satisfy both assumptions, but it ­ain’t this one. And since all talk about meaning tends to presuppose t­ hose two assumptions, it follows, on my view, that t­ here is no choice but to reconstruct the notion of meaning. And, as in the case of the notion of set, any reconstruction ­w ill pinch somewhere. The first assumption is that the meaning of a speaker’s words does not extend beyond what he knows and believes, or possibly beyond what he knows and believes and is disposed to do. In other words, it is not pos­si­ble on this view, for two speakers to know and believe and be disposed to do and say the same ­things and yet mean something dif­fer­ent by a word. 1. Hilary Putnam, “How Not to Talk about Meaning: Comments on J. J. C. Smart,” in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 2, ed. Robert  S. Cohen and Marx  R. Wartofsky (New York: Humanities Press, 1965), 205–22.

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Language and Logic

The second assumption is that meaning determines extension, where the extension of a word is what it is true of. The extension of “rabbit” is the set of rabbits. And it is in­ter­est­ing, by the way, that some of the doubts that students raise in class, and that phi­los­o­phers sometimes raise, about the notion of extension, or the notion of meaning, are just inherited from doubts about the notion of truth. For example, if one says that what the extension of “­water” is depends on what ­water ­really is, not on what we think ­water is, some p ­ eople always get into a flap and say, “Who are you to say what ­water ­really is?” and so on. Which is, of course, just the reason some p ­ eople have questioned the notion of truth. The second doctrine has a small set of traditionally recognized exceptions. They are in­ter­est­ing to look at, for a moment. One is the obviously indexical words. I say “obviously” ­because the burden of my theory ­w ill be that e­ very word is indexical, or almost ­every word. But the obvious indexical words, like “I,” have always been recognized as exceptions to the doctrine. It has been held that the meaning of the word “I” does not determine who you are. David Kaplan and I have the same meaning for the word “I,” but the extension when he utters it is dif­fer­ent from the extension when I utter it. The other famous exception, though not as noncontroversial, is the proper names. Many, though not all, phi­los­o­phers have held that proper names have zero meaning, in the sense in which I am using the term, zero connotation. Since they have zero connotation they all have the same connotation, but they d ­ on’t all have the same extension. So then, why ­shouldn’t one say that, except in the case of indexicals and proper names, meaning determines extension? I ­don’t want to say that ­either of the two assumptions I have mentioned is false just like that. I’m ­going to propose a theory which preserves 2, that meaning determines extension, and sacrifices 1. One could do it the other way, although t­ here are prob­lems which I d ­ on’t see how to overcome if we follow the other line. What I do want to say is that ­those two assumptions jointly imply something which is not true. What they imply jointly is that what a speaker knows and believes determines the extension of ­every term in his language, except for the recognized exceptions. And that just ­isn’t true. What this has to do with meaning being a “battery of rules” ­w ill become clear shortly. What we have to see is why it is not the case that what a speaker knows and believes determines the extension of the words in his



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language. T ­ here are two reasons and ­they’re both in­ter­est­ing. I think both are close to the surface, both have to do with home truths. W ­ e’re not talking, a­ fter all, about DNA molecules; w ­ e’re talking about something we all, in a sense, know and are familiar with. We are all experienced speakers of the natu­ral language. And yet ­these home truths are constantly overlooked in philosophy of language. This suggests to me that t­ here are deep philosophical themes, to which we have more of a commitment than we do to the home facts. The first fact that is overlooked is the division of linguistic l­ abor. Quite simply, while language is a tool, it is not a tool like a saw, a tool that one person can operate. Language is a tool like a ship. It is a tool that takes a crew to operate. To give an example, suppose I make a ring out of aluminium and I put a ­little copper in it so it is a yellow color, and I even go to the length of printing “14K” on the inside. I get a lot of rings and I put them on the t­ able and I ask you as trained speakers, which is gold? I even tell you that some of them are fake. “I d ­ on’t know, get a jeweler.” Is it that the jeweler knows the meaning of the word “gold,” and that “gold” is a word whose meaning most p ­ eople ­don’t know? Most p ­ eople are committed to a theory of meaning that has that entailment. But it seems to be obviously absurd. You know the meaning, so you know the method of verification. Yeah? O.K., so verify. T ­ here are the rings. You say, “Well, d ­ on’t I know a method of verification, namely go ask a jeweler?” Yes and no. ­There are two meanings of “method of verification.” A method of verification could be something which would work, or work in a probabilistic sense, or 90% of the time, or something, in all pos­si­ble worlds. That you certainly ­don’t know. ­There are plenty of pos­si­ble worlds in which the jewelers ­won’t give you the right answer. Or, you could know a method of verification which works 90% of the time in a situation for which you d ­ on’t have a necessary and sufficient condition, a situation that is simply existentially given, which is the situation ­we’re in. What is true is that having a term in a language generally involves ­there being a number of items, some of which I w ­ on’t talk about at all in ­these comments, but among other t­ hings such items as a necessary and sufficient condition, at least a vague one, a way of recognizing, and so forth. It is not true that ­these have to be possessed by the typical speaker, just as the typical sailor does not have to be able to repair the ship’s engine, operate the ship’s engine, steer the ship, use the radio transmitter, ­etc., ­etc. He can

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do ­things which presuppose other ­people having certain kinds of knowledge. The typical user of the word “gold” can do ­things which presuppose other ­people being able to tell ­whether or not something is gold. This is simply a special case of division of l­ abor, the division of linguistic ­labor. To see that the idea that we all possess a necessary and sufficient condition, namely ask a jeweler, ­isn’t correct: imagine a pos­si­ble planet, Twin Earth, which is just like Earth except in one re­spect. I vary the re­spect from time to time depending on what point I want to make, but for this point Twin Earth is just like Earth, it even has a Doppelganger for Michael Dummett and a Doppelganger for me and a Doppelganger for Barbara Partee, but on Twin Earth the metal that is called “gold” is a mixture of aluminum and copper. Let us suppose that the average speaker ­doesn’t know this, let us suppose it is a time when ­people did not know gold was an ele­ment. The pre­sent notion of ele­ment is only 170 years old. So the average speaker on Twin Earth in, say, 1776, has the same beliefs and knowledge as his Doppelganger on Earth. Yet they mean something dif­fer­ent by “gold.” What is meant by “gold” on Twin Earth is a certain mixture of aluminum and copper, what is meant on Earth is gold. They both possess the same method of verification we do, ask a jeweler or ask a chemist, but it leads to dif­fer­ent results. This is b ­ ecause it is not a method of verification in the Logical Positivist sense, that is a test which works (probabilistically) in all pos­si­ble words, but only a test which works in a par­tic­u­lar existentially given situation. Same beliefs and habits down to that method of verification d ­ oesn’t guarantee same extension at all. Even more impor­tant, t­ here are words with which we associate much weaker features than we do with the word “gold.” The words “elm,” “beech,” names of trees, for example. We just do not know very much about trees. For example, the En­glish language does not require the typical speaker to be able to tell an elm from a beech. (Although, I would argue that En­glish requires the typical En­glish speaker to be able to tell a tiger from a leopard.) And again, from the fact that I and my Doppelganger on Twin Earth have the same knowledge and beliefs, it does not follow that the word “elm” on Twin Earth ­doesn’t mean “beech.” It could be that the one difference between the two planets is that they call elms “beeches” and beeches “elms.” Thus, I could be in the same psychological state at each instant, all through life, as my Doppelganger on Twin Earth, and yet t­ here could be a consis-



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tent difference in the meaning of what has been mistaken to be a non-­ indexical word, namely the word “elm.” This brings me to the second point. The division of linguistic l­ abor is already enough to insure that what the individual speaker knows and believes does not in fact determine the extension of ­every term in his language. The other t­ hing that is ignored in traditional meaning theory is the contribution of the environment, and this is harder to spell out, even more contrary to tradition. (­Here I rely heavi­ly on ideas of Saul Kripke.) Let us suppose (as might be expected,) that the jewellers on Twin Earth have dif­fer­ent tests from the jewellers on Earth. What the individual knows, what Doppel Hilary Putnam knows and believes on Twin Earth is the same as what Hilary Putnam knows and believes on Earth, even though ­there is a difference in meaning, at least if meaning determines extension. Nevertheless, t­ here are some ­people who have dif­fer­ent knowledge and beliefs with re­spect to “gold” on Earth and on Twin Earth. Let us give up that feature now. Let us now go to the familiar example of ­water. And let us suppose that we are now taking Earth and Twin Earth prior to the knowledge that ­water is H2O. We ­w ill suppose t­ here is a chemical compound, XYZ, which can substitute for ­water. ­People can drink it, it quenches thirst, it is tasteless, colorless, ­people c­ an’t tell it from w ­ ater. For some strange reason on Twin Earth the clouds are clouds of XYZ, it rains XYZ, not H2O, Lake Michigan is full of polluted XYZ, and so on. Chlorinated swimming pools are full of chlorinated XYZ. And they call XYZ “­water.” In 1700 t­ here is no one, neither the individual nor the entire community, who has any knowledge or beliefs with re­spect to “­water” on Twin Earth dif­fer­ent from our knowledge or beliefs with re­spect to ­water h ­ ere. Yet the extension is dif­fer­ent. “­Water” on Twin Earth means XYZ. “­Water” ­here means H2O; I ­don’t mean “­water” is synonymous with “H2O,” of course. But the extension of the term “­water” as used ­here is dif­fer­ent from the extension of the term “­water” as used on Twin Earth. “­Water” is indexical. What do I mean by that? If it is indexical, if what I am saying is right, then “­water” means “what­ever is like ­water, bears some equivalence relation, say the same liquid relation to our ­water.” Where the “our” is, of course, an indexical word. If that’s how the extension of “­water” is determined, then the environment determines the extension of “­water.” ­W hether “our” ­water is in fact XYZ or H2O.

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Let me connect this with the notion of rigidity, ­because if “­water” is a rigid designator this implies that it is indexical in just this way. The way Saul put it, and I think this is something that came as a shock to a lot of ­people, is this: Suppose we discover that ­water is H2O. Now, instead of a twin planet I describe a twin pos­si­ble world; a pos­si­ble world in which ­there are clouds full of XYZ, e­ tc. I know it is r­ eally a pos­si­ble world, even chemically pos­si­ble, ­because the chemists have given me a glass of XYZ, I’ve drunk it and c­ an’t tell it from w ­ ater, and so on. So t­ here is this pos­si­ble world that somebody has described. And now somebody says “Now, you agree that that’s a pos­si­ble world, right? So you agree that w ­ ater might have been XYZ.” No. You have not proved that w ­ ater might have been XYZ. You have shown that ­there might have been lakes of XYZ. You have shown that the dominant liquid might have been XYZ. T ­ here is no such t­ hing as describing a pos­si­ble world in which ­water is XYZ. Or, in fact, a pos­si­ble world, though this is a ­little trickier, in which ­water is anything but H2O. So when you have discovered that ­water is H2O you have also discovered that it is necessarily H2O, that it is H2O in all pos­si­ble worlds, and so on. That is not to say that it ­isn’t conceivable that ­water ­isn’t H2O; it just ­doesn’t follow that it is pos­si­ble that ­water ­isn’t H2O. Just as from the fact that it is conceivable that Fermat’s last theorem is false it ­doesn’t follow that it is pos­si­ble that it’s false. That is, of course, the sting of this w ­ hole theory. It breaks the connection between possibility and conceivability. It is not necessary for my purposes that Saul’s theory be right, although I think it is right. But you notice that it has as a consequence the indexicality of ­water. ­Because using “­water” rigidly to designate what­ever is of the same character, what­ever has the same impor­tant physical properties, as our w ­ ater, presupposes using “­water” indexically in just the way that I mentioned. Rigidity implies indexicality. I mentioned that t­ here ­were two ways of reacting to this. If t­ hese two points are right, then traditional philosophy of language just leaves out two ­little ­things, the social character of language and the contribution of the world. The way I would like to proceed is to take the normal-­form description of the meaning of the word to be a vector, i.e. an ordered n-­tuple; I’m not sure what all the items should be, but I want to take one of the components of that vector to be extension. That, of course, makes it true by stipulation that meaning determines extension. So one can preserve such



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statements as “They ­don’t have the same meaning on Twin Earth for ‘­water’ as we do,” and so forth. On the other hand, I totally sacrifice the idea that the meaning of a speaker’s words does not go beyond what he knows and believes. That’s just hopelessly sacrificed. The other line, which I think David Lewis may be playing with, I know Fabrizio Mondadori is, would be to take the meaning of a word to be a function which includes specifically all the ways in which extension can depend on one feature of the environment (who’s saying “I”), and then simply say that “­water” has the same meaning on Earth and on Twin Earth, or in this world and in that world, but a dif­fer­ent extension, in the global sense of “extension.” The reason I d ­ on’t like that, or see difficulties with it, although maybe it is just as pos­si­ble as my way, is that I d ­ on’t see, if we take that line, how to avoid saying that “elm” and “beech” have the same meaning, but a dif­fer­ent extension, which seems to me extremely unnatural. If you want to say, “Well at least t­ hey’re dif­fer­ent words,” that’s clearly unnecessary. Suppose that on Earth and on Twin Earth “elm” and “beech” are interchanged. Do we want to say that “elm” has the same meaning even on worlds where it means “beech”? But in any case, you see what the issues are. The issue is simply that what a speaker knows and believes ­doesn’t determine the extension of his words and hence ­doesn’t determine a meaning in any customary sense. What does this do to the notion that the description of the meaning of a word is a specification of a battery of rules? This is where I started. I ­couldn’t at all represent to myself that what characterizes uniquely the word “gold” in my idiolect is a battery of rules that I’ve internalized. ­There’s very l­ ittle that I’ve internalized about “gold,” and gold is something about which I know a lot. If you take elms and beeches t­ here’s nothing that I’ve internalized with re­spect to “elm” that distinguishes it from “beech.” It seems to me that the answer is this. The normal-­form description of the meaning of a word does include a description of the rules for the use of the word; in fact I think a description of the rules for the word, however we spell that out, and that is the main prob­lem, is certainly what we want all the components in the meaning vector to relate to, except for the extension component. The “rule” component gives the full specification of individual competence, or even of collective social competence at a given time; it fails to completely capture what is ordinarily called the meaning

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of the word and in par­tic­u­lar it fails to capture the extension. The battery of rules, w ­ hether you take that in an individual or a social sense, does not determine the extension of the word. What I’m saying is that meaning has two aspects. One is properly the study of socio-­linguistics and one is properly the study of psycholinguistics. The determination of extension is a social ­matter, and also more than a social ­matter; it depends also on the contribution of the environment. So the theory of how extension is determined, which includes the so-­called causal theory of reference, is a topic for socio-­linguistics, not psycholinguistics. The battery of rules that the individual speaker internalizes is a topic for psycho-­linguistics. What Wilfrid is talking about, I think, is the characterization of individual competence. And the traditional ­mistake is the assumption that individual competence determines extension, that the meaning of words does not go beyond individual competence. This is basically all I wanted to say. I just have one or two additional remarks about Wilfrid’s paper. I am personally very unhappy with verificationism, the doctrine that something is wrong with a hypothesis, in terms of meaning, if t­ here is in princi­ple no way one could verify it. An example would be the hypothesis that the world came into existence five minutes ago exactly as if it had always been around. The claim that any such hypothesis e­ ither lacks meaning or truth-­value makes me very unhappy. I’m unhappy for many reasons. I’m unhappy as an inductive logician, I’m unhappy as a phi­los­o­pher of language, I’m unhappy as a realist. We want some other description for what’s wrong with the so-­called pseudo-­hypotheses, than that they lack truth-­value or meaning. I would rather, if you like, say that pseudo-­hypotheses are terrible, and then develop a theory of what is to be terrible. Now, one of the ­things that I distrust about Wilfrid’s approach is that it looks as if it builds verificationism into philosophy of language. The meaning of a term is to be wholly captured by the three kinds of rules he lists: language-­entry rules; internal transition rules; and language-­exit rules. Then, if one has an unverifiable hypothesis, such as the world came into existence five minutes ago exactly as if it has always been around, ­there is not g­ oing to be any combination of language-­entry and language-­ transition rules that lead to it. And that ­w ill be true of all pseudo-­ hypotheses. Therefore, it seems as if all pseudo-­hypotheses are in some



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sense equivalent in meaning and have no meaning, as if verificationism is built into the story. It is even worse than that, b ­ ecause of the language-­transition rules. It is plausible to me that some inferential rules are, in some sense, part of the meaning of some words, although I think that ­doesn’t make them analytic. I would be very unhappy to think that rules for inductive reasoning, for nondemonstrative inference, are simply to be assimilated to rules of language. Yet, as I read Wilfrid’s paper, I get the feeling that if the ­whole story is t­ hose three kinds of rules, that is forced upon us. If, on the other hand, from the very beginning words have extensions to which the environment contributes in the way I’ve suggested, then t­ here is room from the very beginning for a theory of reference which, I think, if fleshed out, combined with truth-­definitions and so on, can lead to a theory of truth that is perfectly happy to assign dif­fer­ent truth-­conditions to sentences which are alike in point of unverifiability. The sort of theory I suggested, precisely ­because it recognizes the contribution of the environment, does not build verificationism in at the outset.

CHAPTER 2

Gareth Evans: On Reference (1983)

G

areth Evans died of cancer when he was barely 34 years of age. He had been working on his book Va­ri­e­ties of Reference for several years; the task of completing it from his notes was carried out by John McDowell. (The first two chapters and the introduction ­were rewritten by Evans himself in the last months of his life.) Evans’s death at such an early age is a tragedy. We can have no real idea what his mature years might have brought forth, and this book is no substitute for t­ hose additional years of life and thought: it is the desperate attempt of a young man on his deathbed to leave a lasting mark on his profession. I do not like—in fact I hate—to say that he did not (in my opinion) succeed. And I apologise to ­those who ­w ill feel personally hurt at a negative review of a work produced by a vital person whom they knew and loved and miss ­today. For reasons I ­shall discuss shortly, it is not pos­si­ble to convey Evans’s main claims, conclusions and arguments in a review for a general audience, nor even to give the flavor of his mode of reasoning. Instead I ­shall con-

A review of Gareth Evans, The Va­ri­et­ ies of Reference, ed. John McDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), in London Review of Books, May 19, 1983.

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Gareth Evans

23

fine myself to describing an example which he relies upon to illustrate and help establish certain main sub-­points in his argument. A man sees one of two whirling steel balls at time A. At time B he sees the other (imagine they cannot be distinguished by him). He has a memory of the second seeing, but not of the first (Evans postulates a bit of amnesia, but ordinary forgetting would do as well). Also, the man (I w ­ ill assume the man is myself, for simplicity of discussion) does not know ­there are two dif­fer­ent balls. Can the man—­that is, can I—­think about the ball I remember? We recall that I have what seems to me to be a perfectly good memory of one (just one) steel ball whirling around. It is in fact a perfectly good memory (if we could trace the origin of the memory trace in my brain, it would go back to an event involving just one of the two original balls). I can believe that I am thinking: “that ball was whirling around terrifically fast.” But, according to Evans—­and this is a vitally impor­tant conclusion for this ­whole book—­I am deceived. What is ­really ­going on is that I appear to myself to have thought a thought: but t­ here was no thought of the kind I appeared to myself to have thought (no thought about a par­tic­u­lar ball) to be thought in my situation. In addition, in Evans’s view, a thought about a par­tic­u­lar object which I perceive (or seem to myself to be perceiving) and which I identify by the use of an ordinary demonstrative (“that ball,” “that ea­gle,” ­etc.) presupposes the non-­illusory existence of that object for its very existence: if the relevant ball, ea­gle or what­ever is a mirage or an illusion or a hallucination, then the “thought” is also an illusion. Russell believed (for very dif­ fer­ent reasons from the ones Evans gives) that t­ here ­were propositions whose existence presupposed the existence of the objects they w ­ ere about (for Russell t­ hese ­were all propositions about sense data). For this reason, Evans calls a thought with this property—­the property that it could not exist if the object it is about did not exist—­a “Russellian thought.” To establish the existence of Russellian thoughts, Russellian Ideas (Idea, with a capital “I,” is Evans’s term for the concept of an individual t­ hing—­e.g. the concept which corresponds to the words “that ea­gle” when I successfully think, “that ea­g le is flying in circles”), Russellian referring expressions, ­etc., is the avowed object of this book. One ­thing a review cannot convey is the relentless technicality of the book. It could not be used in a gradu­ate course in philosophy of language

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without several preliminary lectures on Davidson, on Kripke, e­ tc. (not to say a preliminary course in math logic). It is a book addressed to Evans’s fellow specialists, and only to them. Philosophy, as Evans pictures it, is as esoteric as quantum mechanics. The model of philosophy as a Wissenschaft, if not actually a science, informs the treatment of Evans’s ­great pre­de­ces­sors as well. That Russell’s “propositions” ­were not “thoughts” (they ­were extra-­mental objects which literally had ordinary objects as constituents) is an essential fact about Russell’s metaphysical system which Evans feels f­ ree to ignore; that Frege did assign referents to what Evans calls “empty” descriptions in his ideal language, and that he regarded none of the more-­or-­less vague expressions we use in everyday language as having sense at all (in spite of what Evans calls the “viability” of everyday language), are also not mentioned. Par­tic­ u­lar technical prob­lems are simply ripped out of their place in the rich filigree of the metaphysical system as though they had a significance in­ de­pen­dent of their historical context. In spite of this relentless technicality, it gradually becomes clear that Evans does have a philosophical picture of his own, and not just a set of technical claims about technical issues. The picture is roughly as follows: thoughts are not sentences, nor are they symbols in the mind or brain (they are not “sentence-­a nalogues” in a language of thought, as some Chomskyans think). Thoughts are exercises of structured systems of abilities. The thought that object a has property F involves an ability which is the Idea of a and an ability which is the Idea of F. This claim only has content if we can describe the Idea of, say, “that ea­gle” other­w ise than as what­ever capacity one has to have to make such judgments as “that ea­gle is flying in circles,” “that ea­gle is old,” ­etc. Evans’s tack, as I read him, is not to claim that we are in a position to do this completely, but to indicate at least in part what such a non-­trivial characterisation of the Idea in question might look like. According to Evans, I can only think about ea­gles (or any other sort of t­ hings) if 1) I possess a “Fundamental Idea” of what it is to be an ea­g le (—is a Fundamental Idea an analytically necessary and sufficient condition, or what? Evans does not say), and 2) I know what makes an object of the sort dif­fer­ent from another object of the sort (in the case of ea­gles or other material objects this would be spatial location). When I pick out an object as “that ea­gle” in a perceptual situation, my visual transaction with

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the object puts me in an “informational state” which immediately gives rise to at least two abilities: an ability to roughly locate the object relative to my body (to locate the object in “egocentric space,” in Evans’s terminology); and an ability to locate the object in public space (“objective space,” in Evans’s terminology). Now we can say what is wrong when the object is not r­ eally ­there. If I am fooled by a mirage and I say, “That oasis is a good place to ­water my camels,” then I think I have acquired an ability (the ability to locate the oasis in objective space) which I have not in fact acquired. This is what Evans’s notion of thinking I have a thought when ­there is no such thought to be thought cashes out to in such a case. The prob­lem with the whirling balls is similarly treated. If I describe the ball I remember as “whichever ball caused this memory,” then, in Evans’s view, I am simply passing the buck. I am not showing that I have an Idea of the ball (an ability to locate it in objective space, or to decide of objects which I can locate in objective space w ­ hether or not they are “that ball”), but simply indicating conceptually how I might get such an Idea. The fact that I cannot e­ ither locate “that ball” in objective space nor decide which ball was “that ball” (imagine I have since learned that t­ here ­were two) shows that “that ball” no more refers to a determinate real ­thing than “that oasis” does when t­ here is a mirage. I find none of this convincing at all. (For example, if I d ­ on’t recall, even briefly, in which direction I was looking when I thought, “that ea­gle flew by very fast,” then I did not acquire an ability to locate the ea­gle in ­either egocentric space or objective space: so it would follow I ­didn’t ­really think a thought on Evans’s view.) But this is not the place for a rebuttal of any of Evans’s claims. What bothers me is the conception of philosophy ­behind all of this. Evans appears to assume that philosophy is a technical discipline in which prob­lems have a significance in­de­pen­dent of the ­actual system of thought that generated them; and that one can make uncritical use of the notion of a “conceptual” truth. ­These two ideas undergird each other: what gives substance to the notion of philosophy as a technical discipline for Evans is his amazing confidence that he is discovering indisputable conceptual truths and not just talking in a way he finds compelling. If the picture that lies ­behind all of this—­the picture of language as hooking onto the world through the medium of specifiable object-­involving dispositions and capacities—­could be shown to have some force, then one

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could, perhaps, throw away the technicalities and discuss that picture. But the impossibility of r­ eally specifying even one of t­ hese “capacities” blocks that path (or so it seems to me, as it did to Wittgenstein and Quine before me). What specifiable “capacity” must anyone have to have an “adequate Idea” of an ea­gle, of an elm tree, of ­water? What reason is ­there to think that such a capacity could be specified in finitely many words in a non-­ question-­begging way? Or, if it cannot be specified, why is this capacity-­ reductionism any better than the now abandoned sense data–­reductionism of Ayer and Russell? Evans does not discuss t­ hese questions at all. It has been said that t­ here are two sorts of analytic phi­los­o­phers ­today: ­those who worry about ­whether a bundle of sticks would still be the same bundle if one stick ­were removed, and the therapists who try to cure the first sort of that kind of worry. With re­spect to Evans’s worries about the existence of “Russellian thoughts,” my stance is that of the therapist. But the larger question is what philosophy might be if it gave up the pretence of having a special authority of the kind a real technical discipline possesses. When Evans describes the phenomenology of egocentric space and objective space in one of his chapters (Six), he begins to move in the direction of such a philosophy: I wish he had done more of this and less over-­elaborate “theory.”

CHAPTER 3

Noam Chomsky: Scientism and Explaining Language (1993)

I

n his paper “Explaining Language Use,” Noam Chomsky writes, London is not a fiction, but considering it as London—­that is, through the perspective of a city name, a par­tic­u­lar kind of linguistic expression—we accord it curious properties: as noted ­earlier, we allow that ­under some circumstances, it could be completely destroyed and rebuilt somewhere ­else, years or even millennia l­ ater, still being London, that same city. Charles Dickens described Washington as “the City of Magnificent Intentions,” with “spacious ave­nues, that begin in nothing and lead nowhere; streets, mile-­long, that only want ­houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of ­g reat thoroughfares, which only lack ­g reat

Putnam’s reply to Noam Chomsky, “Explaining Language Use,” Philosophical Topics 20, no. 1: The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. Christopher S. Hill (1992): 205–231. The special issue was published in 1993.

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thoroughfares to ornament”—­but still Washington. We can regard London with or without regard to its population: from one point of view, it is the same city if its ­people desert it; from another, we can say that London came to have a harsher feel to it through the Thatcher years, a comment on how p ­ eople act and live. Referring to London, we can be talking about a location or area, ­people who sometimes live ­there, the air above it (but not too high), buildings, institutions, ­etc., in vari­ous combinations (as in “London is so unhappy, ugly, and polluted that it should be destroyed and rebuilt 100 miles away,” still being the same city). Such terms as London are used to talk about the ­actual world, but ­there neither are nor are believed to be things-­in-­the-­world with the properties of the intricate modes of reference that a city name encapsulates.1 Noam Chomsky’s paper is written with the intellectual authority and clarity that one has come to expect from him; my response to the positions he lays out so well and so forcefully w ­ ill be, first, to contrast my philosophical perspective with the somewhat surprising philosophical attitude that is expressed in this paper, and second, to argue that ­there is no real conflict between Chomsky’s scientific proj­ects and my quite dif­fer­ent concerns. Does London Exist?

What surprised me about this paper of Chomsky’s is that in it he expresses attitudes that I associate with the late Wilfrid Sellars, but that I had not previously associated with Noam Chomsky.2 Like Sellars, Chomsky admits that common-­sense objects are not fictions; t­ here is something “in the world” that they picture; but (he argues ­here) they do not literally exist. ­There are no “things-­in-­the-­world” with the properties we ascribe to cities, or to decks of cards, or to ­houses, to cite three of his examples. Again like Sellars, Chomsky identifies understanding (or at least “deep” understanding, as he puts it in one place) with scientific explanation involving highly abstract postulated entities and very exact laws. In 1. Ibid., 221. 2. For a criticism of t­ hose attitudes, see Lecture 1 in my The Many F ­ aces of Realism (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987).

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a most revealing remark, he writes that “If ‘cognitive science’ is taken to be concerned with intentional attribution, it may turn out to be an in­ter­ est­ing pursuit (as lit­er­a­t ure is), but it is not likely to provide explanatory theory or to be integrated into the natu­ral sciences.” (He also says that “intentional phenomena relate to p ­ eople and what they do as viewed from the standpoint of h ­ uman interests and unreflective thought”!) Employing t­ hese exacting standards, he easily concludes that t­ here are also no such “things-­in-­the-­world” as languages, meanings of words, or reference. (In Chomsky’s view, t­ hese too are not fictions, but t­ here is nothing much to say about them beyond surveying “a Wittgensteinian assembly of particulars.”)3 It is worth remarking that this par­tic­u­lar attitude ­towards the life-­ world (Husserl called it the objectivist attitude) is precisely the one that has dominated Western philosophy since the time of Descartes. It is also an attitude that I have been concerned to combat ever since Reason, Truth and History. But let us look at the reasons Chomsky gives for thinking that cities, decks of cards, and ­houses cannot be “things-­in-­the-­world.” (I find myself in the unexpected position of defending the real­ity of London!) It is true that London could be rebuilt in a dif­fer­ent place, and we would still consider it the same city. But why should the existence of an object always be continuous, ­either in space or in time? (Even the objects of fundamental physics are no longer required to satisfy that condition!) Again, Chomsky is surely right that we sometimes regard the inhabitants of a city as an essential—­sometimes the essential—­part;4 but why should that keep us from saying the city still exists (as a deserted city) when its inhabitants leave? ­A fter all, the legs are an essential part of a mammal, but a mammal sometimes survives the loss of its legs.

3. It should be remarked that the Chomskian notion of a “thing-­in-­the-­world” is closer to the Tractarian notion of an object than to anything the ­later Wittgenstein would have found intelligible. 4. His argument, based on the sentence “London came to have a harsher feel through the Thatcher years,” is not a good one, however; I might say that London has a harsher feel when ­there is continuous sunshine, instead of the familiar fog and drizzle; it d ­ oesn’t follow that I regard the fog and drizzle as parts of London. A better example for the point Chomsky wishes to make would have been something like “London is a bustling city” (where it is clear that it is ­people who bustle, and not buildings and streets).

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It is worthwhile to spend a l­ ittle more time on this last point. Noam Chomsky’s paradigm of a science is a mathematized one—­like fundamental physics, or like computational linguistics or computational modelling of the brain. It is not at all clear what Chomsky thinks is the status of biology (apart, presumably, from molecular biology). He does tell us that the concept “­human being” is one which “­will not fall within explanatory theories of the naturalistic variety; not just now, but ever.”5 But, pace Chomsky, “­human being” is a term of an “explanatory theory of the naturalistic variety,” namely evolutionary theory. Ernst Mayr and other population biologists have pointed out that the population biologist’s notion of a species is almost exactly the same as the lay notion, and, indeed, the lack of a precise criterion for the “identity” of species is inevitable, according to ­these scientists, b ­ ecause the very heart of Darwinian theory is that the members of a species vary enormously, and that one species can shade over into another.6 But the fact that the search for an “essence” of, say, hyena, which is pre­sent in every­thing that is in the species Hyena and absent in ­every dog, would be foolish does not mean that hyena (or, for that ­matter, ­human being) is not a perfectly usable term in population biology. Similarly, contrary to Chomsky, the term life (or “living”) continues to be used—it is essentialist thinking about life and about man that has had to be given up in biology, not the terms “­human being” and “living.” Chomsky’s pack of cards example raises the same issue. First of all, while I would not wish to say that a pack of cards must be regarded as a mereological sum, Chomsky is wrong in thinking it (or a defective pack, missing, say, the queen of spades) cannot be regarded as a mereological sum. (Think of the pack as a mereological sum of fifty-­two space-­time continuants. The fact that one member of the sum has no time-­slice which intersects the current “now” is expressed by saying “one of the cards no longer exists”; that does not mean that the mereological sum does not exist.) But apart from the formal issue, the prob­lem is the same as that with the mammal that loses a leg (or all of its legs, for that ­matter). Chomsky seems to be operating with the picture that a real “thing-­in-­the-­world” ex-

5. “Naturalistic” is a synonym for “scientific” throughout Chomsky’s paper. Nature, in Chomsky’s image, is exhaustively described by the exact sciences. 6. This is a verbatim quote from a conversation with Mayr.

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ists continuously (in both space and time) and never loses or gains a part— in short, a “thing-­in-­the-­world” is like a pre-­quantum-­mechanical atom. The “house” example is even more perplexing. True, if I say a ­house is brown, I mean its exterior is brown. But if I say a star is red, I mean that the light that escapes is red (not the light that is reabsorbed). If I say something is inside a ­house, I do not say it is “near” the ­house. But if I say a particle is inside a star, I do not say it is “near” the star. (Not even if I am using “star” as a scientific term. “Nucleus” is for sure a scientific term, and if we say a gamma particle is inside the nucleus of an atom, we do not say it is “near” the atom.) What this shows is that color is regularly determined by the exterior appearance of a t­ hing, and that “inside” and “near” contrast; not that h ­ ouses are too queer to ­really be “things-­in-­the-­world.” The trou­ble lies with the very notion of a “thing-­in-­the-­world.” Chomsky makes many observations with which I agree; for example, that our concepts are s­ haped by our interests and our contexts, and that we take many dif­fer­ent perspectives on objects. But he confines t­ hese insights to the objects of ordinary discourse; scientific discourse, for Chomsky, belongs to a totally dif­fer­ent realm (it is the product of a dif­fer­ent “faculty”). I agree that we take many dif­fer­ent perspectives on h ­ ouses and cities; I have long urged (and argued the point with examples) that we also take many dif­fer­ent perspectives on such scientific objects as electromagnetic fields and space-­time points. Chomsky is right that such concepts as house and city are pervasively informed by our innate and acquired interests; but that does not mean that ­houses and cities are objects only in a second-­rate sense, while fields and points are objects in nature’s own sense. Nature does not dictate concepts to us, although it vetoes some ways of speaking as unworkable. We make up concepts, make them up in the light of our perspectives and our interests, and nature decides which of our descriptions, using ­those concepts, are true and which false. “London has many old ­houses” is, for example, a true statement; truer, prob­ably, than any statement we can now make in quantum field theory. Chomsky is also right that such concepts as city and house are not well suited to figure in exact laws; but exact laws and scientific explanations are not the only forms of understanding—­even deep understanding—we possess, even in science. Chomsky’s own lifelong concern with social betterment shows that he knows very well that the writ of rational criticism and explanation runs far beyond the exact sciences and computer modelling.

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Does Reference Exist?

As Charles Peirce was fond of emphasizing, reference is a triadic relation (person X refers to object Y by sign S), not a dyadic one.7 Chomsky is right that phi­los­o­phers often speak of a word or phrase as referring, and that it is ­really the person that refers by the word or phrase. This relation is not a purely syntactic one; unlike the relation “R” in the C-­R (Computational-­ Representational) linguistics of which Chomsky speaks, it involves real objects in the world, like London and my h ­ ouse, and not simply “repre­sen­ ta­tions” of t­ hose objects in my brain, or in a computer model of my brain. That ­there is a relation between our words and ­things in the world is fundamental to our existence; thought without a relation to ­things in the world is empty.8 Instead of saying that a word or phrase (as used by a speaker) refers to an object, we sometimes say that the word or phrase is true of the object; this way of speaking brings out the close connection between the fact that subsentential parts of speech can refer and the fact that sentences (as used in par­tic­u­lar contexts by par­tic­u­lar speakers) can be true or false. (This connection was, of course, one of the ­things that Tarski was concerned to formalize in his work on truth.) It is noteworthy that in the pre­ sent paper the connection between reference and truth appears to be of no interest to Chomsky; what is of interest is only what can be used in “C-­R” linguistics and “individualistic” psy­chol­ogy. The identification of what is of interest to ­these research proj­ects with what is “deep,” “explanatory,” ­etc., doubtless accounts for the conclusion that insofar as the study

7. The notion of “reference” that figures in Chomsky’s paper and this reply is simply the notion of a predicate’s being true of an object; this should be distinguished from the kind of identifying reference that Miller (following Strawson’s usage) calls simply “reference.” 8. Reference is “a” (single) relation in the sense of being a single predicate; this is compatible with saying, as I frequently have, that reference is a “­family resemblance” notion (­there is no “essence” of referring), and that the notion of reference is constantly undergoing extensions just as the notion of an object is constantly undergoing extensions. Chomsky is, of course, right that such notions are poor candidates for appearing in certain kinds of scientific laws. However, not only is it pos­si­ble to reflect profitably on such notions, but also it may even be noted that the extendability and open texture of a notion does not preclude its having formal properties worth studying. Economics and logic both deal with notions (including, in the case of logic, reference and truth themselves) which have a good deal of open texture and which are inherently extendable, and both have aspects which yield to impressive mathematical treatment.

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of reference deals with ­matters which are of no concern to “C-­R” psy­ chol­ogy and linguistics, it cannot be deep or explanatory. In the pre­sent paper, Chomsky appears to agree that ­there is such a relation as reference, and that it is a relation to external ­things (although at certain times he seems to be saying that in many—­perhaps most—­cases we can replace talk of reference by something “syntactic”). At one point, however—­when he comes to discuss an example that I used to illustrate the per­sis­tence of reference (i.e., the stability of the extension of a predicate across theory change)—he offers a redescription of the situation which I find disturbingly positivistic. My example concerned the term “electron” (or, to be precise, the German Elektron) in the writings of Niels Bohr. I argued that it is good interpretative practice to regard Bohr’s successive theories as theories of the same ­things (as Bohr himself did), and, in par­tic­u­lar, to regard Bohr as referring to electrons when he used the word Elektron throughout a certain period, a period in which his theories of the nature of electrons changed radically. ­Here is what Chomsky writes about this case: Agreeing . . . ​that an interest in intelligibility in scientific discourse across time is a fair enough concern, still it cannot serve as the basis for a general theory of meaning;9 it is, a­ fter all, only one concern among many, and not a central one for the study of ­human psy­chol­ogy.10 Furthermore, ­there are internalist paraphrases. Thus, we might say that in Bohr’s earliest usage he expressed beliefs that w ­ ere literally false, b ­ ecause t­ here was nothing of the sort that he had in mind in referring to electrons; but his picture of the world and articulation of it was structurally similar enough to ­later conceptions so that we can distinguish his beliefs about electrons from beliefs about angels. What is more, that seems a reasonable way to proceed. This is, of course, exactly what Carnap would have said. (“Bohr’s 1900 theory had a false Ramsey sentence, and thus did not have any admissible 9. Incidentally, one of the t­ hings I emphasized in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” is that I was not proposing a “general theory of meaning,” what­ever such a theory might be. 10. Note, again, the assumption that “the study of h ­ uman psy­chol­ogy”—by which Chomsky means “internalist” C-­R psy­chol­ogy—­must be the purpose subserved by all inquiries into language.

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models, but it is structurally similar enough to his 1934 conception so that we can distinguish his beliefs about electrons from beliefs about angels,” I can imagine him saying.) But the prob­lem is that saying that theory A possesses a structural similarity to theory B is very dif­fer­ent from saying that e­ ither theory describes, however imperfectly, the be­hav­ior of the elusive extra-­mental phenomena we refer to as electrons. I suspect that Chomsky’s view is r­ eally very dif­fer­ent from Carnap’s, however. I think Chomsky knows perfectly well that t­ here is a relation between speakers, words, and ­things in the world. But he wants to emphasize that we cannot engage in discussion of that relation that meets his standards for reflective thought. (Recall the statement that “intentional phenomena relate to ­people and what they do as viewed from the standpoint of ­human interests and unreflective thought.”) I urge Chomsky to consider looking at the ­matter in a dif­fer­ent light. Suppose we say, (1) of course ­there is a relation (or relations) of reference; and (2) of course Chomsky is right that the term “reference” is not g­ oing to appear in causal-­explanatory theories of the sort that he speaks of; but (3) ­there is much to get clear about it nevertheless; and (4) if that kind of clarity is not what “naturalistic explanation” provides, what that shows is the limitations of a certain notion of “nature” and a certain notion of “explanation.” Do Languages Exist?

Chomsky is certainly right in arguing against the idea that languages have sharp bound­aries, or the idea that ­there is any fixed ­thing which is the set of “rules” of a par­tic­u­lar language, or that, for that m ­ atter, ­there is any fixed ­thing which is constitutive of a par­tic­u­lar “meaning” of a par­tic­u­lar word in a par­tic­u­lar language. T ­ hese are points I have long argued for. But my conclusion would not be that languages do not exist, but that one should not think in an essentialist fashion about languages (or about meaning). Again, and predictably, Chomsky and I differ on what follows. For Chomsky what follows is that the notions of language and meaning are of no real interest (or, alternatively, that they are in­ter­est­ing only in the way in which lit­er­a­ture is in­ter­est­ing). But the notion of a language, and the description of languages is of more than literary interest, although of literary interest languages surely are (and that is no bad t­ hing!).

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The notion of a language is of no interest to Chomsky not only ­because of his scientism, but b ­ ecause of his adamant internalism. If you look at the brains of individual speakers from the point of view of computational modelling, you w ­ ill, indeed, not see anything of interest corresponding to the so-­called “psychological real­ity” of a language. But that is not the only pos­ si­ble point of view; it is not even the only pos­si­ble scientific point of view, in a wide sense of “scientific.” Cultural studies (history, anthropology, sociology, and parts of philosophy, for example) are not concerned with the computer modelling of brains. They do not aim at the kind of theoretical constructs or the exact laws that “naturalistic explanation,” in Chomsky’s sense, involves. But they do teach us vital facts about the world we live in, and they can be deep, although with a dif­fer­ent kind of depth than the kind Chomsky is talking about. Languages and meanings are cultural realities. Insofar as Chomsky makes a stab at all at dealing with the prob­lem of interpretation in this paper, it is, once again, to try to reduce the prob­lem to individualistic terms; the speaker, he suggests, assumes the other speaker is identical to herself, and tries “modifications” in that assumption u ­ ntil reasonable results are obtained. While that may well be true, what that perspective leaves out is the vast number of tacit understandings—­ Gricean conventions, established patterns of linguistic cooperation and deference, established stereotypes—in short cultural artifacts within which “modifications” are constructed and tried. Chomsky’s argument, if one takes it seriously, is not just an argument against the real­ity of languages; it is an argument against the real­ity of culture. But the argument should not be taken seriously, for at bottom it just reduces to this: e­ ither show that cultures can be defined essentialistically, or admit that we should forget about them and return to the serious business of computer modelling. And that is just a prejudice.

CHAPTER 4

Akeel Bilgrami: On Meaning and Belief (1993)

T

­ ere is a ­great deal that is of interest in Bilgrami’s paper; I ­shall focus, h uncharitably, on the points with which I disagree, but I ­shall, in the course of this response, also try to point out where we are in agreement. The Division of Linguistic ­Labor

I ­shall begin with what may look like a minor point, but I believe it is “the tip of the iceberg.” At one point in his paper, Bilgrami minimizes the importance of a phenomenon to which I called attention in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” (cited henceforth as MoM) on the grounds that that phenomenon can, he claims, be handled by a Russellian “description theory.”1 According to MoM, when I use a natural-­k ind term, say “elm,” even though I know what the average competent speaker knows about the lexical item

Putnam’s reply to Akeel Bilgrami, “Can Externalism Be Reconciled with Self-­K nowledge?,” Philosophical Topics 20, no. 1: The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. Christopher S. Hill (1992): 233–267. The special issue was published in 1993. 1. “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” is collected in my Mind, Language and Real­ity: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 215–271.

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Akeel Bilgrami

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“elm,” it can be the case that I must rely on experts when I want to know ­whether a par­tic­u­lar object falls in the extension of the term (I ­can’t tell an elm from a beech). In the terminology of MoM, the use of the word “elm” in the language involves a division of linguistic l­ abor. ­Here is Bilgrami’s comment on the significance of this fact, “It does not amount to a referential externalism, ­because it does not attribute the same concept (. . . ​to take a famous example from Putnam, of elm) to the relying agent as it does to the expert, the relied-­upon agent . . . ​it is the differing beliefs, or descriptions of the relied-­upon and the relying agent which are d ­ oing the work so the concepts attributed to them ­w ill be quite dif­fer­ent.” What Bilgrami is claiming is that what the relying agent means by “elm” is “What­ever the experts call an ‘elm’ ”—­and this is, of course, not what the experts mean by “elm.” But this way of understanding the division of linguistic l­ abor is one I rejected in MoM. I rejected it as an account of the meaning of “elm” in ordinary En­glish on the ground that if this claim ­were correct, then it would be false that the En­glish word “elm” is synonymous with the German word “Ulme”!2 And since I was looking for a rational reconstruction of the notion of meaning that would conform to ­actual translation practice, this consequence rules out the description in question as an account of the meaning of the word “elm.” My own account—­which Bilgrami nowhere describes!—­was a “meaning vector” theory. On my theory, the normal form for an ideal dictionary entry (in the case of natural-­k ind words—­this restriction w ­ ill be impor­ tant in what follows!) is a sort of “vector” with a number of components. The two components that concern us ­here are (1) the extension—­this is supposed to be described (as it is in ­actual dictionaries) using any con­ve­ nient description, e.g., a Latin botanical term in the case of “elm,” or “H2O” in the case of “­water”;3 and (2) the stereotype—­a description of what a typical speaker thinks a paradigmatic “elm,” or what­ever, is (or is conventionally assumed to be) like. In the case of “elm,” the ste­reo­t ype is that elms are a common sort of deciduous tree. 2. On the description-­theoretic way of treating the division of linguistic l­ abor, “Ulme” in German would have to mean “what­ever the experts call an ‘Ulme’ ”—­a nd this is a very dif­fer­ent concept from “What­ever the experts call an ‘elm’ ”! 3. N.B.: According to MoM, knowledge of this description of the extension is not attributed to the speaker by the fact that the extension of the speaker’s term is so described in the “dictionary entry.”

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Note that, on this account, the meaning of the word “elm” does not change when an expert uses it (the expert just knows more about elms, he ­doesn’t employ a word with a dif­fer­ent meaning)—­this is so ­because the ste­reo­t ype component in the “meaning vector” associated with the word “elm” is not the individual’s total set of beliefs about elms, which is very dif­fer­ent in the case of an expert and a layman, but a “paradigmatic” or lowest-­common-­denominator idea of an elm, which all speakers are supposed to share. And note also that, on this account, “elm” in En­glish and “Ulme” in German and “Orme” in French all have exactly the same meaning—­which is as it should be. But Bilgrami’s interests are quite dif­fer­ent. In his recent Belief and Meaning he makes it clear that his purpose is not to explicate the concept of meaning at all; indeed, he argues that for the purpose of psychological explanation, what we want is not, in general, a knowledge of the meaning of the thinker’s words.4 Meaning is not all that impor­tant a notion, he thinks. But be that as it may, it is the notion I was trying to explicate in MoM! Bilgrami’s Belief Puzzle

MoM contained an e­ arlier version of a puzzle Kripke dramatized with his famous example of Pierre (who believes that Londres est belle, but also believes that London is ugly). I pointed out that a speaker who is bilingual in En­glish and German could believe of a certain tree “That is an elm” (it has a sign on it that says “elm”) and not believe Das ist eine Ulme. If (to make the case even more like Kripke’s) we imagine that, for some reason, the speaker actually believes that what he sees is not an Ulme, should we then say that the speaker (call him “Peter”) has contradictory beliefs? My answer would be “no.” In the sense in which “contradiction” is used in formal logic, “Px & ~Qx” is not a contradiction. So I would not say that “That is an elm & That is not an Ulme” is a contradiction. Nor would I say that the set of sentences {“That is an elm,” “Das is nicht eine Ulme”} is a contradictory set. “But ­isn’t it natu­ral to extend the term ‘contradiction’ to cover the case of ‘Px& ~Qx’ when P and Q are synonyms?” My answer would be that what 4. Akeel Bilgrami, Belief and Meaning: The Unity and Locality of ­Mental Content ­(Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 1995).

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makes it natu­ral is precisely the hold of “internalism,” our failure to see that a perfectly competent speaker need not be able to know, in a case like this one, that some of the synonyms in his vocabulary are synonyms. The possibility of cases like the one just considered is a very good reason to stick to the narrower (standard logical) use of “contradiction.” Kripke’s worry, however, was a dif­fer­ent one. Kripke’s point was that when we translate Pierre’s French belief into En­glish we make him come out holding the negation of a belief we must also attribute to him in En­g lish (and that Pierre himself voices in En­g lish). My own proposal for dealing with the Pierre puzzle has, I think, a relation to Bilgrami’s proposals;5 in such a case, I agree, ­there is good reason to use descriptions to make clear what is ­going on, and to say that Pierre believes of London ­under the description “London” that it is ugly, and he believes of London ­under the description “Londres” that it is beautiful. And similarly we may say that Peter, in my example above, believes of a certain tree that it falls ­under the description “elm” and not ­under the description “Ulme,” notwithstanding the fact that “Ulme” means “elm.” The meaning of the word “Ulme” is not what explains why Peter says what he does; it is precisely his ignorance of a meaning relation (which does not, in such a case, count as substandard knowledge of the meaning of a word in ­either language in isolation) which is explanatory ­here. But this is not the belief puzzle that Bilgrami raises. Rather he raises a puzzle which does not arise for my theory at all; a puzzle predicated on the assumption that, according to me, attributing the concept w ­ ater to someone is attributing the concept H2O. And that assumption is erroneous. Bilgrami’s account of my views is, in fact, quite careless. Even if we ignore the fact that, according to MoM, “­water” and “H2O” d ­ on’t even have the same extension, it is no part of the doctrine of that paper that they have the same intension;6 that is, that the ordinary concept of ­water just is the 5. See my “Comments” on Kripke’s “A Puzzle about Belief,” in A. Margalit, ed., Meaning and Use (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), and my “Reply to Richard Garrett,” Erkenntnis 4, no. 3 (1991). 6. According to MoM, “­water,” in one of its several senses, is coextensive with—­not synonymous with—­“ H2O give or take certain impurities.” The extension of “H2O” is the set of all substances that consist entirely of molecules consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom; thus most ­water is not, strictly speaking, H2O.

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scientific concept of H2O, which is the view Bilgrami attributes to me. I made it clear in MoM that to characterize the meaning of a term we have, among other ­things, is to indicate what sort of term it is, syntactically and semantically, and that natural-­k ind terms are quite a dif­fer­ent semantic class, in my view, from explic­itly defined terms like “H2O.” (In my terminology, H2O is not a natural-­k ind term but a “one criterion term.”) The dictionary entry for “H2O” would not have the form of a meaning vector (this form of entry was proposed for natural-­k ind terms, and possibly for artifact terms, but certainly not for all terms, as I made clear in MoM), but rather of an analytic definition (yes, I believe ­there are analytic truths!—­just not philosophically very in­ter­est­ing ones). This form of entry—­the analytic definition—­makes it clear that competence in the use of “H2O” presupposes competence in the use of “H” (hydrogen) and “O” (oxygen), as well as in the use of the notions “molecule” and “atom.” The very dif­fer­ent form of entry for “­water” makes it clear that the ability to characterize the extension of “­w ater” in some other way than simply by using the word “­water” (e.g., by a scientific definition) is not presupposed by competence in the use of the word (notwithstanding the fact that the extension of “­w ater,” in one sense of that word, is “ “ H2O” give or take certain impurities”);7 for the description of the extension which is one component of my meaning vector is not something attributed by the linguist to the speaker who uses the word associated with that meaning vector; it is the linguist’s way of describing the extension, not the speaker’s. Since “­water” and “H2O”are not associated with the same concept (if “concept” means meaning—­part of the prob­lem ­here is that Bilgrami ignores the difference between our respective concerns), it is not the case that, on my view, attributing the belief that something is ­water to someone is the same t­ hing as attributing the belief that it is H2O to her; thus Bilgrami’s belief puzzle—­how I can avoid saying that someone who believes that something is w ­ ater but disbelieves that it is H2O has contradictory beliefs—­does not even arise.

7. In point of fact, as remarked in both MoM and my Repre­sen­ta­tion and Real­ity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), “H2O” is highly inaccurate as even an approximate characterization of the extension of “­water”; ­water also consists of more complex molecules, and the notion “consists of” has to be interpreted quantum mechanically, ­etc.

Akeel Bilgrami

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Is ­There a Prob­lem about First-­Person Authority?

I also think—­and ­here Bilgrami and I are in agreement—­that the prob­lem about first-­person authority that Davidson finds in my view also does not arise. But I would explain somewhat differently from Bilgrami why it does not arise. In my view, the only impor­t ant sense in which a thinker or speaker has to know the meaning of her own words is knowing how and not knowing that; concepts, as I put it in Reason, Truth and History, are abilities (I agree with Gareth Evans and John McDowell that they are object-­ involving abilities; indeed, that they cannot be individuated apart from their objects is the ­whole point of “externalism”). It is true that a competent speaker may not know that “­water” means what a good dictionary says it means (may not know that description of the extension); but she does know how to use the word w ­ ater in her own environment (partly on her own, and partly in cooperation with other speakers), and this gives her all the “authority” over her meaning that she wants or needs. Is ­There a Prob­lem about Ineffability?

Bilgrami, I think, anticipates that I might offer some such reply (or that Tyler Burge might), and he has a ­counter (another horn to the dilemma, so to speak): if we externalists say that “­water” and “H2O” are dif­f er­ent concepts, then ­doesn’t possession of the concept ­water become knowledge of something ineffable? This, I think, is the worry that drives his entire paper. But it is a n ­ eedless worry. It is n ­ eedless, in the first place, b ­ ecause possession of a concept ­isn’t simply a case of knowledge that, although it may involve a certain amount of knowledge that. It is primarily knowing how to use a word, as just explained, and it is a feature of a ­great deal of knowing how that it is “ineffable” in the sense that the person who knows how may be unable to explain the ability in words (or even to recognize a good description if someone ­else gives it, if the ability is very complex). And it is ­needless for a further reason; the ste­reo­t ype component of the meaning vector does represent the fact that the competent speaker has some conceptual knowledge (although it may be mis-­knowledge, so to speak—­some ste­reo­t ypes represent canonical mis-­information!). Including the ste­reo­t ype of ­water in the meaning vector does tell us that a speaker who is competent in the

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use of the word has at least one belief about “­water”—­that it is a clear tasteless liquid which quenches thirst. The theory Bilgrami ascribes to me—­ that the meaning is entirely fixed by the extension alone—­is a sort of “direct reference theory” that prob­ably no one has ever held; certainly I have not. “Content” and Psychological Explanation

Bilgrami points out that in MoM I distinguished between two notions of content, “narrow” content, corresponding to psychological states as they are individuated assuming “methodological solipsism” (although I expressed considerable scepticism about both the explanatory value of that sort of state, and about methodological solipsism),8 and “wide” content, corresponding to the meaning of the thinker’s sentences in the shared public language. The central claim of MoM was that “wide” content cannot be specified without reference to ­things external to the speaker’s body. Now I would say, both for the reasons which have been advanced by Tyler Burge and in the light of my current direct realism about perception that I ­don’t think that t­ here are such t­ hings as “narrow contents” (or “psychological states in the narrow sense”); the w ­ hole notion involves just the confusion of brain states with m ­ ental states that I join McDowell in rejecting.9 Bilgrami agrees with this rejection of “narrow content,” but he argues that we need a dif­fer­ent (but also “externalist”) notion of the “content” of a thinker’s beliefs and other propositional attitudes for the purpose of psychological explanation than my “wide content.” His proposal is that, in giving the “content” of thoughts for this purpose we should describe the reference of the thinker’s terms exclusively in language she can understand and (assuming rationality, freedom from self-­deception, e­ tc.) accept. In effect (although, as I pointed out, Bilgrami ignores my “meaning vector” proposal) we should tailor our meaning vectors to the individual

8. See MoM, where I write that “Only if we assume that psychological states in the narrow sense have a significant degree of causal closure” is t­ here any point in “making the assumption of methodological solipsism.” “But three centuries of failure of mentalistic psy­chol­ogy is tremendous evidence against this procedure,” I comment (Mind, Language and Real­ity, 221). 9. See my “Reply to Ebbs,” Philosophical Topics, 20, no.  1: The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. Christopher S. Hill (1992): 347–358; and my “Reply to McDowell,” ibid., 358–361.

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psychological “subject”; if I ­don’t know that ­water is H2O, then the Bilgramian content of “­water” ­w ill not include the fact that ­water is H2O. This is an in­ter­est­ing proposal, but Bilgrami is quite wrong to think that it brings us into conflict. For psychological explanation was only the subject of passing remarks in MoM; the topic of that paper was an account of meaning in the sense of meaning shared in a linguistic community, and Bilgrami himself recognizes (in Belief and Meaning) that this is not what Bilgramian content corresponds to. For example, the Bilgramian content of “­water” for a par­tic­u­lar speaker might include the fact that w ­ ater can be purchased in ­bottles in the supermarket; but it would be wrong to say that this is part of the meaning of the word “­water” in the En­glish language. Should I, then, simply concede that, in addition to the notion I proposed in MoM as an explicans for the concept of (linguistic) meaning, we also need a dif­fer­ent, Bilgramian, notion for the purposes of psychological explanation? I find the suggestion in­ter­est­ing, but I am not sure, and I close simply with one or two observations about it. First, Bilgrami’s vari­ous arguments do not appear to me to be con­ clusive. It is true, to take Tyler Burge’s well-­k nown example first, that if someone does not know that (as I would put it) the ste­reo­t ype associated with “arthritis” includes the fact that this is a disease of the joints only, then the belief that arthritis is a disease of the joints only ­w ill not be part of the relevant “content” of the word “arthritis” for that speaker;10 but this is a case of the subject’s not knowing fully the meaning of the word in En­glish. On any semantic theory, we w ­ ill sometimes have to construct what Davidson calls “passing theories” to account for the use of words by individual speakers and in individual conversations; we cannot always simply ascribe the standard meaning in the language. In general, however, the “ste­reo­type” component of my meaning vector ­will give us beliefs that play the role Bilgrami wants his notion of “content” to play; beliefs that the speaker can understand and recognize as her own, and that are relevant in psychological explanation. Similarly, it is of course true that in psychological explanation of the be­hav­ior of someone who does not know that w ­ ater is (very roughly) H2O we should not attribute the belief that ­water is H2O; but attributing the 10. I speak of the ste­reo­t ype ­here ­because I d ­ on’t believe that names of diseases have analytic definitions. On this, see the discussion of “multiple sclerosis” in MoM.

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meaning represented by the meaning vector for “­water” given as an example in MoM is not in conflict with this requirement, as I have already pointed out.11 Still, Bilgrami may say, it is clearly the case that my “meaning vector” contains information which goes beyond what is required for the purposes of psychological explanation; and this justifies seeking a dif­fer­ent notion which is tailored more precisely to t­ hose purposes. Discussing this would involve me in very large questions about the nature and limits of “psychological explanation”; it is a merit of Bilgrami’s contribution to the discussion (particularly in Belief and Meaning) that it forces us to attend to ­those questions, but I s­ hall not attempt to resolve them ­here.

11. See p. 269 in Mind, Language and Real­ity.

CHAPTER 5

Axel Mueller: On Quine and Putnam on Analyticity (2013)

A

xel Mueller’s essay is a deep study of the similarities and differences between Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”1 and my “The Analytic and the Synthetic.”2 For the most part, I have only admiration for what he writes, and I recommend his analy­sis to all students of ­these issues. However, while I agree that ­there are serious differences between my analy­sis of the issues and Quine’s vari­ous analyses, I also think that Mueller is unnecessarily uncharitable to Quine. Without disagreeing with Mueller’s criticisms of some of Quine’s views, I do want to say that ­there is an analytic-­synthetic dichotomy that Quine demolished. As Mueller

Putnam’s reply to Axel Mueller, “Putnam versus Quine on Revisability and the AnalyticSynthetic Distinction,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Maria Baghramian (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 145–178. 1. Collected in W. V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 20–46. 2. Collected in my Mind, Language and Real­ity: Philosophical Papers, vol.  2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 33–69.

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explains, I have long defended the view that ­there are statements in science at any given period—­I have sometimes called them “a priori relative to a body of (putative) knowledge“ (and more recently simply “framework princi­ples”)3—­which play a special epistemological role, and which are such that, at least in that scientific period, we cannot make sense of the idea that they might be false, or, more precisely, we are totally unable to say how they could be false (and hence the question of “justifying” them does not arise). This is what Mueller sees as my “epistemological” successor to the analytic-­synthetic dichotomy. If Quine wrote t­ hings that ­were supposed to rule out such a successor, then Quine erred. But, I repeat, t­ here was an analytic-­synthetic distinction that Quine demolished, and what I wrote in “The Analytic and the Synthetic” certainly built on Quine’s achievement. Quine’s target was Carnap’s claim that the epistemology of mathe­ matics and logic is no longer a prob­lem once we see that mathe­matics is just logic (and, of course, that logic and mathe­matics are both “analytic”). As Carnap himself put it, “On the basis of the new logic, the essential character of logical sentences can be clearly recognized. This is of the greatest importance for the theory of mathematical knowledge . . .” 4 Nor ­were the positivists the only phi­los­o­phers who thought that impor­tant philosophical prob­lems could be solved by declaring vari­ous propositions “analytic.” [An impor­tant essay that documents this claim that I recommend reading alongside Mueller’s essay is Charles Pigden’s “Two Dogmatists.”5 ] I do not agree that Quine’s arguments all depended on what Mueller calls his “symmetry thesis.” Quine also—­too briefly, but very definitely—­appealed to the history of science to show that propositions that w ­ ere not unreasonably regarded as analytic at one time have often ­later turned out to be false, and this is something that my “The Analytic and the Synthetic” went into at length. And I like very much Quine’s statement in “Carnap and Logical Truth” that the question “which statement in physics are definitions?” is a bad question in the same way that the question, “which places in Ohio

3. See my “Reply to Gary Ebbs,” in The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. Randall E. Auxier, Douglas  R. Anderson, and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 2015), 412–418. 4. Rudolf Carnap, “The Old and the New Logic,” in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (New York: ­Free Press, 1959), 141. 5. Charles Pigden, “Two Dogmatists,” Inquiry 30, no. 1 (1987): 173–193.

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are starting points?” is a bad question.6 (It all depends on what journey you want to take.) I would now like to make some remarks about a dif­fer­ent issue, which receives brief mention in Mueller’s paper. As Mueller reminds us, Quine said in a famous passage that any statement “can be held true come what may,” and Mueller rightly said early on I found the passage “trenchant,” but I l­ ater saw it as it “as shot through with ‘unintelligible’ uses of ‘can’.” It may help our discussion if I explain what I meant by speaking of the “cans” in Quine’s “revisability passage” as “unintelligible.” The claim that a par­tic­u­lar proposition (say, the princi­ple of mathematical induction) is one that underlies virtually all of our mathematical practice, and that we cannot, given our body of (putative) knowledge, and our w ­ hole body of what we take to be coherent alternatives to that “knowledge,” see any way in which it could be false, is one that I find undeniably true. The further claim that it is beyond the power of ­human minds (but perhaps not the minds of extraterrestrials much smarter than we?) to describe something which could be rationally described as a way in which the princi­ple of mathematical induction could be false is, however, obviously very vague. And the still further claim that it is metaphysically impossible for ­there to be any such description, which is what the claim that the princi­ple is “a priori” in the traditional sense comes to, is a claim which employs a modal operator, “metaphysically pos­si­ble” (or more precisely its negative, “metaphysically impossible”) that, I have argued, has not been given any clear sense.7 Thus, I would not say that any statement can be revised, ­because this “can” is just the modal “metaphysically pos­si­ble.” But neither would I say “Some statements are unrevisable.” I would not say “­Every statement can be revised,” nor would I say “Some statements ­can’t be revised.” But we can certainly say that some statements are contextually necessary truths, or even conceptual truths, in the epistemological and “pragmatic” sense that Mueller very well describes.

6. W. V. O. Quine, “Carnap and Logical Truth,” in Ways of Paradox (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 107–132. 7. See my “Is W ­ ater Necessarily H2O?,” in Realism with a H ­ uman Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 54–79.

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A corollary of my view is that fallibilism is ­really hard to state. If what I have just said is right, then one cannot state fallibilism by simply saying “any statement can be revised.” So what does “fallibilism” mean? I think fallibilism is best construed as a recommendation, an attitude. Namely, if someone is intellectually respectable—of course you can make a big m ­ istake about that—­but if someone intellectually respectable defends a view that you are inclined to say “­couldn’t be true,” a view whose negation you find contextually unintelligible, and that person says, “No ­you’re wrong,” you should listen to her arguments. You ­shouldn’t say “I ­don’t have to listen to the arguments, I have this conviction or intuition that the conclusion c­ an’t be right!” If a logician that I re­spect claimed even to have found a contradiction in first-­order arithmetic, I would look at her proof!

CHAPTER 6

Tyler Burge: On Thought and Language (2015)

I

am known for “changing my position,” and while the extent to which I do that is sometimes exaggerated, it is true that I frequently criticize and rethink my views and arguments.1 So, you might expect me to do that again in this lecture, and you would not be totally wrong if you did. But that is not exactly what I want to do h ­ ere. What I ­w ill describe ­here is a philosophical prob­lem concerning which I am not sure w ­ hether what I wrote in the past is right or wrong. In describing it, I w ­ ill be d ­ oing what I did in my classes at Prince­ton and Harvard for almost fifty years, which ­wasn’t to “feed” my students “solutions” to philosophical prob­lems, but rather to show them the activity of philosophizing, an activity which, for me, is inseparable from that of criticizing and rethinking. And, as more than once

An unpublished lecture titled “Thought and Language” given at a conference in honor of Putnam in Mumbai in 2015. 1. I still agree with most of the positions I defended in my Mathe­matics, M ­ atter and Method, vol. 1 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), as well as with many of the positions I defended in Mind, Language and Real­ity, vol. 2 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), my first two collections of papers, for example.

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has been the case recently, what prompts me to think about just this prob­lem is a question from Sanjit Chakraborty. Sanjit asked me w ­ hether language precedes thought or vice versa, and what I wrote back was, “language precedes thought b ­ ecause thought requires [a] distinction between justified and unjustified belief which is not available [I meant “­isn’t applicable”] to prelinguistic organisms. No time to write more now.” Sanjit urged me to expand on this obviously incomplete answer, and, in thinking about it, I arrived at the reflections that I w ­ ill lay before you now. Why I thought that the distinction between true belief and useful belief ­isn’t applicable to prelinguistic organisms

In saying what I did, I relied on an argument I gave in Renewing Philosophy, my Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews.2 In the second of t­ hose lectures, I ­imagined (plausibly) that dogs learn to recognize meat. I expressed this by saying that they have a “proto-­concept” of meat.3 Next, I i­ magined that the technology of making “steaks” from vegetable protein becomes sufficiently advanced that a dog’s brain cannot tell a “veggie” steak from the real t­ hing. We give Fido a veggie steak, and what­ever brain module subserves “meat recognition” responds as it would to real meat. If Fido w ­ ere a language user, say an En­g lish speaking ­human being, we could ask it ­whether it would consider what it had eaten to be meat if it knew that is was made of soy beans, and if the response ­were, “No, but it certainly fooled me,” we could say that the belief that the “steak” was meat had been wrong, even though it had not resulted in any dissatisfaction. But dogs cannot reflect about such contrary-­to-­fact conditionals. I concluded that animals’ proto-­ concepts and proto-­thoughts are successful (useful) and unsuccessful but not true or false (or correct or incorrect in any further sense). When the concept of truth goes beyond mere usefulness, as it does for the person who says of the soy “meat,” “It certainly fooled me”; when the person can distinguish truth from mere satisfactoriness; we have thought properly so called. Before that ­there is only proto-­thought. 2. Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 3. Ibid., 29.

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Why I see prob­lems with this

The title of that Gifford Lecture was “Does Evolution Explain Repre­sen­ ta­tion?,” and the target was a reductionist form of naturalism. The point of the lecture was not that t­ here is something wrong with evolutionary theory, but that the very use of counterfactuals in evolutionary explanations (such as: “many more gazelles would have been eaten by lions and other predators if they ­didn’t run so fast, and so the ones who did run fast passed on more of their genes”) was beyond the bounds of reductive naturalism.4 Moreover, I argued in the third and fourth lectures that reference itself is not a notion that the reductive naturalist can “explain.” All this I still believe. And I still believe that proto-­concepts should not be equated with concepts. However, I argue in a paper that has recently appeared that “naturalism” should not be equated with reductive naturalism.5 I quote with approval work by Tyler Burge, work that depends on the view that the perceptual repre­sen­ta­tions of prelinguistic animals have accuracy conditions: that they genuinely refer. So which of my arguments was right? Are the “proto-­concepts” of prelinguistic animals mere Pavlovian reflexes, in which case they a­ ren’t true repre­sen­ta­tions? Do such animals have any genuine repre­sen­ta­tions? The question is difficult. In the next section I ­w ill say more about Burge’s view, and in the subsequent sections I w ­ ill lay out more considerations that bear on it. Burge’s non-­reductive but naturalist view of perceptual repre­sen­ta­tion

Burge’s view is laid out in length in his path-­breaking Origins of Objectivity.6 T ­ here he writes, in a passage I quoted with approval in the recent paper I mentioned (and still agree with): Promoters of “naturalizing” proj­ects are often driven, I think, by misconceptions of science. ­These misconceptions breed misconceptions of mind. The notion of representation—of reference or 4. Ibid., 26–27. 5. Hilary Putnam, “Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 312–328. 6. Tyler Burge, Origins of Objectivity (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010).

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attribution that can be correct or incorrect and that helps type-­ individuate kinds of psychological states—is entrenched not only in common-­sense explanation but in scientific explanation in psy­ chol­ogy. ­There is nothing unnatural or super­natural about such explanation. Some of the relevant psy­chol­ogy is well-­supported, mathematically rigorous, mature science. T ­ here is no basis, even a prima facie one, to the worry that psychological notions are invitations to mystery or miracle. Even if ­there ­were such basis, the role that ­these notions play in power­f ul empirical science would undermine it . . . ​I know of no good ground for thinking that . . . ​ [psychologists’] explanatory claims must be twisted into the mold of biological or information-­theoretic explanation, or any other explanation in the natu­ral sciences, in order to be explanatorily successful.7 What Burge wrote h ­ ere is not incompatible with what I said in Renewing Philosophy about Fido’s proto-­concept of “meat” (as I s­ hall explain in a moment), but it is incompatible with the idea, which one could easily get from that example and from my discussion of it t­ here, that none of Fido’s ­mental states genuinely refers, and that the m ­ ental states of pre-­linguistic animals have only successes (and, of course, failures to contribute to satisfaction) on this or that occasion, but do not have genuine accuracy conditions. For example, according to my view in Renewing Philosophy, if Fido gobbles down the soy “steak” (assuming the hy­po­thet­i­cal “meat”-­detecting module in Fido’s brain reacted positively to it) then Fido’s proto-­belief that the steak was “meat” was successful on that occasion, but to ask ­whether it was accurate (Fido’s proto-­concept included soy meat) or inaccurate (Fido was fooled, but it was a happy m ­ istake) is to ask a meaningless question. Proto-­concepts are indeterminate, and the indeterminacy is so g­ reat that we cannot apply the “was true / was successful-­on-­that-­occasion” distinction to them. I still think this is the right ­thing to say about that example. The “real meat” versus “fake meat” distinction presupposes conceptualization, and Fido is not a conceptualizer. Conceptualization presupposes language,

7. Burge, Origins of Objectivity, 296–297.

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innate or acquired (although I myself do not believe in “innate language”), and Fido does not have language (or innate “mentalese”). However, what Burge argues at length in Origins of Objectivity is that con­temporary psy­chol­ogy—in par­tic­u­lar vision science—­provides us with perfectly good explanations of the way animals behave (all the way down to very primitive organisms to which we would not, perhaps, even attribute consciousness), explanations that require the idea that their visual systems construct repre­sen­ta­tions of such ­things as the shape and location of objects in the organism’s visual field, and (in certain organisms) of colors and differences of color. ­These repre­sen­ta­tions are nonconceptual (if a frog perceives something as a certain shape, it does not employ a concept of that shape), but they are accurate or inaccurate. Frogs’ visual systems can be fooled, and being fooled is not just a ­matter of being satisfied or unsatisfied (as Fido was satisfied or unsatisfied when it ate the “soy steak”); the relevant sense of “fooled” involves being in a condition in which the organism’s visual system itself misrepresents shapes or colors. ­Here is a short summary of the position by Ned Block (who agrees with it): On Burge’s view, e­ very percept is constituted by a ‘perceptual attributive’ (that represents an attribute) and a singular ele­ment (that represents an individual). The format of a percept is map-­ like or iconic, and could be symbolized as “That  F.” The most basic perceptual judgments and beliefs are conceptualized and propositonalized versions of percepts in which the attributive need not be bound to a time and a place . . . ​that are products of sensory transduction and are causally involved in the production of other visual attributives: shape, spatial relations (including position and size), geometrical motion, texture, brightness and color. Burge discusses a higher-­level attributive for objects (‘integrated body’) and considers that t­ here may be some higher-­level attributives for some biologically impor­t ant properties such as food, danger and shelter. However, he notes (and I agree) that prob­ably ­there are no culture-­specific higher-­level attributives for teacups and recessions.8

8. Ned Block, “Seeing-­A s in the Light of Vision Science,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2014): 560.

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In the next two sections of this lecture I want to: (1) say why I find Burge’s view attractive; and (2) raise some questions (ones whose existence are, in my opinion, not so much arguments against the view as areas that need to be further investigated if the view is right). A principal one is mentioned in the above quote from Block, namely what “higher-­level attributes” are ­there in the case of the ­human visual system? But a further question, perhaps more conceptual than empirical, concerns the crucial notion of accuracy “­under normal conditions.” A ­ fter that, I w ­ ill turn to certain t­ hings that Burge has to say about conceptualization. What I find attractive about Burge’s view

Although at one period of my philosophical life (my “internal realist” period, roughly 1976–1990), misguidedly as I now think, I defected from the realism that I had defended from almost the very start of my philosophical ­career, a realism to which, as the participants in this wonderful conference certainly know, I long ago returned, I never doubted that ­there are such t­ hings as reference and truth; rather, partly ­under the influence of my friend Michael Dummett, I tried to produce an antirealist theory of truth, and an account of reference to go with it. I mention this, ­because it is not Burge’s defense of the legitimacy of talk of reference in Origins of Objectivity that impresses me—­I agree with that, of course, but that is not “news” for me—­but the idea that reference i­ sn’t something that presupposes language. ­Here, obviously, I am close to Chakraborty’s question as to ­whether language precedes thought. In Renewing Philosophy, on the basis of my thought experiment with the dog who is given a veggie steak, I concluded that ­mental repre­sen­ta­tions that can be correct and not merely useful do presuppose language. If that w ­ ere the ­whole story, then, since thought properly so called must be truth-­apt, the answer to Chakraborty’s question would be that thought presupposes language period. Thought does presuppose language (or something very much like language, e.g., “mentalese”), if one requires that “thoughts” consist of propositions, can be joined with logical connectives, are components of inferences, ­etc. But (I learned from Burge) it is not the case only m ­ ental states that consist of propositions, or that contain concepts, can be accurate or inaccurate. Perceptual repre­sen­ta­tions can be accurate or inaccurate. If “thought” means conceptual thought and “language” re-

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fers to an activity that uses concepts, then “thought presupposes (something like) language” is a truism. But the difference between the position I  defended in Renewing Philosophy and the position that Burge defends (and I am now inclined to agree with) is not a difference of opinion over that truism. The difference might rather be described as a difference about ­whether only thoughts are truth-­apt. If you prefer to restrict the range of applicability of the words “true” and “false” to thoughts that consist of propositions, then the issue can still be stated in other words, as we have seen: the difference concerns ­whether only linguistic, or at any rate, propositional ­mental repre­sen­ta­tions refer or describe accurately. If Burge is right, and repre­sen­ta­tion, in a demanding sense, occurs in the brains or parts of the brains of organisms far more primitive than mammals, let alone h ­ umans, then, as he argues in detail in Origins, the arm-­chair individualistic psy­chol­ogy on which famous phi­los­o­phers like Quine and Davidson have based arguments for the indeterminacy of reference is hopelessly naïve. As Dewey insisted (and, as I read him, Wittgenstein too), t­ here is much more bio-­social-­continuity with regard to our ­mental powers than the tradition has been willing to recognize. We do not have to think of reference as leaping magically into existence (like the evils of the world leaping out of Pandora’s box) when our pre-­human ancestors first started to string words together. Bio-­social continuity makes Brentano’s Prob­lem look much less intractable. Some questions for Burgeians (and Block’s responses)

As I said above, the questions that follow are meant not as counterexamples but as areas that must be investigated, conceptually and empirically, if the “Burgeian” view is right. Obviously, one is the question mentioned by Block, as to the existence and number of “higher-­level attributives,” particularly in the h ­ uman case. My discussion of the “Fido” example has proceeded on the assumption that “consisting of animal flesh” is not a perceptual attributive at all, but a conceptual one. But more needs to be said about how one could decide. Secondly, what exactly does it mean to say, as Block does, that “vision science picks out” shape and color (­etc.) as among the basic low level attributives? No organism has a stock of visual repre­sen­ta­tions that includes repre­sen­ta­tions for all pos­si­ble shapes (or so I would suppose). Is the stock

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of available shape repre­sen­t a­tions the same for all members of a given species? Block wrote me as follows: “My response ­here would be that the visual system can represent shapes seen for the first time (and even for the first time in the history of the species). Posner showed long ago that shapes constructed from random placing of dots in a matrix and distortions of ­those patterns could be reidentified by naive subjects without much difficulty. It ­isn’t that the visual system has a stock of all ­those patterns but rather it has the means to produce a template from a few exposures.” The draft I sent Block continued thus: “In the case of color repre­sen­ ta­tions; assuming t­ here are repre­sen­t a­tions for ‘multi-­shade’ colors like red and yellow, colors which cover a ­whole range of shades (as classified in the Munsell system, for example), is the stock of available ‘multi-­shade’ repre­sen­ta­tions the same for all members of a given species?” Burge frequently equates being accurate (in the case of visual repre­ sen­ta­tions) with fidelity to the visual appearance of the object in question ­under “normal conditions.” It is clear that he is thinking of normal conditions of light, background, e­ tc. (“normal” for a par­tic­u­lar sort of organism) for viewing a par­tic­u ­lar object. But it is pos­si­ble for an object to be a par ­tic­u­lar color only ­under abnormal conditions. (Imagine an animal that glows when the lighting is poor!) And how does the idea of a range of color repre­sen­ta­tions fit with the data that Block describes in “Sexism, Racism, Ageism, and the Nature of Consciousness,” data that shows that multi-­shade colors like red and blue include dif­fer­ent shades for dif­fer­ent individuals?9 (N.B.: Block’s paper is not about “sexism,” ­etc., in the po­ liti­cal sense, but about the fact that how colors appear to ­human subjects is somewhat dependent on sex, age, and race.) And on this Block commented: “I think that the right approach to the individual variation point is that normal conditions have to be relativized to individual perceivers. In the case of the glowing animal, normal conditions for perceiving pigment colors are not the same as for perceiving colors of light. Still I agree that an object can appear to have one color in standard conditions and another color in aty­pi­cal conditions. Something that looks green u ­ nder normal conditions can look red u ­ nder weird conditions but 9. Ned Block, “Sexism, Racism, Ageism, and the Nature of Consciousness,” Philosophical Topics 26, no. 1 (1999): 39–70.

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we say it is green. If ­there ­were widespread cases of ­things looking to have dif­fer­ent colors in dif­fer­ent circumstances where we could not easily specify what counted as normal, maybe we would not regard objects as having color at all.” As I said, none of t­ hese questions seems to me to pose any intractable difficulty for Burge’s and Block’s approach, and Block’s responses illustrate this. And, to recapitulate, the relevance of that approach to the question that inspired this paper, the question as to w ­ hether thought precedes language, is that it shows that we cannot suppose in advance that we know what “thought” and “language” are. The picture that emerges from this approach is that reference and repre­sen­ta­tion, which are believed by most phi­los­o­phers to presuppose language, precede both thought and language. Innate language?

I mentioned at the beginning that I do not believe in “innate language” (e.g., Fodor’s “mentalese,” which, when he wrote The Language of Thought, was supposed to have a built-in truth-­conditional semantics, that is a semantics which fixes the meanings of all the sentences a ­human is capable is thinking (­later Fodor moved to the position that “mentalese” has only a built-in syntax, and developed a causal theory of reference to account for content). I have not presupposed that you agree with my rejection of innate language in what I have said so far; in order to avoid that presupposition, I even used the phrase “language (or something very much like language, e.g., ‘mentalese’)” at one point above. But h ­ ere are my reasons for that rejection. The decisive objection, in my view, is that the innate language that Fodor posited was supposed to be able to express all learnable meanings. If all pos­si­ble meaningful terms ­were definable from a number of basic terms that might have been selected for by evolution (such as the logical positivists’ “observation terms”), this would be compatible with Darwinian evolution. But Fodor rejects logical positivism, and he suggested no alternative account of what the basic terms of “mentalese” might be. Nor did The Language of Thought tell us what mechanism could have endowed the brains of primitive men and ­women with terms with such meanings as “quantum potential” and “macroeconomic,” or with terms by means of which they could be defined, if, indeed, t­ here are more elementary terms in which this could be done.

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I am well aware that Fodor rejects Darwinian evolution.10 (Since that theory is highly successful, and constitutes the beating heart of population ge­ne­tics, to mention just one part of biology, I would think that is already reason to dismiss talk of innate language.) But if “mentalese” is supposed to have appeared in the brain serendipitously, that makes the idea even crazier. The story that the hundreds of thousands of terms in h ­ uman languages, and the millions of terms in pos­si­ble ­human languages, all correspond to terms in a master vocabulary of “Mentalese” supplied to us by serendipity is precisely analogous to supposing that monkeys typed out Proust’s Remembrance of T ­ hings Past. Of course, to reject that story is not to deny that some aspects of language might be innate; that would not be incompatible with evolution. Conceptualization and “context-­free ele­ments of thought”

In a few paragraphs of his 2003 paper, “Perceptual Entitlement,”11 Burge described the transition to conceptualization from the sort of primitive repre­sen­ta­tion I have described, the sort he wrote about at length in the book to which I referred ­earlier, his (2010) Origins of Objectivity. In that ­earlier paper, Burge makes a claim about concepts that I initially disagreed with. But upon further reflection, I de­cided that I d ­ on’t disagree with it ­a fter all! In line with what I described above as “­doing what I did in my classes at Prince­ton and Harvard for almost fifty years, which ­wasn’t to feed my students solutions to philosophical prob­lems, but rather to show them the activity of philosophizing, an activity which, for me, is inseparable from criticizing and rethinking,” I s­ hall say why I initially disagreed, or thought I disagreed, and then describe the further reflection that led me to see that I s­ houldn’t disagree. H ­ ere is the claim, quoted from “Perceptual Entitlement,” where Burge gives what he describes as “a preliminary characterization of conceptual repre­sen­ta­tion”: “Concepts are

10. See Jerry Fodor, “Against Darwinism,” Mind & Language 23 (2008): 1–24; Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-­Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). 11. Tyler Burge, “Perceptual Entitlement,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67, no. 3 (2003): 503–746.

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standing or context-­free ele­ments in thought. They have their repre­sen­ ta­tional identity in­de­pen­dently of a par­tic­u­lar context of application.”12 Why I initially disagreed

I have written about the issue of context-­sensitivity in the past,13 and Charles Travis has written several books with detailed arguments and numerous examples;14 it is neither necessary nor pos­si­ble to summarize them ­here. But, briefly, the sort of contextualism I defend does not claim that the meanings of sentences vary from context to context. In some sense of the word “meaning,” it must be true that a speaker “knows the meaning” of each sentence that he or she is able to use prior to using it or understanding another speaker’s use of it in a new context and that this “knowledge of its meaning” plays an essential role in enabling the speaker to know what the sentence is being used to say in the context. What contextualism does deny is that the “meaning” of a sentence in this sense determines the truth-­evaluable content of that sentence or the reference of the predicates. The thesis of contextualism is that in general the truth-­evaluable content of sentences and the reference of the predicates they contain depends both on what they mean (what a competent speaker knows prior to encountering a par­tic­u­lar context) and on the par­tic­u­lar context, and not on “the meaning” alone. I believed that this conflicts with Burge’s claim that concepts are “context-­free ele­ments in thought,” by which I understand him to mean that what a concept refers to (its “repre­sen­t a­tional identity”) is context in­de­pen­dent. Let us look at an example of context sensitivity (or, in Charles Travis’s terminology, “occasion sensitivity”) of the kind that I have used in the

12. Ibid., 524. 13. See “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’ ” in my Mind, Language and Real­ity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 238–241; “The Craving for Objectivity,” in my Realism with a H ­ uman Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 122; and “Meaning Holism,” in Realism with a H ­ uman Face, 278–302. 14. See Charles Travis, Unshadowed Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Travis, Occasion Sensitivity: Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Travis, Objectivity and the Parochial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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past.15 The relevant concept is the concept of milk, and the relevant utterance u is “­There is milk on the ­table,” uttered on two dif­fer­ent occasions. Occasion 1: a child wants some milk to drink. A parent utters u. The child goes to the ­table, finds a glass of milk on it, and drinks it. Occasion 2: a child spills some milk on the t­ able. The parent utters u. The child wipes up the spill. I take it to be clear that on the first occasion, if t­ here ­were no glass or ­bottle or pitcher, e­ tc., of milk on the ­table, u would count as false, even if ­there w ­ ere a ­little spilled milk on the ­table, and that on the second occasion u counts as true if ­there is spilled milk on the ­t able w ­ hether or not ­there is also a glass or ­bottle of milk ­there. What counts as “milk” varies with the context. (Many other examples come to mind: choco­late milk may count as milk or not, soured milk may count or not, ­etc., e­ tc.) Opponents of context-­sensitivity usually say that the “literal meaning” of sentences like u is context-­insensitive (apart from demonstratives and indexical components); examples like u, they say, show that speaker’s meaning is context sensitive, not that meaning-­in-­the-­language is. (A rebuttal I like of one version of this move is Travis’s (1991) review of Grice’s Studies in the Way of Words.)16 When we discussed a related example, a young colleague of mine once suggested that the literal meaning of “­there is ­water in the glass” is “­there is at least one molecule of ­water in the glass.” I replied that it is strange that the “literal meaning” turns out to be something that no speaker ever intends to convey! But we need not go into this debate now, for Burge’s concern is not with the notion of meaning in a language but specifically with the psychological pro­cess of “deriving” a conceptual repre­sen­ta­tion from a repre­sen­ta­tion by the visual system. And it is what speakers mean by their words that, one would suppose, expresses the content of their conceptual repre­sen­ta­tions. And concepts, Burge tells us, are “ele­ments in thought.” It is ­these “ele­ments in thought” and not meanings in a language that are said to be “context-­free.” However, Block tells us, in a passage I quoted above, that Burge and he think ­there are prob­ably no higher-­level attributives (in the visual

15. I discuss similar examples in my “Travis on Meaning, Thought and the Ways the World Is,” The Philosophical Quarterly 52, no. 206 (2002): 99. 16. Charles Travis, “Critical Notice: Annals of Analy­sis,” Mind, n.s., 100, no.  2 (April 1991): 237–264.

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system) for culture-­specific attributes such as teacups (recall that the list of lower-­level attributes is very short). The following interpretation of what Burge wrote (i.e. (*)) thus suggests itself: perhaps Burge only meant to claim that concepts that correspond to perceptual repre­sen­ta­tions are context-­free? If milk is not a perceptual “attributive” (neither lower-­level nor higher-­level), then the example of the sentence u (“­There is milk on the ­table”) is irrelevant. This seems to me a very unlikely interpretation of (*) given that Burge described what he was giving as “a preliminary characterization of conceptual repre­sen­ta­tion.” The most plausible reading is that Burge thinks all concepts are context-­free. T ­ hese are the reflections that made it seem to me that Burge and I w ­ ere in serious disagreement on this issue. Why I ­don’t disagree a ­ fter all

Continuing my reflections, I asked myself, “But do examples like u ­really go against Burge’s (*)?” Both my “contextualism” and Travis’s “occasion-­ sensitive semantics” are concerned to show that meanings in a public language do not determine ­either the truth-­conditions of sentences or the reference of predicates; and it is t­ hese latter that we claim to be occasion-­ sensitive. But Burge is not writing about predicates and sentences but about “ele­ments of thought.” At first this d ­ idn’t satisfy me e­ ither. For if what Burge thinks is that speakers’ meanings are realized by the mind in terms of some repertoire of context-­f ree ele­ments of thought, then this, I thought, is just innate “mentalese,” again. But that thought was mistaken. It was mistaken, b ­ ecause Fodor, when he wrote The Language of Thought, maintained that the meanings of our words are stored in our brains. But, like me, Burge is an “externalist”; that is, he thinks that the identity of our concepts depends on our relations to other p ­ eople and the world, and not just on our neurobiology. Thought d ­ oesn’t just consist of brain-­processes. As I have said in the past, “meanings ­a ren’t in the head” and thoughts a­ ren’t in the head ­either—­not b ­ ecause they are somewhere ­else, but b ­ ecause “meaning” and “thought” refer to world-­ involving capacities and exercises of ­those capacities not to events strictly inside the brain. “Ele­ments of thought” ­doesn’t have to be read as “pieces of mentalese.”

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But what of “context-­free”? (Look at (*) above.) Well, I realized (continuing my reflections), what is my own account of “speaker’s meaning”? In the case of our sample utterance u (“­There is milk on the t­ able”) uttered on “Occasion 2” (the child spilled some milk) the extension of the noun “milk” is understood to include spilled milk, whereas on Occasion 1 (the child wants milk to drink) it ­isn’t. As Travis might put it, on “Occasion 2” the noun milk “bears an understanding” u ­ nder which its extension includes spilled milk. And I agree. (Where Travis and I may not agree is with re­spect to the further question: Do “understandings” themselves—as opposed to sentences that we might use to communicate them—­bear dif­f er­ent understandings (e.g., ones that differ on the reference of “milk,” in the case of our example? Reading his Unshadowed Thought, I sometimes fear that Travis might answer “yes.”) While the reference of our terms has vague bound­aries, the idea that it is subject to dif­fer­ent understandings that are themselves subject to dif­fer­ent understandings that are . . . (and so on ad infinitum) is incompatible with the idea that our terms have objective reference at all. UPSHOT: understandings of terms on par­tic­u ­lar occasions are just what Burge says concepts are: “standing or context-­f ree ele­ments in thought.” Terminology aside, I have no disagreement with Burge ­here ­after all. Conclusion

In the previous section I allowed myself to digress from my subject in this paper, which was w ­ hether prelinguistic animals have thoughts. But I could not resist talking about what Burge says about conceptual thought, especially since it raised an impor­tant question for me, namely how to reconcile the occasion-­sensitivity of the ways we understand our words with my conviction that t­ here is a fact of the ­matter as to what we are referring to on ­those dif­fer­ent occasions. With re­spect to the main subject of this paper, I already summed up when I wrote ­earlier that the relevance of Burge’s approach to the question that inspired this paper is that it shows that we cannot suppose in advance that we know what “thought” and “language” are. The picture that emerges from this approach is that reference and repre­sen­ta­tion, which are believed by most phi­los­o­phers to presuppose language, precede both thought and language.

CHAPTER 7

George Boolos: On Logical Truths (1994)

G

eorge Boolos raises some very deep questions about just where, if anywhere, one should “draw the line” between logic and mathe­matics. I want to defend the suggestion Boolos reports me as making, the suggestion that we count as logical truths only certain of the true sentences of second-­order logic, namely t­ hose which are universal quantifications of valid first-­order formulas. Boolos examines the costs and benefits of my suggestion in a deep and searching way; it is now for me to examine his examination. A benefit of my suggestion, as I argued in Philosophy of Logic, is that the statement that a first-­order sentence is valid ­w ill count as a truth of logic, as it intuitively should. But a difficulty that has been pointed out by several authors concerns the status of the second-­order quantifiers; does second-­order logic presuppose an “ontology” of sets? If it does, then the first-­order variables do not ­really range over all objects, and in that case the universal quantification of a first-­order formula does not ­really succeed in

Putnam’s reply to George Boolos, “1879?,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Bob Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 31–48.

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saying that that first-­order formula is true no ­matter what the objects in the range of the first-­order quantifiers are. The intuitive notion of validity is still not captured. A way out of this difficulty has been proposed by Boolos himself, and I know of no better. Boolos proposes that we think of a second-­order (monadic) quantifier “(∃F)” as meaning not ­there is a set F such that, but rather ­there are some t­ hings (call them F ­things) such that. One’s reaction upon meeting Boolos’s suggestion to, as it ­were, allow the existential quantifier to take a plural inflection may be that it is merely “cute,” but, on the contrary, it seems to me to be extraordinarily deep, and the depth is brought out by just the way it resolves the previously intractable prob­lem of explicating the intuitive notion of validity in any way at all. Taking ­these quantifiers as picking out individuals (in bunches), rather than “abstract entities” (sets of individuals), means that we can quantify over “all objects” in second-­order logic without fearing that the very existence of our second-­order quantifiers belies our claim that our first-­order quantifiers do so range. And t­ here is reason to want to be able to do this even if one shares the view that I have expressed in many places, the view that ­there is no fixed totality of “all objects,” and that “object” is an inherently extendable notion; for no ­matter how we extend the notion, we intend the laws of logic to remain good, and thus we may regard some princi­ples as valid even if the notion of object they involve is an indeterminate one. Boolos himself reports an objection to his suggestion (he ascribes it to Hartry Field) when the second-­order quantifiers are dyadic or polyadic: “the scheme provides no way to translate into natu­ral language second-­order dyadic or, more generally, polyadic quantification. In favorable cases, of course, pairing functions ­w ill be definable in the language and higher degree second-­order quantification reducible to monadic. But the availability of pairing functions cannot be considered to be guaranteed by logic.” ­Here ­there are two distinct prob­lems. One is that finite domains are not closed u ­ nder pairing functions. This does not affect the purpose for which I want to use second-­order logic (interpreted à la Boolos); to say a first-­order formula is valid, I ­will quantify over all objects, ­whether the formula itself concerns all objects or not. (When relativization to a domain is desired, this can be explic­itly indicated, e.g. by writing “for all domains D,” or its symbolic equivalent, in front of the first-­order formula and explic­ itly relativizing all its quantifiers to D.) Since the totality of all objects is

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certainly infinite, ­there is no difficulty in supposing that for any two objects in that totality t­ here is another object which is their ordered pair. The other prob­lem is that, in so interpreting second-­order quantifiers over dyadic, ­etc., relations, I am using a mathematical notion (ordered pair); and is this not incompatible with counting even ­these second-­order formulas (universal quantifications of valid first-­order formulas) as logical truths? To this, my answer is that I am not claiming that e­ ither second-­order quantifiers or pairing functions are logical notions; I am quite willing to regard some statements which contain “mathematical” notions as logical truths. Boolos’s own solution to t­ hese prob­lems is quite dif­fer­ent. His solution to the first I do not understand; while I agree that translatability into a language we already understand is not necessary for understanding in all cases, the fact is that I do not see any way of understanding quantification over dyadic (or higher-­adic) relations on the lines of the “plural quantification” strategy he suggests (and which, as I have already indicated, I find a brilliant idea) without talking about ordered pairs of individuals; for the analogue of saying “­there are some t­ hings, call them F-­things” (this is the Boolosian way of ­handling an existential quantifier over sets) in the case of an existential quantifier over dyadic relations is surely to say “­there are some pairs of t­ hings, call them R-­pairs.” Of course, we could just not interpret the existential quantifier over dyadic relations at all; we could just say “knowing how to use it is understanding it,” but this is compatible with any account of its metaphysical status. The fact is, however, that neither a desire to avoid some metaphysical prob­lem (e.g. “ontological commitment”) nor a desire to avoid “mathematical” as opposed to “purely logical” notions is ­behind my not wanting to class full second-­order logic as logic. My reason is rather the fact that full second-­order logic is not completely axiomatizable; this means that it does not correspond to a definite doctrine of deduction. It seems to me desirable to so define “logic” that it can be viewed as a canon of deduction (since that is what the subject originally started out to be). This is compatible with accepting the fragment of second-­order logic which consists of universal quantifications of valid first-­order formulas as logical truths, but not with accepting the ­whole of second-­order logic. But in truth, I do not attach any profound significance to just where one “draws the line.” With re­spect to the historical part of Boolos’s paper, let me simply say “Bravo!”

CHAPTER 8

Charles Travis: On Mind-­Independence and Quantum Logic (2001, 2002)

Part 1

One might well think it is impossible to say anything both new and true about the ancient prob­lem of “universals,” but that is precisely what Charles Travis has done in his challenging essay on “mind dependence.” Travis clearly finds it legitimate (and, I believe he would say, “indispensable” as well as “legitimate”) to quantify over universals, that is to speak of, to “countenance,” not only individual objects but properties as well.1 He is no Goodmanian nominalist. At the same time, he rejects the familiar metaphysical realist picture according to which “[t]he properties Part 1 is Putnam’s reply to Charles Travis, “Mind Dependence,” Revue internationale de philosophie 4, no. 218 (2001): 503–524, and Part 2 is Putnam’s reply to Charles Travis, “What the Laws of Logic Say,” in Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism, ed. James Conant and Urszula M. Żegleń (London: Routledge, 2002), 188–208. 1. That “quantifying over” abstract entities—­sets, properties, meanings, propositions, states of affairs, e­ tc. [i.e., asserting propositions of the forms “­Every [set, property, or what­ ever] is . . .” And “­There are [sets, properties, or what­ever] which . . .” ] is “assuming their

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the having or lacking of which by given objects makes our judgements true or false distribute as they do entirely in­de­pen­dent of how they are thought of.” What Travis argues instead is that the properties we speak of must not be thought of as having extensions which are completely fixed in advance. A property (the sort of t­ hing we describe as “a way that objects might conceivably be”) requires interpretation, at least in some cases, and (in such cases, or imaginable cases) w ­ hether a given object is in the extension of the property ­w ill depend on how it is reasonable to interpret the property.2 Moreover—­and this is what makes this a kind of “mind dependence”— the reasonableness of property-­interpretations (like the reasonableness of all interpretations) depends on the ­human interests and practices that figure in the par­tic­u­lar context of speaking. And this sort of “mind dependence” of properties is deep (so Travis argues); it goes all the way down (or up). Since I agree with all of this, my “reply” w ­ ill not be a criticism of what Travis says. Instead I want to consider certain attacks that I anticipate Travis’s challenging view ­will meet, and indicate how I, at least, would respond to them.

existence,” in some univocal sense of “existence,” and therefore something to be avoided if at all pos­si­ble, is Quine’s famous doctrine in “On What T ­ here Is,” collected in his From a Logical Point of View [1953] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961). As Travis mentions in passing, this is a doctrine that I regard as seriously misguided (and as the source of a ­g reat deal of bad metaphysics). Cf. my Dewey Lectures, “The Dewey Lectures 1994: Sense, Nonsense and the Senses,” Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 9 (1994): 445–517, at 449–452. 2. From “On What T ­ here Is” on, Quine has argued against countenancing properties on the ground that t­ here ­i sn’t a well-­defined relation of numerical identity between properties. (Since Quine thinks all reference worthy of the name is capable of being “regimented” in a formalized language, being well defined for Quine would mean being context-­independently defined, as well as having no dependence on anything vague, such as our interests and practices.) He might thus accept Travis’s argument completely, and say, “I told you that properties ­were not entities we should tolerate in our first-­class conceptual scheme!” But he himself once came close to admitting that such objects as mountains and t­ ables do not have an identity relation that is well defined by his lights! (See his “What Price Bivalence,” Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 90–95.) “No object without [context-­i ndependent] identity” is not a slogan anyone should accept, in my view.

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The First Attack: Is Science a Counterexample to Travis’s Argument?

A defender of the metaphysical realist view that Travis attacks ­w ill obviously say something like the following: “To be sure words like blue (in Travis’s blue ink example) are vague. And it may be that no word or phrase ­w ill pick out just one definite property unambiguously. But it d ­ oesn’t follow, as Travis suggests, that the notion of a definite property is a ‘we-­ know-­not-­what’ like Kant’s ding an sich” [Travis makes this suggestion when he writes at the end of the first section of his essay. “Mind dependence penetrates all the way to the ways objects are and are not; or at least to any such ways we might speak or think of?”—my emphasis]. “To see the non sequitur in Travis’s argument” [I imagine the metaphysical realist opponent continuing], “consider a physicist speaking about distances. It may well be that the need to use vague terms to fix a standard of length makes it impossible to pick out one completely definite distance by any expression in a natu­ral language.3 But that ­doesn’t mean that the physicist is unable to ‘think of’—­I take it Travis means think about—­ distances which are not themselves at all vague. (S)he can quantify over them, formulate laws about them, construct ­whole space-­time theories in which they indispensably figure, and apply ­those theories successfully in a host of ways. And that is ‘thinking about’ distances—­they are not metaphysicians’ fantasies but scientific objects.” This first attack raises a number of issues, some of which I ­w ill defer to a concluding “Note on Scientific Properties.” However this much should be clear: this first line of attack, if successful, would only show that certain terms in exact science— in par­tic­u ­lar fundamental physics and cosmology—­a re exceptions (i.e., refer to properties which are exceptions) to Travis’s claims. The situation is quite dif­fer­ent with re­spect to more “ordinary” properties (e.g., being blue, being an apple, being a chair).

3. This prob­lem is not avoidable by using atomic rods and clocks: although textbooks [e.g., Charles  W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, and John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation (San Francisco: Freeman, 1973), 393–397] speak of freely falling atomic clocks, no physical system is perfectly freely falling, nor do “freely falling test particles” with “geodesic world lines” ­really exist ­either (their existence would, among other ­things, contradict quantum mechanics!).



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Consider blue, for example. ­There is no one science of color, although aspects of color are dealt with by optics, neurology and psy­chol­ogy, among other disciplines. None of t­ hese sciences identifies colors with anything ideally precise (in the way in which distances are supposed to be ideally precise in geometry or in space-­time physics). One long-­familiar (but deeply flawed) line of thought considers colors to be dispositions to produce certain “sense data,” 4 or at least certain “appearances.”5 One well-­k nown prob­lem is that “sameness” of appearances (let alone of the supposedly private sense data of dif­fer­ent subjects!), is an imprecise notion, and so is sameness of color (although, as Husserl pointed out, we can make and have made sameness of color a more precise notion in response to commercial and technological needs—­w ithout needing to or being able to make it “perfectly” precise—­a notion Husserl regards as having no empirical application at all).6 An opposing view seeks to identify color with something more “objective.” Although the older theory that physical color is just a disposition to reflect light of certain wavelengths was overthrown by the work of Land and o ­ thers, successor theories exist which identify colors with functions of “reflectancies,” which are themselves dispositions.7 As Westphal writes, describing the theory of Wilson and Brocklebank, “A green object in this scheme is an object which refuses to reflect a significant proportion of red light relative to lights of other colors including green.”8 Thus on both 4. I criticize the w ­ hole idea of “sense data” in my Dewey Lectures. (Cited in note 1; t­ hese are also collected as Part 1 of my The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).) 5. For an account of appearances which does not turn them into private “sense data,” see “Second Afterword: Are Appearances Qualia?,” in The Threefold Cord. 6. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the Eu­ro­pean Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 7. The most popu­lar of ­these is the “opponent pro­cess theory.” See Jonathan Westphal, Color: Some Philosophical Prob­lems from Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), as well as David R. Hilbert, Color and Color Perception: A Study in Anthropocentric Realism (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1987), for an account and a philosophical defense. On the other hand, Larry Hardin, Color for Phi­los­o­phers (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), defends the view that color properties are essentially imprecise and concludes that they are therefore “subjective.” 8. Westphal, Color, 81. For the theory described by Westphal, see M. H. Wilson and R. W. Brocklebank, “The Phenomenon of Coloured Shadows and Its Significance for Colour Perception,” Die Farbe 2, no. 1 (1962): 143–146; “Colour Is Where You See It,” in Internationale

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theories, indeed on all theories, colors are dispositions. But dispositions are hardly perfectly well defined and context-­independent properties! The prob­lem, simply stated, is that if we make a dispositional statement, e.g., if we say that “this lump of sugar would dissolve if put in ­water,” what we are understood as claiming—­and what we mean to claim—is that the lump of sugar would dissolve ­under normal conditions. But we need not know in advance—­nor can we know—­exactly which of the infinite number of dif­fer­ent pos­si­ble physical conditions count as “normal.” (For example, that t­ here are physically pos­si­ble but im­mensely improbable conditions in which the sugar w ­ ill fail to dissolve is implied by thermodynamics!) Moreover, the notion of a “normal condition” is highly context-­sensitive. We would not normally say of a piece of limestone that it is “soluble,” ­because in most contexts we do not consider conditions in which the object is allowed to remain in ­water for thousands of years as “normal,” but in a geological context, our interests and assumptions shift and we might well say that limestone rocks are soluble.9 Similarly, to be blue is to look blue u ­ nder normal conditions, but what are normal conditions h ­ ere? In the case of ink, normal conditions are conditions in which the text is viewed on the paper, but ­under what light? And how long ­a fter the text is written? This is, of course, just Travis’s example. Nor ­w ill it help with this prob­lem to say that the counterfactual in question, “text written with this ink would look blue on the page” (or, in the solubility example, “this ­w ill dissolve if put in ­water”) is true if “in all pos­si­ble worlds sufficiently close to the ­actual world” in which text is written with the ink and subsequently viewed (or the object is put in w ­ ater, in the solubility example), the ink looks blue to the viewer (or the object dissolves); for the supposed “similarity metric” on pos­si­ble worlds is itself not well defined. On this, I ­w ill quote the author of this very semantics for counterfactuals. David Lewis has written, “I said that counterfactuals ­were governed in their truth conditions by comparative overall similarity of worlds, but t­ here was no precisely fixed relation of similarity that gov-

Farbtagung (Luzern: Tagungsbericht, 1965), 991–1001; “Goethe’s Colour Experiments,” in ibid., 3–12. 9. I discussed ­these ­matters in more detail in Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 50–55.



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erned all counterfactuals always. To the contrary, the governing similarity relation was both vague and context-­dependent. Dif­f er­ent contexts would select dif­f er­ent ranges of similarity relations, prob­ably without ever reaching full determinacy [emphasis added by me]. In this paper I reiterate all that.”10 But Travis’s point does not apply merely to dispositional properties. ­W hether a bean-­bag chair counts as a chair depends on context as does ­whether an apple that has just begun to form on the branch counts as an apple (or an apple that has been preserved in formaldehyde or . . .). With the pos­si­ble exception of ideally precise scientific properties (but see my “Note on Scientific Properties” below!), Travis’s point holds in full generality. The Second Attack: Does Travis’s Metaphysical Conclusion ­Really Follow?

The defender of the metaphysical realist views that Travis criticizes has a second line of response available, however. Assuming that the first attack has shown that what we just called “ideally precise scientific properties” are immune to what Travis calls “occasion-­sensitivity” (and hence that they neither require nor permit interpretation to determine their extensions in vari­ous contexts), the metaphysical realist can continue as follows: What you (Travis) have shown may be in­ter­est­ing to a phi­los­o­pher of language, but it has no metaphysical significance whatsoever. For the fact is that in princi­ple it is pos­si­ble to give a complete description of the world in terms of ideally precise scientific properties alone. And if t­ hese are not mind dependent, then—­since the description given with their aid does not exhibit the sort of ‘mind dependence’ you think you have found—­and since that description is a complete description of the world, the world as it is apart from ­human perspectives and interests, the world is not at all mind dependent.11 10. David Lewis, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 12. 11. This would obviously be the response of Bernard Williams. See his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), e.g., 136–139, where Williams describes what he calls “the absolute conception of the world.” In Descartes: The

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But in what sense is the description of the world in terms of the fundamental magnitudes of physics complete! It is uncontroversial, I suppose, that “ordinary” properties such as being blue or being a chair are “globally supervenient” on the fundamental magnitudes in the sense that if ­there w ­ ere another universe in which the fundamental magnitudes w ­ ere distributed over objects and locations just as they are distributed in this one t­ here would be exactly the same blue t­ hings, the same chairs, ­etc. (It does not follow that such properties are locally supervenient however, in the sense of depending only on the physical properties of the object to which they are applied, in­de­pen­dently of its relations to other objects, including ­human beings.) But explanations in terms of “supervenient” properties cannot in general be replaced by explanations in terms of the fundamental properties on which they supervene, as I have long argued.12 (I am joined, in this, by Jerry Fodor and other phi­los­o­phers who stress the explanatory indispensability of the so-­called “special sciences,” and particularly of psy­chol­ogy.)13 Indeed, even a materialist metaphysician should reject the view that the description of the world in terms of just the elementary particles and fields and the space-­t ime geometry is complete. For most materialists (though not, I think, Bernard Williams) would regard any description which did not tell us what events cause what as radically incomplete—­indeed, ­there is nothing that interests (most) materialist metaphysicians more than the causal structure of the world. But describing the world’s causal structure requires the use of the predicate “­c auses,” a predicate which is not only not definable in terms of the primitive vocabulary of physics and cosmology, but which is notori-

Proj­ect of Pure Enquiry (Harmonds­worth, UK: Penguin Books, 1978), Williams makes it clear that the absolute description (or “conception”) can be given in terms of the fundamental magnitudes of physics alone. I have discussed Williams’s view in detail in a number of places, e.g., in Renewing Philosophy, chapter 5. 12. See “Reductionism and the Nature of Psy­chol­ogy,” Cognition 2 (1973): 131–146, collected in my Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 428–440, as well as “First Afterword: Psychological Explanation,” in The Threefold Cord. 13. Jerry Fodor, Psychological Explanation (New York: Random House, 1968).



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ously vague and context-­sensitive.14 (Nor can the causal structure of the world be described just by tracing momentum-­flows, as John Mackie mistakenly thought.)15 Bernard Williams himself is also willing to regard intentional talk, talk of meaning, reference, of the content of ­mental states, utterances, texts, ­etc., as no part of the complete description of the world.16 Other materialists, e.g., Hartry Field and Quine, are willing to ­settle for “disquotational” accounts of truth and reference, that is to give up the idea that reference is a relation between utterance-­parts and objects in the world.17 But I think few phi­los­o­phers ­w ill be attracted to the “second attack” once they appreciate just how very l­ ittle the supposed “complete description of the world” actually tells us about the world. Note on Scientific Properties

Suppose A and B are elementary particles both of which exist at a par­tic­ u­lar time t. Is it true, according to theoretical physics as we know it, that ­there is such a t­ hing as “the precise distance” between A and B? The answer, according to quantum mechanics, is that if t­ here ­were, then the relative momenta of A and B would be completely indeterminate (not just completely unknown, but completely indeterminate, objectively without a specifiable value).18 Any particles A, B that we can actually detect in the laboratory or formulate judgments about have momenta within some known bounds, and that means that to speak of their “precise 14. For details on the context-­sensitivity of “­causes,” see “Is the Causal Structure of the Physical Itself Something Physical?,” in my Realism with a ­Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 80–95. 15. See ibid., 93–95, for counterexamples to Mackie’s claim. 16. Williams ends his Descartes with an endorsement of Quine’s criticism of intentional notions. For a criticism of this aspect of Williams’s position, see “Objectivity and the Science / Ethics Distinction,” in my Realism with a H ­ uman Face, 170–174. 17. See my criticism of this line in part 2 of “Is the Causal Structure of the Physical Itself Something Physical?,” and also (with some modifications of the ­earlier criticism) in my third Dewey Lecture [Putnam, The Threefold Cord]. 18. I disregard ­here Bohm’s and related “hidden variable” interpretations of elementary quantum mechanics. My objective ­here is simply to describe pre­sent day scientific opinion, not to evaluate alternatives to it. In any case, the Bohm interpretation has never been extended to quantum field theory.

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positions” or of “the precise distance between them” would be regarded by pre­sent day physicists as making no sense at all. Well, what if A and B are space-­time points? Can we at least say that if A and B are space-­time points, then ­there is such a t­ hing as the precise space-­ time distance between them? No, ­because space-­time itself is “quantized” (treated quantum mechanically) by our deepest con­temporary theories, and that means that the space-­time metric itself exhibits indeterminacy. Lastly, what of “the wave-­function of the universe,” spoken of in many quantum cosmologies? Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to give that expression any precise sense in the real general relativistic world (although in quantum cosmology we give it a kind of partial sense by using idealized models which lack some of the features the world is thought to have). The upshot of all this is that even in theoretical science at the most fundamental level it is only in models which are idealized (i.e., oversimplified) and known to be idealized that one can speak (or better: pretend to speak) of “exact values” of such magnitudes as distance. The connection with the kind of indeterminacy that Travis discusses is this: when we describe physical phenomena using models which we know are only idealizations (without being able to offer a non-­idealized description), what sort of idealization is legitimate and how it is to be applied is—­ once again!—­a context-­dependent and interest-­relative ­matter. Part 2

I think Travis has put forward two impor­t ant ideas, which I s­ hall think about for a long time: one about how to understand what formal logic is; and one about how to understand Wittgenstein’s term “language games.” As I understand the first idea, he proposes that formal logic is not a set of “laws” of anything (thought, or reasoning, or real­ity), but an idealized model of how a part of our language (e.g., the part consisting of certain inferences involving the so-­called “logical connectives”) works. On Travis’s view, the question is not ­whether some par­tic­u­lar laws of logic are “necessary,” but w ­ hether this model is or is not appropriate to any given stretch of discourse. (I take it, however, that Travis is not denying that in a discourse which fits the model, the substitution-­instances of what we call “valid schemata” are true, and that t­ here is a good use of “logically neces-



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sary” in which they can also be called “logically necessary.”) The point is that we should not think that, say, the so-­called “Law of the Excluded ­Middle” actually has only true substitution-­instances in a natu­ral language. It ­doesn’t. When someone says, “­Either you are in ­favor of my proposal or you ­a ren’t,” what they are saying may well be false in a ­par­tic­u­lar context. (If my memory serves me right, a classical paper by Ernest Nagel called “Logic Without Ontology” defended a similar view, which has unfortunately been completely neglected.) And as I understand the second idea, it is impor­tant to realize that Wittgenstein’s “language games” are not parts of which a language consists, but idealized models of parts of a language. (Wittgenstein called them “objects of comparison,” I believe.) Thus, ­there is a similarity between systems of formal logic (including the so-­c alled “deviant logics”) and Wittgensteinian language games. I only want to add a few remarks about quantum logic. My purpose in proposing quantum logic was to propose a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics. O ­ thers who w ­ ere attracted to the idea of interpreting quantum mechanics with the aid of one or another “deviant logic” ­were guided by a very dif­fer­ent motive; their guiding idea was that “true” means “verified by an experiment,” or something like that. In pre­sent day philosophical parlance, their quantum logical interpretations ­were antirealist. My (attempted) realist interpretation was based on the following “proportion”: Quantum mechanics is to modular logic as general relativity is to geometry of variable curvature.19 In other words, just as one cannot understand what it means to accept the theory of General Relativity ­unless one is able to accept the idea that the space (or more precisely, the space-­time) in which we live is a 19. The logic proposed by von Neumann for the interpretation of quantum mechanics— versions of which I employed in my papers on quantum mechanics—is called “modular” ­because its intended models are isomorphic to the lattices of subspaces of vari­ous Hilbert spaces, and ­these are modular lattices. The most obvious characteristics of modular logic are that although (1) the schematic form of the law of the excluded ­middle, “p or not-­p,” is still valid in modular logic, (2) the distributive law, “[p & (q v r)] = [(p & q) v (p & r)],” has false substitution instances.

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non-­Euclidean geometry of variable curvature, so (I claimed) one cannot understand what it means to accept quantum mechanics u ­ nless one is able to accept the idea that the laws of logic—by which, in view of Charles Travis’s paper, I had better explain I meant not the model of some part of our language, but the princi­ples of the logic that physical real­ity requires for its description—­are the non-­A ristotelian laws of modular logic. The most common criticism of quantum logic was (and prob­ably continues to be) that it “merely changes the meanings of the logical words” (i.e., of “or,” “and,” ­etc.). The above proportion also explains why I was not impressed by this objection. For exactly the analogous objection was made in the case of non-­Euclidean geometry at one time! ­Those who made this objection claimed that what we have ­here is simply a case in which the words (i.e., the phonetic shapes) “triangle,” “right ­a ngle,” “straight line,” “plane,” “finite,” “unbounded” (and perhaps “space”?) are given to new and dif­fer­ent meanings. When we are told that straight lines can behave in ­these “non-­Euclidean” ways, the old grammar is not being contradicted but simply abandoned; in fact, the concept of a straight line has been altered. Perhaps it has been; but not arbitrarily altered! For to assimilate t­ hese cases to cases in which t­ here is a mere change of meaning, was quite wrong. As I pointed out in “It ­A in’t Necessarily So,” what one should ask anyone who takes this line is: “Pray, then, which are the straight lines in the old sense.” What was literally inconceivable prior to the invention and application of non-­Euclidean geometry was not only that straight lines, properly so-­called, should not exhibit Euclidean be­hav­ior; it was equally inconceivable that ­there should be no straight lines, in that sense, in space. The moral I drew and continue to draw, is that although t­ here are propositions that we have the right to call “conceptually necessary” at a given time, ­there is no such ­thing as a metaphysical guarantee that we w ­ ill never find a sense in which such a princi­ple is false, or a guarantee that such a sense w ­ ill not come to seem to us the one we must attach to our words if we want to remain true to the scientific (or other) enterprise.20 Thus the focus on the question “Does quantum mechanics change the meaning of the logical connectives?” (as opposed to the question: Does physical real­ity 20. See, for instance, “Rethinking Mathematical Necessity,” in my Words and Life, 245–263.



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allow us to retain the old way of using them?) seemed to me misguided.21 I have given up quantum logic. The approach failed, for complex and technical reasons.22 But I am still appalled at the frequency of appeals to the “meanings” of the logical connectives as a way of ruling out the approach without any serious examination.

21. An example of a use of words that turned out to be impossible to retain unaltered (when it comes to astronomical contexts, or even when space-­travel became pos­si­ble) is the pre-­Relativity use of the term “si­mul­ta­neously” and other time terms. That what looks like a conceptual truth—­“ ­there is such a t­ hing as absolute simultaneity”—­may have to be given up for empirical reasons was the g­ reat lesson of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. No better discussion of this has ever been written than Hans Reichenbach, The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge, trans. Maria Reichenbach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965). 22. For details, see my reply to Michael Redhead in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Bob Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 265–280.

PA RT I I

REALIS M AN D AN TIR E A L I S M

Of par­tic­u­lar interest in Part II is the ongoing clarification of one of Putnam’s most impor­tant ideas—­conceptual relativity—­which we might briefly explain as the idea that in certain cases in the sciences ­there is no fact of the ­matter as to which of the available optional languages should be used, even though they have dif­fer­ent ontologies and are incompatible if taken at face value. Conceptual relativity is a long-­standing reason that Putnam has rejected traditional metaphysical realism, given that it is committed to the idea of ­there being a totality of all “objects” (in some fixed metaphysical sense). Putnam admits to having confusingly formulated conceptual relativity in terms of the notion of t­ hings being relative to a “conceptual scheme,” which, if generalized, suggests the idealistic view that the existence of, say, ­tables and chairs depends on the adoption of a par­tic­u­lar conceptual scheme.1 This unfortunate formulation tends to assimilate conceptual relativity to conceptual pluralism—­the latter idea being that ­there can be two or more alternative descriptions of real­ity, which applies to everyday language no less than to scientific language (e.g., a ­table might be described as being both made of wood and made of atoms). Jennifer Case helpfully suggests that conceptual relativity arises only in special cases, whereas conceptual pluralism is ubiquitous. 1. This has become a common criticism of Putnam during his internal realist period. See, e.g., Amie Thomasson, Ontology Made Easy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 60–61.

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Conceptual relativity can be best clarified by using the notion of an “optional language” and restricting its application to the sciences, logic, and mathe­ matics, given that all of Putnam’s examples of conceptual relativity are from within t­ hese disciplines [Jennifer Case].2 ­Here, as in many other cases, criticism is self-­criticism. Putnam is happy to acknowledge the importance of Case’s clarification of his position. The trope of self-­criticism also shows up in Putnam’s retrospective reflections on his internal realist period (1978–1990), which reserves most criticism for his ambition to reduce the concept of truth to rational acceptability and better or worse epistemic conditions [Richard Miller]. In this paper Putnam also makes the iconoclastic claim that, for all the usefulness of modern logic, “a certain overestimation of its metaphysical and epistemological significance remains a prob­lem for con­temporary analytical philosophy.” If philosophy is a ­great conversation, then within that, twentieth-­century philosophy is, to a large extent, a vibrant conversation about the merits and demerits of logical positivism—­perhaps the most profound influence on twentieth-­century philosophy and absolutely fundamental to Putnam’s own outlook, given that he effectively received his training in philosophy from Quine, Reichenbach, and Carnap, and developed his philosophical outlook in sympathetic opposition to all three. H ­ ere Putnam debates w ­ hether to read Carnap as an empiricist and conventionalist [Thomas Ricketts, Rudolf Carnap]. And he discusses the difference between his antirealism (internal ­realism) and the antirealism of logical positivism [David L. Anderson]. This is one of several discussions of the vexed issue of what one might mean by a “mind-­independent” real­ity, which is also taken up at length in the reply to Travis. A virtue of the essays in Part II is the historical perspective that Putnam always brings to the writing of philosophy—­continuing to converse with the living works of the recently and long dead. A highlight is the discussion of his reactions to Kant in relation to the realism / idealism debate. 2. For example, in formalized geometry, it is optional ­whether we talk about points as individuals or as limits (for instance, as convergent sequences of spheres), even though ­these terms do not have the same meaning, do not imply the same ontology, and apparently lead to contradiction. Putnam’s response is: So much the worse for ontology and traditional semantics! In his last years, Putnam acknowledged that he should have called this phenomenon “cognitive equivalence” b ­ ecause the original term “conceptual relativity” may suggest a connection with relativism that would be utterly inappropriate. See M. De Caro, “Putnam’s Philosophy and Metaphilosophy,” introduction to Putnam, Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity, ed. De Caro (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 14.

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In a respectful but confrontational encounter with Blackburn, Putnam denies he is a naturalist as Dewey meant that term (i.e., as denoting a commitment to non-­supernaturalism in philosophy), on the ground that he is a theist and a practicing Jew [Simon Blackburn]. Although he remained a practicing Jew, Putnam ­later, in Ethics without Ontology [2004], renounced this supernaturalist (or onto-­theological) interpretation of theism, thus setting the stage for becoming a leading figure in what has come to be known as liberal naturalism.3 ­Here he also admits to rejecting a conception of philosophy as scientific reflections on science—­which is how Putnam interprets what he calls Quine’s “weird” naturalism. But for all of his attacks on scientism, it is well to remember that Putnam is one of the most impor­tant phi­los­o­phers of science of the past half ­century. Putnam’s scientific prowess and legendary capacity to summarize complex (often highly technical) ideas in ordinary language is on full display in his quick survey of interpretations of quantum mechanics and their differences regarding the question of how realistic they are—­that is, ­whether they accept the physical real­ity of postulated entities [David Albert]. Putnam speaks of the enormous amount he has learned from Dummett’s work and the philosophical significance of their ongoing discussions—­ especially about realism and antirealism—­that have lasted through the years [Michael Dummett]. Although Putnam rejected his own internal realism (in 1990) and the semantic antirealism that is central to it, he continued to think (and this is the lasting insight in Dummett’s position) that truth is very often not recognition-­transcendent. He mentions a rare exception: “­There do not happen to be any intelligent extra-­terrestrials.” This is an example of Putnam’s conceptual cartography—­mapping the normative relations of truth and rational acceptability from discourse to discourse—­which relies on the wisdom of pragmatism.4 “The heart of pragmatism is the idea that notions that are indispensable to our best practice are justified by that very fact; and in this re­spect, I am a pragmatist.” We are also told that t­ here are no “short ways with old and deep questions,” of which the realism / antirealism issue is one [Ian Hacking]. Putnam 3. For a detailed discussion of liberal naturalism from vari­ous points of view, see M. De Caro and D. Macarthur, eds., Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and De Caro and Macarthur, eds., Naturalism and Normativity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 4. For a discussion of the importance of this conception of Putnam as a conceptual cartographer, see David Macarthur, “The Many F ­ aces of Objectivity,” Análisis (Spain) 5, no. 1 (2018): 91–109.

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shows himself to be fully alive to the difficulties of this debate—­which is reflected in his many changes of mind between vari­ous subtly articulated realisms and antirealisms over his lifetime. To be a phi­los­o­pher is to look carefully at t­ hings, including looking carefully at looking itself. Reflection on one’s own experience is a key method in philosophy. Putnam relates a personal story about when, as a college student, he noticed that the colors of t­ hings looked dif­fer­ent to his right eye compared to how they looked to his left eye. But this reflection does not lead Putnam to deny that most vis­i­ble objects have stable colors. ­There is also an account of his changes of mind in the philosophy of perception—­perhaps better described as an evolution in his thinking—­from his 2007 view that b ­ ecause t­ here is no way to define sameness of qualitative character it was “a prob­ably unsolvable epistemological prob­lem,” to his ­later ac­cep­tance of Block’s neurophysiological solution to this prob­lem [Ned Block].5 And fi­nally, in his back-­and-­forth exchanges with McDowell we see clearly that philosophy is not primarily about achieving agreement but more about the quality of the ongoing conversation, one in which one is striving to remain open to learn from one’s conversational partners while retaining a certain critical detachment. Putnam’s famous gift for philosophically potent thought experiments is also on display h ­ ere, as is as his sense of the history of philosophy. As often in Putnam’s work, the reflections on “experience” involve engaging with ideas from a wide range of interlocutors, including Kant, Leibniz, Neurath, and Davidson.

5. See Ned Block, “Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh between Psy­chol­ogy and Neuroscience,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (2007): 481–548.

CHAPTER 9

Donald Davidson: On Conceptual Relativism (1987)

T

he “internal realism” I have defended has both a positive and a negative side.1 Internal realism denies that ­there is a fact of the ­matter as to which of the conceptual schemes that serve us so well—­the conceptual scheme of commonsense objects, with their vague identity conditions and their dispositional and counterfactual properties, or the scientific-­ philosophical scheme of fundamental particles and their “aggregations” (i.e., their mereological sums)—is “­really true.” Each of ­these schemes contains, in its pre­sent form, bits that ­w ill turn out to be “wrong” in one way or another—­bits that are right and wrong by the standards appropriate to the scheme itself—­but the question “which kind of ‘true’ is r­ eally Truth”— is one that internal realism rejects.

­ uman This paper was originally published as “Truth and Convention,” in Realism with a H Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 96–104. 1. See my Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) for a defense of internal realism.

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A ­simple example ­will illustrate what I mean.2 Consider “a world with three individuals” (Carnap often used examples like this when we w ­ ere ­doing inductive logic together in the early nineteen fifties), x1, x2, x3. How many objects are t­ here in this world? Well, I said “consider a world with just three individuals” ­didn’t I? So ­mustn’t ­there be three objects? Can ­there be non-­abstract entities which are not “individuals”? One pos­si­ble answer is “no.” We can identify “individual,” “object,” “par­tic­u­lar,” ­etc., and find no absurdity in a world with just three objects which are in­de­pen­dent, unrelated, “logical atoms.” But ­there are perfectly good logical doctrines which lead to dif­fer­ent results. Suppose, for example, like some Polish logicians, I believe that for ­every two particulars ­there is an object which is their sum. (This is the basic assumption of “mereology,” the calculus of parts and ­wholes in­ven­ted by Leśniewski.) If I ignore, for the moment, the so-­called “null object,” then Iw ­ ill find that the world of “three individuals” (as Carnap might have had it, at least when he was ­doing inductive logic) actually contains seven objects: World 1 World 2 x1, x2, x3 x1, x2, x3, x1+ x2, x1+ x3, x2 + x3, x1+ x2 + x3 (A world à la Carnap) (“Same” world à la Polish logician) Some logicians (though not Leśniewski) would also say that t­ here “null object” which they count as a part of e­ very object. If we accepted this suggestion, and added this individual (call it O), then we would say that The Polish Logician’s world contains eight objects. Now, the classic metaphysical realist way of dealing with such prob­ lems is well known. It is to say that ­there is a single world (think of this as a piece of dough) which we can slice into pieces in dif­fer­ent ways. But this “cookie cutter” meta­phor found­ers on the question, “What are the ‘parts’ of this dough?” If the answer is that x1, x2, x3, x1+ x2, x1+ x3, x2 + x3, x1+ x2 + x3 are all the dif­fer­ent “pieces,” then we have not a neutral description, but rather a partisan description—­just the description of the Warsaw logician!

2. This example comes from my The Many F ­ aces of Realism: The Paul Carus Lectures (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987).

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And it is no accident that metaphysical realism cannot r­ eally recognize the phenomenon of conceptual relativity—­for that phenomenon turns on the fact that the logical primitives themselves, and in par­tic­u­lar the notions of object and existence, have a multitude of dif­f er­ent uses rather than one absolute “meaning.” An example which is historically impor­tant, if more complex than the one just given, is the ancient dispute about the ontological status of the Euclidean plane. Imagine a Euclidean plane. Think of the points in the plane. Are ­these parts of the plane, as Leibniz thought? Or are they “mere limits,” as Kant said?3 If you say, in this case, that ­these are “two ways of slicing the same dough,” then you must admit that what is a part of space, in one version of the facts, is an abstract entity (say, a set of convergent spheres—­a lthough ­there is not, of course, a unique way of construing points as limits) in the other version. But then you w ­ ill have conceded that which entities are “abstract entities” and which are “concrete objects,” at least, is version-­ relative. Metaphysical realists to this day continue to argue about w ­ hether points (spacetime points, nowadays, rather than points in the plane or in three-­dimensional space) are individuals or properties, particulars or mere limits, ­etc. My view is that God himself, if he consented to answer the question “Do points ­really exist or are they mere limits?,” would say “I ­don’t know”; not ­because His omniscience is ­limited, but ­because ­there is a limit to how far questions make sense. One last point before I leave ­these examples: given a version, the question, “How many objects are ­there?” has an answer, namely “three” in the case of the first version (“Carnap’s World”) and “seven” in the case of the second version (“The Polish Logician’s World”). Once we make clear how we are using “object” (or “exist”), the question “How many objects exist?” has an answer that is not at all a ­matter of “convention.” That is why I say that this sort of example does not support cultural relativism. Of course, our concepts are culturally relative; but it does not follow that the truth or falsity of what we say using t­ hose

3. “. . . (dem) mathematischen Punkte, der einfach, aber kein Teil, sondern bloss die Grenze eines Raumes ist. . . .” Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B470; note also the flat statement “Nun besteht der Raum nicht aus einfachen Teilen, sondern aus Räumen” (B463). Both remarks occur on the “Antithesis” side of the Second Antinomy.

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concepts is simply “determined” by the culture. But the idea that t­ here is an Archimedean point (or a use of “exist” inherent in the world itself) from which the question “How many objects ­really exist?” makes sense, is an illusion. Nor does it help, in general, to talk about “meanings” or “truth conditions.” Consider again the two sentences (I am referring to the same example as before): 1) ­There is an object which is partly red and partly black. 2) ­There is an object which is red and an object which is black. Observe that 2) is a sentence which is true in both the Carnapian and the Polish Logician’s version if, say, x 1 is red and x2 , is black. 1) is a sentence which is true in the Polish Logician’s version. What is its status in the Carnapian version? Let me introduce an imaginary phi­los­o­pher whom I w ­ ill call “Professor Antipode.” Professor Antipode is violently opposed to Polish mereology. He talks like this, “I know what ­you’re talking about if by an object you mean a car, or a bee, or a ­human being, or a book, or the Eiffel Tower. I even understand it if you refer to my nose or the hood of my car as ‘an object.’ But when phi­los­o­phers say that t­ here is an ‘object’ consisting of the Eiffel Tower and my nose, that’s just plain crazy. T ­ here simply is no such object. Carnap was talking just fine when he said to you ‘consider a world with just three objects’—­I ignore Carnap’s regrettable tendency to what he called ‘tolerance’—­and it’s crazy to suppose that ­every finite universe contains all the objects t­ hose Poles would invent, or, if you please, ‘postulate.’ You c­ an’t create objects by ‘postulation’ any more than you can bake a cake by ‘postulation’.” Now, the language Carnap had in mind (we w ­ ere working together on inductive logic at the time, and most often the languages we considered had only one-­place predicates) prob­ably did not contain a two-­place predicate for the relation “part of”; but even if it did, we can imagine Professor Antipode denying that t­ here is any object of which x 1 and x2 are both “parts.” “If ­there ­were such an object, it would have to be dif­fer­ent from both of them,” he would say (and ­here the Polish logician would agree), “and the only object dif­fer­ent from both of them in the world you showed us is x3. But x3 does not overlap with e­ ither x1 or x2. Only in the overheated imagination of the Polish Logician is t­ here such an additional object as

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x1+x2.” If we add “Part of” to Carnap’s ­little language, so that sentence 1) can be expressed in it, thus: 3) (∃x)(∃y)(∃z) (y is Part Of x & z is Part Of x & Red(y) & Black (z)). then, true to his anti-­Polish form, Professor Antipode ­will say that this sentence is false. “­W hether you say it in plain En­glish or in fancy symbols,” he growls, “if you have a world of three non-­overlapping individuals, which is what Carnap described, and each is wholly red or wholly black, which is what Carnap said, then t­ here cannot be such a t­ hing in that world as an ‘object which is partly red and partly black.’ Talking about the ‘mereological sum of x1and x2’ makes no more sense than talking about ‘the mereological sum of my nose and the Eiffel Tower’.” Professor Antipode, it w ­ ill be seen, is a staunch metaphysical realist. He knows that only some objects are parts of other objects, and that to say that for ­every pair of objects t­ here is an object of which they both are parts (which is an axiom of mereology) is just “rubbish.” (In the world Carnap ­imagined) 1) is false and 2) is true, and ­there’s the w ­ hole story. Carnap himself would have taken a very dif­fer­ent attitude. Carnap was a conceptual relativist (that is, in part, what his famous Princi­ple of Tolerance is all about), and he would have said that we can choose to make 1) false (that is, we can choose to talk the way Professor Antipode talks) or we can choose to make 1) true—to talk as the Polish Logician talks. T ­ here is even—­and this is very impor­tant—­there is even a way in which we can have the best of both worlds. We keep Carnap’s version as our official version (our “unabbreviated language”); we refrain from adding Part Of as a new primitive, as we did before, but we introduce Part Of as a defined expression (as “abbreviated language,” or, as Quine often puts it, as a façon de parler). This can be done, not by giving an explicit definition of Part Of, but by giving a scheme which translates the Polish Logician’s language into Carnap’s language (and such a scheme can easily be given in a recursive way, in the case of the kind of first-­order language with finitely many individuals that Carnap had in mind). U ­ nder such a scheme, 1) turns out to say no more and no less than 2). (To verify this, assuming that “red” and “black” are predicates of Carnap’s language, observe that the only way a Polish Logician’s object—­a mereological sum—­can be partly red is by containing a red atom, and the only way it can be partly black is by containing a black atom. So if (I) is true

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in the Polish Logician’s language, then t­ here is at least one red atom and at least one black atom—­which is what (II) says in Carnap’s language. Conversely, if ­there is at least one black atom and at least one red atom, then their mereological sum is an “object” (in the Polish Logician’s sense) which is partly red and partly black). While the formal possibility of d ­ oing this—of “interpreting” the Polish logician’s version in Carnap’s version—is easy to establish as a result in mathematical logic, the philosophical significance of this fact, of the interpretability of the second language in the first, is more controversial. An objection—an objection to the idea that this kind of interpretability supports conceptual relativity in any way—­might come from a phi­los­o­pher who pursues what is called “meaning theory.” Such a phi­los­o­pher might ask, “What is the point of treating 1) as an abbreviation of 2), if it ­doesn’t, in fact, have the same meaning as 2)?” Meaning theorists who follow Donald Davidson might argue that, while 1) and 2) are “mathematically equivalent” (if, like the Polish logician, and unlike Professor Antipode, we are willing to count the axioms of mereology as having the status of logical or mathematical truths), still sentence 2) is not a sentence one would ordinarily offer as an explanation of the truth conditions of sentence 1); or, at least, ­doing so would hardly be in accordance with what is called “translation practice.” And a “meaning theory,” it is said, must not correlate just any extensionally or even mathematically correct truth conditions with the sentences of the language the theory describes; the sentence used to state a truth condition for a sentence must be one that might be correlated with that sentence by “translation practice.” What­ever one is d ­ oing when one invents reductive definitions that enable one to explain away talk about “suspicious” entities as a mere façon de parler, it obviously ­isn’t just “radical translation.” One suggestion as to what one is ­doing comes from a classic article by Quine.4 In “On What ­There Is” he suggested that the stance to take in a case such as the one I have been describing—a case in which one language seems more useful than another, ­because it countenances entities which (although philosophically “suspicious”) enable us to say vari­ous ­things in fewer words, and in which the at first blush “richer” language is 4. W. V. O. Quine, “On What ­There Is,” in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 1–19.

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formally interpretable in the at first blush “poorer” language might be to say—­this is a stance Professor Antipode might adopt—­“Sentence 1), asserting as it does the existence of mereological sums, is literally false. But if one wants to go on talking like the Polish logician while rejecting his undesirable ontological commitments, one can do that. One can responsibly take the view that the Polish logician’s story is only a useful make-­believe, and yet employ its idioms, on the ground that each of the sentences in that idiom, what­ever its ‘meaning,’ can be regarded—by fiat, if you like—as merely a con­ve­nient abbreviation of what­ever sentence in the ‘unabbreviated language’ it is correlated with by the interpretation scheme.” To give another example, one long familiar to students of mathematical philosophy, Frege and Russell showed that number theory is interpretable in set theory. This means that, if one wants to avoid ontological commitments to “unreduced numbers” (to numbers as objects over and above sets)—­and if one does not mind commitment to sets!—­one can treat ­every sentence of number theory, and, indeed, ­every sentence in the language which uses a number word, as a mere abbreviation for another sentence, one which quantifies over sets, but not over any such entities as “numbers.” One need not claim that the sentence of number theory and its translation in set theory have the same “meaning.” If they ­don’t, so much the worse for our intuitive notion of a “number”! What this kind of interpretation—­call it reductive interpretation—­provides is evidence against the real existence of the unreduced entities, as anything over and above the entities countenanced by the language to which we are d ­ oing the reducing. The moral we should draw from the work of Frege and Russell is not that ­there is a conceptual choice to be made between using a language which countenances only sets and one which countenances sets and numbers, but that—­unless the numbers are in fact identical with the set with which we identified them—­there is no reason to believe in the existence of numbers. Talk of numbers is best treated as a mere façon de parler. Or so Quine maintains. It is easy to see why Professor Antipode should like this line. In the case of the two versions we have been discussing, the reductive interpretation is syncategorematic; that is, it interprets sentence 1) (and likewise any other sentence of Carnap’s language) as a w ­ hole, but does not identify the individual words in 1) with individual words and phrases in 2); nor does it identify “mereological sums” with any objects in the language to which

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the reducing is being done. 1) as a w ­ hole is “translated” by 2) as a w ­ hole; but the noun-­phrase “object which is partly red and partly black” has no translation by itself. In this case the moral of the translation—­the moral if Professor Antipode imitates Quine’s rhe­toric—is slightly dif­fer­ent. We cannot say ­either mereological sums are identical with the entities with which we identified them or they ­don’t ­really exist (­because the “translation,” or relative interpretation of the Polish logician’s language in Carnap’s language, ­didn’t identify “mereological sums” with anything, it just showed how to translate sentences about them syncategorematically). The moral is rather, mereological sums ­don’t ­really exist, but it is sometimes useful to talk as if they existed. Of course Professor Antipode would be delighted with this moral! I ­don’t mean to give the impression that the possibility of reducing entities away by a formal translation scheme is always decisive evidence that they d ­ on’t ­really exist, according to Quine. Sometimes we have the choice of e­ ither ­doing without one batch of entities, call them the A entities, or ­doing without another batch, call them the B entities—­the reduction may be pos­si­ble in ­either direction. In such a case, Occam’s Razor ­doesn’t know who to shave! Or the reducing language may itself seem suspicious (some p ­ eople think sets are very suspicious entities). But, when the reducing language (the prima facie “poorer” language) is one we are happy with, and the reduction does not go both ways, it is clear that Quine regards this as very strong evidence for denying the real existence of the unreduced entities. Carnap, on the other hand, rejected the idea that ­there is “evidence” against the “existence” of numbers (or against the existence of numbers as objects distinct from sets). He would, I am sure, have similarly rejected that t­ here is evidence against the “existence” of mereological sums. I know what he would have said about this question: he would have said that the question is one of a choice of a language. On some days it may be con­ve­ nient to use what I have been calling “Carnap’s language” (although he would not have objected to the other language); on other days it may be con­ ve­nient to use the Polish logician’s language. For some purposes it may be con­ve­nient to regard the Polish logician’s language of mereological sums as “primitive notation”; in other contexts it may be better to take Carnap’s language as the primitive notation and to regard the Polish logician’s language as “abbreviations,” or defined notation. And I agree with him.

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It ­w ill be seen that ­there are a number of dif­fer­ent stances one could take to the question of the relation between 1) and 2). One could say: a) The two sentences are mathematically equivalent. b) The two sentences are logically equivalent. c) The two sentences are neither logically or mathematically equivalent. d) The first sentence is false and the second true (Professor Antipode’s position). e) The two sentences are alike in truth value and meaning. f) The two sentences are alike in truth value and unlike in meaning. g) The second sentence can be used as an abbreviation of the first, but this is ­really just a useful “make believe.” My own position—­a nd my own internal realism—is that ­there is no fact of the m ­ atter as to which of ­these positions is correct. Taking the original dispute up into the “metalevel” and reformulating it as a dispute about the properties—­mathematical or logical equivalence, synonymy, or whatever—of linguistic forms ­doesn’t help. None of ­these notions is well defined enough to be a useful tool in such cases. Suppose, for example, I follow the apparently innocent route pioneered by Donald Davidson, and say that the test for meaning is to see what we get when we construct a theory of the language which is (i) recursively presented (in the style of a Tarskian truth definition), and (ii) in accord with translation practice. Obviously, I s­ hall have to admit that it violates standard translation practice to give 2) as a translation of l).5 This s­ ettles the truth value of e) above; e) is false, w ­ hether the sentences be alike or unlike in truth value, since they are not the same in meaning. Suppose we follow Davidson farther, and accept the central Davidsonian tenet that if I regard a sentence in an “alien language” as meaningful (and I claim to know what it means), then I must be able to give (or would be able to give, if I w ­ ere sufficiently self-­conscious about my knowledge) a truth condition for that sentence in my “own” language. (One which follows from a “meaning theory” which is in conformity with the “constraints on translation practice.”) If my “own” language is Carnap’s, and we accept it 5. For example, even the truth-­functional connectives are not preserved if we “translate” 1) as 2).

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that no “truth condition” for 1) stateable in Carnap’s language ­w ill satisfy the constraints on translation practice any better than 2) did, then the conclusion is forced: the Polish logician’s language is meaningless. We have arrived at a strong metaphysical result from what looked like a bit of ordinary language philosophizing (aided with a bit of Tarskian semantics) about the notion of “meaning”! Of course we might simply adopt the Polish Logician’s language as our own language to begin with. But what we cannot do, according to Davidson, is regard both choices as genuinely open. It seems to me that the very assumption that t­ here is such a t­ hing as the radical interpreter’s “own” language—­one language in which he can give the truth conditions for ­every sentence in ­every language he claims to be able to understand—is what forces the conclusion. As long as one operates with this assumption, conceptual relativism ­w ill seem unintelligible (as it does to Davidson).6 But if one recognizes that the radical interpreter himself may have more than one “home” conceptual scheme, and that “translation practice” may be governed by more than one set of constraints, then one sees that conceptual relativity does not dis­appear when we inquire into the “meanings” of the vari­ous conceptual alternatives: it simply reproduces itself at a metalinguistic level!

6. Donald Davidson, “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 183–198.

CHAPTER 10

Jennifer Case: On Conceptual Pluralism and Conceptual Relativity (2001)

J

ennifer Case ­here continues her profound engagement with my writings. This searching paper needs to be read with the pre­de­ces­sor paper that she refers to in her notes. “On the Right Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” a paper which has clarified my own thinking on ­these extremely difficult issues. I w ­ ill begin by recapitulating a point that she makes in the e­ arlier paper, and then segue into the pre­sent paper.—­But even before that, I would like to say a word about some of the misunderstandings that I encounter in the lit­er­a­ture in connection with my notion of “conceptual relativity,” misunderstandings that she discussed in the e­ arlier paper. The most common misunderstandings are (1) that by a “conceptual scheme” I meant any body of thought and talk at all, including our ordinary talk of ­tables and chairs; and (2) that by “conceptual relativity” I meant a doctrine which implies that ­every conceptual scheme in this sense,

Putnam’s reply to Jennifer Case, “The Heart of Putnam’s Pluralistic Realism,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4, no. 218: Putnam with His Replies: Con­temporary Phi­los­o­phers / Philosophes contemporains (December 2001): 417–430.

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­every body of thought and talk, has an alternative which is incompatible with it (sometimes my critics miss the qualifier—­“at face value”) but equally true. According to t­ hese misunderstandings of the notion, “­there is a computer on this desk” is true or false depending on what “conceptual scheme” one happens to pick.—­But the prob­lem with this is that, as ­things stand right now (I happen to be typing ­these words into a computer on the desk in front of me), if anyone w ­ ere to use t­ hose words to make a false statement, then e­ ither (s)he would be talking about a dif­fer­ent desk or a dif­ fer­ent time and place, or (s)he would be giving at least one of ­those words a dif­fer­ent meaning or reference in some other way. ­There is no in­ter­est­ing sense in which the truth of “­There is a computer on this desk” is “relative to the conceptual scheme,” as opposed to depending (trivially) on what content ­those words are being used to express—­which of course depends on the language the words are in and the context of their use. It was never part of my doctrine of conceptual relativity that ­e very statement is an example of it, and while the relativity of the content of our utterances to the context of their use is indeed something that interests me very much, it is not an example of what I called conceptual relativity.1 Obviously t­ hese misunderstandings are my fault as well as that of the misunderstanders, for I did not say clearly what I meant by a “conceptual scheme.” This is the gap that Jennifer Case has worked to fill in the ­earlier paper to which I referred. What she called attention to is that the examples I used over and over again—(1) the choice, in dif­fer­ent contexts, of including or not including mereological sums in one’s ontology; (2) the choice, in formalized geometry, of taking points to be individuals or taking them to be convergent sequences of spheres (or of other solids—­not to mention the vari­ous dif­fer­ent ways in which the notion of a “convergent sequence” has been formalized!); (3) the choice, in a certain portion of classical electrodynamics between taking the action between charged particles to be mediated by

1. The importance of the context-­sensitivity of utterance-­content is stressed in my The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), as well as in “Strawson and Skepticism,” in The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1998), 273–283, and “Skepticism,” in Philosophie in Synthelischer Absich, ed. Marcelo Stamm (Stuttgart: Klett-­Cotta, 1998).



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“fields” of by “point-­source retarded potentials”;2 and (4) the choice, in mathematical logic, between taking sets to be characteristic functions or taking them to be primitive objects and taking functions to be sets of ordered pairs3—­are of a very special kind. For one t­ hing they all belong to science (although they do not all belong to empirical science), or to descriptive contexts in which a certain amount of scientific machinery (mereological sums, terms from geometry) has been introduced. [In fact, all of ­these examples have been formalized. Although the question, ­whether points in space are “­simples” or “mere limits” was posed by Kant (as a part of the Second Antinomy in The Critique of Pure Reason), the idea of identifying “limits” themselves with mathematical objects, namely equivalence classes of series, is due to Whitehead and Russell, and figures in their formalization of geometry in Principia Mathematica. Mereology, of course, was formalized by Leśniewski, and electrodynamics is itself a mathematized theory.] If instead of using the vague expression “conceptual scheme,” which invites all the misinterpretations I complained about, I had followed Case’s suggestion in the e­ arlier paper and spoken of optional languages, all of t­ hese misinterpretations might have been avoided. In that paper [“On the Right Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”], Case wrote: To speak the language of the Polish Logician is to employ the conceptual scheme of mereological sums, but it is not to speak Polish. A speaker of Polish may employ the Polish Logician’s conceptual 2. The latter approach is due to Liénard (1898) and Wiechert (1900). See, for example, W. K. H. Panofsky and M. Phillips, Classical Electricity and Magnetism (New York: Addison-­ Wesley, 1964). For an illustration of the way in which retarded potentials and fields are regarded as equivalent, see J. S. Bell, “How to Teach Special Relativity,” in his Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 67–79. On page  79, n.  9, Bell remarks that certain fields “follow from the point-­source retarded potentials”—­i.e., once he has used the Liénard-­Wiechert theory, which is an action at a distance theory which does not involve fields as causal intermediaries between the particles, to determine the potentials he feels perfectly f­ ree to regard them as expressions in a field theory! 3. A characteristic function is a function whose values are 0 and 1. In hierarchy theory, a branch of mathematical logic in which I published papers for many years, it is customary to take numbers as individuals and to identify sets of numbers with characteristic functions (and sets of sets of numbers with characteristic functions with characteristic functions as arguments, ­etc.), rather than to take sets as primitive and introduce functions as sets of ordered pairs. No mathematician would suppose that this “ontological difference” had the slightest mathematical or metaphysical significance.

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scheme on one occasion and Carnap’s on another, all the while speaking Polish. This situation may be generalized: for any natu­ral language L, a speaker of L may employ the Polish Logician’s conceptual scheme on one occasion and Carnap’s on another, all the while employing only sentences of L. . . . Reading Davidson’s discussion of conceptual schemes as contravening Putnam’s agenda requires overlooking the difference between natu­ral languages and languages like Carnap’s and the Polish Logician’s. For lack of a better term, let me call languages of the latter variety “optional languages.” If having a conceptual scheme is to be associated with having a language, it should be associated with having an optional language. Modifying a remark of Davidson’s, we may say that where conceptual schemes differ, so do optional languages. It is not necessarily the case that where conceptual schemes differ so do natu­ral languages. Someone who has a single natu­ral language may have multiple optional languages and, therefore, multiple conceptual schemes. . . . ​In the following passage from “Truth and Convention”[4] I have added bracketed subscripts to each occurrence of the term ‘language’ to indicate what should be the sense in which readers should understand the term. The subscript “o” stands for “optional”; the subscript “n” stands for “natu­ral.”5 ­ ere is Case’s subscripted version of the passage in question: “It seems to H me that the very assumption that t­ here is such a t­ hing as the radical interpreter’s ‘own’ language(o)—­one language(o) in which he can give the truth-­conditions for ­every sentence in ­every language(o,n) he claims to be able to understand—is what forces the conclusion. As long as one operates with this assumption, conceptual relativism w ­ ill seem unintelligible as it does to Davidson. But if one recognizes that the radical interpreter himself may have more than one ‘home’ conceptual scheme [i.e., language(o)—­J. Case], and that ‘translation practice’ may be governed by more than one set of ‘constraints,’ then one sees that conceptual relativity does not dis­ 4. “Truth and Convention” is chapter 6 of my Realism with a H ­ uman Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 5. Jennifer Case, “On the Right Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 35, no. 1 (1997): 11–12.



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appear when we inquire into the ‘meanings’ of the vari­ous conceptual alternatives: it simply reproduces itself at a metalinguistic level!”6 Speaking of “optional languages,” as Case suggests h ­ ere, has the virtue of drawing an impor­tant distinction (one which I do not claim was clear in my mind before reading Case’s e­ arlier paper—­thus my pre­sent understanding of “conceptual relativity” is in an impor­tant re­spect due to Case herself). The distinction is between parts of language that masters of a language and possessors of the cultural inheritance that is inseparable from being a master of a natu­ral language have no option but to employ and parts that are genuinely optional. We are not, given the material and social worlds in which we live, genuinely ­free not to quantify over ­tables and chairs, for example. But we are ­free to employ the conceptual scheme of mereology or not, even in mathe­matics, even in empirical description, even, for that m ­ atter, in philosophy. If we are geometers, we are completely ­free to ­either take points as primitive objects (as Kantian “­simples”) or to identify them with “limits,” and if we do the latter, we are f­ ree to take ­those limits to be equivalence classes of convergent sequences as well! In the context of J. S. Bell’s ­little calculation that I cite in a footnote to this paper, he was ­free to use only Maxwell’s theory or to simplify his calculation, as he did, by using the point-­source retarded potential formation of Lienard and Wiechert. And of course no working logician would regard it as making the slightest difference ­whether one takes sets as primitive and identifies functions with a kind of set or does the reverse. At the same time, at least some of ­these choices correspond to strikingly dif­fer­ent images. That dif­fer­ent images (he called them Weltbilder— ”Worldpictures”) can have exactly the same empirical application, can, in some sense, be cognitively equivalent—­was, as far as I know, first pointed out by Hertz in the introduction to his Princi­ples of Mechanics. Conceptual relatively as I have explained and defended it [especially in the reply to Blackburn that she cites, but not only t­ here] insists that Hertz had a profound insight, that ­there are indeed cases in which dif­fer­ent—­and seemingly incompatible—­scientific images [if we formalize them, theories with ­either dif­fer­ent ontologies (mereological sums or no mereological sums, points as individuals, or extended geometrical objects as the only individuals, fields and only contact action or only particles 6. Putnam, “Truth and Convention,” 104.

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and action at a distance) or with dif­fer­ent identify relations among the ele­ments of the ontology (between sets and functions, for example)] are cognitively equivalent.7 It is not a doctrine about all bodies of thought and discourse whatsoever, but about certain areas of thought. It concerns scientific images and optional languages, just as she said. It does not claim ­either that every­thing we say and think belongs to a “conceptual scheme” in the sense I had in mind (an optional language in some area of science), nor does it claim that every­thing that anyone might call a “conceptual scheme” has a significant alternative. As she emphasizes, it has nothing to do with cultural relativism. And it certainly does not claim that genuinely incompatible theories can be true; indeed, I criticized Goodman for claiming precisely that.8 I have spent so long on Case’s ­earlier paper, ­because this seems an excellent opportunity for me to acknowledge in print the importance of her clarification. In the pre­sent paper she again finds my terminology unfortunate in certain re­spects, and again I have to agree that this is right. Specifically—­and embarrassingly—­she points to a serious inconsistency in my use of the term “conceptual relativity.” On the one hand, she points out that in the preface to Realism with a ­Human Face, I used the term to cover a doctrine of the interpenetration of fact and convention. An e­ arlier statement of that doctrine, one I still regard as very impor­tant, was the paper “Convention: A Theme in Philosophy.”9 On the other hand, I use the term to cover what I call “the phenomenon of conceptual relativity,” a phenomenon I first defined u ­ nder the name “cognitive equivalence” in a paper titled simply “Equivalence” and that was a central topic in my Carus Lectures.10 Two formalized or at least mathematically formulated theories or scientific descriptions are instance of conceptual relativity in this sense if: (1) they at least look incompatible; in7. See my Realism and Reason, vol. 3 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), especially the Introduction and chapters  2, 10, 11, and 12; The Many ­Faces of Realism (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987), especially Lectures 1 and 2; the last chapter of my Repre­sen­ta­tion and Real­ity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988); chapter 6 of Realism with a ­Human Face; and “Model Theory and the ‘Factuality’ of Semantics,” in Reflections on Chomsky, ed. Alex George (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 8. In chapter  6 of my Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 9. Chapter 10 of my Realism and Reason. 10. Ibid., chapter 2. My Carus lectures ­were published as The Many ­Faces of Realism.



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deed, if we simply conjoin them without taking account of the dif­fer­ent ways the terms are used, we get a contradiction at once. (E.g., if we conjoin a theory in which points are sets of convergent spheres, or equivalence classes of such sets, with a theory in which spheres are sets of point or mereological sums of points, and we assume the Axiom of Foundation of set theory we get an immediate contradiction. Yet, as Case notes, I find it silly to suppose ­there is a fact of the ­matter as to which of ­these theories is “­really true.”); (2) T ­ here is a way of translating each statement in the “optional language” of the one theory or description into a statement in the optional language of the other which “translates” scientific explanations into equally acceptable scientific explanations.11 I continue to agree with Hertz that this phenomenon is real and impor­tant, and to stress that classical metaphysical forms of realism are forced to deny its existence, with disastrous results. Moreover, as Case notes, conceptual relatively is only a special case of the wider phenomenon she calls (and I should have called) pluralism. The fact that the contents of a room may be partly described in two very dif­ fer­ent vocabularies cannot be an instance of conceptual relativity in my sense, b ­ ecause (as just noted) that phenomenon involves descriptions that are cognitively equivalent in the sense just described, but which are incompatible if taken at face value. But the fact that the contents of a room may be partly described in the “optional language” of fields and particles and the fact that it may also be partly described (in natu­ral language) by saying that ­there is a chair in front of a desk are not in any way “incompatible”: “the room may be partly described by saying ­there is a chair in front of a desk” and “the room may be partly described as consisting of fields and particles” d ­ on’t even sound “incompatible.” And they are not cognitively equivalent (even if we do not bar the fantastic possibility of defining terms like “desk” and “­table” in the language of fundamental physics, the field-­ particle description contains a ­great deal of information that is not translatable into the language of desks and chairs).12 That we can use both of 11. See my “Equivalence” (chapter 10 of my Realism and Reason), 38–40, for a more precise account. 12. Not only is such a definition impossible in practice, it would violate the linguistic character of words like “desk” and “­table” (cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.  E.  M. Anscombe, Peter Hacker, and Joachim Schulte [ed. Hacker and Schulte] (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), §75, §76).

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t­ hese schemes without being required to reduce one or both of them to some single fundamental and universal ontology is the doctrine of pluralism; and while conceptual relativity implies pluralism, the reverse is not the case. Similarly, the choice between cognitively equivalent but seemingly incompatible descriptions is an instance of what I have called “convention,” and cognitive equivalence itself depends on informal judgements about what are the phenomena to be explained;13 but ­there are many cases of convention which have nothing to do with cognitive equivalence. Thus conceptual relativity implies the interpenetration of fact and convention, but the reverse is not the case. Once again, I have to thank Jennifer Case for pressing impor­tant clarifications upon me.

13. See again my “Equivalence,” 38–40.

CHAPTER 11

David L. Anderson: On Internal Realism (1993)

I

am grateful to David Anderson for his profound analy­sis of the debates pro and con of my “internal realism.” Anderson is quite right to point out that my model-­theoretic arguments ­were not intended as ­either ­simple reductios or as ­simple burden-­of-­the-­proof arguments.1 How they w ­ ere intended is something he explains very well. Anderson also does a fine job (for someone whose own sympathies are still with metaphysical realism!) in explaining how my “internal realism” is in the realistic spirit. The following anecdote may serve as a footnote to Anderson’s claim that the assumption he calls “the coherence of scepticism” tends to be central to the thinking of metaphysical realists. (It has to do with the question, which Anderson discusses, of why I began Reason, Truth and History Putnam’s reply to David L. Anderson, “What Is Realistic about Putnam’s Internal Realism?,” Philosophical Topics 20, no.  1: The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. Christopher  S. Hill (1992): 49–84. The special issue was published in 1993. 1. I make this point also in “Model Theory and the ‘Factuality’ of Semantics,” in my Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 351–375.

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with the Brain in a Vat argument.)2 I gave a seminar at Prince­ton in the late seventies at which I presented and defended my model-­theoretic arguments. David Lewis, who was pre­sent, commented that “­there must be something wrong somewhere”—­because, if my arguments ­were right, it followed that we could not be brains in a vat! I also agree that the position Anderson calls “causal realism” (this consists of the three princi­ples Anderson regards as forming the core of metaphysical realism plus ac­cep­tance of the sort of causal constraints on reference that I defend) is forced to give up a good deal that is central to metaphysical realism. At this point, I should like to add the following remark to Anderson’s discussion of this point (I s­ hall say more about causal realism in the sequel): Not all of the sequences of events that Brains in a Vat ­w ill regard as causal sequences need be causal sequences from our unenvatted point of view. Consider a paradigm case of causation in the Brain in a Vat world; say a “fire” (involving, say, “wood”) “producing” “smoke.” If we say—­and this seems to me the right course for a causal realist—­that the Brains in a Vat are, unbeknownst to themselves, referring to pro­cesses, data, e­ tc., in the computer when they speak of “fires,” “smoke,” and the like in Vat En­glish, still the relation between what­ever in the computer corresponds to “fire” and what corresponds to the subsequent “smoke” need not be that the former computer-­object ­causes the latter. Rather, it could be that the entire sequence is programmed to occur in that order when one of the brains emits the appropriate electrical impulses. In that case, ­there ­w ill, indeed, be a counterfactual-­supporting relation between “fires” (in certain “substances”) and “smoke” in the Brain in a Vat World; a relation that may be relied on, used to justify inference licenses, ­etc., just as the relation of causation is relied on, used to justify inference licenses, ­etc., among the unenvatted, but it is not the same relation. Brains in a Vat can no more refer to what the unenvatted call “causation” than they can to what the unenvatted call “fire.” For causal realists insist that the causal constraints that apply to our reference to any physical relation apply to reference to causation itself.3 But by the same token, we cannot be assumed to have available a 2. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 3. More precisely, ­those constraints apply to reference to such predicates as “sequence of ­causes and effects.” Michael Devitt’s well-­k nown claim that “causal connection”

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notion of “causation” that transcends our par­tic­u­lar way of being situated in the world. But then, neither can we assume that we have a notion of “the intrinsic nature of mind-­independent real­ity”—­for what is that supposed to come to? If we say, with many scientific realists, that the intrinsic ­nature is given by the predicates needed, at the deepest level, for causal explanation, then what “intrinsic nature” refers to ­w ill depend on our situation in the world, just as the reference of “vat” depends on our situation in the world. It would seem that causal realism cannot give us the “view from nowhere” that metaphysical realism requires—or even the resources to allow that such a view is conceivable. Anderson on Internal Realism

I turn now to the question of w ­ hether “internal realism” is a form of “verificationism.” Anderson points out that if it is, it is a very dif­fer­ent form of (early) logical positivism. He notes, that, e.g., the attitude ­toward statements about the past is very dif­fer­ent. As Anderson points out, my position does not have the consequence that “Dinosaurs existed 50 million years ago” depends for its truth-­value upon the existence of certain bones to be found in museums ­today. As I pointed out in response to Gary Ebbs, my position entails that “Lizzie Borden murdered her parents with an axe” has a truth-­value regardless of ­whether evidence that exists now or that w ­ ill exist in the ­f uture ­will ever enable anyone to verify that Miss Borden committed the crime or to verify that she did not. Indeed, even if quantum mechanical fluctuations, or what­ever, have destroyed the relevant evidence, I maintain that the accusation against Miss Borden has a definite, if unknown, truth-­value. In this sense, it is consistent with my position that some statements should depend for their truth on “conditions the obtaining of which may be, in princi­ple, inaccessible to ­human beings” (that is, inaccessible as t­ hings now stand, even if they w ­ ere at one time accessible). Since this is closely connected with Anderson’s (M2), and Anderson grants that I could interpret (Ml) and (M3) harmlessly, it is not clear that

is related to causal connection itself by causal connection would require that C(E,C), where E is the expression “causal connection” and C is the relation of causal connection, violating the Axiom of Foundation for relations.

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his three “M” princi­ples do succeed in drawing the line between metaphysical realism and “merely” internal realism.4 (But this is what one should expect if I am right, and, in the end, ­there is no way of capturing what the metaphysical realist “is trying to say”! And, it does seem remarkably difficult to make clear just what statements ­really imply “metaphysical realism.”) Late logical positivism (­a fter about 1936) allowed confirmability to any degree as a sufficient condition for cognitive meaning; but the predicate “true” was not explained in terms of confirmation conditions, but rather treated as, in effect, a device for disquotation. Thus, on Carnap’s post-1936 position, “S is true or false” is just a way of saying “S or not-­S” (where S is any cognitively meaningful statement), and this is a tautology— it has no content at all, but just expresses our decision to say of e­ very S in the scientific language that it is “true or false.” On my position, in contrast, truth is a genuine property of some of our statements, one that we wish the statements we make to have, when we are sincere and responsible. It is not a ­matter of convention that e­ very “scientific” statement is “true or false”—­ indeed, quite a few statements in science may well lack a truth-­value (see [his] note 25). And truth is, moreover, a property that frequently depends on the antics of objects distant from the speaker; in this sense, as Anderson points out, my view does treat truth as, in his terminology, “correspondence.” My view has no similarity to logical positivism early or late. Nor does my view limit truth to what is accessible to ­human beings. Indeed, in Repre­sen­ta­tion and Real­ity, I myself appealed to an argument of Thomas Nagel’s (a hard-­core metaphysical realist if anyone is) to the effect that it would be absurd to suppose that that ­there could not be intelligent beings so much smarter than we that some of their thoughts could not even be understood by us; and surely (both Nagel and I argued), some of t­ hose thoughts could be true. (They could also be warrantedly assertable ­under good enough epistemic conditions—­warrantedly assertable by ­those 4. T ­ hese are (Ml) Correspondence Truth (“. . . ​A statement is correspondence true if and only if it bears the (unique) relation ‘correspondence’ to Ding-­an-­sich real­ity”); (M2) Semantic Realism (“Statements . . . ​­w ill be true or false in virtue of the intrinsic nature of mind-­independent real­ity, and thus in virtue of conditions the obtaining of which may be, in princi­ple, inaccessible to ­human beings”); (M3) Ontological Realism (“All or most of the objects . . . ​countenanced by twentieth-­century science and common sense exist in­de­pen­ dently of any mind”).

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beings, say Alpha Centaurians, even if not by us.) Thus, not only can ­there be truths that are no longer “accessible to h ­ uman beings,” but also t­ here can (consistently with my “internal realism”) be truths which are true “in virtue of conditions the obtaining of which may be, in princi­ple, inaccessible to h ­ uman beings.” But, it is still the case that, as I have formulated my position in the past, e­ very truth that ­human beings can understand is made true by conditions that are, in princi­ple, accessible to some h ­ uman beings at some time or other, if not necessarily at all times or to all h ­ uman beings. And it would seem that this is what must keep an internal realist from accepting (M2) as Anderson understands it. I agree that this is a consequence of “internal realism” as I formulated it in Reason, Truth and History and also in Repre­sen­ta­tion and Real­ity and elsewhere, but that seems to be a good reason for jettisoning ­those formulations. For consider the following pair of statements: (1) ­There is intelligent extra-­terrestrial life. (2) ­There is no intelligent extra-­terrestrial life. (1) does not pose a prob­lem for the identification of truth with idealized warranted assertability, for if ­there is intelligent extra-­terrestrial life, then a properly placed h ­ uman observer could be warranted in believing that ­there was. But (2) is more difficult. ­There might, of course, be some physical reason why (3) ­there c­ ouldn’t be intelligent extra-­terrestrial life, and in that case why should we not be able, in princi­ple, to discover it? But that is not the only way (2) could be true. (2) could just happen to be true; that is, it could be the case that, although intelligent life might have evolved on some other solar system, this just never happened. Intelligent life could be a “fluke” that happened just once. Speculating about, or even seriously considering the possibility, that (2) is true is not the same ­thing as considering the possibility that t­ here ­couldn’t be intelligent life anywhere except on earth. Now, antirealists w ­ ill reply that it is just a grammatical illusion that (2) could just happen to be true in this way. But this reply flies in the face of our most basic intellectual practices. For (1) is granted to be a meaningful empirical claim; and to say that the negation of (1) can only be true if the much stronger (3) is true is no part of our a­ ctual practice. Antirealism is as much guilty of presuming to occupy a “view from nowhere”

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as is metaphysical realism. Speaking from inside what we normally regard as our best and most rational practice, without philosophical revisionism, (2) is a claim that almost certainly has a truth-­value, and if it is true, it is very unlikely that this is b ­ ecause (3) is true.5 So where do we stand? What is right, I think, is that our understanding of what it means to say that (2) is true is tied to our conception of situations in which it would be reasonable to at least consider (2), as well as to our conception of situations in which it would be reasonable to reject it. Our understanding of conjecture, speculation, etc.—­and of what warrants all of the vari­ous uses of statements—­undergirds our understanding of truth, and conversely. But even Ebbs’s deliberately vague formulation—­“ The most we can say is that our understanding of what it means to say that a statement S is true is essentially tied to our conception of situations in which S would be correctly affirmed by someone or other”—is too strong. I still continue, of course, to insist that our grasp of the notion of truth depends on our grasp of the notion of warranted assertability; for if we had no grasp of what made (1) warrantedly assertable, we would not be able to even understand (2). But what makes us consider (2) a pos­si­ble truth is not that we have any clear notion of what would make it warrantedly assertable (or that we have a grasp of what it would be for the stronger (3) to turn out to be true—­indeed, our grasp of what that would be like is, to use a phrase of Ebbs’s, “­either extremely vague, or subject to fundamental revision, or both”). What makes us consider (2) a pos­si­ble truth is that it is the negation of an empirical statement. Our conception of what is a pos­si­ble truth is not based only on what we could verify, even in the most generous and idealized sense of “verify”; it is also based on our understanding of logic. Again, an antirealist—­I am thinking, of course, of Michael Dummett—­ would say “so much the worse for our logic.” But this involves again the attempt to step outside of our own skins, to determine what we ­really do 5. I say “almost certainly” b ­ ecause of the possibility that ­there might be borderline cases of extra-­terrestrial life. (2) could fail to have a truth-­value b ­ ecause the state of ­things is such that it is indeterminate (just as “my watch is lying on the ­table” could fail to have a truth-­value ­because the watch is standing on end on the ­table, and we have not stipulated ­whether that counts as “lying” or not). B ­ ecause of the possibility of that sort of truth-­value gap, to say of an empirical sentence S “it is ­either true or false” is to make a substantive claim—it is not a “tautology” or a linguistic convention, as the positivists thought.

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and ­really do not have access to apart from the concepts we actually employ. (Although Dummett is famous for the “language acquisition argument,” he has not offered any account of perception, and, in par­tic­u­lar, of the role of concepts in perception. But lacking such an account, talk of what we could and could not “acquire” is empty.) Thus I am led once again, and in a deeper sense, to endorse Gary Ebbs’s conclusion, discussed above, that “only careful, context-­sensitive investigation of the norms under­lying our rational inquiries can shed light on the complex relationship between our concepts of truth and rational acceptability. T ­ here is no reason to think that t­ here are any informative generalizations about the relationship of ­these concepts.” Is My Position “Idealistic in the Kantian Tradition”?

According to Anderson, my realism is “idealistic in the Kantian tradition.” If this simply means that the idea of seeing truth and warranted assertability as interdependent notions is in the spirit of Kant’s empirical realism, then this is something I myself have repeatedly pointed out. But that does not mean that I accept Kant’s transcendental claim that space and time are “inside us,” or the idea that our knowledge fails to reach to the “intrinsic properties” of the “­things in themselves,” claims whose intelligibility I have repeatedly challenged. Like Peter Strawson, I believe that ­there is much insight in Kant’s critical philosophy, insight that we can inherit and restate; but Kant’s “transcendental idealism” is no part of that insight. But Anderson’s words, however he may intend them, raise an in­ter­ est­ing challenge: in what sense can one hold, as I do, that “­there is no scheme-­independent fact of the ­matter about the ultimate furniture of the universe” and still be more of a realist than Kant? Every­thing rests on how Anderson is interpreting my denial of “mind-­ independent objects” (or language-­independent objects). I suspect—if this is unfair, I apologize, but I suspect—­that Anderson may be reading it thus: For ­every x, if x is an object, then x is mind-­dependent. So that, given that Mt. Everest is an object, I am committed to “Mt. Everest is mind-­dependent.” To be sure, Anderson himself points out that, in

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ordinary senses of “in­de­pen­dent,” I hold that dinosaurs—­a nd, n ­ eedless to say, mountains as well!—­a re in­de­pen­dent of the existence of language-­ speakers. However, in one of his footnotes (n. 36) he argues that what constitutes my failure to believe in the “in­de­pen­dence of the m ­ ental” is that I reject (M3) on a “strong semantic reading.” I take it that to give (M3) a strong semantic reading is just to accept (M2) as well; but the prob­lem is that (M2) contains the phrase “the intrinsic nature of mind-­independent real­ity,” and thus presupposes that we already know what “mind-­ independent” is supposed to mean. We are left with the charge that in some sense of “in­de­pen­dent” that Anderson does not make clear I deny the in­de­pen­dence of dinosaurs and mountains from the ­mental. What I meant by my doctrine of scheme dependence (or to use my own preferred term, conceptual relativity) is that (1) the notion of an “object” is an inherently extendable one; we extend it when we speak of the strange “objects” of quantum mechanics as objects; we extend it (in an unfortunate way, I think) when we refer to numbers as “objects”; we extend it when we invent such recherche notions as “mereological sum” and begin to refer to mereological sums as “objects”; and we ­shall undoubtedly continue to extend it in the ­f uture.6 (The same is, of course, true of such technical-­ sounding variants as “entity.”) ­Because the notion is inherently open in this way, the very notion of a “totality of all objects” is senseless. (2) certain ­things are paradigmatically objects, for example ­tables and chairs, but other uses of the term “object” are, to a greater or a lesser degree, optional. Thus ­there is no fact of the ­matter as to ­whether numbers, or mereological sums, are objects or not (and since “object” and “exist” are conceptually linked, ­there is no fact of the ­matter as to ­whether “numbers exist” and no fact of the ­matter as to ­whether “mereological sums exist”). (3) As a consequence of (2), apparently incompatible schemes—­for instance, a scheme that quantifies over mereological sums and one that denies that ­there are any such ­things—­may serve equally well to describe one or another state

6. In mereology (a “calculus of parts and ­wholes” in­ven­ted by Leśniewski, and studied by Nelson Goodman and Henry Leonard, among ­others), any group of objects can be regarded as a single object. If A, B, and C are objects, their mereological sum is considered to be a concrete object with A, B, and C as parts; thus it is not the same as the set {A, B, C}, which is an abstract entity. (If A, B, C are spatial objects, then their mereological sum is also a spatial object, and it occupies all the space that is occupied by A, B, and C.)

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of affairs. For example, the state of affairs that would ordinarily be described by saying “­there are three objects on the ­table” would be described in a scheme that countenanced mereological sums as objects by saying “­There are seven objects on the ­table.” Evidently, then, on my view, the truth or falsity of “­There are seven objects on the t­ able” is not “scheme in­de­pen­dent.” Does this mean that I reject (M2)? Surely, to interpret (M2) so that it requires that the truth or falsity of a sentence is fixed by “the intrinsic nature of mind-­ independent real­ity” in­de­pen­dently of variations in how the sentence is used would be unreasonable on any semantics. But since, in this case, changing the scheme decidedly changes the way the words are used, it is, once again, unclear that ­there is any conflict with Anderson’s statement of “metaphysical realism.” Perhaps a “metaphysical realist” would say that all that is involved in this example is a difference in meaning of a perfectly ordinary kind, and dependence of the truth-­values of statements on meaning in this ordinary sense is no prob­lem for (M2). “Object,” the metaphysical realist might say, sometimes includes mereological sums and sometimes excludes them. “Of course, mereological sums are objects; but in ordinary language we do not usually use ‘object’ in the wide sense in which we use it in metaphysics. What you call ‘variations in the way the sentence is used’ are just dif­fer­ent choices of a subclass from the universe of all objects.” As I have said, h ­ ere I part com­pany with metaphysical realism. I believe t­ here are dif­fer­ent uses of “object” and no metaphysically privileged use (although the everyday use always remains the fundamental one). And I deny that t­ here is such a ­thing as “the totality of all objects in the sense in which ‘object’ is used in metaphysics.” I d ­ on’t think t­ here is a clear sense in which “object” is used in metaphysics. (Incidentally, when I point out that “the same state of affairs” can be described in dif­fer­ent ways, depending on the choice of a scheme, I am not assuming that “states of affairs” are parts of ­every adequate ontology. I could equally well have said that the same “events” can be described in ­either scheme, and I could have spoken in many other ways as well. Conceptual relativity is a phenomenon that can be pointed out without privileging any one description.) So far, then, I have seen no reason to agree with Anderson’s claim that internal realism is “idealistic in the Kantian tradition.” In Reason, Truth and History I did, however, use the meta­phor that “Mind and the world

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jointly make up mind and the world”—­and surely this is an idealist meta­ phor? (I myself called it “Hegelian.”) To unpack the meta­phor, it ­will help if we recall that it is sentences that are true and false (the world exists in­de­pen­dently of language, but it is not true or false). While it is true that the stars would still have existed even if language users had not evolved, it is not the case that sentences would have existed. ­There would have still been a world, but ­there would not have been any truths. So far even a metaphysical realist might go along with me. But for a metaphysical realist this is not impor­tant. The reason it is not impor­ tant is that for the metaphysical realist ­t here is one description of the world which is the description of the world as it is “in itself.”7 In effect, language users only write down (an imperfect version of) the description that is waiting to be written down. But in my view, for the reasons just given, this is nonsense. If I correctly describe a part of the world once by saying “­There is a cat in front of me” and once by saying “­There is a physical system with such and such properties in such and such a location,” both descriptions describe what is before me (although they do not give the same information), but neither describes it as it is “in itself”—­not ­because the “in itself” is an unreachable limit, but ­because the “in itself” ­doesn’t make sense. We make up uses of words—­many, many dif­fer­ent uses of words—­a nd none of them is merely copied off from “the intrinsic nature of real­ity itself.” Yet for all that, some of our sentences state facts, and the truth of a true factual statement is not something we just make up. One might say not that we make the world, but that we help to define the world. The rich and ever-­growing collection of truths about the world is the joint product of the world and language users. Or better (since language users are part of the world), it is the product of the world, with language users playing a cre7. Anderson remarks (in his n. 5) that “few phi­los­o­phers think this is a necessary condition for being a [metaphysical] realist.” But I think ­there must be a misunderstanding at this point. Surely metaphysical realists do believe that (1) t­ here is a totality of all concrete objects, and (2) t­ here is a totality of all intrinsic properties of t­ hose objects. But then ­there could be (in the sense of abstract mathematical possibility, not ­human capacity) a language with a name for each object and a name for each intrinsic property and relation (up to any given level in the type theoretic hierarchy); and in that language, ­there would be exactly one true and complete description of real­ity “as it intrinsically is”—­complete up to the chosen level, anyway.

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ative role in the pro­cess of production. And that is what I meant with my “Hegelian meta­phor.”8 Is Causal Realism Metaphysically Realistic?

I do not agree with Anderson’s claim that my Brain in a Vat argument presupposes metaphysical realism.9 In my view it does no such t­ hing. The premisses of the Brain in a Vat argument are: (i) the disquotation scheme for reference (this assumes that the metalanguage contains the object language, which it does when the languages in question are my own): (D) “P” refers to Ps and (ii) that reference to common objects like vats, and their physical properties (and also to the theoretical objects and properties of science, e.g., electrons, charge) is only pos­si­ble if one has information carry­ing causal interactions with ­those objects and properties, or objects and properties in terms of which they can be described.10 Both premisses are simply part of the current system of factual and semantical beliefs that many of us hold; neither presupposes “metaphysical realism” (not least of all ­because, according to me, ­there is no intelligible position that can be called “metaphysical realism,” and the premisses of my argument are supposed to be perfectly intelligible). My last comment has to do with the relation of metaphysical realism to causal realism. Causal realism, as described by Anderson, accepts (M1), (M2), and (M3), but abandons (E2) (and, according to Anderson, (E4) as well).11 Thus it is a version of metaphysical realism in the sense of 8. This paragraph, and the one that precedes it, are adapted from my “Reply to Terence Horgan,” Erkenntnis 34, no. 3 (1991): 419–423. 9. ­Here is the simplest form I know of the Brain in a Vat argument (this form is due to Crispin Wright, based on a suggestion from me): (1) In Vat En­g lish (the language spoken by the Brains in a Vat) “vat” does not refer to vats. [From the description of the Brain in a Vat world, and the causal constraints on reference]; (2) in my language, “vat” refers to vats. [Disquotation applied to my own language.] Therefore, my language is not Vat English—­i.e., I am not a Brain in a Vat. 10. Note that it is not assumed that non-­physical properties such as truth, justification, or probability are within the scope of the causal constraints. 11. This is so ­because, according to Anderson, if causal realism is true, “I am in no privileged position to appreciate what my thoughts are about simply in virtue of their

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preserving the “core” princi­ples. But, as I suggested above, it is not clear that the notion of “the intrinsic nature” of mind-­independent real­ity that figures in (M2) can ­really be understood if causal realism is correct. Of course, it can be understood if we are willing to relativize that notion to our own situation in the world; but that would seem to be precisely to give up metaphysical realism’s claim to be able to conceive “the view from nowhere.” Thus it is not clear that the causal realist does not ­really end up abandoning metaphysical realism.

being mine.” I am not sure this is right, b ­ ecause, in virtue of (D), even if causal realism is right I can say what, for example, “­water” refers to in my own language by saying “It refers to ­water.” Of course, ­there may be other descriptions of w ­ ater, e.g. “HP” that I am unaware of, but that’s true u ­ nder any theory. Perhaps what Anderson means is that t­ here may be descriptions of the “intrinsic nature” of ­water that I cannot even conceive of; but I would question w ­ hether that thought is ­really thinkable if causal realism is right.

CHAPTER 12

Richard W. Miller: On Perception and Internal Realism (1993)

­These vari­ous views of justification, content, and content-­determining strategies have all been in the spirit of Putnam, at least in the following sense: once their approximate descriptive adequacy is acknowledged, Putnam’s anti-­positivist arguments make it impossible to dismiss them as partial, superficial reflections of deeper general princi­ples such as canons of scientific method, causal ­recipes for reference-­fixing, and functionalist algorithms for ­mental functioning. I ­will assume that ­doing semantics and epistemology in the spirit of Putnam means developing ­these views, rather than dispensing with them. (Miller)

M

iller is right that certain assumptions that ­were characteristic of positivism remain widespread in analytic philosophy even a­ fter the supposed abandonment of positivism. In part this is the case ­because ­those assumptions antedated positivism; they w ­ ere, in large mea­sure, implicit in

Putnam’s reply to Richard W. Miller, “Realism without Positivism,” Philosophical Topics 20, no. 1: The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. Christopher S. Hill (1992): 85–114. The special issue was published in 1993.

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the Fregean revolution. For Frege a “fuzzy” concept was no concept at all;1 the idea that “rationality” is not ­really a proper concept ­unless it can be reduced to a set of precise rules is simply an application of this picture of what it is to have a real concept. Modern logic was a ­great and useful discovery; but a certain overestimation of its metaphysical and epistemological significance remains a prob­lem for con­temporary analytical philosophy. In that sense, what I have been trying to think out—­and I am glad to welcome Miller as an ally—is not just what a post-­positivist philosophy should look like, but what a philosophy that refuses to take mathematical logic as its paradigm of rational thought—­a post-­logicist philosophy—­should look like. Miller is also right in thinking that what I have done is at best to indicate a direction in which it is necessary to go much further, and Miller makes impor­tant suggestions, drawing not only on my work, but also on his own past work in epistemology and philosophy of science, as to how one might proceed further in the same general direction. This is a profound paper, and if I do not comment on many parts of it, that is ­because I am in very substantial agreement with Miller, and I ­shall not attempt to restate points that he has stated very well. The Question of Perception

Miller brilliantly attacks the idea that belief can be broken into two components, one of which is wholly internal to the believer. H ­ ere I want to suggest that he should extend his attack to the “causal theory of perception,” the theory according to which perception involves the presence of something entirely “internal” to the individual perceiver—­a “sensation”—­which becomes a crucial part of a perception of something external (becomes, in fact, the “interface” between mere causal interactions and our minds) not by virtue of its intrinsic relation to what is perceived, but solely by virtue of its accidental causal connections to the external object. I have already indicated in my replies to Ebbs and McDowell that I regard my own retention of this picture in Reason, Truth and History and in some of my other writings of the same period as a major weakness of my position in ­those writings. 1. See Cora Diamond, “Frege on Fuzz,” in The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

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Most present-­day phi­los­o­phers agree that perceptual experience is typically experience of aspects of the perceiver’s environment. What distinguishes “natu­ral realist” accounts like William James’ or Austin’s from the “causal theory” is that, on the latter accounts, it is a fallacy of division to suppose that the perceptual experience can be broken up into two parts, an internal part (the sensation, or “sense datum,” plus the ensuing thought) and an external part (the object plus the “causal chain of the appropriate kind”). Natu­ral realist accounts are not distinguished simply by their rejection of the idea that we know of the existence of external objects by inference. That idea is also rejected by many phi­los­o­phers who retain the idea of sense data; natu­r al realist accounts are distinguished by their rejection of the very notion of “sense data.” I wrote that perceptual experience is typically of aspects of the environment, not only for the obvious reason that such experience may be non-­veridical, but b ­ ecause it supplies us with other kinds of information as well (a pro­cess that is also not factorable into an internal and an external part). Imagine, for example, that I am standing across the street from Memorial Hall and looking at that building. I perceive: (1) A large brick building; (2) How that building looks from that par­tic­u­lar place; (3) How it looks to someone who is wearing corrective lenses for a par­tic­u­lar combination of nearsightedness and astigmatism; and, if I remove my glasses, I perceive (4) That Memorial Hall looks blurred. (Note that “that Memorial Hall looks blurred” is not parasitic on the sense-­less (5) That Memorial Hall is blurred* in the way in which (6) “That sweater looks green to me” is parasitic on (7) That sweater is green.)

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Both (4) and (6) are information about my sensory experience of a par­ tic­u­lar object, but (4) concerns the qualities of my perception rather than the apparent properties of the percipient. (Of course a picture of an object may also be blurred, e­ tc.; this is one of the analogies between perceptions and pictures that encourages the idea that perception must involve “visual images.”) Miller himself is emphatic on the point that conception cannot be factored into a purely internal part and a wholly external part. It follows that “sensations,” conceived of as purely “internal” events, would have to be non-­conceptual. I urge that, in line with Miller’s ac­cep­tance of the nonseparability thesis with re­spect to belief and conception, we should accept the nonseparability thesis also with re­spect to perception. To accept it is not to conceive of perception as a mysterious transaction between the mind and the perceived object, somehow bypassing the body. I have already discussed the idea that the mind should be thought of as a system of capacities, not an organ, in expressing my agreement with McDowell. T ­ hose capacities, like all our capacities, depend on our physical transactions with our environment. (To employ Aristotle’s language while updating his metaphysics, the mind is the form of a subset of t­ hose transactions.) In perception ­there are causal chains, whose nature it is the business of psy­chol­ogy, neurophysiology, ­etc., to find out, between the ­objects we perceive, our sense organs, our nerves, and our ce­re­bral pro­ cesses. But (as James already urged in the Psy­chol­ogy) we should resist the temptation to look for point-­to-­point correlations between ­mental pro­ cesses and brain pro­cesses. No brain pro­cess is identical with the pro­cess of perception, although ­there are many brain pro­cesses on which perception depends. (To use an analogy suggested in another context by Elijah Millgram, no physical pro­cess or stuff is identical with the debt I have to Harvard University for the educational loans I received on behalf of my ­children, but that does not mean that debts do not depend on physical pro­ cesses, or that they are “mysterious non-­physical objects.”) Giving up the picture of a perception as the causing of a sensation (something wholly “inside the mind,” non-­conceptual, ­etc.) by an external object permits us to give up the unfortunate idea that all empirical knowledge is a ­matter of inference. My knowledge that ­there is a computer on my lap right now is observational, not inferential; which does not mean that it is infallible, or that it does not depend on my possession of concepts

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and my possession of inferential powers. (In this regard, I should note that Miller’s claim that the empirical justification of ­every truth-­claim consists in showing that it is entailed by a causal explanation of what is observed that is better than any relevant rivals is an overgeneralization, and on two grounds: (1) that a “truth-­claim” accurately reports what has been observed is a perfectly good justification; and (2) ­there are frequently no “relevant rivals.”) I believe that t­ hese remarks are ones that Miller w ­ ill accept. (However, at one point he writes that a secondary property is “a property that has an approximate definition in terms of tendencies to give rise to certain kinds of sensations in normal ­humans.” I hope that this is a momentary lapse; for that picture of what a secondary property is presupposes just the story about perception I have been attacking.)2 Miller on Reason, Truth and History

While I am dissatisfied with the version of “internal realism” in Reason, Truth and History, I cannot accept Miller’s account of what that version was. Miller makes two startling suggestions about the views I held in that book. First, he suggests that (in his sense of “formal”) the notion of coherence I employed was a purely formal one (amounting to the Machian notion of con­ ve­nience for prediction, in fact). But I think it should be clear on rereading the relevant chapters that all the considerations Miller wants to bring in—­the “prima facie truisms” whose impor­tant role he very well explains, as well as the need for informality and flexibility in the application and elaboration of ­those truisms that Miller stresses—­fit very well into the account of coherence that I gave. Indeed, one ­whole chapter (Chapter 5) was devoted to rejecting precisely the idea that rational acceptability is a formal notion.3 Second, Miller claims that “the ideal epistemic circumstance” (according to Reason, Truth and History) is one in which “someone surveys” 2. I discuss this picture in chapter 5 of Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Note also Miller’s remark about our “inclination to associated strategies of manipulation with spatial images”—as Husserl rightly notes (e.g., in Ideen), what strategies of manipulation are associated with is activities in an objective space, not with private “images.” 3. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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the totality of the experiences we actually have had, are having, and w ­ ill have. This is a strange reading, not only b ­ ecause no other critic has ever understood me that way, but b ­ ecause as early as “A Defense of Internal Realism” I emphasized that a statement about the past (the example was a statement about dinosaurs) can be true even though it is not warranted on the basis of the experiences we have had or ­w ill have in the ­f uture.4 Although ­these attacks on the position in Reason, Truth and History involve a misreading, something ­else Miller says does seem to me to catch a very central point on which I was unclear at that time. Miller writes: “In describing epistemic luck, I have used the concept of truth itself. I do not think this ultimate circularity is avoidable. It would not do to say that the ideal circumstance is one in which no experience which might have occurred would have made belief-­revision a dictate of rationality.5 ­There is always such evidence, since skewed extra evidence can overturn true beliefs as surely as evidence overturns false beliefs in luckier pro­cesses.” It was the hope that this ultimate circularity might be avoided, and that truth might actually be reduced to notions of “rational acceptability” and “better and worse epistemic situation” that did not themselves presuppose the notion of truth that was responsible for the residue of idealism in Reason, Truth and History. As Miller notes, that residue has now been repudiated.6

Miller writes,

Truth as Ideal Justification

Suppose, then, that truth is what would be justified if all the data ­were in, the adjustment of basic causal princi­ples to accumulated experiences ­were formally ideal, and t­ here is no experience that might have arisen which would have revealed the falsehood of the actually justified belief. This way of connecting truth with ideal 4. “A Defense of Internal Realism” is collected in my Realism with a ­Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 30–42. 5. Miller has “some experience” ­here rather than “no experience,” but this is clearly a slip of the pen. 6. As Miller writes in a footnote, “This realism is especially emphatic in such recent writings as The Many ­ Faces of Realism, Lecture I, and Repre­sen­ta­tion and Real­ity, chapter 7.”

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warrant is not idealist, since the requirement of epistemic luck acknowledges nature’s freedom not to fulfill our epistemic needs. This connection is not a means of defining away or eliminating the concept of truth—an untroubling lack at this point, since the rejection of positivism is, quite generally, an abandonment of reductionist demands. In this view, “truth that does not consist in ideal justification” is empty verbiage, distorting the real content of “truth”; but without reliance on the concept of truth, the nature of ideal justification is unspecifiable.7 I do not any longer think that in all cases “truth that does not consist in ideal justification” is empty verbiage. What Miller’s arguments show, I think, is that belief and ideal justification are internally related (if you believe that p could never be justified, not even with epistemic luck, then it is not clear what it would mean for you to “believe” p). But in the case of epistemic attitudes other than belief (e.g., speculation, conjecture)8 and statements more complex than singular statements about an object we can refer to truth does not always admit of identification with ideal justification.9 (Cf. the example of “­There is no intelligent extra-­terrestrial life” used above.)

7. Miller, “Realism without Positivism,” 104. 8. It is not necessarily pointless to conjecture that we may just happen to be the only intelligent life in the physical universe, even if that conjecture cannot be verified u ­ nder any circumstances we can now envisage; such a conjecture might be an expression of cosmic loneliness—or, alternatively, of pride in a high existential destiny. 9. H ­ ere I follow Miller in distinguishing (with Strawson and Gareth Evans) referring to something and having a belief which contains a definite description which is true of that ­thing.

CHAPTER 13

Simon Blackburn: On Internal Realism (1994)

P

recisely b ­ ecause our outlooks differ totally, I was delighted by Simon Blackburn’s paper, which pre­sents our differences (as they appear from his point of view) with admirable sharpness and clarity. But b ­ ecause Blackburn does not distinguish between what I actually say and consequences which he claims to derive from my views, I am concerned that a reader who tries to deduce my views from Blackburn’s criticisms of them ­w ill get the wrong idea. It is, therefore, necessary to begin by saying a word or two in explanation of the term “internal realism,” as I use it. What follows is just an attempt to stress key points (points that tend to be misunderstood), however, and not a substitute for the more detailed statements that I have published elsewhere.1

Putnam’s reply to Simon Blackburn, “Enchanting Views,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Bob Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 12–30. 1. See, in par­tic­u­lar, my Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); the Introduction and chapters 11 and 12 in Realism and Reason, vol. 3 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); the last chapter of Repre­sen­ta­ tion and Real­ity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988); The Many F ­ aces of Realism: The Paul Carus Lectures (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987); and “Model Theory and the ‘Factuality’ of Semantics,” in Reflections on Chomsky, ed. Alexander George (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 213–232.

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“Internal realism” is the name that I once gave to a picture of what truth comes to, rather than what most phi­los­o­phers would call a “theory of the nature of truth” (by which phi­los­o­phers ­today understand a reduction of the notion of truth to concepts which do not presuppose it or such related concepts as “reference”).2 On that picture, a statement is true just in case a competent speaker fully acquainted with the use of the words would be fully rationally warranted in using ­those words to make the assertion in question, provided she or he ­were in a sufficiently good epistemic position. Although I no longer accept that picture, I emphasize that this formula was meant to connect the notion of truth to the way in which words are used (including the speech act of assertion) and to the notions of rational acceptability and of sufficiently good epistemic conditions, and I still believe that our understanding of the notion of truth is intricately interwoven with our understanding of ­those notions.3 But what are “sufficiently good” epistemic conditions? They are conditions ­under which one can tell if the assertion in question is true or false! Obviously, if the formula “an empirical statement is true just in case, ­etc.” in the preceding paragraph had been intended as a reduction, it would be flagrantly circular. But, as I have already said, it was not so intended. The point of the picture was to combine realism with a concession to moderate verificationism (a concession I would no longer make, by the way): the concession was the idea that truth could never be totally recognition-­transcendent.4 At the same time, I rejected—­and I continue to reject—­the idea that the use of words is fixed once and for all by something like a set of algorithms.5 2. For a history of this term, see the intellectual autobiography included in the first three of my replies in Philosophical Topics 20, no. 1: The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. Christopher S. Hill (1992). 3. When I presented this view in Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), I employed the fiction of “ideal epistemic conditions,” but in spite of my warning that this was a fiction, many readers took it literally. For this reason, from then on I have used the notion of “sufficiently good” epistemic conditions, as above. See, for example, my Realism and Reason, xiii–­x viii. My reasons for giving it appear in my Dewey Lectures, “Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the ­Human Mind,” Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 9 (September 1994): 445–517. 4. An example whose truth, if it is true, may be totally recognition-­transcendent (I would now say) is: “­There do not happen to be any intelligent extra-­terrestrials.” 5. This conception of use, which is represented by Dummett’s program for “meaning theory,” by Rorty’s references to normal discourse as governed by “criteria”

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Learning to use words is more like learning to play a musical instrument than like learning to extract square roots. Sensitivity is involved, and so is informal rationality, and ­there is room for individual creativity. Yet ­there are reasonable and unreasonable, warranted and unwarranted, ways of using words. I continue to think of truth, like warrant, as fundamentally a normative notion. A second claim of “internal realism”—­one I have not at all given up; the one I have increasingly emphasized in my writings, and the one at which most of Blackburn’s fire is directed—­concerns notions like “object,” “entity,” “property,” and “existence.”6 I have argued that it makes no sense to think of the world as dividing itself up into “objects” (or “entities”) in­de­pen­dently of our use of language. It is we who divide up “the world”—­that is, the events, states of affairs, and physical, social, ­etc., systems that we talk about—­into “objects,” “properties,” and “relations,” and we do this in a variety of ways. “Object,” “entity,” “property,” (and “relation”) have not one fixed use but an ever-­expanding open ­family of uses. ­Because “exist” and “entity” are conceptually linked, the same is true of “exist.” One example is so familiar as to run the danger of seeming trivial; we may partly describe the contents of a room by saying that ­there is a chair in front of a desk, and partly describe the contents of the same room by saying that ­there are particles and fields of certain kinds pre­sent. But to ask which of ­these descriptions describes the room as it is “in­de­pen­dent of perspective,” or “in itself,” is senseless. Both descriptions are descriptions of the room as it ­really is. In saying this, I am, of course, contesting a

and “algorithms,” and, in a dif­fer­ent way, by my former “functionalism,” is criticized in detail in Repre­sen­ta­tion and Real­ity. Not only is truth not always recognizable by using anything that could be called a decision procedure, even ­under the best epistemic conditions; it is obvious that, in the case of empirical statements, decisions as to truth are generally defeasible (and so are decisions as to w ­ hether one’s epistemic position is good enough to decide on the truth of a statement). 6. The relation between the two claims is this: if truth depends on use, and the world does not dictate how we are to use our words (although it constrains our choices), then the possibility of the sort of “conceptual relativity” that is asserted by the second claim opens up.

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metaphysical claim which many philosophers—­including, I suspect, Simon Blackburn—­w ish to make about modern science, namely that science, and science alone, describes the world “as it is in­de­pen­dent of language.” I suspect that it is ­because I contest this thesis (contest its very intelligibility) that I provoke attacks like Blackburn’s. A controversial corollary of this claim—­one Blackburn discusses—is that, given the variety of dif­fer­ent ontologies that can legitimately be ­adopted to describe one and the same state of affairs, statements which are inconsistent if taken at face value (e.g. “­there are mereological sums,” “mereological sums do not exist”) can both be true (that is, each can be true in the way of speaking—in the case of mereology, the formalized language—to which it belongs). I refer to this phenomenon as “conceptual relativity,” and it is on my doctrine of conceptual relativity that Blackburn focuses his fire. Blackburn’s Charges

Blackburn brings two main charges against the position I have just described: 1. That I am committed to holding that “genuinely inconsistent descriptions of t­ hings” can be true. 2. That I reject the regulative ideal of unifying our knowledge. In addition: 3. Blackburn tries to show that the sorts of ontological issues to which the doctrine of conceptual relativity is addressed pose no real prob­lem for metaphysical realism. I s­ hall address the two charges in the pre­sent section, and claim (3) in the next. Re Charge (1)

Blackburn writes as if I hold that “genuinely inconsistent propositions” can be true. Of course, I do not hold this. When I said that propositions which are inconsistent from the point of view of classical semantics can be true, I was criticizing “classical semantics,” not endorsing the conclusion Blackburn ascribes to me.

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As Blackburn mentions, one of my examples is the dispute over the existence of mereological sums.7 I i­magined a mini-­world in which t­ here are just three individuals, each of which is wholly red or wholly black, and at least one is wholly black and at least one is wholly red. If our ontology includes individuals but not mereological sums, then the sentence: (A) There is an object which is partly red and partly black. is false. (I call a par­tic­u ­lar first-­order language with this ontology “Carnap’s language.”) However, if we adopt an ontology which includes mereological sums, then the sentence (A) becomes true. (I call a par­tic­u­lar first-­order language with this second ontology “the Polish logician’s language.”) My claim was that the question “Do mereological sums ­really exist?” is a senseless one. We can use the words “object” and “exist” so that such “objects” as mereological sums “exist” (by adopting the Polish logician’s language) or we can use the same words so that it ­w ill be true to say that “­there are no such objects” (by adopting Carnap’s language). If we make this latter choice, we s­ hall have to say that ­there is no object in the mini-­ world which is partly red and partly black. But the mini-­world itself does not force us to talk one way or to talk the other way. Now, two remarks, one on the content of this view and one on its tenability. On the content: in one of the works Blackburn cited, I pointed out that the Polish logician’s language can be “translated” into Carnap’s language by vari­ous logical tricks. U ­ nder one such interpretation, (A) above receives the translation: (B) There is an object which is red and an object which is black. Notice that if we adopt this interpretation of (A), the sentence (A) of the Polish logician’s language becomes consistent with the following sentence (C) of Carnap’s language (which, taken at face value, is identical with the negation of (A) in the Polish logician’s language): 7. This example is used both in The Many ­Faces of Realism, 18–20, and in “Truth and Convention,” in my Realism with a H ­ uman Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 96–104.

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(C) There is no object which is partly red and partly black. Since the status of the apparent “inconsistency” between (A) and (C) (when ­these sentences are in two dif­fer­ent languages, as described) depends on which way we choose to interpret the Polish logician’s language in Carnap’s language, one cannot simply argue that (A) is true in the Polish logician’s language. But (C) is true in Carnap’s language. Therefore, if internal realism is right, genuinely inconsistent propositions can be true. For, if I am right, (A) and (C) need not be (and, I would argue, should not be) regarded as “genuinely inconsistent.” The fact that the words “object” and “exist” are used differently in the two languages is what blocks Blackburn’s conclusion. On its tenability: Blackburn seems to anticipate this answer, and replies, in effect, “Well then, you are just saying that ‘object’ and ‘exist’ have dif­fer­ent meanings. We just have to distinguish between ‘uninterpreted and interpreted sentences’ and classical semantics takes care of the prob­lem for us.” What is wrong with this line is that the difference between the two uses of “object” and “exist” I have described is a very dif­fer­ent phenomenon from the one we normally refer to as a “difference in meaning.” To point out that one pos­si­ble relative interpretation of the Polish logician’s language in Carnap’s language maps (A) on to (B) is not to make a remark about the “meaning” of the words in (A) in any sense of the word “meaning” that an ordinary speaker (or a linguist) would recognize. Suppose that instead of considering individuals in a mini-­world, we consider objects on a ­table. If the sentence “­There are three objects on the ­table” ­were genuinely inconsistent with the sentence “­There are seven objects on the ­table,” even when the first sentence occurs in a vernacular description and the second occurs in a version which employs the notion of a mereological sum, then I would face the charge Blackburn makes. But it makes no difference to our predictions or actions which of ­these schemes we use. Nor are ­these schemes equivalent only in the weak sense of what is sometimes called “empirical equivalence,” but, as I pointed out in the works Blackburn cites, each sentence in one of them can be correlated in an effective way with a “translation” in the other scheme, and the sentence and its translation w ­ ill have the same truth-­value and the same explanatory power.8 8. I discuss the nature of such equivalence in “Equivalence,” in Realism and Reason, 26–45.

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However, as I just remarked, the kind of “translation” just referred to does not provide what we would ordinarily regard as a linguistically synonymous expression. Moreover, ­these “translations” (the technical name for them is “relative interpretations”) are not unique; the mereological sum version can be interpreted in the version without mereological sums in more than one way. But the question “Which translation scheme, if any, preserves the meanings of the sentences being translated?” is a bad question. The ordinary notion of “meaning” was simply not in­ven­ted for this kind of case. In contrast, a metaphysical realist would say “Well, all that is involved is a difference in meaning of a perfectly ordinary kind. The fact is just that ‘object’ sometimes includes mereological sums and sometimes excludes them” (in fact, Blackburn does say something very much like this); but this reply assumes that of course mereological sums are objects (other­w ise one could not include them in one’s ontology), and the choice of dif­fer­ent “meanings” of the word “object” is just a choice of a subclass from a universe, or fixed totality, of all objects. ­Here I part com­pany with Blackburn. I believe ­there are dif­fer­ent uses of “object” and no metaphysically privileged use (and thus no sense to the notion of a totality of all objects fixed once and for all). In par­tic­u ­lar, the idea that ­there is a fixed, clear, notion of “object” (or “exist”) in which it makes sense to ask “Are mereological sums objects?” (or “Do they r­eally exist?”) is one I reject. But I do not reject the idea that in an ordinary sense of the phrase “state of affairs” the “same state of affairs” can be described e­ ither by saying that “­There are three objects on the ­t able” or “­There are seven objects (counting mereological sums) on the t­ able.” Incidentally, saying that two dif­fer­ent versions are about “the same state of affairs” or describe “the same physical system” or “the same event” is itself sometimes a part of a commonsense version of what we are ­doing; accepting such a version does not require us to elevate “states of affairs,” ­etc., to the status of a universal ontology.9

9. This paragraph and the two that precede it are virtually identical with three paragraphs in my reply to a similar argument offered by Bill Throop and Katheryn Doran, “Putnam’s Realism and Relativity: An Uneasy Balance,” Erkenntnis 34, no. 3 (1991): 357– 370. See my “Replies and Comments,” ibid., 401–424.

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Re Charge (2)

Blackburn’s basis for the second charge is the following argument: internal realism holds that genuinely inconsistent propositions can be true. But genuinely inconsistent propositions cannot be conjoined in any one language. Thus, if internal realism is right, ­there are truths (pairs of sentences each true in its own language) which cannot be conjoined. So we must give up the idea that all truths can be conjoined if we accept internal realism, and this would be to give up the regulative ideal of the unity of knowledge. Since I have rejected the first premise, this argument has already been answered. Indeed, an example Blackburn himself uses seems to me to show the implausibility of his claim that any acknowl­edgment of conceptual relativity is a rejection of the unity of knowledge. Suppose scientific knowledge, or total knowledge (science, history, philosophy, ­etc.), or ideal versions of ­these, ­were formalized. Imagine two dif­fer­ent formalizations (I would say, trivially dif­fer­ent formalizations), which are alike except that in the first formalization numbers are identified with sets (as in von Neumann set theory) and in the second formalization numbers are assumed as abstract entities over and above the sets. It is easy to see that any factual statement that can be expressed in one of the resulting formalized languages has a reasonable “translation” into the other, in the sense of “translation” just discussed. Of course the sentence “Numbers are identical with sets” in the first language would not normally be translated into the second, nor would the sentence “Numbers are distinct from sets” in the second language normally be translated into the first; but ­these sentences are surely not statements of fact, but expressions of the conventions that structure ­these two languages.10 The fact that I cannot conjoin a convention which underlies one way of speaking and a convention which underlies a dif­fer­ent way of speaking is surely no real limitation on the unity of knowledge. It may help the reader if I compare my position to the positions of Carnap and Quine. My position resembles Carnap’s (in “Empiricism, ­Semantics, Ontology”) inasmuch as I hold that differences in ontology 10. That t­ hese sorts of statement are normally not translated when we have a case of two equivalent descriptions which are “extensionally isomorphic,” was first pointed out by Nelson Goodman, The Structure of Appearance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951).

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sometimes amount to no more than differences in how we use words. But unlike Carnap, I do not rest the distinction between questions which have to do with the choice of a linguistic framework and empirical questions on an absolute analytic-­synthetic distinction. ­W hether something is or is not “conventional,” i.e. ­whether what is at stake is no more than a question of how to talk, is itself something to which empirical facts are relevant. T ­ here is a continuum stretching from choices which, by our pre­sent lights, are just choices of a way of talking to questions of what are plainly empirical fact, but ­there is nothing ­here which is guaranteed to be true no ­matter what the facts may turn out to be.11 What I would criticize Quine for is the suggestion that a distinction between fact and language-­choice which is not absolute, not drawn once and for all unrevisably, is of no use. The Price of Metaphysical Realism

Blackburn addresses this issue very clearly at one point in his paper. I have in mind the following passage: One way of attacking metaphysical realism would be to find an internal inconsistency in it. A combination giving rise to such an inconsistency might be that of a determinate ontology, and an indeterminate or conventional identity relation. Thus we cannot both believe in a determinate, unique, mathematical ontology, containing numbers and sets, and also hold that ­whether we identify numbers and sets is a m ­ atter of convention. For e­ ither the 11. As I put this point in Repre­sen­ta­tion and Real­ity, 112–113, “It is known since Principia Mathematica that we can identify points with sets of convergent spheres and all geometric facts w ­ ill be correctly represented. We know that we can also take points as primitive, and identify spheres with sets of points. So any answer to this question [‘Is a point identical with a set of spheres that converge to it?’] is . . . ​conventional, in the sense that one is ­f ree to do ­either. But what Quine pointed out (as applied to this case) is that when I say ‘We are ­f ree to do ­either,’ I am assuming a diffuse background of empirical facts. Fundamental changes in the way we do physical geometry could alter the ­whole picture. The fact that a truth is t­ owards the ‘conventional’ end of the convention / fact continuum does not mean that it is absolutely conventional—­a truth by stipulation, ­f ree of e­ very ele­ment of fact. And, on the other hand, when we see such a ‘real­ity’ as a tree, the possibility of the perception is dependent on a w ­ hole conceptual scheme in place (one which may or may not legislate an answer to such questions as ‘Is the tree identical with the space-­time region that contains it?’ . . .). What is factual and what is conventional is a m ­ atter of degree.”

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ontology, which is not “up to us,” has numbers as well as sets, in which case it would be a ­mistake to identify them, or it has only sets, in which case it would be a m ­ istake to separate them. A determinate ontology takes away our freedom with identity; conversely, freedom with identity undermines the view that t­ here is a determinate ontology. . . . ​The point is undeniable, but it is not clear why a realist of any kind should be troubled by it . . . ​the means of avoidance are to hand: one draws the ontology so that nothing genuinely “up to us” is determined by it (for example, in the numerical case, by sticking with sets and construing arithmetic as not concerned with objects at all). So the means of avoidance “in the numerical case”—­the means of avoiding an admission that the decision to identify / not to identify numbers with sets is a ­matter of convention—is to “draw the ontology” so that numbers do not exist (i.e. so that all statements about numbers are reconstructed as universal quantifications over infinite sequences).12 What is amusing about this suggestion is that the meta­phor of drawing the ontology suggests precisely the view Blackburn wishes to deny—­the view that the ontology is something we can “draw,” i.e. that it is “up to us.” I take it that this is not what Blackburn wanted to say (although it is a point at which his text deconstructs itself in the fashion literary theorists discuss so much nowadays); I take it that what Blackburn means is that we should believe—­ because it is true—­the view that ­there ­really are sets and ­there ­really do not exist any such t­ hings as numbers. If I thought I understood what such an assertion might mean, I would ask Blackburn how the devil he knows! But the fact is that never in my life, even when I counted myself as a metaphysical realist, did I think that kind of talk had any meaning at all. A sensible realist had better be able to allow that some ways of “drawing the ontology” (an expression I like, by the way) are equally right. 12. What Blackburn means by saying that arithmetic is “not concerned with numbers at all” is that—in a reconstruction first proposed by Paul Benacerraf and, I take it, endorsed by Blackburn ­here—we can construe the statements of pure arithmetic as statements about infinite sequences (“co-­sequences”). A statement of applied mathe­matics, e.g. “The Jewish Patriarchs are four,” is then reconstrued as asserting a relation between the set in question (the set of Jewish Patriarchs) and members of each co-­sequence. See Paul Benacerraf, “What Numbers Could Not Be,” in Philosophy of Mathe­matics: Selected Readings, ed. Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 274–294.

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A curious feature of Blackburn’s resolution of the ontological issue with re­spect to mathematical objects is that it contradicts Blackburn’s own previous position. In Spreading the Word, Blackburn’s view is that we should assume that nothing exists (in the supposed strong metaphysical realist sense of “exist” that Blackburn believes in) except “the natu­ral world” (including our reactions to it).13 Nevertheless, according to Blackburn, we are justified in speaking as if vari­ous other t­ hings existed (in several places Blackburn lists moral, ­mental, and mathematical facts, along with counterfactuals), and, as Blackburn also says in the pre­sent paper, in using the word “true” in t­ hese domains, even though they do not belong to the natu­ral world: this is called taking a “projectivist” attitude ­towards the discourses in question. Mathematical statements, in par­tic­u­lar, are not “true” (on this e­ arlier position) in the sense of being true of mathematical objects, for ­there are no such non-­natural objects, but are true (when they are) in the sense that some of them are “grounded in practice.” Blackburn’s insistence on bivalence as a property of truth does not extend to areas about which he is a projectionist: thus, about mathe­matics he wrote: Arithmetical truths gain their status as something more than mere formalisms ­because numbers ­matter; they are what we count and mea­sure with, and b ­ ecause of this we are not f­ ree to invent propositions about them as we wish. But it is quite unclear how far this constraint goes. It seems to compel just one ordinary arithmetic. But mathematicians can devise systems which contain conflicting accounts of how many infinite numbers t­ here are, and how they are packed. [­Here Blackburn is referring to the existence of large cardinals, and certain other questions in set theory.] Is one of t­ hese true, and the other not? Perhaps the correct account of how mathematical truth is grounded in practice shows that the grounding does not extend so far, and that we have h ­ ere a ­matter for choice.14 So in Spreading the Word, the properties of sets ­were allowed to be, in certain re­spects, possibly a “­matter of choice”! (Of course, Blackburn would point out that when he took the e­ arlier position, he was “drawing the on13. Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 14. Ibid., 208–209. Emphasis added.

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tology” so that sets ­were not ­really included at all.) Yet in the pre­sent paper, denying precisely the position Blackburn put forward ­earlier is the means we are said to have “to hand” to avoid internal realism! I presume that Blackburn has given up the doctrine of Spreading the Word, perhaps ­because he has come to see that mathe­matics is so interwoven with empirical science that to be a projectionist about sets and functions and a realist about electrons makes no sense, as Quine has long argued. But Blackburn need not fear that recognizing that t­ here is an ele­ment of choice in mathe­matics means saying that every­thing is a ­matter of choice. Blackburn worries that “Putnam can try insisting that all questions of identity are up to us.” But Putnam would not be caught dead “insisting” on that. It is not up to us ­whether Blackburn and Dummett are identical, or ­whether 2 + 2 and 17 are identical, or ­whether the null set and the unit set of the null set are identical. Yet it is up to us w ­ hether the number 2 is identical with a set, and if so, which set it is identical with. Saying that a few—­but by no means most—­identity questions call for a convention seems to Blackburn to be giving up the very notion of existence; to me, it seems to be giving up only a metaphysical fantasy, a fantasy that is, perhaps, built into the grandiose word “ontology.” But if Blackburn ­will not allow us to regard any identity question, even the question as to ­whether we should identify numbers with sets, as a question calling for a convention, what price ­shall we have to pay? Phi­los­o­ phers disagree, and have disagreed since Kant, over the question of ­whether points are / are not identical with limits (of convergent sequences of regions). Since Whitehead, we have known how to formalize Kant’s claim that points in space are “mere limits” (by identifying points with, say, equivalence classes of convergent sequences—of course, identifying sequences with sets is something that itself can be done in more than one way). Do we have to “draw our ontology” so that points exist over and above regions and sequences of regions? Or do we have to “draw our ontology” so that ­there are only regions (“Space consists only of regions,” Kant wrote), and construe geometry as not concerned with points at all? And how are we to know which of t­ hese ways of “drawing our ontology” is metaphysically correct? Phi­los­o­phers have long disagreed, and disagree t­ oday, over the relation of commonsense objects—­tables and chairs—to their ­matter. Quine believes that a ­table is identical with its ­matter, that its ­matter is the electromagnetic,

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gravitational, ­etc., fields that occupy the volume in question, that fields are simply collections of space-­time points with certain properties, and that, in consequence, ­tables and other physical objects are, in the last analy­sis, identical with space-­time regions. David Lewis believes that they are identical with mereological sums of time-­slices of molecules. Saul Kripke believes that they are distinct from their ­matter, on the grounds that they have dif­fer­ent modal properties from their ­matter (the ­table could have consisted of dif­fer­ent molecules; it could have occupied a dif­fer­ent place). Our ordinary language can be rationally reconstructed (i.e. formalized) in accordance with any one of ­these doctrines, and our description of such states of affairs as ­there being three glasses on the t­ able ­w ill not be affected. Indeed—­a nd this is what Blackburn objects to—­I would say that ­these dif­fer­ent formalizations just provide us with dif­fer­ent ways of describing what is, by commonsense standards, the same state of affairs. Blackburn complains that “we are not given . . . ​a ny help [by Putnam] in understanding how much of the commonsense standard we are being asked to abandon, or why we should do so,” but of course I am not asking us to abandon any part of the commonsense standard, of the commonsense practice (for such I take it to be) of regarding it as no real question at all w ­ hether a t­ able is “identical with the region it occupies in space-­time or with the mereological sum of time-­slices of molecules that it contains.” What I am asking us to “abandon” is the idea that such a question must have a non-­conventional answer. The price to be paid for taking the “way” that Blackburn finds so inviting (and so “to hand”), then, is refusing to admit that any of t­ hese ontological questions is a pseudo question. But, as my quotation from Spreading the Word indicates, not even Blackburn is ­really willing to pay that price— or at least, he is not consistently willing to pay that price. My Attitude to Ontological Relativity

Blackburn devotes more than a third of his paper to an attempt to s­ addle me with Quine’s notorious doctrine of ontological relativity.15 Briefly, my view is that the model-­theoretic argument is not a proof of ontological rel15. I discuss the relation between Quine’s model-­theoretic arguments and my own model-­theoretic arguments in “Model Theory and the ‘Factuality’ of Semantics.”

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ativity but rather a reductio ad absurdum of ontological relativity and of the “naturalism” that underlies Quine’s arguments for ontological relativity. (I put the word “naturalism” in shudder quotes ­here, ­because, what­ever one’s attitude t­ owards naturalism may be—­I suppose that, as a theist and a practicing Jew, I cannot call myself a “naturalist” in the sense in which John Dewey, who introduced it, used that term—­the Quinian usage is weird. In Quine’s sense, to be a “naturalist” is to believe that t­ here is nothing to be said about science except what science itself can discover about science, i.e. t­ here is no distinctive activity of philosophy apart from science. I would like to note that Dewey himself was not a “naturalist” in this sense.) Blackburn worries about w ­ hether non-­intentional facts (his “base totality”) determine the intentional facts (e.g. the fact that “rabbits” refers to rabbits), but he does not perceive the unclarity of “determine.” For his argument to go through, “determine” must mean no more than this: A-­ facts determine B-­facts just in case B-­facts are supervenient on A-­facts.16 Other­w ise, the following is a non sequitur: “One could see Putnam as poised to adopt it [the view that t­ here are nonreducible or “self-­standing” semantic facts], since the drift of his work is to refuse to grant especial ontological privilege to any par­tic­u­lar kind of fact, and that would include facts from the base totality. But t­ here is a cost . . . ​the real difficulty is not epistemological, but ontological. For Quine appears to put into the base totality every­thing we could possibly want in order to determine reference and meaning. If we say he did not, then we are making an ontological claim. We are denying that semantics supervenes on the extensional facts about ­things.”17 In this passage, saying that facts in the base totality do not “determine” reference and meaning means denying supervenience. But when Moore—­a phi­los­o­pher Blackburn has thought about a ­great deal—­denied that facts in the base totality determine moral facts he was not denying supervenience, and likewise when John McDowell and I both deny, from 16. This is a rather unhappy sense of “determine,” even in physics, by the way, since, given general relativity, it is the case that electromagnetic facts are supervenient on gravitational facts—no change in the electromagnetic facts without a change in gravitational facts—­w ithout its being the case that the electromagnetic facts are explained by the gravitational facts. 17. Emphasis added.

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our respective points of view, that facts in the base totality determine semantic facts we are not denying supervenience. Our point is rather that, if you want to understand why semantic facts are supervenient on facts in the base totality—­accepting, for the moment, this way of talking—­you must, so to speak, look from above; you must look at the (allegedly)18 “non-­ intentional” facts about how we use words (e.g. “We often assert ‘­There’s a rabbit’ when a rabbit is pre­sent, and not very often when ­there is no rabbit pre­sent, or when we d ­ on’t see the rabbit”) from the standpoint of your intentional notions, rather than trying to explain from below—­trying to use physics, or behaviour science, or computer science, or what­ever, to explain why words refer. The negative part of this claim—­the denial that intentional notions, such as reference and meaning, are reducible to physical-­ cum-­computational notions—is something I argue at length in Repre­sen­ ta­tion and Real­ity. The analogy with ethics may be helpful h ­ ere. If you want to know why two ­people who do the same ­things and think the same thoughts cannot differ in moral worth, you should ask a moralist, not a physicist. If you want to know why two p ­ eople who causally interact with the same t­ hings (both directly and through the medium of their culture), think the same words, have the same dispositions, ­etc., cannot be referring to dif­fer­ent t­ hings (apart from the trivial case of indexicals), you should ask a phi­los­o­pher of language, not a physicist (or a computer scientist). In par­tic­u ­lar, if you want to know why it does not make sense to imagine a world in which ­people use their words just as we do but in which the reference of all the words is systematically permuted in such a way that the truth conditions of ­whole sentences are unaffected—so that “cat” refers to cats*, etc.—­the answer is that using words in the way we do is what any good interpreter would call “Using ‘cat’ to refer to cats and not to cats*,” ­etc.19 (Note that this answer employs the intentional notion of “calling 18. I say “allegedly” non-­intentional facts ­because I myself believe that the notion of seeing something is an intentional notion. Quine’s often-­criticized notion of “stimulus meaning” is, of course, an attempt to dodge this very issue. If facts about “seeing” are not included in the base totality, then it is unclear why Blackburn wants to claim that “Quine appears to put into the base totality every­thing we could possibly want in order to determine reference and meaning.” A quite dif­fer­ent reason why one might won­der about ­whether the facts in the base totality ­really are “non-­intentional” is that the most fundamental physical theory we have—­quantum mechanics—­employs the intentional notion of registration of information in a way which no one has to date succeeded in eliminating. 19. See my Reason, Truth and History, 34–35.

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something a so and so,” i.e. referring. That is why this is an answer “from above” and not an answer “from below.”)20 On one point I agree with Blackburn, however: this answer is also (formally) available to a metaphysical realist—­but only, I would add, to a metaphysical realist who has given up the demand that the very possibility of semantical facts be explained from below, and thus one who is not a “naturalist” in what I described as the weird sense. Thus, I agree with Blackburn that model-­theoretic arguments cannot by themselves, as a ­matter of logic alone, “prove” that internal realism is correct, as opposed to metaphysical realism; but this is something I myself have repeatedly pointed out.21 What model-­theoretic arguments do, as Blackburn recognizes, is pose a prob­lem—­a prob­lem with which, I claim, “naturalism” in ­either Quine’s version or Blackburn’s cannot deal. However, as I remarked in “A Defense of Internal Realism,” I do not think the metaphysical realist picture has any content t­ oday when it is divorced from the “naturalism” which leads phi­los­o­phers like Blackburn (and perhaps Bernard Williams) to espouse it.22 The only form of metaphysical realism with “clout” in our time is (to call it by its proper name) materialism, and one cannot si­ mul­ta­neously agree that ­there are non-­reducible semantic facts and honestly claim to be a materialist.

20. Thus I would now reject the claim that I made in “Why ­There ­Isn’t a Ready-­Made World?,” in Realism and Reason, 225, that intentional relations are not “in the world.” (“If the materialist cannot define reference, he can, of course, just take it as primitive. But reference, like causality, is a flexible, interest-­dependent notion: what we count as referring to something depends on background knowledge and our willingness to be charitable in interpretation. To read a relation so deeply ­human and so pervasively intentional into the world and to call the resulting metaphysical picture satisfactory (never mind ­whether or not it is ‘materialist’) is absurd.”) T ­ oday I would say that the interest relativity of ascriptions of reference (and causality) shows that t­ here are alternative right descriptions of the world with re­spect to reference (and causality), but not that reference (and causality) are “not in the world.” What is absurd is absolutizing any one of the alternative right descriptions. 21. E.g. in “A Defense of Internal Realism” (reprinted in Realism with a H ­ uman Face, 30–42), and “Model Theory and the ‘Factuality’ of Semantics.” Note that as far back as Realism and Reason, ix, I wrote, “[The model-­t heoretic argument] is not an attempt to solve this prob­lem (how the ‘correspondence’ is fixed) but rather a verification that the prob­lem ­really exists.” 22. Putnam, “A Defense of Internal Realism,” 37.

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Miscellaneous

Let me make three remarks on other points in Blackburn’s paper. Re Blackburn’s claim that Correspondence and Bivalence have “hygienic” interpretations: one must distinguish between “Correspondence” as a trivial claim which one can make once a language is in place—­the claim that the sentences of that language have certain truth conditions, expressed in terms of the objects and relations which that language posits—­and Correspondence as the metaphysical theory that t­ here is a totality of All Objects (and All Properties, and All Relations, e­ tc.) such that e­ very language’s universe of discourse (and e­ very language’s ideology, or se­lection of properties and relations) is just a subset of that totality (respectively, a subset of the totality of All Properties and Relations) and a Universal Correspondence Relation which assigns truth conditions to an arbitrary sentence in an arbitrary language in terms of the totalities in question. This is the picture that informs metaphysical realism, and I believe it leads to both logical paradox and philosophical confusion.23 (The denial that identity is ever conventional, discussed above, is an example of the confusion in question.) That “correspondence with facts” can be just a synonym for “true” is something I myself have pointed out (referring to William James, as Blackburn does), but when “true” is the word that does the work in explaining what “correspondence with facts” means, no Universal Ontology is presupposed. Re the claim that Bivalence has a hygienic interpretation: Blackburn’s formulation (“a determinate proposition is ­either true or false”) is just not a statement of bivalence. Of course, a determinate proposition (one that is true or false) is ­either true or false; the question is ­whether a complete description of the world can be given using a language in which all propositions are determinate.24 Last but not least, Blackburn’s claim that we cannot give up the idea of One Determinate Ontology (he calls giving this up “being cavalier about 23. See the title essay of Realism with a H ­ uman Face, 3–17. 24. On this, see my “Vagueness and Alternative Logic,” in Realism and Reason, 271– 286. Notice also the enormous weight given to examples of vagueness (“Stand roughly ­here”) in the early sections of Wittgenstein’s Investigations. Note that it is not trivial, from any point of view, to argue that vague language is “dispensable” in the description of real­ity.

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unification”) “without treating our commitments not as beliefs at all but as instrumental ac­cep­tances of a dif­fer­ent kind” depends on his claim that acknowledging conceptual relativity requires forswearing the ideal of unified knowledge, and this is a charge that I have already spoken to. The point of internal realism is not that ­there are perspectives that you cannot conjoin, as Blackburn seems to think, but that ­there is no one privileged “ontology” in terms of which real­ity is to be described. Even unified knowledge can have a plurality of forms.25

25. The meta­phor of “perspectives” is, of course, Blackburn’s, not mine, and it begs just the points at issue. ­There are ways of describing a physical object other than describing its appearance from a visual perspective; referring to alternative conceptual schemes as “perspectives,” of course, makes it sound as if t­ here must be ways of describing the world as it is apart from the descriptions. This is just the disastrous Kantian error that we need to avoid.

CHAPTER 14

Michael Dummett: On Realism and Idealism (1994)

I

have learned enormously from Dummett’s work, and I find his call for a more moderate realism and a more moderate idealism, and his suggestion that they may coincide, of g­ reat interest. If I focus in what follows on points in Dummett’s chapter that occasioned some discomfort, that is ­because I value the opportunity to continue our discussions through the years. The central theme in Dummett’s writing on realism, early and late, is that truth can never be totally recognition-­transcendent. My own picture of truth from Reason, Truth and History to Repre­sen­ta­tion and Real­ity, the “internal realist” picture, was an attempt to show the compatibility of this idea with commonsense realism. T ­ oday I no longer accept that picture of truth; I ­shall not discuss my reasons for giving it up in this reply, but I ­shall discuss Dummett’s reasons for thinking that even internal realism is too close to metaphysical realism.

Putnam’s reply to Michael Dummett, “Wittgenstein on Necessity: Some Reflections,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Bob Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 49–65.

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It was when I read the description of internal realism late in the chapter that I became uneasy. When Dummett writes, “Putnam’s moderate internalist notion of truth invokes both the ideal and the subjunctive conditional,” I do not disagree, although, as I pointed out in my comments on Blackburn’s chapter, in my internal realist writings I avoided reference to “ideal” epistemic conditions a­ fter I saw the misunderstandings that that term provoked in the early 1980s; what I spoke of w ­ ere sufficiently good conditions.1 But Dummett continues his exposition of my view, “truth is what we should eventually arrive at ­were we to commit nothing that was a ­mistake by our own lights.” ­Here two ­things bother me: the “eventually” makes it sound as if, in the internal realist picture, truth depends on what we could verify in the f­ uture, even when the statement is about the past, and to speak of nothing that is a m ­ istake by our own lights reinforces the impression that I was a Peircean; that is, that I envisaged convergence to a situation in which we “make no ­mistakes” about anything. Nevertheless, I hope that this is not what Dummett means. As I wrote in another connection, Is it incumbent, then, to go back to the Peirce-­James view, that “truth” (as distinct from “warranted assertibility”) is to be identified with the tremendously Utopian idea of “the final opinion,” the theory to be reached (and to become coercive) at the end of in­ def­initely continued investigation? Not necessarily. . . . ​Suppose, for the moment, that what is right in pragmatism is the idea that truth is an idealization—­a useful and necessary idealization—of warranted assertibility. The idealization need not involve the Utopian fantasy of a theory satisfying all the requirements that the idealists placed on the “ultimate coherent account” (an account which, they argued, could only be known by the Absolute, that is, God). The idealists’ ultimate coherent account had to contain the 1. By an “ideal,” or better, a sufficiently good, epistemic situation I meant something like this: if I say “­There is a chair in my study,” the ideal epistemic situation would be for me to be in my study, with the lights on or with daylight streaming in through the win­ dows, with nothing wrong with my eyesight, with an unconfused mind, without having taken drugs or being subjected to hypnosis, e­ tc., and look to see if t­ here is a chair t­ here. Being at or near the end of “completed science” tens of thousands (billions?) of years in the ­f uture would not help; indeed, by that time, no one w ­ ill know that I existed, or that t­ here was a study ­there.

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truth about ­every single question—it had to be what a con­ temporary logician would call a “complete and consistent theory” of every­thing. It is perhaps understandable that James and Peirce would accept the ideal of One Complete and Coherent Theory of Every­thing, since they ­were influenced by the very philosophy they w ­ ere combatting. Yet James’s own pluralism eventually led him to reject the idea that all truth must cohere in one final system. If a statement can withstand all the criticism that is appropriate given its context, perhaps that is truth enough. This general idea— the idea of truth as, in some way (not in Peirce’s way, but a more humanly accessible, modest way), an idealization of the notion of warranted assertibility—­has recently been revived in writings by Michael Dummett, Nelson Goodman, and myself.2 But it may well be that I am being overly sensitive. In any case, my purpose in quoting all this is to set the stage for considering Dummett’s next remarks: “By the nature of the ­matter, this [‘what we should do ­were we to make no ­mistakes’] is something that we cannot in all cases know: what justifies us in assuming that ­there is some specific ­thing that we should in ­those ideal circumstances do? Indeed, to put the question in this epistemological form is to make it too weak; it should be a metaphysical question, namely: if t­ here is some specific t­ hing that we should do, what makes it the case that we should do that, even though we cannot be sure what it is?” Consider the proposition, “Caesar had someone shave him on the day he crossed the Rubicon.” I believe that this proposition has a determinate truth-­value.3 “Ideal circumstances for determining that truth-­value” are not hard to describe; for example, to have been with Caesar the entire day, observed him closely, and paid par­tic­u­lar attention to w ­ hether or not he had someone shave him. Now “if ­there is some specific t­ hing that we should do” (say, assert that Caesar did have someone shave him), “what makes it 2. “William James’s Ideas” (with Ruth Anna Putnam), reprinted in my Realism with a ­Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 222–223. 3. I am, of course, aware that t­ here are cases in which it is indeterminate ­whether or not someone was shaved, but such cases are sufficiently rare to justify the belief that ­there is a fact of the ­matter in the case of Caesar on the day in question. (I am by no means wedded to universal bivalence—on that question, see my “Vagueness and Alternative Logic,” in Realism and Reason, vol. 3 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 271–286.)

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the case that we should do that, even though we cannot [now, two thousand years ­later] be sure what it is?” If this is a “metaphysical question,” it seems to me that it has a decidedly non-­metaphysical answer. If what we should say in the envisaged “ideal” (sufficiently good) situation is that Caesar had someone shave him, what “makes it the case that we should do that” is that we would, w ­ ere we in that situation, hear Caesar tell a slave, as it might be, to shave him, and see Caesar being shaved and see Caesar cross the Rubicon on that same day, ­etc.; and given our competence with the En­glish language, we are quite sure that this would license us to assert “Caesar had someone shave him on the day he crossed the Rubicon.” And if what we should say in the “ideal” situation is that Caesar did not have anyone shave him, the fact that we could testify to this would “make it the case” that we should say “Caesar did not have anybody shave him on the day he crossed the Rubicon.” If this is not the answer to the “what makes it the case” question, nothing is. But with re­spect to other kinds of judgement, e.g. judgements of rationality, and moral judgements, this may seem unsatisfactory. H ­ ere, a­ fter all ­there is frequently dispute as to what would constitute a sufficiently good epistemic situation for determining the truth of the judgement, and as to what would license making the judgement even in a well-­described situation. But if one does believe that such a judgement is true, then one ­w ill typically have convictions about both of ­these ­matters, and one ­w ill have arguments for ­those convictions—­methodological arguments, if the dispute is a methodological one, or moral arguments, if it is a moral dispute, or what­ever sort of argument is appropriate to the judgement; and it is by means of such arguments that one should answer the “what makes it the case” question and not by appeal to a metaphysical answer to a metaphysical question. If this sounds “Wittgensteinian,” that is b ­ ecause it is the sort of ­a nswer Wittgenstein gives (I do not read Wittgenstein as a “radical internalist” as Michael Dummett does; on this, more below). Wittgenstein considers cases in which t­here is dispute about the inner life of another person (for example, is he or she feigning a feeling he or she does not have?).4 And he says (I have rectified the translation): 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), II: xi, 227–228.

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Is t­ here such a t­ hing as “expert judgement” about the genuineness of expressions of feeling—­Even ­here ­there are ­those whose judgement is “better” and ­those whose judgement is “worse.” Prognoses that are more correct ­w ill generally issue from the judgements of ­those who understand ­people better [des besseren Menschenkenners]. Can one learn this knowledge? Yes; some can. Not, however, by taking a course in it, but through “experience.”—­Can another be one’s teacher in this? Certainly. From time to time he gives him the right tip. This is what “learning” and “teaching” are like ­here.—­W hat one acquires is not a technique; one learns correct judgements. ­There are also rules, but they do not form a system, and only experienced ­people can apply them right. Unlike calculating rules. So Wittgenstein’s answer to what makes judgements “correct” is in terms of notions like “understanding p ­ eople” (Menschenkenntnis), “experience,” and even (ibid., 228) “imponderable evidence.” And t­ hese are just the sorts of answer we ordinarily give; they are not metaphysical answers. I think I know what ­w ill bother Dummett about this response (both mine and Wittgenstein’s). Given the remarkable and beautiful architecture of his chapter, I would expect him to point out that this response is “banal,” and say that a banal response cannot meet the question raised by the “radical internalist.” “Of course we say that e­ ither Caesar had someone shave him or he did not have anybody shave him on that day,” the radical internalist w ­ ill respond, “but that does not mean that one of the disjuncts is determinately true. The ­whole disjunction is true, ­because it is what we say; but you begged the question by assuming that one of the disjuncts is determinately true. You have not shown that ­there is an admissible notion of truth other than being accepted as true.” The dialectical position of this “radical internalist” is not a comfortable one, however. For one ­thing, he or she cannot literally mean that we are to accept the schema: “p” is true iff p is accepted as true ­ ecause this scheme does not satisfy Frege’s Equivalence Princi­ple (i.e. the b disquotation schema). We do not accept:

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“Caesar was shaved the day he crossed the Rubicon” is accepted as true iff Caesar was shaved the day he crossed the Rubicon, ­after all. And it w ­ ill do the “radical internalist” no good to just think that the notion of truth is identical with the notion of being accepted as true but not to say it; for, as Dummett rightly remarks, if the radical internalist cannot say it, he or she cannot think it e­ ither. A better move for the radical internalist to make would be to say that true is just a device for disquotation, and not the name of a significant property that the proposition “Caesar had someone shave him the day he crossed the Rubicon” determinately does or does not have. Of course, this ­w ill not work e­ ither if “True is the name of a significant property that the proposition ‘Caesar had someone shave him the day he crossed the Rubicon’ determinately does or does not have” is something we “accept as true.” It is not quite clear that t­ here is such a (coherent) position as radical internalism. But the best move for the radical internalist is to join forces with Rorty, who recently says, “Let’s try some new ways of thinking! We might like them. Our interests and values—­both old familiar interests and values and some new ones which we may not yet be quite conscious of having—­may turn out to be better served by ­these new ways.”5 But if the radical internalist position is to be conceived of in this way, as just a proposal for a new way of talking, Dummett has mounted what seems to me the best pos­si­ble argument against it by pointing out that the consequences would be disastrous. The heart of pragmatism is the idea that notions that are indispensable to our best practice, are justified by that very fact; and in this re­spect, I am a pragmatist. It may be, however, that Dummett’s metaphysical question, “namely: if t­ here is some specific ­thing that we should do, what makes it the case that we should do that, even though we cannot be sure what it is?” is a question about my use of counterfactuals. Perhaps the question is this: what makes it the case that one of the two counterfactuals—(1) if we ­were in the “ideal” situation we would say that Caesar had someone shave him on the day he crossed the Rubicon; (2) if we w ­ ere in the “ideal” situation we would say that Caesar did not have anybody shave him on the day he crossed the Rubicon—is determinately true, even though we cannot, now and perhaps 5. I am quoting from Richard Rorty’s “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” Journal of Philosophy 90 (1993).

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even in the ­future, be sure which of the counterfactuals is true? But again, the answer—­the only answer—is “banal.” If (1) is true, what “makes it true” is that Caesar did have someone shave him on the day he crossed the Rubicon, together with the fact that this is the sort of t­ hing that a person who is with another person, and paying attention, can observe and rec­ord. And if (2) is true, what “makes it true” is that Caesar did not have someone shave him on the day he crossed the Rubicon, together with the fact that this is the sort of ­thing that a person who is with another person, and paying attention, can observe and rec­ord. “But this assumes what is at issue—­that Caesar did or did not have someone shave him on the day he crossed the Rubicon, even if we cannot now or in the f­ uture justify an answer.” Of course. What are we supposed to do, “refute” skepticism? Dummett is perfectly right in thinking that if one is what he calls a “moderate constructivist,” then one’s explanation of the sense in which the notion of truth is not “recognition-­transcendent” ­w ill involve counterfactuals. And at times Dummett himself has been attracted to a more extreme constructivism (or internalism), which may be why he equates regarding (any) unverified counterfactuals as having truth-­values with “taking an externalist attitude t­ owards counterfactuals.” But regarding some statements (e.g. some counterfactuals) as having determinate truth-­ values even though we ­w ill never know what they are is only radical externalism when ­those statements are supposed to be such that we could not have recognized their truth or falsity, even if we had been well placed. But is even radical externalism always mistaken? To be sure, ­there is a form of externalism that leads directly to skepticism: the form that insists we might all be “brains in a vat.” And our practice does, I believe, presuppose that that form of externalism is wrong, that truth is not, in a vast majority of cases, recognition-­transcendent. But is it ­really never “recognition-­transcendent”? Suppose I say, Even if ­there happen to be intelligent extra-­terrestrials, we may never be able to verify that ­there are. The antecedent of this conditional certainly presupposes that it is pos­si­ble that ­There do not happen to be any intelligent extra-­terrestrials

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(other­w ise why the conditional?). But if it is true that ­there do not happen to be any intelligent extra-­terrestrials, could we verify it, even in princi­ple? And if we cannot now say how we could, must we decide that, ­a fter all, we do not know what we mean when we say this might be true? I s­ hall not discuss this question h ­ ere, but I think we must ask w ­ hether it is obvious that commitment to the idea that truth is sometimes recognition-­transcendent does ­really amount to “metaphysical realism.”6 Wittgenstein

Dummett cites textual evidence that Wittgenstein held what he and I would both regard an untenable position with re­spect to mathematical necessity, counterfactuals, e­ tc. I w ­ ill not enter into an argument as to ­whether the passages Dummett cites must be read in the way he reads them. But I ­will say the following: (a) this is not material Wittgenstein published (Heaven forfend that anyone should publish as my views some of the ideas I have entertained, and even tried out in my courses); (b) by and large, Wittgenstein only discusses positions that he himself has been at one time or another strongly attracted to—­one cannot infer that he continued to hold them; (c) I have been working on, and plan to publish, a number of studies arguing that Wittgenstein provides us with the basis for a sane realism. Even if my interpretation of Wittgenstein is right, it does not follow that Dummett’s is flatly wrong. ­There may, ­a fter all, be more than one “line” that one can extract from Wittgenstein’s protracted philosophical reflections. But I would insist that the radical internalist line, if it ever was Wittgenstein’s, should not be read into the l­ ater work. Even in the unpublished works one can find quite dif­fer­ent attitudes from the one Michael Dummett finds. I should like to close with two examples. In the unpublished “Lectures on Religious Belief,” Wittgenstein says that the religious person is “using a picture.”7 But, at the end of the last lecture, he himself offers what Dummett would call a “banal” reading 6. I s­ hall discuss this issue (and defend the view that truth is sometimes recognition-­ transcendent) in my Dewey Lectures published in the Journal of Philosophy. 7. In my Renewing Philosophy: The Gifford Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) I argue that Wittgenstein is not proposing a “non-­cognitivist” account of religious belief in t­ hose lectures.

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of this remark. And he adds, “If I wished to say anything more I was merely being philosophically arrogant.” Elsewhere Wittgenstein himself writes, “It is true that we can compare a picture that is firmly rooted in us to a superstition; but it is equally true that we always eventually have to reach some firm ground, ­either a picture or something e­ lse, so that a picture which is at the root of all our thinking is to be respected and not treated as a superstition.”8 That being true is not the same as merely being accepted as true is a picture that is firmly rooted in us if anything is, and it is at the root of all of our thinking, as Dummett very well reminds us. We can, from within our thinking and our lives, refuse to treat it as a superstition without thinking that we must provide the guarantee from outside that metaphysical realism seeks. And this is what I think Wittgenstein was trying to tell us.

8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 83.

CHAPTER 15

Ian Hacking: On Philosophy of Science (1984)

I

an Hacking has written an in­ter­est­ing, confusing, fast-­reading, slow-­ digesting, exasperating, idiosyncratic book which is must reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of science. The introduction is alarming indeed. A ­ fter describing Feyerabend’s position (“­There are many rationalities, many styles of reason, and also many good modes of life where nothing worth calling reason ­matters very much”), Hacking adds: “My own attitude to rationality is too much like that of Feyerabend to discuss it further.” Fortunately, this professed deconstructionism turns out to be so much hype: Hacking thinks well of both Feyerabend and Austin, but it’s on Austin’s side that he finds himself when the chips are down. In any case, as he himself tells us, “what follows is about scientific realism, not rationality.” In a charming sub-­section of the first chapter titled “If you can spray them, then they are real,” Hacking explains that he “never thought twice” about scientific realism u ­ ntil a friend told him about an experiment in

Review of Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natu­ral Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), in London Review of Books, May 3, 1984.

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which the experimenter altered the charge on a tiny niobium ball to determine ­whether the passage from positive to negative charge occurs at zero or at plus or minus one-­third the charge of the electron (the purpose being to try to detect f­ ree quarks). How did the experimenter alter the charge on the niobium ball? “Well, at that stage,” said Hacking’s friend, “we spray it with positrons to increase the charge or with electrons to decrease the charge.” “From that day forth I’ve been a scientific realist,” Hacking writes. “So far as I’m concerned, if you can spray them then they are real.” Samuel Johnson long ago made the same argument. (“If you can kick them, then they are real.”) Of course, Johnson d ­ idn’t actually say anything like this, but when he “refuted” Berkeley by kicking a stone he was making the same point. Still, as all phi­los­o­phers know, ­there are t­ hings wrong with such short ways with old and deep questions. The trou­ble is that Berkeley d ­ idn’t doubt the existence of stones. It is hard to say what a stone or a t­ able is in, for example, the language of elementary particle physics. It i­sn’t just a structured aggregate of atoms ­because (as Saul Kripke has emphasized) the identity conditions for the stone ­aren’t the same as the identity conditions for the aggregate of atoms (it would be the same stone but not the same aggregate of atoms if one atom ­were removed). Deep and sophisticated theories about “time-­slices” and “space-­time regions” and “continuity” have been proposed to reconcile the scientific conceptual scheme with common sense. But any such reconciliation ­w ill allow one to believe both that the world “ultimately” consists of atoms and electrons and protons and the like, and that it makes sense to speak of certain heaps (or, better, certain space-­time rivers of ­matter) as “stones” and “­tables” and “chairs.” An exact translation of ordinary language into scientific language need not be pos­si­ble. In the same way, a Bishop Berkeley can believe both that the world “ultimately” consists of minds and their sense-­impressions (“spirits and their ideas”) and that we can speak of certain rivers of sense-­impressions as “stones” and “­tables” and “chairs,” at least “speaking with the vulgar.” If Berkeley had doubted that ­there ­were stones or that one could kick them, Johnson’s act would have been a striking reminder of the wrongness of Berkeley’s view; as it is, it merely begged the question. Why i­ sn’t Hacking simply repeating Johnson’s ­mistake? Well, I ­don’t know why Hacking ­isn’t. (That’s why I called the book “exasperating.”) Hacking may not have an argument for scientific realism at

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all, as opposed to a psychological observation about what convinces us. (He may even reject this distinction.) But to understand the book one has to turn to the other side of the “scientific realism” question, to realism about theories. H ­ ere Hacking parts com­pany with most “scientific realists.” His realism is a robust belief in the in­de­pen­dent existence of certain objects (“if you can spray them, then they are real”), not a belief in the objective truth of the schemes of repre­sen­ta­tion and explanation we call scientific theories. Hacking’s doubts about the objectivity of scientific theory are ­connected with a prob­lem which has fascinated many phi­los­o­phers (including the logical positivists, contrary to a claim of Hacking’s). This is the prob­lem of Equivalent Descriptions—­the prob­lem posed by the fact that, as Hacking puts it, “­there might be several ways to represent the same facts.”1 To see why this is a prob­lem, consider the history of science as it might have been written before the awareness of the prob­lem of Equivalent Descriptions. (Hacking traces this awareness to Hertz’s posthumous book, The Princi­ples of Mechanics of 1894.) A pre-­Hertzian historian of science might have said that Carnot’s theory of the ideal steam engine “turned out to be approximately correct, except that the reference to ‘caloric’ as a mysterious fluid is an unnecessary ele­ment, and that it was also necessary to unify Carnot’s ideas with the princi­ple of the conservation of energy.” This is the traditional picture of science “converging” to The Truth. In the same spirit, one might t­ oday write a history in which one said that what Newton did was to discover that ­there is a causal contribution that the presence of one mass (say, the sun) makes to the acceleration of another (say, the earth). The magnitude of this acceleration is described to a high degree of accuracy by Newton’s inverse square law. ­Today (thanks to Einstein) we have discovered the mechanism of this causal contribution (space-­time curvature) and eliminated the reference to Absolute Space as an unnecessary ele­ment. Now, a famous textbook of General Relativity by Weinberg pre­sents the theory in a very un-­Einsteinian way: in the Weinberg version ­there is no curved space-­time! Suppose the Weinberg theory to be fully inter-­ translatable with the Einstein theory (as it is for most applications). Then, if we “spoke the language” of the Weinberg theory we would simply say 1. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 143.

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that we had discovered (thanks to Weinberg) the mechanism of Newton’s “gravitational attraction” (a field with a massless quantum of spin two): but this is a very dif­fer­ent answer from that yielded by the Einsteinian version of the theory. Is this so bad? I consider myself a “realist” with a small r (an “internal” realist, I like to say), and I would not be troubled by such a situation. I would be prepared to treat the Weinberg theory and the Einstein theory as mere notational variants if a full inter-­translatability could be established. “But then we c­ ouldn’t give an answer to the question Is space-­time curved or not? that was in­de­pen­dent of our own conceptual choices!” But why should we be able to do that? Why should it trou­ble us so that we cannot divide up “what makes a statement true” into a part that is The Way T ­ hings Are in Themselves and another which is Our Conceptual Contribution? Why ­shouldn’t we say that both versions are correct, if ­either is? This is not Hacking’s reaction, however. Hacking wants truth to be totally non-­perspectival, and this leads him to what I find the least persuasive distinction in the book: he attempts to distinguish between “­simple, non-­representational assertions” (My typewriter is on the desk), concerning which t­ here is a “truth of the m ­ atter,” and “a barrage of more or less instructive repre­sen­ta­tions,” which is all we get in physical theory. Where Hacking’s book is strongest is in its documentation of the extent to which an experimenter’s confidence in the real­ity of what he is manipulating can be in­de­pen­dent of commitments to a serious explanatory theory. Hacking does convince me that phi­los­o­phers of science are woefully ignorant of the facts of life about experimentation, and the second part of this book is an excellent remedy for this woeful ignorance. But what I find less convincing is the supposed in­de­pen­dence of experimental real­ity from repre­sen­ta­tion. I can describe a mea­sure­ment or a manipulation as a mea­sure­ment or a manipulation of electromagnetic fields: but I can also describe the same mea­sure­ment or manipulation as a mea­sure­ment or manipulation of forces acting at a distance (non-­instantaneously) on bits of ­matter. What we manipulate does not carry its own description, its Aristotelian essence, on its face. This is a pervasive phenomenon. A Hopi describes a situation as “producing a forked pattern in a bush by hand action” where we speak of “pulling a branch aside.” A Hopi Hacking might say that “if you can produce them by hand action then they are real,” and thus establish the “real­ity” of forked patterns!

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If I cannot buy Hacking’s arguments, I do appreciate his numerous careful discussions of vari­ous views (including two chapters on my own views), as well as his rich account of a­ ctual science and past science. But I would draw a dif­fer­ent conclusion. Instead of trying to save metaphysical realism (“externalism”) by restricting it to “­simple, non-­representational assertions” (kicking Samuel Johnson’s stone), I would insist that t­ here is no philosophically in­ter­est­ing class of assertions that is innocent of our own conceptual contribution (and could thus serve as our “representation-­ independent” hold on real­ity). The search for that conceptually uncontaminated Real­ity “out t­ here” still looks like a mug’s game.

CHAPTER 16

Rudolf Carnap (Thomas Ricketts): On Empiricism and Conventionalism (1994)

T

ho­mas Ricketts’s close reading of Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language is certainly a contribution to our understanding of that work, and I have learned much from it. I certainly agree that the notions of language-­independent “fact,” of ­things that “make true” the sentences of a language L, indeed, any substantive notion of truth, are absent from that work and are not presupposed by Carnap’s argument. Yet I am not ready to admit that my criticisms of Carnap ­were based on misreadings, or that my charges of conventionalism and empiricism ­were completely unfounded. Ricketts’s Carnap, the Carnap who holds no doctrines but only asks for “clarification” without any substantive position on what clarification consists of, is just not the Carnap I knew and loved.1 Putnam’s reply to Thomas Ricketts, “Carnap’s Princi­ple of Tolerance, Empiricism, and Conventionalism,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Bob Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 176–200. 1. “Carnap is open to considering what­ever is offered by way of clarification,” Ricketts writes (emphasis added).

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Re Carnap’s empiricism: the fact is that Carnap wrote Der Logische Aufbau der Welt. And while readings of that work which resemble Ricketts’s reading of the Logical Syntax have been offered, they depend on playing down both the massiveness of the construction presented in that work—if Carnap just wanted to give an example of the possibility of alternative, equally correct “bases” for the reconstruction of the language of science, it is striking that he chose to work so hard to provide a phenomenalistic, indeed a solipsistic, reconstruction—­and the explicit statement in that work that the solipsistic (Eigenpsychisch) basis is epistemologically primary. Re Carnap’s conventionalism: Ricketts himself does attribute one quite substantive ambition to Carnap—­“coordinating definitions that specify the linguistic be­hav­ior that would make individuals the speakers of a language with a given syntax.” We have an idea of what Carnap had in mind from a late paper proposing a behavioral criterion for synonymy and analyticity in natu­ral languages.2 What corresponds behaviorally to analyticity, according to that paper, is the subject’s refusal to say he or she would give up a statement, even in counter-­factual circumstances that the investigator instructs the subject to consider. Thus our (counterfactual) unwillingness to give them up does make statements analytic; and it also makes them true in the only sense of “true” that Carnap recognized, a Tarskian disquotational sense. That it makes them true in a metaphysical realist sense of “true” is not a position that I ever attributed to Carnap. (My other criticisms of Carnap’s conventionalism turn on the l­ ater introduction of the semantic notion of “consequence” in Carnap’s writing, and Ricketts makes it clear that he is not discussing that period in Carnap’s thought.)

2. Rudolf Carnap, “Meaning and Synonymy in Natu­ral Languages,” Philosophical Studies 6 (1955): 33–47.

CHAPTER 17

David Albert: On Quantum Mechanics (2013)

D

avid Albert has proved an impor­tant theorem, a surprising one, which certainly has relevance to the way we w ­ ill understand quantum mechanics in the f­ uture. W ­ hether its moral is r­ eally the “non-­narratibility” of the history of the quantum world is, however, dependent on interpretative questions about which phi­los­o­phers and physicists—­even phi­los­o­phers and physicists who, like David Albert and myself, are looking for what the late, g­ reat, J. S. Bell called an “unromantic” interpretation of quantum mechanics—­are sure to disagree. In this brief comment I want to say what Albert has certainly shown, and what depends on ­those interpretative questions (and, of course, what ­those questions are). By an “unromantic” interpretation, what Bell meant is an intelligible and mathematically precise interpretation in which ­there is no talk about “consciousness” reducing the wave packet, “mea­sure­ments” are simply described as a subclass of physical interactions, and, of course, ­there is no loose talk about the world consisting of “information.”

Putnam’s reply to David Albert, “Physics and Narrative,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Maria Baghramian (London: Routledge, 2013), 225–236.

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What Albert has shown is that t­ here is no transformation which w ­ ill always give you the complete history of the evolution of the wave function of “the world” (of an arbitrary quantum mechanical system) in one frame, or f­ amily of spacelike hypersurfaces (henceforth: “one foliation”) given the history in an arbitrary dif­fer­ent foliation. A fortiori, ­there is no Lorentz transformation that ­will do this: Lorentz transformations do not act on the wave function. (One philosophically significant consequence is that the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics—an interpretation in which ­there is “only the wave function”—­does not give us one single Lorentz invariant “narrative” of the history of the world.) The Interpretative Issues

Albert’s interpretation of the, so to speak, metaphysical significance of his theorem is that the physical world has a ­family of foliation-­dependent histories, not one unique history. The history of the evolution of the world is not completely capturable by a single “narrative.” But t­ here are other pos­ si­ble interpretations. That is what I want to explain. To do this, it ­w ill be useful to explain a term introduced into the discussion by John Stewart Bell, the term “beable.” A “beable” is an entity that a theory postulates as being physically real. In “The theory of local beables,” Bell wrote, The word “beable” ­w ill . . . ​be used ­here to carry [the distinction] familiar already in classical theory between “physical” and “non-­physical” quantities. In Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory, for example, the fields E and H are “physical” (beables, we ­w ill say) but the potentials A and ϕ are “non-­physical.” B ­ ecause of gauge invariance the same physical situation can be described by very dif­fer­ent potentials. It does not m ­ atter that in Coulomb gauge the scalar potential propagates with infinite velocity. It is not ­really supposed to be ­there. It is just a mathematical con­ve­nience.1

1. J.  S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 52–53.

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And further: We ­w ill be particularly concerned with the local beables, t­ hose which (unlike, for example, the total energy) can be assigned to some bounded spacetime region. For example, in Maxwell’s theory, the beables local to a given region are just the fields E and H and all the functionals thereof. It is in terms of local beables that we can hope to formulate some notion of local causality.2 All realistic interpretations of quantum mechanics postulate the existence of some beables or other (that is what makes them realistic interpretations), but they do not all postulate the existence of local beables. In the Many Worlds interpretation, for example, the wave function itself is a “beable,” one might call it a “global beable,” but t­ here are no local beables. In Roderich Tumulka’s version of the GRW (Ghirardi-­ R imini-­ Weber) 3 interpretatation, however, the wave function is not regarded as a beable, but simply as a mathematical object that represents the probability distributions over the beables, and the only beables—­a nd they are local ones—­are the “flashes,” that is the point-­like events that occur when a particle (which prior to such an event has only a potential existence) momentarily “flashes” into existence.4 In the Bohm interpretation, the wave function seems once again to be a global beable (at least this is how Bohm seems to have thought of it), but t­ here are a full complement of local ­beables: the particles. But the Bohm interpretation does not pretend to be Lorentz invariant, so the history of the world in the preferred frame is the history. Equipped with ­these concepts, we can now return to Albert’s example of a system with the remarkable property that, if we follow the time evolution of its wave function in one foliation, call it “Alice,” then ­there the 2. Ibid., 53. 3. Roderich Tumulka, “A Relativistic Version of the Ghirardi-­R imini-­Weber Model,” Journal of Statistical Physics 125, no. 4 (2006): 821–840. An account of Tumulka’s model that presupposes only elementary mathe­matics is chapter 10 of the third edition of Tim Maudlin, Quantum Non-­locality and Relativity: Metaphysical Intimations of Modern Physics (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2011). 4. The “flash” ontology was proposed by J. S. Bell in “Are T ­ here Quantum Jumps?,” in Schrödinger: Centenary Cele­bration of a Polymath, ed. C. W. Kilmister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 41–52, reprinted in Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, 201–212.

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spin of a certain particle a is always perfectly correlated with the spin of its distant “twin” a′, while if we follow the time evolution of its wave function in anther foliation, call it “Bob,” then t­ here is a period of time during which the spin of a is correlated with the spin of a dif­fer­ent particle b′, and not correlated with the spin of a′. Alice and Bob “tell” entirely dif­fer­ent stories about the correlations between the spins of four particles, a, a ′, b, b′ (I have left out the part of the story that concerns b and a′ ). But are spins (or correlations between spins of separated particles) beables? According to Tumulka’s version of GRW (with the “flash” ontology) they are not. In the “world” Albert describes ­there are no collapses, and hence no “flashes.” It is a world where a number of ­things could have happened (­there was a positive probability of a “flash”), but, as luck would have it, nothing did happen. And that’s an easy history to narrate: nothing happened. Is this the right interpretation of quantum mechanics? Time ­w ill tell. Moral: the ultimate evaluation of the significance of Albert’s result ­w ill have to wait, as so much ­else about quantum mechanics ­w ill, ­until we arrive—if we ever do—at an interpretation of quantum mechanics that satisfies us (and that, we hope, does so ­because it is the right one).

CHAPTER 18

Ned Block: On the Qualitative Character of Experience (2013)

N

ed Block writes that “(Hilary Putnam mentioned that he sees colors differently in dif­fer­ent eyes).” Actually, I already noticed when I was a college student that when I looked at a sandy beach in bright sunlight, the exact color of the sand looked dif­fer­ent if I looked with my right eye shut and if I looked with my left eye shut. ­Later I discovered that I can get other ­people to have a similar experience, if I tell them to go outside and find a white wall (or a wall some pale shade of gray or yellow) some distance away and try looking at it with their left eye closed and then with their right eye closed. As Block mentioned, the explanation turns out to be very ­simple: the maculae of the two eyes are not identical with re­spect to pigmentation. But that d ­ oesn’t mean that the macula of one eye is “normal” nor that the macula of the other eye is abnormal. This is not a hy­po­thet­ i­cal case, and it does not depend on a thought experiment.

Putnam’s reply to Ned Block, “Wittgenstein and Qualia,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Maria Baghramian (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 275–318.

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As I say, I have experienced it in my own case. And it also d ­ oesn’t ­really depend on the names we have for the vari­ous colors and shades of colors. First of all, the difference ­isn’t so ­great that with one eye closed I would say “It’s a grey wall” and with the other eye closed I would say “It’s a white wall.” In the case of my experience when looking at a beach in bright sunlight, what I might have said is that the beach seemed to be slightly dif­ fer­ent shades of yellow, depending on which eye was open. But I w ­ ouldn’t say that it seemed to be yellow when viewed through my left eye alone, and gray when viewed through my right eye alone. The difference was not that extreme. And it w ­ ouldn’t have affected my “matching” per­for­mance on a color chart. No ­matter which eye is shut, if the beach matches yellow32 with the left eye shut, it ­w ill match yellow32 with the right eye shut. And by the way, our notion of “exactly the same color” has itself been affected by and refined by technology, especially by mass production and the resultant need for standardization. My own experience thus prepared me to accept one of the points that Block makes: the view (common to “intentionalists” and “disjunctivists” in the philosophy of perception) that the phenomenal quality of a subject’s visual experience upon looking at (hearing, feeling, smelling, ­etc.) a certain portion of her environment is exhausted by the objective appearance-­ properties (e.g., looking such-­and-­such a shade from such-­and-­such a point in space u ­ nder such-­and-­such lighting conditions) of that portion of the environment is untenable. This view is, of course, a strong form of “naïve realism,” and while I think naïve realists are right to say that what we see (hear, feel, smell, ­etc.) when we perceive objects and events in our environment are properties of t­ hose objects and not properties of our qualia (something Block also thinks is right, as his paper makes clear), it is a ­mistake to say that describing what we perceive in objective terms also completely describes the phenomenology of the perceptual experience. That phenomenology is determined by a combination of objective and subjective ­factors, and repre­sen­ta­tionalists err by failing to recognize the contribution of the subjective side. On all this Block and I are in agreement. Afterthoughts

(What you have just read is what I said in my comments a­ fter Ned’s talk in March 2007.) But what I went on to say, I no longer agree with! I said:

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The assumption you [Ned] need for the full picture you want, and that I cannot go along with, is the assumption that sameness of qualitative character is well-­defined both when we consider one person at dif­fer­ent times and when we consider dif­fer­ent p ­ eople at the same or dif­fer­ent times. In other words, you need to assume that ­there is a fact of the ­matter, albeit what you call an “ineffable” one, about ­whether the qualitative character of the experiences of the two subjects, or the one subject at dif­fer­ent times, is the same or dif­ fer­ent.1 I think that we should give that up. I myself believe that are no good candidates in pre­sent day neurology for a relation of sameness of qualitative character which is well-­defined in that sense. I also considered the idea (which Block advocates) that the requisite relation of “sameness of qualitative character” could be fixed by finding out which brain-­states qualia are (assuming that a “mind-­brain identity theory” is correct for qualia). And I said, “Now, that certainly suggests that some straightforward identification of quale with certain brain states is ­going to be discovered. But if ­there ­were such an identification, knowing which one it is is a prob­ably unsolvable epistemological prob­lem.”2 I now think that my claim that determining which brain-­parameters determine qualitative character is “a prob­ably unsolvable epistemological prob­lem” was wrong. This is a claim to which Block devoted an impor­tant paper which had not appeared when I made ­those remarks.3 In that paper, Block wrote, “I ­will give an empirical argument that we can achieve a better fit between psy­chol­ogy and neuroscience if we assume that the perspectives just described are wrong. . . . ​The alternative I have in mind is just the familiar default “method” of inference to the best explanation, that is the approach of looking for the framework that makes the most sense of all the data, not just reports.” Block’s argument in that paper (to which I refer the interested reader) convinces me, and I am happy to withdraw the objection to the assumption I could not “go along with” in Dublin. 1. By “ineffable” Block does not mean “indescribable in princi­ple,” but indescribable in ordinary language with the terms used to describe objective appearances, e.g., “such and such a shade of red.” 2. I remarked that this is a point I argued for in chapter 4 of my Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 3. Ned Block, “Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh between Psy­chol­ogy and Neuroscience,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (2007): 481–548.

CHAPTER 19

John McDowell: On Perception (2013)

M

cDowell”s “Concepts in Perceptual Experience” is a fascinating paper. McDowell is a phi­los­o­pher whose work I admired and have learned from (which does not mean ­there ­a ren’t any disagreements between us). In his paper, McDowell sees me as agreeing with Travis in a denial that “perceptual experiences have content,” but I would not put my view that way . . . Re: “Perceptual Experiences Have Content”

When McDowell says that perceptual experiences have content he means conceptual content, as he makes clear. But what is conceptual content? That is not so clear. Moreover, McDowell has himself modified his view in an essay published in 2009.1 In any case, in his ­great book, Mind and World (1994), McDowell wrote: Putnam’s reply to John McDowell, “Concepts in Perceptual Experience: Putnam and Travis,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Maria Baghramian (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 341–346. 1. John McDowell, “Avoiding the Myth of the Given,” in Having the World in View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 256–272. I do not know ­whether this was written e­ arlier or ­later than the pre­sent essay.

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No subject could be understood as having experiences of color except against a background of understanding that makes it pos­ si­ble for judgments endorsing such experiences to fit into her view of the world.2 and he claimed that this applies also to inner experiences such as the experience of “seeing red” produced by a blow on the head, or even the judgment that I have a pain.3 Thus McDowell’s claim that the experiences of a “subject” (by which he means, as he also makes clear, a person capable of understanding the question as to the justification of any one of her judgments) have conceptual content entails that even sense impressions of the most primitive kind are only pos­si­ble for such a subject if she has the conceptual abilities required to understand such judgments as “that was an experience of red” or “that was an experience of pain.” In an essay “Avoiding the Myth of the Given” (2008) McDowell gives up the claim that the experiences of such a “subject” (which experiences he refers to by the Kantian term “intuitions”) presuppose that the subject already possesses the concepts (including demonstrative concepts, like “this shade”) needed to describe their content, but he takes the ability to form such concepts to be “in play” when one has ­those experiences, and he describes t­ hose abilities as “discursive” abilities.4 Thus it is clear that McDowell still takes the learning of a language to be a pre-­requisite for having experiences in the sense in which rational beings—­beings that can understand and respond to requests for justifications for their judgments—­ have experiences. According to McDowell, I resist this idea ­because I have a “blind spot.” To reassure me that his discontinuity thesis does not threaten the idea that cats and dogs have experiences, he writes: Nothing in the Kantian conception requires its adherents to resist if someone, for instance Putnam, wants to use the word “experience” differently, so that it fits whenever a creature, rational or not, is on to ­things through the operation of perceptual capacities.

2. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 30. 3. Ibid., 30. 4. McDowell, “Avoiding the Myth of the Given,” 256–272.



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If “percept” goes with “experience,” and if we use “concept” in such a way that only rational animals can have concepts, that would mean that we cannot say “No percepts without concepts.” Alternatively, we could keep “No percepts without concepts” by giving “concepts” a dif­fer­ent use. [emphasis added] But I am not reassured! If McDowell’s claims are right, then not only do cats and dogs not have sense impressions of the sort with which we language-­users are familiar (in Mind and World McDowell seems to me to use “impressions” and “experiences” interchangeably), but neither do small ­children, ­until they learn to speak, and not just to speak, but to understand requests for justifications for what they say. And to say, as McDowell, in effect, does say “Well, if you want, you can give the word experience a “dif­fer­ent” use; you can decide to say that when a cat or a child learns to respond differentially to the presence or absence of, say, something hot by the way it feels to the touch, then it has “experiences” of “heat,” does not address my utter disbelief in what McDowell claims. I see no reason whatsoever to doubt that a two-­or three-­year old child (and prob­ ably even a neonate) experiences heat and pain much as I do now; or, to be more precise, to doubt that the phenomenal quality of the experience is much the same as it w ­ ill be when the child grows up.5 I have used the expression “phenomenal quality” h ­ ere, in full knowledge that talk of the “phenomenal quality” of experiences may be a “nono” to McDowell. Indeed, the distinction between an apperception and a mere sense impression goes missing in both of the essays of McDowell and Travis. And it is ­because it goes missing that I wrote that I would not put my view as a s­ imple denial that “perceptual experiences have content.” (Most of this paper w ­ ill be an explanation of this remark.) McDowell takes Kant as his phi­los­o­pher of perception of choice (Travis’s is Frege, obviously).6 And Kant, at one crucial point, makes a m ­ istake 5. The case of color vision in cats and dogs is dif­fer­ent from that in h ­ umans, ­because it was long supposed that cats, and possibly dogs as well, are color blind. In the 1960s, however, researchers managed to teach cats to discriminate between colors. But the training took a long time. “Untrained” cats show no color discrimination. That is why I used the experience of heat as an example above, and not the experience of red. Cats do, however, readily discriminate dif­fer­ent shades of gray! 6. See Charles Travis, “Frege, ­Father of Disjunctivism,” Philosophical Topics 33, no. 1 (2008): 307–334.

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that, it seems to me, foreshadows, even if it was not the source for, McDowell’s belief that e­ very experience of any (adult language-­adept) h ­ uman is 7 accompanied by a full-­fledged conceptualization. In Kant’s language, a fully conceptualized experience of a rational being is accompanied by the “Ich denke.” It involves, in terminology that Kant also uses, both apperception and apprehension.8 And the possibility of an experience that is not accompanied by the “I think” is dismissed thus: The I think [“Ich denke,” in German] must be capable of accompanying all my pre­sen­ta­tions; other­wise something would be presented to me which could not be thought at all, which means no less than: the pre­sen­ta­tion would be ­either impossible, or at least nothing to me . . . ​Consequently ­every manifold of perception has a necessary relation to the I think, in the same subject in which the manifold is found.9 What is right in what Kant writes is that when I have an experience that I do not attend to at all, or apply any predicate to (even the predicate “my experience”), I cannot at the same time think of it as mine. But it does not follow that it must be “nothing to me,” ­because I may very well be able to remember it ­later—­certainly a moment ­later, and on some occasions, many years ­later. (I myself have a few memories from the time when I could barely talk, from around age two.) Try the following s­ imple experiment: walk around a crowded beach, or a busy street, or any other place where the scene is colorful and variegated. Now stop, close your eyes, and try to remember some of the scene 7. Strictly speaking, this was McDowell’s view in Mind and World. I discuss the modified view (as of “Avoiding the Myth of the Given”) ­later in this paper. 8. “If we consciously imagine for ourselves the inner action (spontaneity), whereby a concept (a thought) becomes pos­si­ble, we engage in reflection; if we consciously imagine for ourselves the susceptibility (receptivity), whereby a perception ( perceptio), i.e. empirical observation, becomes pos­si­ble, we engage in apprehension; however, if we consciously imagine both acts, then the consciousness of one’s self (apperceptio) can be divided into that of reflection and that of apprehension. Reflection is a consciousness of the understanding, whilst apprehension is a consciousness of the inner sense; reflection is pure apperception, but apprehension is empirical apperception.” Footnote to Book I, Section 4, of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor L. Dowdell, ed. Hans H. Rudnick (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978). 9. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, §15 and §16, B131.



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that you did not particularly attend to, or think about, just before you closed your eyes. If you are like me, you ­w ill find that you can remember parts of the visual scene that you did not “conceptualize” in any sense of “conceptualize” I can understand, b ­ ecause you ­were not attending to them at all, although they ­were part of the total scene. Your pre­sent memory-­ experience of that part of the visual scene is, obviously, conceptualized, but the experience of which it is a memory was not. Someone might suggest that all I now know is what my “conceptualized” memory-­experience of what I saw at age two, or even of what I saw a moment ago but did not attend to at the moment, is like; that t­ here is no way to talk about the “phenomenal character” of any such experience at the time it was peripherally experienced but not attended to. But to accept this suggestion would amount to total skepticism about something we know, or have e­ very reason to think we know, of our experience from memory, including short-­term memory. The total introspectable quality of an experience certainly can be modified by paying attention to it. But my memory tells me something of the immediately-­past color-­appearance of the apple that is on the ­table as I type ­these words (I am working in my kitchen). I do not claim that we can recover all the details of any past experience, even an immediately past one, nor that my memory of the details I do remember is completely accurate. But memories are not an interface ­behind which past experiences are somehow “hidden.” They reveal our past experiences, and they do not have to be perfectly accurate to do that. McDowell’s position as of 2009 does not require him to deny this. All he still insists on is that I could not have had t­ hose experiences if I had not had the conceptual powers needed for a certain counterfactual to be true. The original experience may indeed not have been conceptualized in the literal sense (brought u ­ nder a concept), but it could have been—­could have been even if I did not already possess the appropriate concept and do not, in fact, possess it now. As Hilla Jacobson and I interpret “Avoiding the Myth of the Given” in a joint paper,10 the counterfactual McDowell is assuming is: 10. Hilla Jacobson and Hilary Putnam, “Against Perceptual Conceptualism,” paper read (by Hilla) at Philosophy in an Age of Science: A Conference in Honor of Hilary Putnam’s 85th Birthday, Harvard and Brandeis Universities, May 30–­June 3, 2011.

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(AC:) The attention counterfactual: For any phenomenal aspect [any “intuition” in McDowell’s Kantian terminology], had the subject attended to the feature [e.g. the par­tic­u­lar shade of color of an object] represented in that intuition, she could have recognized it [brought it u ­ nder a concept] at the time the experience was had. Moreover, (AC) itself admits of more than one interpretation. On one interpretation, (AC) requires the ­actual possession of the appropriate concept as a condition for having the par­tic­u­lar “intuition” (or “sense impression”). On another interpretation—­a nd this is how Jacobson and I understand “Avoiding the Myth of the Given”—(AC) requires merely the ability to acquire the appropriate concept upon having the experience, and the attention counterfactual expresses a condition upon having that ability. In our joint paper, Jacobson and I argue, largely for empirical reasons, that on ­either interpretation (AC) is false. But I ­shall not repeat ­those argument ­here. Instead, I ­shall simply say that even if (AC) ­were true, I do not see how it is supposed to follow that the subject, who is admitted to have had the experience at a time when the appropriate concept was not formed (­because the “intuition” in question was not attended to) nevertheless was able to have the “intuition” only b ­ ecause the “discursive ability” to form such a concept was “in play.” Indeed, since the sense in which that discursive ability was supposed to be “in play” is supposed not to be accessible to empirical science, that power, and its mysterious activity, would seem to belong to Kantian transcendental psy­chol­ogy, a proj­ect I see no sense in or hope for.11 (Moreover, I certainly did not have “discursive abilities” McDowell talks about at age two!) Where McDowell Went Wrong

in Mind and World as well as subsequently, McDowell (rightly, in my view) rejects the “coherentism” that he finds in Donald Davidson’s claim (taken, as Davidson acknowledges, from Neurath) that experiences do not (that is, cannot, are not the sort of t­ hing that can) justify beliefs, or be evidence for

11. See McDowell’s “Tyler Burge on Disjunctivism,” Philosophical Explorations 13 (2010): 243–255.



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or against them.12 Nor does Davidson think that our beliefs have determinate semantic relations to objects in the world: on Davidson’s account, reference is determinate only to the extent that translation practice is determinate; but translation practice only correlates linguistic expressions to other linguistic expressions, so that (if he is right) language as a ­whole has no connections to the world other than purely causal ones. As McDowell puts it, “[F]or Davidson receptivity can impinge on the space of reasons only from outside, which is to say that nothing can be rationally vulnerable to its deliverances. Davidson differs from Quine only in that he is explicit about this and clear-­sightedly draws the consequence: we cannot make sense of thought’s bearing on the world in terms of an interaction between spontaneity and receptivity. If we go on using the Kantian terms, we have to say that the operations of spontaneity are rationally unconstrained from outside themselves. This is indeed a way of formulating Davidson’s coherentism.”13 The alternative to “Davidson’s coherentism” that McDowell sees is a “minimal empiricism, which makes out that the very idea of thought’s directedness at the empirical world is intelligible only in terms of answerability to the tribunal of experience, conceived in terms of the world ­impressing itself upon perceiving subjects.”14 In “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (as McDowell reads that famous paper in the first chapter of Mind and World) Davidson rejects minimal empiricism b ­ ecause he sees it as involving “The Myth of the Given,” that is, the incoherent idea that something totally non-­conceptual can rationally justify a belief. McDowell agrees that this is an incoherent idea, but he suggests that Davidson has a “blind spot”;15 Davidson does not consider the possibility that 12. “Neurath was right in rejecting the intelligibility of comparing sentences or beliefs with real­ity . . . ​Nor can such events be considered in themselves to be evidence, ­unless, of course, they cause us to believe something” (Donald Davidson, “Empirical Content,” in his Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001], 173). That (token) experiences, which Davidson regards as identical with brain events, cannot stand in justificatory relations to beliefs is the gravamen of his famous “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973–1974): 5–20; reprinted in Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 13. McDowell, Mind and World, 139. 14. Ibid., xvi. 15. Ibid., 14.

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impressions might themselves by conceptualized, or (as in “Avoiding the Myth of the Given”) ­shaped somehow by our rational powers (“spontaneity”) so as to make them fit to stand in justificatory relations to conceptually structured claims and beliefs. In sum, McDowell thinks we have to combine “minimal empiricism” with a Kantian notion of what an “impression” is. But McDowell himself has a blind spot, I believe. What McDowell’s blind spot keeps him from seeing is, in fact, almost in view on p. 17 of Mind and World, when McDowell writes, “One option would be to renounce empiricism, at least with experience construed in terms of impressions.” What the last nine words imply is that one pos­si­ble option would be, not to “renounce empiricism,” but to reconceive experience, by construing it, in its role of justifying beliefs, as something other than “impressions.” This is not what McDowell does, however. What he does is reconceive impressions, by adopting his Conceptualism. What I wish to propose is not that impressions are themselves (always and necessarily) s­ haped by our discursive abilities, as Conceptualism requires but rather that ­there are more sorts of experiences than just “impressions.” Specifically, t­ here are apperceptions. Apperceptions and Impressions

Although both Leibniz and Kant take “apperception” to involve the awareness of one’s “inner state” or of one’s “self,” that is not how I ­shall use the term h ­ ere.16 Instead, I ­shall use it in the sense, found in many dictionaries, of a “fully conscious perception.” That a fully conscious perception is something that takes place “inside” us, is a survival in both Leibniz and Kant, of Descartes’ picture of the mind, but the w ­ hole “inner sense / outer sense” distinction is dubious once the interface picture of experience is jettisoned, as McDowell, Travis, and I all agree it should be. And I ­w ill take

16. In section 4 of the Princi­ples of Nature and of Grace (1714), Leibniz says that apperception is “consciousness, or the reflective knowledge of this internal state.” He adds that this is “something not given to all souls, nor at all times to a given soul.” And in a passage from Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View previously quoted, apperceptio is said to involve “consciousness of one’s self.”



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the relevant sense of “fully conscious” to be conceptualized.17 What I maintain is that apperceptions are not beliefs caused by experiences; they are bona fide experiences in their own right. That they are not simply “inner states,” however, follows at once from the fact that apperceiving something in my environment is an activity that involves that something; it is, as I have put it elsewhere,18 the exercise of a capacity to function “with long arms,” arms that reach out to the environment. Thus, apperceptions ­aren’t qualia; but qualia are not all t­ here is to experiences. To be sure, the line between an apperception and the accompanying qualia, when ­there are accompanying qualia (the reason for this “when” ­w ill be explained in a moment) is not sharp. As William James put it, in the case of a “presented and recognized material object . . . ​Sensations and apperceptive ideas fuse h ­ ere so intimately that you can no more tell where one begins and the other ends, than you can tell, in t­ hose cunning circular pa­noramas that have lately been exhibited, where the real foreground and the painted canvas join together.”19 And I have heard some “disjunctivists” argue that talk of qualia is fatally compromised by just the vagueness of the boundary between qualia and “apperceptive ideas” that James pointed out. But “fo­liage,” “weed,” “place to visit,” e­ tc., e­ tc., all have vague bound­aries, and are still perfectly good notions. The very fact that, as I argued above, I can remember some unconceptualized qualia means that qualia are not a grammatical illusion, or a product of “bad philosophy.” Two further points, before I continue: (1) while visual apperception is accompanied by qualia in paradigm cases, not all apperceptions are so accompanied; some apperceptions are “amodal,” to use a term I learned from Alva Noë.20 I see a tomato as something that has another side; I do not see the other side, but I apperceive the tomato as having one. (2) T ­ here 17. In this sense, the recognition by means of the senses of an object or event as the sort of object or event it is counts as an “apperception,” while the mere seeing of it that Travis describes as equally available to a ­human and an animal as long as the object or event is before the eyes, is not. See Charles Travis, “Affording Us the World,” in Baghramian, Reading Putnam, 322–340. 18. See my Prometheus Prize Lecture, “Corresponding with Real­ity,” in Philosophy in the Age of Science, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 19. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. Ralph Barton Perry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 16. 20. Alva Nöe, Perception in Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

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is a difference between what I would experience w ­ ere my arm simply to rise of itself (an alarming possibility!) and what I experience when I raise my arm of my own volition (something I can clearly apperceive), but t­ here is no quale of “voluntariness.” T ­ here is something it is like to raise one’s arm of one’s own volition; “what it’s like” ­isn’t always quale. Apperceptions are experiences even when they are amodal. The reason that my position is not, as McDowell takes it to be, a s­ imple denial that “perceptual experiences have content,” is that what I deny is that mere impressions (qualia) have conceptual content; but apperceptions do have conceptual content, and they are “perceptual experiences.” I am now ready to say what the upshot of all this is: in brief, all the claims McDowell makes about perceptual experiences in Mind and World are true of apperceptions and seeming-­apperceptions, including amodal apperceptions: they are conceptualized but non-­inferential, and they can be judged as wrong even though they seem right. Justification begins with apperceptions, not with impressions. ­Isn’t this, however, just the Myth of the Given? ­A ren’t my “apperceptions” just perceptual beliefs? ­Isn’t this just the Neurath-­Davidson thesis that beliefs are justified by other beliefs in a dif­fer­ent language? My reply should come as no surprise: to repeat, apperceptions are conceptually ­shaped and they can justify judgments. But they are not the same as perceptual beliefs. I may have an apperception, or, better, a seeming apperception, that one “shaft” is longer than the other in the Müller-­Lyer illusion, but I do not believe what I seem to be apperceiving. One can seem to oneself to apperceive when one knows that one does not (successfully) apperceive, but one cannot seem to oneself to believe when one does not believe. The distinction between qualia and apperceptions is not the same as the distinction between qualia and perceptual beliefs. In my view, Neurath and Davidson both operated with too narrow a range of relevant ­factors in perceptual judgment: they had only unconceptualized experiences (sense impressions) and beliefs (which Davidson identified with linguistic objects, sentences) to work with. The picture of unconceptualized impressions acting purely causally to “trigger” beliefs is a picture of the mind that ­either leaves out intentionality, or requires the Myth of the Given to forcibly insert it. And Kant, and, following Kant, McDowell, try to reinsert intentionality, and the possibility of a justificatory relation between experiences and beliefs, by insisting that all impressions



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(with the pos­si­ble exception of some that are “nothing to us,” in the passage from Kant I quoted ­earlier) are conceptualized; but Conceptualism turns out to be ­either bad empirical psy­chol­ogy or a claim about mysterious ­mental powers being mysteriously “in play.” Neurath and Davidson have no unconceptualized experiences in their picture; McDowell (and Kant) have only conceptualized experiences. In real­ity, t­ here are both sorts of experiences. ­There are both unconceptualized impressions and apperceptions (and, as James noted, combinations of the two). The most likely cause of re­sis­tance to the picture I advocate, I believe, ­w ill be the hold on us of the traditional empiricist idea that knowledge begins with qualia, and beliefs are inferred from qualia. In fact, we do not even know that qualia (which, with Ned Block, I believe to be brain events) occur e­ arlier than the related apperceptions.21 Apperceptions and seeming-­apperceptions are not mysterious “beliefs” floating unsupported in an epistemic void; they are the most primitive cognitive experiences we have. And our beliefs about the world, when justified, are justified, however indirectly, by apperceptions (or, more precisely, by apperceptions plus framework princi­ples).22

21. A point made, I seem to remember, in Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: L ­ ittle, Brown, and Co., 1991). 22. But ­a ren’t framework princi­ples themselves ultimately justified by apperceptions? My view since the 1950’s (“It ­A in’t Necessarily So” and “The Analytic and the Synthetic,” both collected in my Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Mind, Language and Real­ity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975]) has been that the question of justification does not arise for framework princi­ples ­until and ­unless someone conceives of a workable alternative to them. But that does not mean that they are unrevisable.

PA RT I I I

PRAGM AT I S M AN D S K E P TIC IS M

In Part III we find Putnam as advocate and defender of a certain reading of the classical pragmatists—­Peirce, James, and Dewey—­a nd of the importance of their legacy for con­temporary discussion. The emphasis particularly falls on the latter two ­because they go farthest in the attempt to reconcile science and our ethical / po­liti­cal commitments and spiritual lives, as well as our aesthetic engagements with nature and art. Putnam’s response to Cornel West’s brand of “prophetic pragmatism” is curious for its deference: it is an essay largely composed of judicious quotations that gives a platform to a “prophetic” voice that Putnam wants to be more widely heard. Sometimes in the conversation of philosophy it is impor­tant to give one’s conversational partner the first (or, in this case, the last) word. The discussion is animated by Putnam’s own personal po­liti­cal vision: a social democracy (tinged with the many disappointments of his past socialist allegiance) that allows for both secular and religious voices to be heard without prioritizing the former or denigrating the latter.1 In a reply to his wife, Putnam admits, “Ruth Anna had a ­great deal to do with my ‘conversion’ [to a pragmatist outlook]”—­a lthough it is worth noting that Putnam (like Quine in this re­spect) was reluctant to call himself a “pragmatist” 1. See Hilary Putnam, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in The Library of Living Phi­los­ o­phers, vol.  34: The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. R.  E. Auxier, D.  R. Anderson, and L. E. Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 2015), 80–82.

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largely b ­ ecause he did not accept any version of the pragmatist theory of truth, neither Peirce’s convergence theory nor James’s instrumental theory.2 We also find in t­ hese essays an intellectual biography regarding Putnam’s early exposure to pragmatist ideas, with prominent roles played by Donald Piatt and Ruth Anna Putnam; and along the way we learn that Putnam is only three degrees of separation—­via C. West Churchman and E. A. Singer—­from William James. Together with Dewey, James is perhaps Putnam’s most cherished intellectual hero. Putnam provides a passionate defense of pragmatism against a reading that attributes to classical pragmatism rather crude instrumentalist models of thinking and talking [Robert Brandom]. In criticizing Brandom, Putnam is at the same time criticizing, as he does often in his writing, influential phi­los­ o­phers that stand b ­ ehind him: in this case Richard Rorty, the other leading neo-­pragmatist voice in addition to himself and Ruth Anna Putnam. A key pragmatist theme explored in the essays in Part III is anti-­ skepticism in the form of Putnam’s defense of his argument that we are not brains in a vat [Crispin Wright], as well as a repudiation of a sophisticated relativism [Joseph Margolis]. Putnam concedes that Wright formulates his brain-­in-­a-­vat argument better than he himself did. And he makes a fine methodological remark: “A successful internal skeptical challenge must at the very least confront us with an antinomy, and one always learns from an antinomy.” Skepticism, then, is not to be banished from the promised land of philosophy but retained and reflected upon ­because it is something we can always learn from. It is noteworthy that Putnam is happy to accept the charge of having misread Rorty on truth and to withdraw an objection based on this misreading [Joseph Margolis]. Reading and occasionally misreading are the lifeblood of criticism. Putnam explains his departure from Frege’s logicism, which inaugurated analytic philosophy, by defending a “moderate objectivism” that embraces vagueness (versus a commitment to bivalence), context-­sensitivity (versus a commitment to timeless propositions), and, in science in par­tic­u­lar, approximate truth (versus truth pure and s­ imple). T ­ here is also a discussion of what objectivity looks like in ethics and mathe­matics—­a non-­object-­based objec2. Most of the pragmatist papers by Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam, including three papers written together, have been collected in the volume Pragmatism as a Way of Life: On the Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey, ed. David Macarthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

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tivity, or what we might call objectivity without ontology. A “standing theme” of Putnam’s work as a whole—­“the qua­dru­ple entanglement of facts, theories, ethics, and mathe­matics”—is also discussed. Another impor­t ant aspect of criticism is the provision of vision statements and compact synopses of one’s position. Philosophy, in the dialogical mode Putnam employs, requires both imaginative vision and detailed conceptual “analy­sis”—­but ­here “analy­sis” does not mean the provision of a logical analy­sis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Putnam provides the following exemplary instance of a vision when he writes that “pragmatic pluralism . . . ​was intended to show how one could retain what is right in objectivism . . . ​w ithout falling into the errors of metaphysical realism.”

CHAPTER 20

Cornel West: On Deweyan and Prophetic Pragmatism (2001)

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the prob­lems of phi­los­o­phers, and becomes a method, cultivated by phi­los­o­phers, for dealing with the prob­lems of men. john dewey

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met Cornel West when he was still an undergraduate, at the end of the 1960s. T ­ oday t­ hose years are often remembered simply as the years of “protest against the Vietnam War,” which they ­were, but they ­were also much more. They ­were watershed years in American life. The ­great civil rights strug­g les of the early 1960’s ­were only a few years in the past—in fact, only four years separated Martin Luther King’s ­great speech in Washington, Originally published as “Pragmatism Resurgent: A Reading of The American Evasion of Philosophy,” in Cornel West: A Critical Reader, ed. George Yancy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 19–37.

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D.C. to a quarter of a million p ­ eople in 1963 and the public draft refusals of 1967 (and it was at a meeting of the New ­England Re­sis­tance, an organ­ ization of draft resisters centered in Boston, that I myself heard the terrible news of King’s assassination in 1968). Moreover, the first power­f ul rumblings of the renewed power and energy of feminist protest w ­ ere being heard, and at times disturbed even the patriarchy that controlled such radical groups as S.D.S. (whose almost wholly male leadership was at times outspokenly contemptuous of the ­women in the movement). If anything has characterized life in the United States since the 1960s it has been, on the one hand, the sense that irreversible changes have taken place—­changes in how white Anglo-­Saxon Americans are called upon to relate to African-­A mericans, Hispanics, and other still oppressed groups, changes in how men are called upon to relate to w ­ omen, and significant changes in the way in which many citizens respond to demands by their government that they support this or that military action or adventure—­a nd, on the other hand, the appearance of a power­f ul backlash, a backlash that always shouts “this has gone too far,” and that seeks to turn back the clock in race relations (by undoing affirmative action) as  well as in gender relations, and to enforce the old style of jingoistic “patriotism.” One of the classes that Cornel West took with me in the late sixties, in the m ­ iddle of the po­liti­cal storms of the time, was a course in Marxism, and this led to a dialogue between us which has continued to this day. (In Spring 2000, at the end of my last year at Harvard before retirement, Cornel West and I co-­t aught a course on “Pragmatism and Neo-­Pragmatism” which offered us an opportunity to continue and extend that dialogue in front of more than a hundred students.) In the de­c ades since that dialogue began Cornel West has matured from an idealistic undergraduate to one of the most impressive thinkers (as well as one of the most impressive h ­ uman beings) that I know. His penetrating intelligence, his breadth of knowledge, the brilliance of the connections he draws between the most diverse areas of lit­er­a­ture and scholarship are obvious to all who know him. If Cornel West wished to be no more than an “ivory tower intellectual,” nothing could be easier, given t­ hese talents. But West has never forgotten Dewey’s injunction to “deal with the prob­ lems of men [­human beings]” and not simply with “the prob­lems of phi­ los­o­phers.” It is in this light that I want to examine West’s book-­length



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engagement with the American Pragmatist tradition, The American Evasion of Philosophy.1 As I remember, the book received mostly favorable reviews. But it seems to me that even some of the most favorable reviewers missed just what West achieved—­not ­because the book ­isn’t clear; it could hardly be clearer! but b ­ ecause its agenda is foreign to the way academic reviewers think (just as John Dewey’s was). Consider, for example, the contrast between the two “blurbs” printed on the back cover of the University of Wisconsin’s paperback edition of West’s text. The blurb by Paul Boyer (a Professor of History) seems to me right on target when Boyer writes that “[w]hat shines through, throughout the work, is West’s firm commitment to a radical vision of philosophic discourse as inextricably linked to cultural criticism and po­liti­cal engagement” [emphasis added]. Rorty’s blurb is equally friendly, but the emphasis is markedly dif­fer­ent. Thus Rorty writes, “I believe that The American Evasion of Philosophy ­w ill be widely read and respectfully reviewed, and that it may well become a standard account of the role of Pragmatism in American thought.” H ­ ere the emphasis is on the book as, so to speak, an academic credential. For what aspiring academic ­doesn’t hope that her book ­w ill be “respectfully reviewed” and that it ­w ill become “a standard account” of so-­and-so? I wish to argue that to see the book in t­ hese terms is necessarily to miss its real contribution. For to appreciate any of West’s contributions requires just what it requires to appreciate the contributions of the thinkers he writes about and (critically, to be sure) applauds—­Emerson, Dewey, James, Du Bois or Gramsci, namely to experience the writing as a challenge, a challenge to one’s w ­ hole mode of life. But Why Pragmatism?

It is in part ­because the American Transcendentalist movement of which Emerson was the universally recognized leader was in its time seen as a challenge to the personal as well as the collective lives of Americans that Cornel West pays so much attention to Emerson. (Even more impor­tant is the fact that West finds in Emerson themes which he believes the American Left needs to reincorporate in its philosophical and po­liti­cal vision.) 1. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

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Moreover, West is right to see the classical Pragmatists as “standing, in part, on Emerson’s shoulders.”2 Although Stanley Cavell has recently attempted to draw a line in the sand between Emerson (whom he praises as a pure teacher of the individual in search of the betterment of her private soul) and Dewey (whom he patronizes, as a—­worthy, to be sure, but hardly unique—­social reformer), such a dichotomy is, in my opinion, something that both Dewey and E ­ merson opposed throughout their respective c­ areers. 3 As the ­Transcendentalist minister O.  B. Frothingham ­later testified: among the Transcendentalists, and among t­hose whom the Transcendentalist preachers inspired (in 1854). The antislavery agitation was felt to be something more than an attempt to apply the Beatitudes and the Parables to a flagrant case of inhumanity—it was regarded as a new interpretation of religion, a fresh declaration of the meaning of the Gospel, a living sign of the purely ­human character of a divine faith, an education in brotherly love and sacrifice; it was a common saying that now, for the first time in many generations, the essence of belief was made vis­i­ble and palpable to all men; that Providence was teaching in a most convincing way, and none but deaf ears could fail to understand the message. . . . ​Then, if ever, we ascended the Mount of Vision.4 And even more tellingly, Frothingham adds (loc. cit.): It was a ­great experience; not only was religion brought face to face with ethics, but it was identified with ethics. It became a religion of the heart: pity, sympathy, humanity and brotherhood ­were its essential princi­ples. At the antislavery fairs all sorts and conditions of men met together, without distinction of color or race or sex. ­There was ­really an education in the broadest faith, in which 2. Ibid., 6. 3. Stanley Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?,” in The Revival of American Pragmatism, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 4. O.  B. Frothingham, Recollections and Impressions, 1822–1891 (New York: G.  P. Putnam & Sons, 1891), 49–50.



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dogma, creed, form, and rite w ­ ere secondary to love, and love was not only universal, but was warm.5 Moreover, the living faith, the “original revelation” that Emerson famously called for, was not something felt only in Transcendentalist circles: it had meaningful po­liti­cal impact. As Albert von Frank has recently written, “Without the general encouragement of Transcendentalism, without its assault on institutions or its invitation to subjectivity and au­ then­tic action, antislavery might never have been seen as an occasion for religious renewal or become popu­lar on that basis.”6 It is not particularly hazardous to guess than “an education in the broadest faith, in which dogma, creed, form, and rite [are] secondary to love, and love [is] not only universal, but was warm” is part of what Cornel West means by the phrase “prophetic pragmatism” that he uses to designate his personal combination of Pragmatist, Socialist, and Christian ideas. But West also finds more par­tic­u­lar insights and inspirations in both Transcendentalism and Pragmatism, and particularly in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Dewey, insights which he believes the American Left needs to reincorporate in its philosophical and po­liti­cal vision. I ­shall concentrate on the special contribution of Dewey, as I think both Cornel West and I see it. The Distinctiveness of Pragmatism

When Cornel West repeatedly praises Pragmatism for “the evasion of epistemology-­centered philosophy” he is using the word “epistemology” as a pejorative, just as Dewey did (for instance, in his Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association in 1905).7 In epistemology, Dewey said ­there, “philosophy has dreamed the dream of a knowledge which is other than the propitious outgrowth of beliefs that ­shall develop aforetime their ulterior implications in order to recast them, to rectify 5. Ibid., 50–51. 6. Albert J. von Frank, The Trial of Anthony Burns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 268. 7. John Dewey, “Beliefs and Existences [Beliefs and Realities],” in The M ­ iddle Works of John Dewey, vol. 3, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 83–100.

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their errors, cultivate their waste places, heal their diseases, fortify their feebleness—­the dream of a knowledge that has to do with objects having no nature save to be known.” Evidently Dewey associated the term “epistemology” with transcendental epistemology, not just in the technical sense of Kantian epistemology, or the sense of Hegelian epistemology (from which he had made his break known, to James at least, only two years before), or in the sense of Platonic epistemology or Aristotelian epistemology, but more broadly with the w ­ hole proj­ect of finding indubitable “foundations of knowledge,” foundations which, once the phi­los­o­pher had ascertained them, would permit her to say with unshakeable confidence what could and what could not be known and how to go about knowing it. Even empiricist epistemology, Dewey tells us in The Quest for Certainty, has its aprioristic aspect: the empiricist thinks that the form of the data (namely, that they are all, in the last analy­sis, describable in the language of “ideas and impressions,” or, to use the term made popu­lar by Russell’s writings, the language of “sense data”) is fixed once and for all, in advance of investigation, whereas in fact, Dewey teaches, the right language for “instituting” data is one of the hardest ­things to discover, and one of the ­things that science constantly revises. The “evasion of epistemology-­ centered philosophy” might thus be described, in more familiar language, as the rejection of all foundationalisms and the espousal of a thorough-­going fallibilism. The term “evasion of philosophy” that Cornel West uses (I conjecture that the language reflects his sympathies with Rorty at that time, sympathies which have considerably moderated as Rorty’s pronouncements against philosophy have grown increasingly extreme in the more than a de­cade that has followed) is misleading however, even with the qualifier “epistemology-­centered,” ­because (as West indeed makes clear), ­there is a topic which is usually lumped ­under the rubric of “epistemology” which is not only not rejected by Dewey, but which is absolutely central to his enterprise—­namely, the topic of inquiry. By all accounts, Logic: the Theory of Inquiry is a major work—­some would consider it Dewey’s magnum opus, and Ruth Anna Putnam and I, at least, are quite willing to call it “epistemology” even if Dewey w ­ ouldn’t.8 8. See Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, “Dewey’s Logic: Epistemology as Hypothesis,” in Hilary Putnam, Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 198–220.



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The “theory of inquiry” that Dewey develops as a replacement for the aprioristic and foundationalist epistemologies of both empiricism [I have just explained why Dewey considers empiricism to be marred by apriorism] and rationalism is obviously inspired by the previous writings of Pierce and of James. I myself would say that it involves at least the following four impor­tant claims:9 1. Knowledge of facts (true singular statements) presupposes knowledge of “theories” (i.e., true statements about what is true in general, or in most cases). 2. Knowledge of “theories” (of what is true in general, or true in most cases) presupposes knowledge of facts. 3. Knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of values. 4. Knowledge of values presupposes knowledge of facts.10 While this is not the place for a detailed explanation of t­ hese claims, I w ­ ill say that the reference to “knowledge” in ­these claims is, of course, a reference to fallible, revisable, but nonetheless “warrantedly assertable” judgements, which is what the theory of inquiry (in Dewey’s sense) is concerned with. It ­w ill be seen from even ­these few too-­brief remarks that while Pragmatism shares with Positivism a repudiation of all non-­ empirical or would-be trans-­empirical metaphysics, it rejects Positivism’s sharp fact / value dichotomy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that while both Positivism and Pragmatism thought ­there ­were deep lessons to be learned from the success of the new empirical way of “putting questions to nature” practiced by science from Bacon on, they differed profoundly over what ­those lessons ­were. For Positivists, the moral of the success of science was that one should try to make ­every respectable field of inquiry look like physics. If that was obviously unrealistic in the case of ethics or aesthetics, that showed that ethics and aesthetics ­were not ­really fields of inquiry at all; what we mistakenly take to be “judgments” in ethics and aesthetics are r­ eally just expressions of emotion or volition or something of that sort. For Pragmatists, the moral (or rather the morals) ­were quite dif­fer­ent. Science succeeded not ­because it all looks like physics 9. See my Pragmatism: An Open Question (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 14. 10. For an explanation of why Pragmatists accept (3) and (4) see, in addition, my “Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity,” in Words and Life, 151–181.

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(which it ­doesn’t, if one actually looks at the motley of the sciences), but ­because it has learned a number of lessons, particularly the lesson of fallibilism, the lesson that the successful pursuit of knowledge involves cooperation, and the lesson that that cooperation must provide opportunity to challenge accepted hypotheses by challenging the evidence upon which they w ­ ere accepted, or by criticizing the application of the norms of scientific inquiry (which must themselves be open to challenge and revision!) to that evidence, or by offering rival hypotheses. And ­these lessons, Pragmatists believe, are just as relevant—­indeed, even more crucially relevant— to ethical and po­liti­cal inquiry as they are to natu­ral science. Far from abandoning ethical inquiry as a contradiction in terms, as Positivism would have it, we must learn to apply the genuine lessons of the scientific revolution to ethical inquiry, as Dewey argued early and late. The Distinctiveness of Dewey

What I have just said about the distinctiveness of Pragmatism applies as much to James’s Pragmatism or to Mead’s or (with an impor­tant qualification) to Peirce’s as it does to Dewey’s.11 But Dewey is distinctive in other ways, ways which make it natu­ral that he should (in spite of certain shortcomings that West detects in Dewey’s po­liti­cal strategies) be an exemplary figure for Cornel West. West is, ­a fter all, the very opposite of a “compartmentalized” intellectual. Religious (a lay preacher), po­liti­cally active to an extent that would exhaust a dozen ordinary “po­liti­cal activists,” a serious phi­los­o­pher, Cornel West is at the same time a person who refuses to believe that one’s literary and aesthetic sensibilities are simply a ­matter of recreation, something to be kept apart from one’s philosophy or one’s religion or one’s politics. And in ­these re­spects he resembles Dewey. Although Dewey lost his Christian faith before his turn from Idealism to Pragmatism, he remained someone for whom ideals and the willingness to sacrifice for ideals w ­ ere central.12 11. The impor­tant qualification referred to is that Peirce, at least in certain moods, did not think that one should apply reasoning to practical decisions of a moral, religious or po­liti­cal nature. ­Here, he thought, one should rely on sentiment and tradition, especially the latter. 12. John Dewey, Ethics, published as The M ­ iddle Works of John Dewey, vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977).



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In Ethics, co-­authored with Tufts, he could approvingly quote George Eliot in Romola: It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a ­great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves, and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before every­thing e­ lse, ­because our souls see it is good. Again like West, Dewey valued democracy while refusing to shut his eyes to the distance we have to travel if we are to achieve real democracy. For real democracy, Dewey consistently taught, is not just a ­matter of counting votes; it is the ideal of real participation in the decision-­making pro­cess by ­those effected by the decisions to be made, and it requires a new kind of education,13 a new way of applying intelligence to social prob­ lems,14 and what he called a “demo­cratic faith,”15 and attitude ­towards individuals that manifests itself in all of one’s personal relations and not just in “public life.” In addition, the centrality of aesthetic experience to what we may call Dewey’s “philosophical anthropology” is obvious. (My friend Steve Wagner has remarked that Dewey’s Art as Experience could as well have been named “Experience as Art.”) While t­ here are aspects of Dewey’s philosophical anthropology that Cornel West finds troubling (he sometimes finds a lack of the sense of the tragic, an insensitivity to the existential dimensions of life, in Dewey), the idea that the phi­los­o­pher must above all integrate and not compartmentalize is common to both West and Dewey. Dewey is the supreme example in American life up to the pre­sent day that one does not have to choose between being a cultured and sensitive 13. On Dewey’s educational philosophy cf. Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, “Education for Democracy,” in my Words and Life, 221–241. 14. See “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” chapter 9 in my Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 15. See Dewey’s A Common Faith [1934], in The L ­ ater Works of John Dewey, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), particularly pp. 35 and 58. See also p. 428 in Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

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­ uman being, a professional phi­los­o­pher, and a po­liti­cally committed h public intellectual. The Purpose of the American Evasion of Philosophy

If, then, ­there are many reasons why Cornel West should find the thought and legacy of American Pragmatism (as well as, as has been mentioned, Emersonian Transcendentalism), and of John Dewey in par­tic­u­lar, well worth engaging, it is impor­tant to understanding how he chose to engage it. Although West is a trained phi­los­o­pher, he did not choose to write a straight philosophical text, although, as he says, the book certainly “tries to get inside the formulations and arguments of American pragmatists so that the social roles and functions of ideas do not exhaust their existence or curb intellectual curiosity.” The method he chose instead, as he tells us, is that of “a social history of ideas.”16 But, as we explained at the outset, that does not mean that he intended to write a merely academic history, although Rorty was not wholly wrong to think the book could be read (and deserves praise as) such a history. The book is a call to arms, an attempt to, as it w ­ ere, reissue the Pragmatist challenge, a­ fter critically analyzing that challenge. That Cornel West’s “social history of ideas” has a po­liti­cal aim is made quite explicit in the Introduction. Thus, a­ fter the disclaimer that “The turn to the American heritage—­a nd especially American pragmatism— is neither a panacea for our ills nor a solution to our prob­lems,” the author continues, “Rather it should be an attempt to reinvigorate our moribund academic life, our lethargic po­liti­cal life, our de­cadent cultural life, and our chaotic personal lives for the flowering of many-­sided personalities and the flourishing of more democracy and freedom.”17 To briefly describe the book, for ­those who have not read it: what is unique about The American Evasion of Philosophy as a social history of ideas is how widely it casts its net. What West does is to show us how tremendously influential Deweyan pragmatism was, how wide and deep an impact it made, especially in the years of Franklin Roo­se­velt’s New Deal, but also during the years that followed—­the “cold war” years. “Influential” does not, however, mean, successful. And part of the question West wants 16. West, American Evasion, 6. 17. Ibid., 5.



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us to think about is how a movement could have “influenced” so many prominent thinkers while accomplishing so l­ ittle of what John Dewey wanted in to achieve. For example, the figures discussed in the chapter titled “The Dilemma of the Mid-­Century Pragmatic Intellectual”—­Sydney Hook, C. Wright Mills, W. E. B. Du Bois, Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling—­ were among the most prominent “public intellectuals” of their time, and, as West shows, even ­those among them who started out by attacking Dewey and what they thought he stood for ended up far more influenced by Dewey than they perhaps themselves appreciated. Indeed, by analyzing a thinker like Niebuhr (or a thinker like C. Wright Mills) in this way, Cornel West gives us a far richer vision of his intellectual, personal, even existential trajectory than I have seen anywhere e­ lse. The fact that all of ­these thinkers except Du Bois (who ended as a despairing Marxist) became, at least intermittently, “Cold Warriors,” shows, however, that the story West is telling is not a success story. It is true that in his Introduction, West tells us, “My basic aim in this book is to chart the emergence, development, decline, and resurgence of American pragmatism.” The “resurgence” he speaks of h ­ ere is described in Chapter 5, “The Decline and Resurgence of American Pragmatism: W. V. Quine and Richard Rorty.” T ­ here is no question that Quine is a philosophic genius, and that he owes some debt to Pragmatism, although, as West rightly points out, “Quine’s evasion of modern epistemology is not as thorough as Dewey’s.”18 This is so owing to the residues of logical positivism in Quine’s monumental breakthrough: namely his ontological allegiance to physics and his need for minimally foundationalist (though radically underdetermined) “observation sentences” in his Skinnerian behaviorist psy­chol­ogy. But po­liti­cally Quine is a conservative (he was extremely hostile to the antiwar protests of the late 1960s, for example), and Rorty is criticized by West for “po­liti­cal narrowness.”19 “Rorty leads philosophy to the complex world of politics and culture, but confines his engagement to the transformation of the acad­emy and to apol­o­getics for the modern West.”20 So the

18. H ­ ere it is impor­tant to remember the special (and pejorative) Deweyan inflection of the word “epistemology” in The American Evasion of Philosophy. 19. West, American Evasion, 207. 20. Ibid.

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“resurgence” Cornel West describes in this chapter is a resurgence of academic interest in Pragmatism, not a resurgence of Pragmatism as a left po­ liti­cal force. The latter sort of resurgence remains a hope and a program (“prophetic pragmatism”). Cornel West’s Diagnosis of Dewey’s Po­liti­cal In­effec­tive­ness

As Robert Westbrook relates, Dewey arrived to take up his professorship at the University of Chicago in the m ­ iddle of a ­great ­labor strug­gle, “for he found himself on a train to the city at the height of the Pullman strike.” As Westbrook explains, the strike was provoked by a “severe wage cut at the Pullman car works—­a cut unaccompanied by any reduction in the rents, food prices, and ser­v ice rates George Pullman charged his workers in the model com­pany town he had built for them just north of Chicago in the 1880s.” The strikers won the support of Eugene Debs’s recently formed American Railway Union, while Pullman received the support of the General Man­ag­ers Association of the twenty-­four railroads with Chicago terminals, and “by July the strike had escalated from a local dispute to an effort by ­these power­f ul corporate man­ag­ers to break the ­union and assert the superior power of capital.”21 Dewey was whole-­heartedly on the side of the strikers, but he published nothing directly in support.22 As Westbrook describes his stance at the time, “Dewey couched [social criticism] in language carefully designed to avoid giving offense to the power­f ul.”23 Cornel West makes a similar remark on Dewey’s po­liti­cal caution in this period (p. 83): [Dewey] moved in 1894 to John  D. Rocke­fel­ler’s University of Chicago (a move engineered by his friend and former colleague James  H. Tufts), where his work in Jane Addams’s Hull House became a focus of his activities. From then on, Dewey practiced

21. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 86. 22. Ibid., 86–88. 23. Ibid., 91.



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professional caution and po­liti­cal reticence. He remained deeply engaged in civic affairs, but shunned controversy.24 Neither Westbrook nor West suggests that Dewey was actually co-­opted by the corporate man­ag­ers, however. West writes, “I am suggesting neither that opportunism motivated Dewey’s be­hav­ior in Chicago, nor that he lacked the courage of other colleagues. Rather I am claiming that his high-­ falutin left-­Hegelian rhe­toric of a few years e­ arlier had simmered back down into professional research and respectable activism.”25 In fact, some of that rhe­toric had been anything but “high-­falutin.” For example, in an article Dewey wrote for the first volume of the International Journal of Ethics titled “Moral Theory and Moral Practice” Dewey had written: Let us take then a specific case. ­Here is a streetcar conductor, and the question is ­whether he should (­ought to) join in a strike which his Union has declared. . . . ​The man thinks of his special work, with its hardships indeed, and yet a work, an activity, and thus a form of freedom or satisfaction; he thinks of its wage, of what it buys; of his needs, his clothing, his food, his beer and pipe. He thinks of his ­family . . . ; his need of protecting and helping them on; his ­children that he would educated and give an evener start in the world than he had himself; he thinks of the families of his fellows; of the need that they should live decently and advance somewhat; he thinks of his bonds to his Union; he calls up the way in which the families of the corporations which employ him live . . . ​26 Moreover, Dewey was l­ ater to position himself conspicuously to the left of the New Deal liberal consensus, as the most prominent intellectual who publicly supported Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party. Cornel West does take Dewey to task for neglecting Marxism. As Cornel West well knows from our conversations, I find his own version of 24. West, American Evasion, 83. 25. Ibid. 26. John Dewey, “Moral Theory and Practice,” International Journal of Ethics 1 (1891): 191; reprinted in The Early Works of John Dewey, vol. 3, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969). In Ethics (1908), 450–451, Dewey again makes his sympathy with l­ abor and the ­unions very clear.

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Marxism rather too rosy to be attributed to the ­actual Marx. Thus, when West writes: Dewey remains unable to conceive of Marxism as anything but a “uniformitarian theory” that “throws out psychological as well as moral considerations” in the name of “objective forces.” He goes so far as to say that this is true of “Marx and e­ very Marxist ­a fter him.” This is blatantly false.27 I would reply “Cornel, you are right that ­there are Marxists a­ fter Marx who gave much more weight to psychological and moral considerations (even if, like Lukacs, some of them ­were also able to function as vicious communist functionaries!). But Marx himself was openly hostile to psy­chol­ogy (“I need no psychological premises,” he writes in The German Ideology). Moreover, the w ­ hole point of the laborious mathematical model of capitalism in the third volume of Capital is supposedly to show that capitalism must inevitably suffer worse and worse economic crises ­because of, in effect, a mathematical law of “the falling rate of profit.” I do not find Dewey’s take on Marx as an economic determinist at all incorrect.” But this it not the place for this conversation, which I am sure Cornel West and I ­w ill continue to have. In the end, however, Cornel West’s central criticism of Dewey—­and it is a just one—is that he has no sense of real politics, of a politics that goes beyond gentle persuasion and appeals to good w ­ ill and enters the arena of ­actual strug­gle and confrontation. “The point h ­ ere is not that Dewey possesses a deep nostalgia for a lost golden age of harmonious Gemeinschaft, but rather that he believes that social conflict can be resolved and societal prob­lems overcome by a widely held consensus more characteristic of artisanal towns or farming communities than of industrial cities or urban cap­i­tal­ist socie­ties.”28 And West adds: This focus does permit Dewey to see more clearly than most—­ especially his Marxist (sic) and liberal contemporaries—­the cultural dimensions of the crisis of American civilization, yet it also distorts his view regarding the role of critical intelligence in dis-

27. West, American Evasion, 110. 28. Ibid., 101–102.



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lodging and demo­cratizing the economic powers that be. Thus, Dewey’s central concern is to extend the experimental method in the natu­ral sciences to the social, po­liti­cal, cultural, and economic spheres rather than to discern the social forces and historical agents capable of acting on and actualizing (i.e., approximating) his creative democracy. His relative confinement to the professional and reformist ele­ments of the ­middle classes makes such discernment unlikely. [emphasis added]29 The sympathetic reference to Dewey’s insight into “the cultural dimensions of the crisis” is not accidental. Even in this chapter, Cornel West clearly sympathizes with Dewey’s aim of “the cultural enrichment and moral development of self-­begetting individuals and self-­regulating communities by means of the release of h ­ uman powers provoked by novel circumstances and new challenges,” and in the closing chapters the centrality of this aim to West’s own prophetic-­pragmatist vision becomes ever more clear.30 Yet he trenchantly summarizes his criticism of Dewey when he writes: Contrary to popu­lar opinion, Dewey’s proj­ect never r­ eally got off the ground. Like Emerson’s moralism, Dewey’s culturalism was relatively impotent. Why? Principally ­because his favored historical agents—­the professional and reformist ele­ments of the m ­ iddle class—­were seduced by two strong waves of thought and action: managerial ideologies of corporate liberalism and bureaucratic control, and Marxist ideologies of class strug­gle.31

29. Ibid., 102. Yet, when West comes to examine Dewey’s writing about Marxism and Stalinism at the end of the chapter from which I have been quoting (Chapter 3), he makes it clear that if Dewey had an unrealistic view of the social forces capable of actualizing his proj­ect, that does not mean that he had an unrealistic view of the forces opposed to it (ibid., 110): “Dewey is often accused of ­either assuming a pluralist-­interactionist view of society that overlooks the larger structural forms of power or promoting an explanatory nihilism that fails to give more weight to one f­ actor over another, and therefore yields no explanation. I think Dewey is innocent of both charges. In fact Dewey approaches Marxism in highlighting the economic, though he is actually closer to Charles Beard’s Madisonian economic determinism that that of Marx.” 30. West, American Evasion, 103. 31. Ibid., 107.

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Dewey and Gramsci

The Marxist thinker who, more than any other, is described as an influence on Cornel West’s own “prophetic pragmatism,” especially in the last two chapters of The American Evasion of Philosophy, is Antonio Gramsci, and it is of value, I believe, to reflect on the ways in which, in t­ hose chapters, West does and does not find him superior to Dewey. Certainly t­ hose aspects of Marx’s thought that I find reductionist (and whose presence in Marx’s thought West seemed to want to deny or at least minimize in a sentence I quoted e­ arlier) are not aspects that West admires in Gramsci. I refer, of course, to the idea of iron laws of history (“laws of motion” of capitalism, for example), or a fatal (and mathematically demonstrable) contradiction in the cap­i­tal­ist “mode of production” as such. Gramsci was, to be sure, a “Marxist-­Leninist” for all his originality and iconoclasm, and West criticizes him for this. But it is not even Gramsci’s theoretical revisions of Marxism that West, in the end, values, but rather his innovative conceptions of how one should go about mobilizing popu­lar energies for strug­g les against oppression, conceptions which do not depend at all on Marxist “super theory.” West’s main discussion of Gramsci begins in the section of the penultimate chapter of the book devoted to Umberto Unger. I want to call attention to this section, b ­ ecause in it, and continuing to the end of the book, we find a much more positive valuation of Dewey than we seemed to find in the ­earlier chapter (Chapter 3) devoted explic­itly to Dewey. It is as if Cornel West came to appreciate Dewey more and more as he approached the end of the book! Cornel West describes Unger’s proj­ect as a “third-­wave romanticism,” a description that he explains thus: I ­shall argue three claims concerning Unger’s proj­ect. First, I ­shall suggest that his viewpoint can best be characterized as the most elaborate articulation of a third-­wave left romanticism now [1989] sweeping across significant segments of principally the first world progressive intelligent­sia (or what is left of this progressive intelligent­sia!). Second, I ­w ill show that this third-­wave left romanticism is discursively situated between John Dewey’s radical liberal vision of socialism and Antonio Gramsci’s absolute histori-



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cist conception of Marxism. Third, I ­shall highlight the ways in which this provocative proj­ect, though an advance beyond much of con­temporary social thought, remains inscribed within a Eurocentric and patriarchal discourse that not simply fails to theoretically consider racial and gender forms of subjugation, but also remains ­silent on the antiracist and feminist dimensions of concrete progressive po­liti­cal strug­gles. What West means by speaking of successive “waves” of left romanticism is this: the liberatory rhe­toric of Jefferson and Rousseau certainly deserves to be dubbed “romanticism,” and it certainly helped to inspire the French and American Revolutions. As West says, “it unleashed unpre­ce­dented ­human energies and powers, significantly transformed selves and socie­ ties, and directed im­mense ­human desires and hopes ­towards the ­grand moral and credible po­liti­cal ideals of democracy and freedom, equality and fraternity.”32 Yet, West tells us, we need to be “disturbed.” For first-­wave left romanticism also “reinforced and reproduced barbaric practices” including white supremacy, slavery, imperial conquest over indigenous ­peoples, male supremacy, and “excessive business control and influence over the public interest” as seen in, e.g., laws against ­unions. The second “wave” of left romanticism, in West’s chronology, “is manifest in the two ­great prophetic and prefigurative North Atlantic figures: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Karl Marx.” (­Here we should remember that West’s Marx is the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts and the 1848 Manifesto, rather than the author of Capital or The German Ideology.) This second wave leads to Emersonian ideals of American democracy and to Marxist conceptions of socialism. But ­here again, West tells us, t­ here was a disturbing side. For, by the end of the Second World War, “the second wave of left-­romanticism began to wane. The dominant version of the Marxist legacy—­Marxist-­Leninist (and at the time led by Stalin)—­was believed by more and more left romantics to be repressive, repulsive and retrograde. And the major mode of the Emersonian legacy—­A mericanism (led then by Truman and Eisenhower)—­was viewed by many left romantics as racist, penurious, and hollow.”33

32. Ibid., 216. 33. Ibid.

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We see in ­these paragraphs a certain architectonic, and we are not to be disappointed. Each “wave” is led by two g­ iant figures, and each wave leads to certain disappointment. But since the third wave is only a gleam in Unger’s eye, the disappointment is not g­ oing to be that it has been played out, or degenerated in a way that reveals that certain shortcomings w ­ ere t­ here all along. Instead West is ­going to caution Unger that if he does not improve his views (and his politics) in certain ways the “third wave” ­will inherit the defects of the second. The two figures that West sees Unger as steering between are, as already said, John Dewey and Antonio Gramsci. And in this entire section, somewhat surprisingly (in the light of what West said in Chapter 3), Unger is consistently criticized for being insufficiently critical of Gramsci and being too neglectful of Dewey (whom Unger has recently come to value as highly as West himself does, by the way). T ­ here is no question but that in this section Dewey wins a significant victory over Gramsci. West’s procedure is first to describe Unger’s debts to Gramsci in some detail, ending with the sentence: “In short, the major lesson Unger learns from Gramsci is to be a more subtle, nuanced and sensitive super theorist than Marx by building on ele­ments in Marx and o ­ thers.”34 (Although this might sound positive, we w ­ ill soon see that it is “left handed” praise.) This sets the stage for a remarkably laudatory paragraph about Dewey. In the paragraph in question, West first chides Unger: “Dewey is virtually absent in Unger’s text. Furthermore, the one reference to Dewey is a rather cryptic and misleading statement.”35 The passage in question is one in which Unger first says that it is wrong to associate the sort of theory he advocates (Unger calls it “ultra theory”) with “Leftist or modernist intellectuals.” He asks rhetorically, “Why not John Dewey? (despite the gap between the commitment to institutional experimentalism and the slide into institutional conservatism).”36 ­Here is Cornel West’s response to this passage: This passage is perplexing for three reasons. First, is Unger implying that Dewey was neither a leftist nor a modernist intel34. Ibid., 220. 35. The text West quotes from is Roberto M. Unger, Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task; A Critical Introduction to Politics, a Work in Constructive Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 36. Unger, Social Theory, 237.



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lectual? Second, is Unger drawing a distinction between his own social experimentalism and Dewey’s institutional experimentalism? Third, in what sense and when did Dewey slide into institutional conservatism? If Unger answers the first question in the affirmative, he falls prey to a misinformed ste­reo­typical view of Dewey as a vulgar Americanist. For as we saw e­ arlier, Dewey’s sixty-­five year po­liti­cal rec­ord as a demo­cratic socialist speaks for itself.37 And no argument is needed for Dewey’s being a modernist intellectual when he stands as the major secular intellectual of twentieth-­century Amer­i­ca. If Unger is making a distinction between his form of experimentalism and that of Dewey, its validity remains unclear u ­ nless one remains fixated on Dewey’s educational reform movement and neglects the broader calls for fundamental social change put forward during the years Dewey concentrated on progressive education as well as afterward, in the late twenties, thirties, and forties. And the implausible notion that Dewey slid into institutional conservatism holds only if one wrongly views his brand of anti-­Stalinism in the forties as conservatism, for his critique of American society remained relentless to the end. This is all-­out defence of Dewey! (not to say fulsome praise). And the praise continues: ­a fter two more paragraphs of praise of Dewey’s “linkage of scientific attitude (as opposed to scientific method) to democracy as a way of life,” Dewey’s insistence on “re­spect for the other and accountability as a condition for fallibility,” and his admonition to use theories “as any other instruments or weapons we have, and to use them when they serve our purposes and criticize or discard them when they utterly fail us,” West delivers the coup de grace: The significant difference between Gramsci and Dewey is not that the former accepts Marxist theory and the latter rejects it, but rather that Gramsci tenaciously holds onto Marxist theory in ­those areas where it fails, e.g., politics and culture. Dewey accepted much of the validity of Marxist theory, and simply l­ imited 37. In fact what West wrote ­earlier was that “it seems that Dewey ­adopted this label [‘socialist’] more by default than by choice.”

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its explanatory scope and rejected its imperial, monistic, and dogmatic versions.38 Ten pages ­later, however (in a dif­fer­ent section of this chapter), we get an appreciation of what West sees as the positive contribution of Gramsci. What seems most impor­tant to West is that Gramsci demanded that left intellectuals give up their elitist contempt for all ways of thinking that are not secularized through and through.39 Cornel West gives this demand his own ringing endorsement. West condemns the “arrogant scientistic self-­privileging or haughty secular self-­images of many modern thinkers and intellectuals,” and continues: The point ­here is not that serious con­temporary thinkers should surrender their critical intelligence; but rather that they should not demand that all ­peoples mimic their version of critical intelligence, especially if common efforts for social change can be strengthened. . . . ​For Gramsci, ideologies of secularism or religion are less sets of beliefs and values, attitudes and sensibilities and more ways of life and ways of strug­gle manufactured and mobilized by certain sectors of the population in order to legitimate and preserve their social, po­liti­cal, and intellectual powers. Hence the universities and churches, schools and synagogues, mass media and mosques become crucial terrain for ideological and po­ liti­cal contestation.40 West goes on to say that phi­los­o­phers are not exempt from “this fierce ­battle,” even within the walls of the university; a thought that was not alien to Emerson or James or Dewey. Cornel West makes the comparison explic­

38. West, American Evasion, 221. 39. West also writes that “Gramsci’s work is historically specific, theoretically engaging, and po­liti­cally activistic in an exemplary manner.” This may seem hard to square with the statement only ten pages ­earlier that “Gramsci tenaciously holds onto Marxist theory in ­those areas where it fails, e.g., politics and culture,” but I think that the contradiction is only apparent; dif­fer­ent sorts of theory are involved. The “theory” that Gramsci is criticized for tenaciously holding on to is Marxism-­Leninism; but the historically specific analyses that ground Gramsci’s recommendations for po­liti­cal activism do not presuppose “industrial strength” Marxism-­Leninism, but only the sensitivity to questions of economic power that we also find in Dewey. 40. West, American Evasion, 232.



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itly, when he writes (loc. cit.) that “Similar to the American pragmatist tradition, Gramsci simply suggests that phi­los­o­phers more consciously position ­these ­battles themselves as objects of investigation and thereby intervene in ­these ­battles with intellectual integrity and ideological honesty.” What Cornel West Means by “Prophetic Pragmatism”

Up to this point—­the m ­ iddle of page 232—­West has proceeded as he said he would, by the method of a “social history of ideas.” Since only seven and a half pages remain in the book, it is clear that this history—­and the critical comments that West has made throughout his attempt to “chart the emergence, development, decline, and resurgence of American pragmatism”—is supposed to carry the burden of telling the po­liti­cal lessons that West wants the reader to learn. The book is not at attempt to sell a very specific program, and indeed Cornell West tells us that “­There is—­and should be—no such ­thing as a prophetic pragmatist movement.” 41 Nevertheless, its aim is to “inspire progressive and prophetic social motion.” 42 ­These final seven and a half pages, brief as they are, are clearly the point at which The American Evasion of Philosophy draws morals and recommendations from its “social history of ideas.” I have already remarked that the “resurgence” of pragmatism in the story that West tells is, paradoxically, more a resurgence in the acad­emy than in Amer­i­ca’s po­liti­cal life, and this is clearly something that he wants to change. If we review the positives and negatives in the history as Cornel West has told it, the bottom line might look something like this (I omit many central figures in West’s story in this summing up, in order to highlight what seem to me to be the main conclusions of the story as a w ­ hole): Emerson: Cornel West sympathizes with what he in one place describes as the “Emersonian themes of the centrality of the self’s morally laden transformative vocation; the necessity of experimentation to achieve the self’s aims of self-­mastery and kinship with nature; and the importance of self-­creation and self-­authorization.” 43 But he also tells us that 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 234. 43. Ibid., 216.

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Emerson’s concerns with “power, provocation, and personality” need to be rechannelled “through Dewey’s conception of creative democracy and Du Bois’s social structural analy­sis of the limits of cap­i­tal­ist democracy.” 44 In short, West shares Emerson’s sense that ­human individuals have Promethean possibilities. He sees Emerson as a figure who was “unable to engage honestly in sustained activities with agitators or reformers,” but he is aware of the way in which Transcendentalism was able (as we saw above), if only for a short time, to unleash moral energies to extraordinary effect.45 West, like Unger, thinks that leftist politics must value ­human aspirations to self-­creation and self-­realization, not denigrate or despise them as “petty bourgeois.” If we modify Emerson by thinking in Deweyan terms of a ­whole culture of creative democracy, then, West tells us, the first step is to give some sense of the pro­cess by which it can be created.46 ­Here West builds on what he perceives as Emerson’s anti-­foundationalism. As West interprets him, Emerson sees the traditional phi­los­o­pher’s belief in formal thought, foundations, certainty as a way of creating detached abstractions “which command their creators and thereby constrain their creators’ freedom.” “This consequence is both anti-­libertarian and antidemo­cratic,” West writes, “in that ­human potential and participation are suppressed in the name of philosophic truth and knowledge.” Thus Emerson sets the stage for Dewey’s strategy of connecting the rejection of apriorisms of all kind with the valorization of democracy. The positive aim is to be, “a society and a culture where po­liti­cally adjudicated forms of knowledge are produced in which ­human participation is encouraged and for which ­human personalities are enhanced. Social experimentation is the basic norm, yet it is operative only when ­those who must suffer the consequences have effective control over the institutions that yield the consequences, i.e., access to decision-­making pro­cesses.” 47 Not only must Emerson’s impor­tant insights—­his optimism about the Promethean potentialities of ­human beings, his anti-­conformity, his anti-­ foundationalism—be rendered po­liti­cal by being set in the framework of

44. Ibid., 212. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 212–213.



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Deweyan aspirations for creative democracy, but they must also “confront candidly the tragic sense found in Hook and Trilling.” 48 What Cornel West means by this, if I am not mistaken, is that “Promethean possibilities” include Promethean potentialities for evil as well as good, and that a realistic left must never fall into the error of imagining that ­human beings can or ever ­will be angelic beings. (I hope that Cornel West ­will sometime write at more length about just how—­and how far—he views the Christian emphasis on our “fallen” condition as compatible with Emerson’s calls for self-­realization and self-­empowerment.) Dewey: since most of this essay has been about Cornel West’s reading of Dewey, I can be brief. I have emphasized that in the course of The American Evasion, West’s appreciation of Dewey as a man and as a thinker obviously grows; but an impor­tant criticism still remains. That criticism is that Dewey called for social change from below but did not, in fact, pay any real attention to that “below,” to mass movements and po­liti­cal developments outside of the white American m ­ iddle class. The moral is clear! Du Bois: Du Bois (who received an honors degree in philosophy at Harvard in 1890) was strongly influenced by James. The influence of pragmatism was joined by the influence of Marxism especially ­a fter the Rus­sian Revolution. In West’s beautiful words, “Du Bois provides American pragmatism with what it sorely lacks: an international perspective on the impetus and impediments to individuality and radical democracy, a perspective that highlights the plight of the wretched of the earth, namely the majority of humanity who own no property or wealth, participate in no demo­cratic arrangements, and whose individualities are crushed by hard ­labor and harsh living conditions.” 49 And ­after showing how Du Bois is superior in this re­spect to James (“who did not see social structures, only individuals”), Dewey (who “saw social structures and individuals yet primarily through an American lens), Hook (whose “cold war sentiments give a tunnel vision of the third world as a playground for the two superpowers”), and C. Wright Mills (who comes closer, but for whom “postmodern historical agency resides almost exclusively in the Western (or Westernized) intelligent­sia”), West writes that, “Du Bois goes beyond them all in the scope and depth of his vision: creative powers reside among 48. Ibid., 212. 49. Ibid., 148.

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the wretched of the earth even in their subjugation, and the fragile structures of democracy in the world depend, in large part, on how t­ hese powers are ultimately exercised.” In the end, however, ­a fter suffering tremendous persecution during the McCarthy years, Du Bois gave up all hope that racism in American could ever be overcome (he died in 1963, the very day that Martin Luther King delivered the “I have a dream” speech). Obviously, Cornel West has not given up hope; yet he soberly concludes the section on Du Bois with the words: “. . . ​though Du Bois may have lost his own ideological ‘sight’ owing greatly to national neglect and ­limited po­liti­cal options, ­there is no doubt that what he did ‘see’ remains a major obstacle for an Emersonian culture of radical democracy in Amer­i­ca.” Quine and Rorty: As we already said, Quine is valued by West not for his politics but for his contribution to the overthrow of foundationalism and apriorism in all their forms. Surprisingly [and I believe West has subsequently revised this estimate], so is Rorty: “Rorty strikes a death blow to modern North Atlantic philosophy.”50 Gramsci: sees the need to bring po­liti­cal strug­gle into the church (West adds the synagogue and the mosque), and, indeed, into all cultural forms and institutions, especially popu­lar ones. In late twentieth ­century Amer­ i­ca, the example of Martin Luther King was a power­f ul example of how a religious figure who spoke the language of prophecy (not in the sense of prediction, but in the sense in which the Transcendentalist sermons that Albert von Frank describes might be said to have spoken the language of prophecy)51—­the language of moral vision and absolute moral exhortation—­c an have enormous po­liti­c al impact and mobilize undreamed of popu­lar energies. Moreover, as a Christian thinker, West can say that “unlike Gramsci, I am religious not simply for po­liti­cal aims, but also by personal commitment.” He adds, “­Needless to say, without the addition of modern interpretations of racial and gender equality, tolerance, and democracy, much of the tradition warrants rejection. Yet the Christian epic, stripped of static dogmas and decrepit doctrines, remains

50. Ibid., 201. 51. James Kugel points out that “prediction” is not what the Biblical prophets typically or primarily engaged in ­either! See his The G ­ reat Poems of the Bible (New York: ­Free Press, 1999), 107–128.



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a rich source of existential empowerment and po­liti­cal engagement when viewed through modern lenses (indeed, the only ones we moderns have!).”52 When we put together the lessons that Cornel West has drawn in the course of telling this story, we already get a picture of what he describes as his own prophetic pragmatism, namely a “demo­cratic faith” that resembles Dewey’s but goes beyond it in both existential depth and po­liti­cal consciousness. I ­w ill close with one more quotation from The American Evasion of Philosophy, ­because I want to give Cornel West the last word. But before this quotation, let me say my own “last word” on this book: what Cornel West has produced is obviously an extraordinary work, personal and po­liti­cal at once (in keeping with the Emersonian idea that any politics worthy of the name must be personal), one which connects in its large sweep the history of the rise and decline of Amer­i­ca’s most promising intellectual movement to date and a program for its “resurgence,” and which concludes with what I can only call an act of “witness” to a demo­cratic faith. If much of the story is cautionary, at the end of the day it is for us who share that faith to heed ­those cautions as we add our own acts of witness to Cornel West’s. ­Here is my last quotation: . . . ​on the po­liti­cal level, the culture of the wretched of the earth is deeply religious. To be in solidarity with them requires not only an acknowl­edgment of what they are up against but also an appreciation of how they cope with their situation. This appreciation does not require that one be religious; but if one is religious, one has wider access into their life-­worlds. This appreciation also does not entail an uncritical ac­cep­tance of religious narratives, their interpretations, or, most impor­tant, their often oppressive consequences. Yet to be religious permits one to devote one’s life to accepting the prophetic and progressive potential within ­those traditions that shape the everyday practices and deeply held perspectives of most oppressed p ­ eoples. What a wonderful privilege 53 and vocation this is!

52. West, American Evasion, 233. 53. Ibid., 233–234.

CHAPTER 21

Robert Brandom: On Pragmatism (2002)

I

regret that the essay that follows is wholly critical. For this reason it may give a very wrong idea of my opinion of Brandom as a phi­los­o­pher. He is unquestionably a brilliant and consistently in­ter­est­ing and impor­tant thinker. I wish to stress that my criticism of his paper is almost entirely ­limited to one aspect: his depiction of classical American pragmatism. Indeed, Brandom’s paper could be turned into an excellent essay very simply: all he would have to do is change “Pragmatism . . . ​centered on evaluating beliefs by their tendency to promote success at the satisfaction of wants” to “Richard Rorty centered on evaluating beliefs by their tendency to promote success at the satisfaction of wants,” e­ tc. Indeed, I suspect that Brandom’s real target may well be Rorty, and he is simply using “the classical American pragmatists” as a sort of stand-in for his real target.1 But

Putnam’s reply to Robert Brandom, “Pragmatics and Pragmatisms,” in Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism, ed. James Conant and Urszula M. Żegleń (London: Routledge, 2002), 40–58. 1. The very last footnote in Brandom’s paper reads: “Accordingly, I find a major tension in Rorty’s thought, between his robust appreciation of the transformative potential of new vocabularies, and his continued appeal to instrumental models for thinking and talking about them.”

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the fact remains that serious students of pragmatism have spent almost a ­century rebutting the sort of travesty of what the classical pragmatists thought that Brandom relies on, and it must not be allowed to go unrebutted now. Brandom on “The Classical American Triumvirate”

I have to admit that my heart sank when I read the first sentence of Brandom’s paper: “Pragmatism can be thought of narrowly: as a philosophical school of thought centered on evaluating beliefs by their tendency to promote success at the satisfaction of wants, whose paradigmatic prac­ti­ tion­ers ­were the classical American triumvirate of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.” I had hoped that this caricature of what the classical American pragmatists w ­ ere about was no longer alive and well, but I see that I was wrong. Much of this reply w ­ ill therefore be focused on saying why this description of the “triumvirate” is, in my view, completely wrong. I w ­ ill make my points by taking up the members of the triumvirate in turn. But first some general remarks about the “philosophical school of thought” in question. Each member of the school had certain distinctive aims and interests that the other members did not very greatly share. Peirce, for example, was interested in constructing a metaphysical theory of the evolution of the entire cosmos, and in showing that his theory entailed consequences for the direction physics would have to take, an interest neither of the o ­ thers shared;2 James was interested in the extent to which “the right to believe” could be defended against rationalist critics (a subject on which Peirce wrote only once or twice, and Dewey not at all, ­unless one counts A Common Faith, in spite of its naturalism); and Dewey was interested in demo­cratic theory and in the relation of art to the rest of experience. In spite of ­these differences, one can say that all three owed a debt to Peirce’s theory of truth (although James alters it substantially); that all three ­were strong fallibilists; and that all three ­were “cognitivists” with re­spect to value judgments: indeed, all three

2. See my introduction to Peirce’s final lecture in Charles Sanders Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of ­T hings, ed. K. L. Ketner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). (The volume is edited by Kenneth Lane Ketner, with an introduction by both of us, and introductions to the individual lectures by me.)

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believed that all knowledge of fact presupposes value judgments. 3 The question is: does this mean that they ­either (1) identified what is true with what promotes success in the satisfaction of wants; or (2) thought that we should forget about truth and just concentrate on finding what promotes success in the satisfaction of wants; or (3) thought that what promotes success in the satisfaction of wants is more impor­tant than what is true? I s­ hall argue that the answer is “No, they did none of the foregoing.” Peirce

This is perhaps the easiest case in which to refute the “success in the satisfaction of wants” story. Peirce insisted that the interest that drives pure scientific inquiry is utterly dif­fer­ent from the interests that drive ordinary practical inquiry. If one does not know this, one cannot understand why Peirce distanced himself from James’s pragmatism.4 Moreover, as early Peirce’s famous “The Fixation of Belief,” the interest that drives scientific inquiry is identified with the interest in having one’s beliefs fixed by “an external permanency,” by “nothing h ­ uman.” In short, it is the aims of pure science (which are sui generis, in referring to the in­def­initely long run) that Peirce has in mind h ­ ere (as elsewhere), and not the wants of the agent (­unless what the agent wants is truth). Indeed, in the first of his Cambridge Conference Lectures, Peirce pours scorn on the idea that the phi­los­o­pher / scientist should have any concern at all with the needs (or “wants”) of practical life.5

3. See Hilary Putnam, “Pragmatism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95 (1995): 291–306; for the way in which Peirce regarded logic itself as dependent on the theory of value see Christopher Hookway, Peirce (London: Routledge, 1992). See also Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, “Dewey’s Logic: Epistemology as Hypothesis,” collected in Hilary Putnam, Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 4. In his “Lectures on Pragmatism” Peirce writes: “In order to understand pragmatism, therefore, well enough to subject it to intelligent criticism, it is incumbent upon us to understand what an ultimate aim, capable of being pursued in an in­def­initely prolonged course of action, can be.” See “Lectures on Pragmatism,” in Pragmatism and Pragmaticism: The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), §135. The “ultimate aim” referred to turns out to be simply scientific knowledge. See also Hookway, Peirce. 5. Reprinted as Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of T ­ hings.

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James

This par­tic­u­lar misreading of James was common in James’s own lifetime, and James never tired of repudiating it. Contrary to what he himself terms “misunderstandings,” James insists that a truth must put us in contact with a real­ity.6 This strain in James’s thought is termed (by him) his “epistemological realism,” and Perry admits that his famous work “largely ignores” it.7 Early and late James speaks of “agreement” with real­ity and even of “correspondence” although he also insists that correspondence is a notion that must be explained, not one that can simply function as the explanation of the notion of truth.8 However, James also thinks that what kinds of contact with realities w ­ ill count as “fruitful” depends on our “aesthetic and practical nature.” Thus James rejects both the view that agreement with real­ity i­ sn’t required at all for truth (or i­ sn’t a meaningful notion) and the Peircean view that our convergence to certain beliefs ­w ill be forced on us “by nothing ­human.” In fact, the idea that satisfactions are sufficient for truth is explic­itly listed as a “misunderstanding” of his doctrine by James in The Meaning of Truth.9 “Such anti-­pragmatism as this,” James says, seems to me a tissue of confusions. To begin with, when the pragmatist says “indispensable,” it confounds this with “sufficient.” The pragmatist calls satisfactions indispensable for truth-­ building, but I have everywhere called them insufficient u ­ nless real­ity be also incidentally led to. If the real­ity assumed ­were cancelled from the pragmatist’s universe of discourse, he would straightway give the name falsehood to the beliefs remaining in spite of all their satisfactoriness.” [emphasis added]

6. See James’s “The Meaning of Truth,” in William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 270ff. 7. R.  B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 2 (Boston: L ­ ittle, Brown, 1935), 591. 8. “Pragmatism,” in James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth, 96. 9. Cf. Chapter 8 of The Meaning of Truth, “The Pragmatist Account of Truth and Its Misunderstanders,” James’s reply to what he calls the fourth misunderstanding, 270ff. The “fourth misunderstanding” is “No pragmatist can be a realist in his epistemology.”

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We ­shall return to James’s views on the respective roles of “real­ity” and “satisfactions” when we look at Brandom’s section on “Classical Pragmatism.” Dewey

In Dewey’s most worked-­out statement of his own pragmatism, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), Dewey concerns himself exclusively with questions concerning warranted assertability. (The concept of truth is mentioned only in one footnote, in which he endorses Peirce’s definition.) So we have to ask: does Dewey identify warranted assertability with the tendency of beliefs to promote success at the satisfaction of wants? The answer again (by this time the reader w ­ ill not be surprised, I trust) is “no.” To be warrantedly assertable, according to Dewey, a belief must resolve a problematical situation. But it ­isn’t the case that satisfying wants is sufficient for resolving a problematical situation—as a staunch cognitivist, Dewey is quite willing to say that you may have the wrong wants.10 Nor is it the case that resolving a problematical situation is sufficient for warranted assertability: you may not have inquired sufficiently well to be warranted in thinking the belief resolves the problematical situation even if it does. Dewey is certainly concerned with what he calls “growth” (in ­Human Nature and Conduct, “growth” is a sort of final end of h ­ uman existence), and Dewey mea­sures growth by the increase in the ability of ­human beings to find out what is valuable and to achieve it, but he is insistent that what is valuable is not the same as what is valued (i.e. wanted). And, as just said, when beliefs are what we are talking about, Dewey’s first question is always are they warranted or not?—­a question that makes no appearance in Brandom’s picture of “the classical American triumvirate of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.” 10. As Dewey himself puts it: “To say that something satisfies is to report an isolated finality. To say that it is satisfactory is to define it in its connections and interactions. The fact that it pleases or is immediately congenial poses a prob­lem to judgment. How ­shall the satisfaction be rated? Is it a value or is it not? Is it something to be prized and cherished, to be enjoyed?” See John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1929); reprinted in John Dewey, The L ­ ater Works, vol. 4, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). The quotation appears on 260–261 of the reprinted edition.

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Classical Pragmatism

Brandom returns to his account of the founding f­ athers of American pragmatism in the section of his paper titled “Classical Pragmatism.” He begins by saying that, as he reads them, the classical American pragmatists are pragmatists in all three of the senses he has distinguished so far. Although I do not find his terms “fundamental pragmatism,” “methodological pragmatism” and “semantic pragmatism” completely clear,11 I ­w ill not take issue with this. What I do take issue with is the “instrumentalism” he reads into the classical pragmatists. Brandom writes, I also think the classical American pragmatists endorse a normative pragmatics, and therefore, given their fundamental pragmatism, a normative pragmatism. But this generic commitment is to some degree masked by the specific account they go on to offer of the norms they see as structuring our broadly cognitive practices. For they focus exclusively on instrumental norms [emphasis in the original]: assessments of per­for­mances as better or worse, correct or incorrect, insofar as they contribute to the agent’s success in securing some end or achieving some goal. As we have already seen, none of the classical triumvirate thought that a cognitive per­for­mance can be assessed as better or worse exclusively in terms of how far it contributes to “the agent’s success in securing some end or achieving some goal.” To go through the list again: as we have seen, Peirce thought that (1) the agent’s practical goals are irrelevant to the success of his cognitive per­for­mance, what counts is the verdict of the community of inquirers i­ magined as g­ oing on forever, and (2) the community of inquirers referred to is l­imited to ­those who employ the scientific method. The goal of ­those who employ that method is to allow their opinions to be fixed by “external permanencies,” by “nothing ­human.” James

11. For one t­ hing, ­these kinds of pragmatism are explained in terms of a “semantics /  pragmatics” distinction that I find suspect, for reasons well laid out by Charles Travis in a series of publications. See, in par­tic­u­lar, Charles Travis, The Uses of Sense: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Charles Travis, “Annals of Analy­sis,” Mind 100, no.  2 (April  1991): 237–263; and Charles Travis, Unshadowed Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

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thought that satisfactions are “indispensable” to “truth-­building” but not sufficient.12 James says, as we already saw, that for a belief to be true a real­ity must be “incidentally led to.” The reason he can regard this as a substantial requirement (in contrast to Schiller, whom he criticizes in Pragmatism for getting ­things “butt-­end foremost”)13 is that he is “an epistemological realist,” i.e. he thinks that t­ here is a “pre-­human fact” given in experience which, however modified by our conceptualizations, is still not totally plastic. As he goes on to say: Real­ity is in general what truths have to take account of; and the first part of real­ity from this point of view is the flux of our sensations. Sensations are forced upon us, coming we know not whence. Over their nature, order and quantity we have as good as no control. They are neither true nor false; they simply are. It is only what we say about them, only the names we give them, our theories of their source and nature and remote relations, that may be true or not: The second part of real­ity, as something that our beliefs must also obediently take account of, is the relations that obtain between our sensations or between their copies in our minds. And a­ fter pointing out that we have a certain freedom in our dealings with t­ hese ele­ ments of real­ity, and that in par­tic­u­lar which [of our sensations] we attend to, note, and make emphatic in our conclusions depends on our interests; and according as we lay the emphasis h ­ ere or ­there, quite dif­fer­ent formulations of truth result. We read the same facts differently. “Waterloo,” with the same fixed details, spells a “victory” for an En­glishman, for a Frenchman it spells a “defeat.” 12. Moreover, even when James does equate truth with “expediency” it is expediency “in the long run” that counts, and the long run extends far beyond the agent’s lifetime (James, “Pragmatism,” 107). For a discussion and interpretation of this passage, see my “James’s Theory of Truth” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 166–185. 13. See James, “Pragmatism,” 117.

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James cautions against carry­ing this thought too far: Both the sensational and the relational parts of real­ity are dumb; they say absolutely nothing about themselves. We it is who have to speak for them. This dumbness of sensations has led such intellectualists as T.H. Green and Edward Caird to shove them almost beyond the pale of philosophical recognition, but pragmatists refuse to go so far.14 In the same vein, James cautions Schiller (in a letter dated 9 August 1904), writing: ­ fter all, our side is only half developed—­I am sure that not one A of us has any clear idea of what the ultimate pre-­human fact—­ which we encounter and which works, through all our stratified predicates, upon us—­the hyle as you call it—­really is or signifies. But the clearest statement of James’s realism is undoubtedly in the letter to Dickinson Miller dated 5 August, in which James uses the following analogy: The world per se may be likened to a cast of beans on a ­table. By themselves they spell nothing. An onlooker may grasp them as he likes. He may simply count them all and map them. He may select groups and name them capriciously, or name them to suit certain extrinsic purposes of his. What­ever he does, so long as he takes account of them, his account is neither false nor irrelevant. If neither, why not call it true? It fits the beans-­minus him and expresses the total fact, of beans-­plus-­him.15 And last but not least, I have already reviewed the several re­spects in which Dewey thinks that evaluating beliefs simply in terms of their tendency to “secure some end or achiev[e] some goal” is quite inadequate. Am I perhaps misinterpreting Brandom’s claim that they [the classical pragmatists] focus exclusively on instrumental norms: assessments of per­for­mance as better or worse, correct or 14. All quotations in this passage are from James, “Pragmatism,” 118. 15. The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 295.

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incorrect, insofar as they contribute to the agent’s success in securing some end or achieving some goal? Unfortunately, it seems that this sentence expresses exactly how Brandom reads the classical pragmatists. For he continues: This is the kind of norm they see as implicit in discursive practice, and . . . ​as the ultimate source of specifically semantic dimensions of normative assessments such as truth. They understand truth in terms of usefulness, and take the contents possessed by intentional states and expressed by linguistic utterances to consist in their potential contribution to the success of the agent’s practical enterprises. The pragmatists, he writes, have [t]he strategy of understanding how what underwrites vari­ous sorts of normative assessment can be implicit in practice ultimately in terms of the success or failure . . . ​to achieve antecedent ends. I repeat not one of the three classical pragmatists had such a strategy.16 And It Goes on Like That . . .

Nor does Brandom ever relent. Thus the second paragraph of the next section (“Three objections to instrumental pragmatism”) opens with the sentence “The basic idea [sic] of classical pragmatism is that one can understand normative assessments of truth of beliefs as assessments of the extent to which the holding of that belief would contribute to the satisfaction of desires. Beliefs are true insofar as they are good tools or instruments for getting what one wants” [emphasis added]. Precisely James’s “Fourth misunderstanding” of pragmatism! Precisely the misunderstanding that Peirce feared when he changed the name of his philosophy from “pragma16. Moreover, the idea that success or failure in any enterprise, practical or theoretical, is mea­sured by ­whether it achieves antecedent ends is criticized by Dewey early and late. “Ends” are themselves subject to revision and criticism; an enterprise may be successful precisely b ­ ecause it rejected the “antecedent ends”!

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tism” to “pragmaticism”! Precisely the misunderstanding Dewey referred to when in a letter to James in 1903 he complained about the misunderstanding that pragmatism has no room for purely intellectual interests!17 Interestingly, in the same section Brandom gives a fine argument against the m ­ istake of supposing that the notion of a desire’s being satisfied (in the sense in which we can speak of h ­ uman desires and wants as being satisfied) is prelinguistic. When we think of an organism as adopting strategies to satisfy desires, we are thinking of desires “as something that has intentional—­that is, conceptually articulated—­content,” he writes. ­There is a tremendously impor­tant distinction between desires and strategies for their fulfilment and itches and ­things that make them go away. But he mars this fine observation in two ways: (1) in a footnote he writes, “Dewey was aware of this distinction and makes much of it in his writings on value [he certainly did!—­HP]. But I believe that he never thought through its consequences for the foundations of his approach.” The idea that “the foundation of Dewey’s approach” is the idea that true beliefs are ones that satisfy “antecedent” desires is, of course, Brandom’s own fabulation—­a fabulation which, apparently, Brandom does not lose his confidence in even when he notices that it is completely contradicted by Dewey’s “writings on value”! (2) When he comes to “holistic” versions of what he calls “instrumental pragmatism,” Brandom lists Heidegger and Wittgenstein as examples, writing: The language-­as-­tool trope unites figures other­wise as diverse . . . ​ as the early Heidegger and the l­ ater Wittgenstein. I want to close by arguing that the idea that language is for anything—in par­tic­ u­lar that is for pursuing antecedently intelligible ends—is confused and wrongheaded. Now I am no Heidegger scholar, but Wittgenstein makes precisely the point that Brandom makes about desire and its satisfaction in connection with expectation and its fulfilment, and it would be absurd to suppose that

17. This letter [appears in volume 10] of The Correspondence of William James, [1902–­ March 1905, edited by Ignaz K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley] (Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press[, 2002]), which includes the 1903 letters, with an introduction by me.

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he did not think the same about a desire and its satisfaction.18 (But no doubt Brandom would reply that he believes that “[Wittgenstein] never thought through its consequences for the foundations of his approach.”) And the “swipes” at classical pragmatism go on, unrelentingly, to the very end of the essay. Thus, the penultimate sentence of the essay reads, “In this essay I have tried to sketch the ele­ments of a broad tradition of pragmatism about the discursive, and to distinguish it from the narrower instrumental pragmatism notoriously associated with the classical American pragmatists.” As I said at the outset of this reply, serious students of pragmatism have spent almost a c­ entury rebutting this sort of travesty of the thought of the classical pragmatists. It is regrettable that Brandom is putting it back into circulation.

18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), §445.

CHAPTER 22

Ruth Anna Putnam: On Pragmatism (2013)

R

uth Anna Putnam’s “Taking Pragmatism Seriously” is a beautiful statement of almost all the ideas that I take to be of lasting value and vital importance in the legacy of American pragmatism. I am thrilled that she has put all this together so persuasively and yet so tersely. It could serve as a manifesto for what the two of us would like philosophy to look like in the twenty-­first ­century and beyond. If I agree completely with the ideas in question t­ oday, this was not always the case, and Ruth Anna herself had a ­great deal to do with my “conversion.” Since I have no disagreements or criticisms to voice in this “reply,” I s­ hall instead devote it to acknowledging her influence on my thought. But first a brief history of my involvement with pragmatism. One of my principal teachers when I was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania was C. West Churchman (who ­later edited the journal Philosophy of Science for a number of years). Churchman was an aty­pi­cal pragmatist—­aty­pi­cal in that he knew a good deal about the logic Putnam’s reply to Ruth Anna Putnam, “Taking Pragmatism Seriously,” in Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism, ed. James Conant and Urszula  M. Żegleń (London: Routledge, 2002), 7–11.

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of statistical testing and interwove this knowledge with a pragmatist rejection of the fact / value dichotomy.1 I remember Churchman writing on the blackboard the following propositions, which he attributed to E. A. Singer, Jr. (who had been a student of William James, and who was an emeritus professor at “Penn”). 1. Knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of theories [­under which term Singer included all generalizations]. For example, to know that something is an oak tree is to know that it belongs to a kind of tree, which generally has leaves with a certain shape, which usually produces acorns, e­ tc. ­Here Singer was attacking the idea that science can “start” with bare par­tic­u­lar data and build up to generalizations by induction and abduction. We always already presuppose a stock of generalizations when we observe. 2. Knowledge of theories (in the wide sense described) presupposes knowledge of [par­tic­u­lar] facts. (­There are no generalizations about the world we can know a priori.) 3. Knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of values. This is the position I defend. It can be broken into two separate claims: (i) that the activity of justifying factual claims presupposes value judgments; and (ii) we must regard ­those value judgments as capable of being right (as “objective” in philosophical jargon) if we are not to fall into subjectivism with re­spect to the factual claims themselves. 4. Knowledge of values presupposes knowledge of facts. (Against all phi­ los­o­phers who believe that [some part of] ethics is a priori.) Although this sounds as if I was well launched as a “pragmatist” already as an undergraduate, in fact I paid ­little attention to this at the time (I was much more interested in Freud, Kierkegaard, Marx—­until I read A.  J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, and became briefly “converted” to Ayer’s view). The truth is that, like many undergraduates, I was more interested in discovering what vari­ous very dif­fer­ent thinkers had said and what they had regarded as impor­tant issues, than in formulating a “position” of my 1. Richard Rudner, who was a Churchman student, l­ ater published a famous article explaining this connection: “The Scientist Qua Scientist Makes Value Judgments,” Philosophy of Science 20 (1953): 1–16.

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own at such an early stage. And when I went first to Harvard for a year and then to UCLA to do my gradu­ate work, I fell u ­ nder the spell first of Quine and then of Reichenbach. True, I did have one excellent seminar on Dewey’s Logic from Donald Piatt, but I resisted very strongly the idea that fact and value could be interdependent at that time—in spite of what Churchman had tried to teach me! (Nevertheless, what I learned in Piatt’s seminar proved valuable de­cades ­later.) Ruth Anna, however, already had a very high regard for Dewey when we married in 1962, and over the years her gentle advocacy gradually persuaded me to take a second look. I had already begun to think that the evaluation of “facts” depends (as the word “evaluation” already suggests!) on value judgments, as a result of arguments by phi­los­o­phers of language, including John McDowell (whom I met in 1976), Iris Murdoch and Paul Ziff; and in 1980 I began to seriously study and teach the philosophy of William James, but it was both conversations with Ruth Anna and reading and discussing her papers on the “Seamless Web” of fact and value that brought both the idea of fact-­value interpenetration and the contribution of John Dewey to the center of my attention.2 Eventually we wrote papers together on both Dewey and James, and I know that my next book (which is tentatively titled The Collapse of the Fact / Value Dichotomy) strongly reflects her influence and her example. This “reply” is a very inadequate attempt to express my gratitude for both.3

2. Ruth Anna Putnam’s papers on this topic include: “Perceiving Facts and Values,” Philosophy 73 (1998): 5–19; “The Moral Life of a Pragmatist,” in Identity, Character and Morality, ed. Owen Flanagan and Amélie Rorty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 67–89; “Weaving Seamless Webs,” Philosophy 62 (1987): 207–220; and “Creating Facts and Values,” Philosophy 60 (1985): 187–204. 3. Our joint articles include “Education for Democracy,” Educational Theory 43, no. 4 (1993): 361–376; “Epistemology as Hypothesis,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 26, no.  4 (1990): 407–433; “William James’s Ideas,” Raritan 8, no.  3 (1989): 27–44. [Editor: It is worth pointing out that since the publication of this reply, David Macarthur has edited a volume that collects almost all the papers on pragmatism published by both Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam titled Pragmatism as a Way of Life: On the Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017)].

CHAPTER 23

Crispin Wright: On the Brain-­in-­a-­Vat (1994)

I

felt a ­great deal of plea­sure on hearing, and l­ater on reading, Crispin Wright’s careful and insightful study on “Putnam’s Proof that We Are Not Brains in a Vat.” Wright formulates very clearly—­more clearly than I myself did, in fact—­the premises and the deductive steps involved in my argument, and he is admirably sensitive to the aims of the argument. Only with Wright’s concluding section do we come into disagreement. Wright claims that “it is quite clear” that “this line of criticism” [of metaphysical realism] ­w ill fail. Thus the existence of a disagreement is clear, but the exact nature of the disagreement may not be so clear. Skepticism, Internal and Infinitely Regressive

One way of exploring this question is to consider vari­ous ways in which one may be a skeptic. One sort of skeptic—­a very uninteresting sort—­may raise a skeptical doubt only so that, no ­matter what premises one may rely on in answering the doubt, he or she can respond, “and how do you know that?” Putnam’s reply to Crispin Wright, “Putnam’s Proof That We Are Not Brains in a Vat,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Bob Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 216–241.

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Obviously, this sort of skepticism—­call it infinitely regressive skepticism— is “unanswerable,” but equally obviously the existence of infinitely regressive skepticism shows only that justification must end somewhere. My argument was obviously not meant to refute infinitely regressive skepticism. A more in­ter­est­ing form of skepticism—­the form all in­ter­est­ing skepticism has taken from Sextus Empiricus to David Hume and beyond—­works from within (for this reason, we may call it internal skepticism). The aim of the internal skeptic is to convince us, on the basis of assumptions we ourselves hold, that all or a large part of our claims about the empirical world cannot amount to knowledge.1 Of course, even if the internal skeptic succeeds, we may not agree to become skeptics; we may decide to revise some of our beliefs instead. But the possibility that the internal skeptic may force us to do this is precisely the g­ reat value of internal skepticism. A successful internal skeptical challenge must at the very least confront us with an antinomy, and one always learns from an antinomy. It was against internal skepticism that my brain-­in-­a-­vat argument was directed. The internal skeptic I i­ magined argues that on the basis of our own beliefs about the brain, ­etc., it follows that we might all be brains in a vat. My reply has the following form. (1) I argue that many of us—­perhaps most of us, nowadays—­believe that t­ here are causal constraints upon reference. ­Those constraints have roughly the following form: to refer to an object in the physical world, or to a physical property or relation, one must ­either have an appropriate kind of causal connection to the object, property, or relation (where part of the “appropriateness” of the connection lies in its being a differential, or “information-­carrying” connection; e.g. my causal connection to cats is such that ­whether I apply the word “cat,” on occasions when I am using the word in what I intend to be a case of demonstrative reference, normally depends on the presence or absence of par­tic­u­lar cats; my causal connection to the property of being charged is such that w ­ hether I apply the word, on occasions of the same kind, depends on w ­ hether the object I am demonstratively referring to is charged, ­etc.), or be able to describe what it is one intends to refer to in terms of objects, properties, and

1. Obviously internal skeptics may be, and traditionally have been, skeptics about other sorts of knowledge as well, but I speak only of knowledge about the empirical world ­here, ­because that is the only kind of knowledge that my brain-­in-­a-­vat argument concerns.

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relations to which one does have such an appropriate causal connection.2 (For the purposes of the brain-­in-­a-­vat argument, the weaker assumption that such constraints are satisfied when the word is originally acquired is sufficient.) (2) If we do accept this much about the nature of reference, then the internal skeptic cannot, in fact, show on the basis of premises we accept that we may be brains in a vat. (The details are well described by Wright, and I ­shall not repeat them h ­ ere.) Two further comments: first, what my argument shows is that this form of internal skepticism works against a certain kind of metaphysical realist, but it does not work against my sort of realism. Second, the key premise—­that ­there are causal constraints on reference—is one which is accepted by a good many realists, including some of the most severe critics of my own “internal realism.”3 Now, the skeptic may grant that I have given a valid argument from premises we accept, and reply by challenging our belief that t­ here are causal constraints on reference. Perhaps we are wrong, and transcendent reference is pos­si­ble, the skeptic might argue. But at this point my skeptical opponent has ceased to be an internal skeptic and has become an infinitely regressive skeptic. And of course one cannot “refute” infinitely regressive skepticism; but that was never my aim. What is puzzling about the concluding section of Wright’s paper is that it seems to waver between pointing out that infinitely regressive scepticism has still not been refuted, and attempting a reply on behalf of an internal skeptic. But if the latter is Wright’s intention, it is not clear what the reply is. Skepticism “in the Presence of a Plausible Externalism”

Still, Wright claims that the skeptical doubt he describes is one that one can still hold “in the presence of a plausible semantic externalism.” Since 2. Note that I do not claim that the notion of an appropriate kind of causal connection can be spelled out without employing the notion of reference and other intentional notions. Thus the position that t­ here are causal constraints on reference does not imply that reference can be reduced to causality. 3. For an account of “internal realism,” see my reply to Simon Blackburn in “Comments and Replies,” in Clark and Hale, Reading Putnam, 242–254. Among the critics of my position who accept the existence of causal constraints on reference are Richard Boyd, Michael Devitt, Clark Glymour, and, perhaps, Blackburn himself.



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“semantic externalism” is current philosophy-­of-­language jargon for the idea that meaning and reference are subject to causal constraints, it does seem that Wright wishes his doubt to be one that makes sense compatibly with the ac­cep­tance of the sorts of causal constraint on reference that I outlined above. But does it? We cannot, of course, ask Wright to describe exactly what the envisaged state of affairs is supposed to be, for the ­whole point of the doubt that is described not being “akin to Ω-­inconsistency” (although superficially resembling Ω-­inconsistency) is that the envisaged state of affairs is supposed to be such that, if we are in it, then we cannot conceive of its exact nature. However, if we are supposed to be able to think that we are in some state of affairs of a very general kind—­a “certain type of situation”—we have to be able to say what type of situation that is, even if “any instance of the type that we can conceptualize can be demonstrated not to obtain.” Wright’s description of the type is this: “they are debarred from arriving at the concepts necessary to capture the most fundamental features of their world and their place in it.” They lack any assurance that “[they] are on to the right categories in terms of which to depict the most general features of the world and [their] place in it.” They are not able to “form concepts which reflect the real kinds that t­ here are.” How is this talk of “fundamental features of the world,” “right categories,” “real kinds,” e­ tc., to be cashed out? One way might be this: we could consider the hypothesis that ­there are physical magnitudes such that, if we knew of the laws connecting ­those magnitudes with one another and familiar phenomena, we would say that we ­were as badly deceived as the brain-­people in the brain-­in-­a-­vat story. Obviously this ­w ill not do, b ­ ecause, if “semantic externalism” is accepted, we ­w ill not be able to conceive of the laws connecting ­these magnitudes with one another and with familiar phenomena if the hypothesis is true; but, following Wright’s lead, we might reword the hypothesis thus: we are so situated that we are unable to conceive of the true laws governing the most fundamental physical magnitudes. Does this work? I think it is quite clear that it ­w ill fail. Of course, it does not fail if it is intended as expressing a mere worry about the limits of h ­ uman science; so understood, the hypothesis may well be true, but does not imply any radical skepticism. (Perhaps Martians could carry physics all the way to the most fundamental laws, but h ­ uman cannot.) But to understand the

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hypothesis as a skeptical doubt, let us return to the brain-­in-­a-­vat story, and see what goes wrong if the brain in a vat tries forming, not the hypothesis that it is a brain in a vat, but the vaguer hypothesis just described. The difficulty is that the notion of a “physical magnitude” is the notion of a magnitude that applies to bodies distributed in space, one which governs the time evolution of their positions, momenta, energies, ­etc., according to causal laws.4 But the brains in a vat cannot refer to “space” (i.e. to spatial relations, such as being “in” a vat) as ­those relations are understood by the unenvatted. The unenvatted notion of “space” and the unenvatted notion of a “physical” magnitude are no more available to brains in a vat than are the specific notions “in” and “vat.” On the other hand, in their sense of “physical,” the brains in a vat are not disbarred from discovering what “physical” magnitudes t­ here are and what laws they obey. And if we are in a position fully analogous to that of brains in a vat (even if we are unable to conceive of what that position specifically is), neither can we be assumed to have available a transcendental notion of a “physical” magnitude; for to assume that we do is just to assume that the property of being “physical” is not subject to the causal constraints which constitute semantic externalism. Of course, the skeptic may doubt semantic externalism; but then the skeptic is not playing the internalist game any longer. Nor ­w ill it help to just drop the reference to physical laws and magnitudes. Even the hypothesis that “we are not able to conceive of the most fundamental causal laws” is subject to the same difficulty. For just as brains in a vat refer to something quite dif­fer­ent than unenvatted beings when they use such a word as “physical,” so do they refer to something quite dif­fer­ent when they use such a word as “cause.” Consider a paradigm case of causation in the brain-­in-­a-­vat world; say a “fire” (involving, say “wood”) “producing” “smoke.” Even if we follow Davidson’s sensible suggestion (in line with “semantic externalism”) and say that the brains in a vat are, unbeknownst to themselves, referring to pro­cesses, data, ­etc., in the computer when they employ vat En­g lish, still the relation between what­ever in the computer corresponds to a brain’s perceiving “fire” and 4. To be sure the space may be a more general space than ordinary 3-­space; e.g. Hilbert space, or the space of supergravitation theory; but ­these more general spaces are explained by relating them to ordinary space.



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what corresponds to the subsequent “smoke” need not be that the former ­causes the latter.5 Rather, we may plausibly imagine that the entire sequence is programmed to occur in that order when a Brain emits the appropriate electrical impulses. ­There is, indeed, a counter-­factual supporting relation between “fires” (of certain “substances”) and “smoke” in the brain-­in-­a-­vat world, a relation that may be relied on, used to justify inference licences, ­etc., just as the relation of causation is relied on, used to justify inference licences, e­ tc., among the unenvatted, but it is not the same relation. Brains in a vat can no more refer to what the unenvatted call “causation” than they can to what the unenvatted call “fire,” for semantic externalists insist that the causal constraints that apply to our reference to any physical relation apply to reference to causation itself.6 And if we are in a position fully analogous to that of brains in a vat (even if we are unable to conceive of what that position specifically is), we cannot be assumed to have available a transcendental notion of “causation;” for to assume that we do is just to assume that the relation of causation is not ­subject to the causal constraints which constitute semantic externalism. Again, the skeptic may doubt semantic externalism; but then the skeptic is not playing the internalist game any longer. (It is, perhaps, the vagueness of terms like “fundamental categories,” “real kinds,” ­etc., that conceals from Wright the fact that he is tacitly assuming conceptual access to such general notions as “physical” and “causation.” But I take it that what we mean by “fundamental categories” and “real kinds” is kinds and categories that play a fundamental role in the description of physical t­ hings and their causal relations; if not, then I ­will ask Wright to give me an account compatible with externalism of how a being whose position is analogous to that of a brain in a vat could refer to the property of being “fundamental.”)

5. In Donald Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in Truth and Interpretation, ed. Ernest Lepore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 307–319. 6. Indeed, this doctrine of externalism has often been thought (mistakenly in my view) to be a way of refuting my own “model-­theoretic” arguments against metaphysical realism. Michael Devin, Clark Glymour, and Richard Boyd have all repeatedly insisted that the words “causal connection” are “attached to causal connection by causal connection,” and that that is what makes it pos­si­ble for us to refer to causal connection. I am not ­here making an ad hoc extension of externalism for dialectical purposes, but appealing to a feature which opponents as well as proponents of internal realism recognize to be characteristic of “semantic externalism.”

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In sum, Wright’s ingenious attempt to formulate a skeptical hypothesis which (1) reinstates the “contingency” of the relation between a theory’s meeting our highest cognitive standards and its being correct, which is the most prominent feature of metaphysical realism, and (2) can be held by an internal skeptic, is not successful. Just making the terms used in stating the doubt more abstract ­w ill not exempt them for the externalist constraints on which my brain-­in-­a-­vat argument turns. More on Metaphysical Realism

­ here is, however, another way of seeing the significance of the brain-­in-­ T a-­vat argument for the argument against metaphysical realism.7 If we grant that, as they understand the terms, the brains in a vat can describe “the fundamental physical laws,” the “basic causal relations,” ­etc., even though, if we ­were pre­sent in the same world, and interacted with the computer, the brains, e­ tc., in our normal unenvatted way, we would give a very dif­fer­ent description of the same events—­say, describe them as sequences of data pro­cesses in a computer—­then we are led to the thought that the notion of how ­things are makes no sense apart from the way in which we interact with ­those ­things. As John Dewey urged in Experience and Nature and elsewhere, all reference is transactional. We are not led to say, with Richard Rorty, that ­there is no such ­thing as correct description or truth, except in an emotive sense (truth is a “compliment” we pay to certain sentences, according to Rorty), but we are led to agree with Rorty that the idea of the mirror of nature—­the language that is nature’s own language, intrinsically, the language that is “correct” for reasons which have nothing to do with how we interact with nature, apart from how we are embedded in nature—­makes no sense. And if (as I believe Dewey did) we succeed in remaining realists while giving up the idea of the Mirror of Nature, we ­will have become what I call “internal realists.”

7. I owe thanks to Gary Ebbs for pointing this out to me.

CHAPTER 24

Joseph Margolis: On Relativism and Pluralism (2006)

F

or many years, Joseph Margolis has been the most sophisticated Anglo-­ American defender of relativism, but he is much more than that—he is a phi­los­o­pher who, in addition to his undoubted dialectical skills, possesses extraordinary historical sensitivity and knowledge. And ever since he published The Truth About Relativism, I have figured in his writing as someone whose criticisms of relativism are to be rebutted!1 So I was not exactly surprised to find that “Hilary Putnam and the Promise of Pluralism” chides me for not having refuted “a coherent version of relativism.” Accordingly, in this reply I ­w ill try, if not exactly to “refute” relativism, to say why I am not convinced that we have been offered a clear and coherent version, and, beyond that, why I would not be inclined to join Margolis in the relativist camp even if he did convince me that the position is “coherent.”

Putnam’s reply to Joseph Margolis, “Hilary Putnam and the Promise of Pluralism,” Con­ temporary Pragmatism 3, no. 2 (2006): 15–25. 1. Joseph Margolis, The Truth About Relativism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

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I ­w ill begin with a discussion of Margolis’s own position, b ­ ecause he does not spell it out very much in the pre­sent essay, but it is clearly the background to what he writes about my book. Margolis’s “Robust Relativism”

In The Truth About Relativism, Margolis distinguished sharply between positions which relativize truth to a culture, speaker, point of view, ­etc., which he finds (as I do) self-­refuting, and his own “robust relativism.” As I understand his “robust relativism,” it is characterized, first, by a rejection of certain classical logical princi­ples, and secondly by a rejection of the idea that e­ ither real­ity itself or the mind of the cognizing subject have an invariant structure (sometimes he adds: “that can be known as such”). Margolis regards this latter rejection as the ­great insight of Protagoras, and an appreciation and interpretation of that phi­los­o­pher is a central feature of at least three of Margolis’s books.2 In The Truth About Relativism, Margolis also charged me with being unfair to Richard Rorty, when I interpreted his position as involving a relativization of the truth-­predicate to cultures, and I think that Margolis is right about that. I have g­ reat re­spect for Richard Rorty (I would not spend so much time criticizing his views if I ­didn’t!), and I am happy to withdraw that par­tic­u­lar charge. Unfortunately, however, in replying to the accusation of being a relativist about truth, Rorty defended an explicit relativization of warranted assertability to cultures, and that is just as self-­refuting, though for dif­fer­ent reasons.3 But that is not my topic h ­ ere. In The Truth About Relativism, we are told that (in “robust relativism”) “ ‘true’ is not thus relationized at all, but rather the bivalent values are systematically replaced in a formal way by a logically weaker set of many valued truth-­values or truth-­like values;4 so that, where, on the bivalent 2. In addition to The Truth About Relativism, I have in mind Margolis’s Historied Thought, Constructed World: Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the Millennium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and The Flux of History and the Flux of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 3. In “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” Rorty writes, “I view warrant as a so­cio­ log­i­cal ­matter, to be ascertained by observing the reception of S’s statement by her peers.” Journal of Philosophy 90 (1993): 450. 4. Margolis, The Truth About Relativism, 8.



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model, logical inconsistency or contradiction obtains, now, on the replacement model, and in accordance with appropriate relevance constraints, such logical incongruences (as we may call them) need no longer be treated as full logical inconsistencies, incompatibilities, contradictions, or the like.”5 And again “The robust relativist’s thesis is that ­there is no purely formal reason why many valued truth-­values should function inconsistently or incoherently; or why such values cannot be distributively applied in an advantageous way in this or that par­tic­u­lar sector of inquiry. In fact, the relativist claims that ­there is no reason for supposing that bivalent and many-­valued truth values cannot be systematically used together (with due care) without risking conceptual disaster.”6 ­Later in the same work, it becomes clear that Margolis regards all arguments against relativism that presuppose the “strong realist reading” of the princi­ples of excluded ­middle and noncontradiction as question begging.7 ­Here I am partly sympathetic. I have long felt that, ­unless we are willing to deny the real­ity of vagueness altogether . . . ​then we should regard the princi­ple of the excluded ­middle as an idealization.8 I have also long felt that the notion of “approximate truth” is an indispensable one, and I am not moved by the often-­heard complaint of analytic phi­los­o­phers that t­ here is no precise formal and context-­independent definition of “approximate” (in the phrase “approximate truth”).9 In addition, I am an admirer of Charles Travis’s work on context-­sensitive semantics.10 But I utterly fail to see how granting that much of what we want to say about real­ity can only be said in language that is vague and context-­sensitive, and granting, further, that it may be that even in fundamental physics we do 5. In fact, Margolis does not provide ­either a formal semantics or a formal logic for his “truth-­like values.” I have no idea what “in a formal way” refers to h ­ ere. 6. Margolis, The Truth About Relativism, 9. 7. Ibid., 74–75. 8. See my “Vagueness and Alternative Logic,” in Realism and Reason, vol. 3 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 9. ­These phi­los­o­phers, it seems to me, are trapped by the image of the crystalline purity of logic that Wittgenstein famously decried. (“We have got onto slippery ice where ­there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just ­because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground” [Philosophical Investigations, §107].) 10. See my “Travis on Meaning, Thought, and the Ways the World Is,” Philosophical Quarterly 52 (2002): 96–106.

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not know ­whether we ­w ill ever be able to formulate laws that are better than approximately true, supports any talk about real­ity being “flux.” Nor do I see how statements (theories, views, e­ tc.) which ­either lead to incompatible predictions in the same context or require us to behave in incompatible ways in the same context can both be even approximately true. (And if one gives up the princi­ple of noncontradiction to the extent of saying they can be, then the Margolis claim that relativism is not self-­refuting is trivial. Absent the princi­ple of noncontradiction in some form, ­there is no such ­thing as a self-­refuting position.) Nor, fi­nally, do I see how talk of “many-­ valued truth-­values” and of replacing the notion of “incompatibility” with “incongruity” could possibly help h ­ ere. But it is time to turn to what Margolis writes about Ethics Without Ontology. Pluralism and the Grenzbegriff of Rationality

Margolis begins by pointing out, reasonably enough, that my talk of pluralism had better amount to more than a recognition of the “first-­order fact” that ­people describe ­things in many ways, including erroneous ones. And it does; what I mean is that ­there are descriptions (e.g., a description in a language in which points are identified with sets of lines, and a corresponding description in a language in which lines are identified with sets of points), which would be inconsistent if regarded as belonging to the same language11 (so they cannot simply be conjoined), but which are equally true, and, in a sense which is impor­tant in scientific practice, “say the same ­thing.” How do we know they are true? How do we know they are equivalent descriptions? We rely, I would say, on the best grasp we have of rationality—in this case, scientific rationality. At this point, Margolis quotes something I wrote in Reason, Truth and History: I raised the question, “Is ­there a true conception of rationality?” And I said that, although all we ever have is our conception of rationality, “the very fact that we speak of our dif­fer­ent conceptions as dif­fer­ent conceptions of rationality posits a Grenzbegriff, a limit-­concept of the ideal truth.” And Margolis responds, “Perhaps. But to posit a Grenzbegriff hardly

11. Their conjunction would violate the axiom of Foundation.



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entails that ­there is anything more than a purely formal, completely empty notion of ‘the ideal truth’.”12 Now, almost a quarter ­century ­later, I too find talk of Grenzbegriffe and “the ideal truth” overly metaphysical. As I mentioned in my reply to Pihlström, Fred Stoutland in “Putnam on Truth” correctly describes my current view. In par­tic­u­lar, as explained in my third Dewey Lecture, I distinguish between ­those theories of truth that disquote sentences regarded as “marks and noises,” and ­those that disquote “judgments” or “contents” or Wittgensteinian Sätze (which I take to be sentences in meaningful use).13 I also distinguish between deflationist theories that presuppose a verificationist account of what the meaningful use of a sentence is (Carnap and, in one publication, Paul Horwich) and deflationist theories (­those of Frege, Wittgenstein, myself) that do not.14 ­Today I defend what I would call a “moderate objectivism.” It is “moderate” ­because, as I said above, it recognizes that much of what we want to say about real­ity can only be said in language that is vague and context-­ sensitive, and that in many cases approximate truth is the best we can achieve. It is moderate in another re­spect as well; as I argue in The Collapse of the Fact / Value Dichotomy, when we come to questions of “rational preference,” partial orderings are the best we can hope for.15 (I would hope that this would leave room for enough pluralism in, for example, aesthetics, but I am sure Margolis ­won’t think so.) It is “objectivism,” surely, in the Margolian sense of rejecting “robust relativism,” but that is not a very clear sense, at least to me, ­because “robust relativism” remains unclear to me

12. Margolis, “Hilary Putnam and the Promise of Pluralism,” 16. 13. Collected in my The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 49–69. Note that in t­ hose pages I use “deflationary” to refer to theories which combine the idea of disquoting sentences (construed as mere “marks and noises”) with a verificationist account of what it is for such “marks and noises” to have a meaning. In a dif­fer­ent sense, I am myself a “deflationist,” as Stoutland points out in “Putnam on Truth.” 14. See Rudolf Carnap, “Truth and Confirmation,” in Readings in Philosophical Analy­sis, ed. Herbert Feigl and Wilfrid Sellars (New York: Appleton-­Century-­Crofts, 1949), 119–127; Paul Horwich, “Wittgenstein and Kripke on the Nature of Meaning,” Mind and Language 5, no. 2 (1990): 105–121. For some comments on Horwich’s paper, see The Threefold Cord, 193–194. 15. Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact / Value Dichotomy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). chap. 5: “On the Rationality of Preference.”

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in impor­tant re­spects.16 But in fact I am an objectivist (in the sense that seems appropriate to me in each case) in a number of the areas that Margolis discusses in his books. My “Objectivism”

In The Truth About Relativism, referring to my views about reference in what I called the “mature sciences” (meaning sciences in which substantial predictive and explanatory success has been achieved), Margolis wrote, “What Putnam claimed at that time was (i) that . . . ​the executive terms of a ‘mature science’ functioning at the explanatory level ‘typically refer’ in the usual realist sense of successful reference; and (ii) that the alternative theories that appear to compete with one another in the ­actual pro­cess of scientific work nevertheless ‘typically refer’ to the same theoretical entities for which they offer diverging or incompatible characterizations.17 The trou­ble is that, contrary to doctrines (i) and (ii), the existence and nature of the entities in question may be no more than artifacts of the theories themselves.”18 Although (writing in 1990), Margolis assumed that I had given up ­those awful views, he was mistaken. I did not give them up (not even in my “internal realist” period, although I gave up the idea that they support metaphysical realism),19 and I certainly would not give them up ­today. A ­little ­earlier than the Locke Lectures, in “What Is Mathematical Truth?,” I had written: “The positive argument for realism is that it is the only philosophy that ­doesn’t make the success of science a miracle. That terms in a mature science typically refer (this formulation is due to Richard Boyd), that the theories accepted in a mature science are typically approximately true, that the same term can refer to dif­fer­ent ­things even when it occurs 16. One such re­spect is the total unclarity of the “truth-­like” many-­valued truth-­ values Margolis posits, and of the “formal way” (see note 5 above) in which they are to replace the usual bivalent truth-­values; another is the way in which “robust relativism” is supposed to avoid collapsing into some version of cultural relativism. 17. Writing in 1990, Margolis was referring to my John Locke Lectures, delivered at Oxford University in Hilary Term of 1976. See Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 20. 18. Margolis, The Truth About Relativism, 129. 19. This is made explicit in Meaning and the Moral Sciences itself, from which Margolis was quoting. Read carefully the first three paragraphs of p. 123!



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in dif­fer­ent theories—­these statements are viewed by the scientific realist not as necessary truths but as part of the only scientific explanation of the success of science, and hence as part of any adequate scientific description of science and its relation to its objects.”20 To—­I am sure—­the dismay of many (not only of Joseph Margolis, but also of some of my Wittgensteinian friends and former students), I still believe that. But, again, on a suitably modest construal. First the modesty, and then the reasons that I still believe it. The modesty: First, I do not believe (and I did not believe then, in fact) that science converges to a single “ontology” in Quine’s sense. And second, nothing in what I wrote then commits me to the Peircean view that science must in the long run converge to an absolutely true theory of the world. It may well be that we h ­ umans cannot get beyond approximate truth. But approximate truth is attainable, and about some ­things (“ships and shoes and sealing wax,” for example) we know a lot of truths, not all of them approximate by any means. In fact, an early version of the doctrine that I now call “conceptual relativity” was already defended in a paper I published in 1967: The same fact can be expressed by saying that the electron is a wave with definite wavelength λ or by saying that the electron is a particle with a sharp momentum p and an indeterminate position. What “same fact” comes to ­here is, I admit, obscure. It would be absurd to claim that the sentence “­there is an electron-­wave with the wavelength λ” is synonymous with the sentence “­there is a particle electron with the momentum h / λ and a totally indeterminate position.” What is rather being claimed is this: that the two theories are compatible, not incompatible, given the way in which the theoretical primitives of each theory are now being understood; that indeed, they are not merely compatible but equivalent.21 ­ oday, the fact that the same theory in mathematical physics may admit of T dif­fer­ent “ontologies” in Quine’s sense is well known to quantum physicists,

20. Collected in my Mathe­matics, ­Matter and Method: Philosophical Papers, vol.  1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). See p. 73. 21. “Mathe­matics Without Foundations,” in my Mathe­matics, M ­ atter and Method: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, 46.

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who speak of t­ hese “ontologies” as dif­fer­ent “repre­sen­ta­tions” of a given quantum mechanical theory. Such repre­sen­ta­tions can even differ over ­whether a particle is or is not a boson, or over the number of dimensions of space-­time!22 But this is not incompatible with the “doctrines (i) and (ii)” that Margolis mentions, for no ­matter which of ­these “equivalent descriptions” (as I have called them) we may choose, it is equally the case that the theory of which they are equivalent versions is approximately true!23 Cases in which it is unclear, from the point of a ­later theory, what an “executive term” in an e­ arlier theory referred to are sometimes cited as an objection to “doctrines (i) and (ii)”—it is alleged, for example, that it is indeterminate from the standpoint of relativity theory ­whether the term “mass” in Newton’s theory referred to rest mass (which is my view, by the way) or to “relativistic mass”—­but if this w ­ ere a genuine ambiguity, it would still be the case that Newton’s laws ­were approximately true ­under both interpretations! Hardly an embarrassment for a scientific realist. What of Margolis’s claim that “contrary to doctrines (i) and (ii), the existence and nature of the entities in question may be no more than artifacts of the theories themselves.” Cases in which a scientific realist has to concede that this was the case have occurred, but they are in fact extremely rare (­unless, of course, one believes that all scientific entities are “artifacts of the theories themselves”—­but I see no reason to believe this). And when they are “artifacts” of the theories themselves, it is ­later and better theories that have shown us that this is the case. But in physics at least, ­those ­later theories have always preserved a ­great deal of the deep mathematical structure of the ­earlier theories, as well as a large part of the interpretation of that structure. But what of objectivity in ethics? Or in mathe­matics? Well, what of the objectivity of the claim that a certain way of solving a practical prob­lem meets the relevant needs? John Dewey was wont to ask. In the view I defend in Ethics Without Ontology, what we call ethics does not rest on a “foundation” in the usual phi­los­o­pher’s sense, but on a 22. See for instance C. P. Burgess and F. Quevedo, “Bosonization as Duality,” Nuclear Physics B421 (1994): 373–390. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any papers in this area that do not presuppose knowledge of quantum field theories. 23. See “Equivalence,” collected in Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, 26–45.



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complicated set of ­human interests (ones which, moreover, sometimes conflict). The objectivity of a warrantedly assertible ethical judgment is the objectivity of reasonable solutions to prob­lems of interpreting and reconciling and satisfying such interests. Such reasonable solutions need not have what preference theorists call a “complete ordering” with re­spect to the interests in question; but complete ordering does not seem to me something that a modest objectivism in ethics requires. And as for mathematical objectivity, I have argued ever since “What Is Mathematical Truth?” that mathe­matics and physics are entangled in such a way that trying to unite objectivism (which I prefer to call “scientific realism”) in physics with anti-­realism in mathe­matics is incoherent. Indeed, entanglement—­the qua­dru­ple entanglement of facts, theories, ethics, and mathe­matics—is a standing theme in my work; and also, I believe, in the philosophies of the classical pragmatists. Where Margolis Goes Wrong in His Interpretation of My Pluralism

I have gone into this much detail concerning my own past and pre­sent views, ­because the body of Margolis’s essay is based on a misinterpretation of the purpose of the “pluralism” that I defend. (This misinterpretation is linked, in his essay, with his decision—­which I find difficult to understand—to take as his target not my pre­sent views, but the passage about the Grenzbegriff of the “ideal truth” in a book whose “internal realism” I repudiated more than fifteen years ago.)24 Early on, he writes: If Putnam believed he could claim more [than a Grenzbegriff which is just a posit “originating ‘from within our tradition’ . . . ​ 24. In Reason, Truth and History, in the course of writing on subjects that went far beyond my pre-1975 interests, I made what I now see as a false start by defending a version of anti-­realist semantics that I sometimes called “internal realism.” I gave it up for a more “realist” position by 1990, as I stated in my reply to Simon Blackburn at the conference on my philosophy at the University of St. Andrews in November of that year. A “written-up” version of that reply is published in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Bob Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). The reasons I gave it up are stated in the first three of my replies in “The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam,” Philosophical Topics 20 (Spring 1992), where I give a history of my use(s) of the unfortunate term “internal realism,” and, at more length, in my Dewey Lectures.

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changing with e­ very significant change in our society’s collective experience”]—­a changeless Grenzbegriff, say—­wouldn’t he have endorsed the objectivism he himself repudiates among the classic forms of logical positivism? And if he admitted the insuperable objections against that option, ­wouldn’t he be obliged to admit some form of relativism (assuming, against Putnam himself, of course, that t­ here are indeed coherent, self-­consistent, non-­ solipsistic forms of relativism)? Since Putnam says No to objectivism and relativism, we must take his pragmatic pluralism to count as a third option between the two supposedly indefensible extremes, I see no other way to read the first citation.25 The “first citation” to which Margolis refers is embedded in the first paragraph of his essay: “Putnam says ­there [in Ethics Without Ontology], in his orienting lecture, that he intends to replace both “inflationary” ontology (exemplified in the views of the conventional Plato of the Forms) and “deflationary” ontology (as in Democritus and Berkeley) by what he calls “pragmatic pluralism,” which, enlisting Wittgenstein, Putnam characterizes as combating the illusion that t­ here could be just one sort of language game which could be sufficient for the description of all of real­ity.”26 H ­ ere the two “indefensible extremes” that I promise to combat are not “objectivism” and “relativism” but inflationary ontology and deflationary ontology. I suppose that the metaphysics usually ascribed to Plato is a form of “objectivism,” in Margolis’s sense, but the fact that I combat it does not mean that my target was objectivism, u ­ nless one assumes that all objectivism must presuppose one or another form of inflationary metaphysics (an assumption for which I can find no justification). And by no stretch of the imagination w ­ ere e­ ither Berkeley or Democritus relativists. Moreover, I d ­ on’t believe I have ever criticized logical positivism for objectivism. If anything, I criticized it for not treating scientific theories as objective descriptions of real­ity.27 So pragmatic pluralism was not in25. Margolis, “Hilary Putnam and the Promise of Pluralism,” 16–17. 26. Ibid., 15. 27. See “What Theories are Not,” collected in Mathe­matics, ­Matter and Method: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, 215–227, and “Explanation and Reference,” collected in my Mind, Language and Real­ity: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 196–214.



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tended as a “third option” between objectivism and relativism. It was intended to show how one could retain what is right in objectivism (as I explained above) without falling into the errors of metaphysical realism. In this connection, Margolis also writes that “It may be that pluralism ­can’t be saved as a third option [between ‘objectivism’ and ‘relativism’]. But if it can be—in taking up the question of a valid universalism—­then it must, I suggest, advance a theory of how ­human beings can know anything.”28 This seems to me to be the old phi­los­o­pher’s trick of claiming that your opponent has the burden of solving the prob­lems of philosophy in a definitive way, while you, of course, do not. I believe that Margolis and I in fact agree t­ here are such t­ hings as situated good reasons, even if the dream of “a theory of how h ­ uman beings can know anything” is a phi­los­ o­pher’s fantasy. But Margolis thinks that only a relativist (of his sort) is entitled to say that. As I read this essay, engagingly and powerfully written as it is, virtually all of it depends on the two moves of (1) supposing I am producing an alternative to objectivism and relativism (as opposed to trying to say what is reasonable and right in objectivism); and (2) insisting that one is only entitled to reject relativism if one can supply “objective procedures” for determining what can and what cannot be known. This is tantamount to claiming that a pragmatist must be a relativist, and I see no reason to believe that! But What Is “Relativism”?

My “objectivism,” to use the term Margolis offers me, does not endorse Peirce’s claim that ­every empirical question can be de­cided if only scientific inquiry goes on long enough—­that claim surely goes beyond anything we have good reason to believe. But just to take the case of physics (since Margolis explic­itly includes it in the scope of his “robust relativism”): ­Haven’t we, in fact, discovered, if not an “invariant structure” of physical real­ity, at least the broad outlines of the history of the cosmos over the last six to ten billion years? Is that just something that this society’s “experience” ­causes it to find “noticeably difficult” to doubt? ­Don’t we know of approximately true statements of many physical laws that, we have good reason to believe, held for ­those six to ten billion years, with the pos­si­ble 28. Margolis, “Hilary Putnam and the Promise of Pluralism,” 18.

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exceptions of the first almost infinitesimal fraction of a second ­a fter the Big Bang? Holding, even approximately, for six billion or more years is darned close to “invariant” in my book! And “approximately” ­here means: good enough to predict with an accuracy of twenty decimal places! Why must trust in the best science we have (in the area of cosmology) be validated by “a theory of how h ­ uman beings can know anything”? Is it indefensible “Peircean optimism” to believe that ­there are physical invariances in this sense, and that we can have fallible knowledge of them? In The Truth About Relativism, Margolis described “incongruent alternative opinions and profound historical revision” as among the “philosophical saliencies of our own age.”29 Extended to physics, this sounds to me very much like Kuhn. I do not believe that e­ ither Kuhn or anyone ­else has shown that “profound historical revision” leads to “incongruence”—­ whatever that may come to. (It sounds like Kuhn’s claim that scientists “live in dif­fer­ent worlds” before and ­a fter a scientific revolution.) I confess that in the end I am not sure what the coherent version of relativism that Margolis claims to possess ­really comes to. The arguments he uses to support it (from, for example, “profound historic revision” and (allegedly) “incongruent alternative opinions”) do sound to me like arguments for saying that the only notion of rationality we actually possess is rationality relative to a historical period, a Kuhnian “paradigm,” a Zeitgeist, or something of that sort. Was I perhaps wrong in thinking that “robust relativism” is intended to be dif­fer­ent from cultural relativism?

29. Margolis, The Truth About Relativism, 196.

PA RT I V

MORAL I T Y, P OL I TI C S , AN D   R EL I G IO N

In a fine discussion of the importance and limits of rule-­talk in philosophy, Putnam makes the impor­t ant point that “­there are dangers in becoming wedded to just one picture of our moral life” [Martha Nussbaum]—­which is a radical pluralist vision when one considers that the tripartite debate between consequentialism, Kantian deontology, and Aristotelian virtue theory is typically conducted in such a way that advocates of each of ­these pictures of the moral life see their task as defending their picture in opposition to the other two. Putnam remarks: “I suspect that both the ontological pretensions and the epistemological pretensions of philosophy have failed.” Philosophy needs renewal, as the title of one of his books implies.1 And for skeptics like Rorty who would urge putting an end to philosophy, Putnam remarks that the “­great tensions of t­ hose who would debunk the prob­lems of philosophy” have themselves collapsed. As Putnam liked to say, philosophy buries its undertakers. The conversation of philosophy is a conversation with the entire history of phi­los­o­phers living and dead. The fact that all past works of philosophy are, in an impor­t ant sense, alive depends on the view that philosophy is not 1. Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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fundamentally a catechism. And it goes with the idea that “one can learn from any of the ­great phi­los­o­phers without sharing all of their cherished beliefs.” Yet disagreements often drive a discussion even where ­there is wide agreement on many issues [Jürgen Habermas]. The agreement in this case includes a strong sympathy for the outlook of pragmatism and the way to extend it. Like Habermas, Putnam admits to not finding it useful (contra Dewey) to “widen the term ‘scientific method’ so that it applies to each and e­ very use of intelligence.” Putnam’s main criticism of Habermas is that the notion of an “ideal speech situation” is empty in the absence of a description of that situation using thick ethical concepts. This essay is a wonderful example of the way a philosophical conversation can stumble and require careful and detailed elucidations to move forward. A case in point is moral pluralism. It is distinguished from moral realism—­which is a commitment to a realm of distinctively moral “objects” or “properties.” Furthermore, in Putnam’s hands pluralism does not apply to every­thing. For instance, the wrongness of instrumentalizing ­people, of treating ­people as mere means, is non-­negotiable. The conversation is understood by both parties to be unending; if it “ends,” it is only in a practical sense. Putnam concludes the essay musing on “further discussion in the ­f uture” and posing questions to initiate that further discussion, such as w ­ hether Habermas is committed to a God’s Eye View of value judgments. A distinctive feature of philosophical conversation with ­others who engage in dif­fer­ent ethical, religious, and sexual practices is a commitment to the idea that t­ hese alternative practices may contain insights that we have missed or left undeveloped simply b ­ ecause we do not share that outlook. Putnam gives the example of the Buddhist tradition’s deep appreciation of what compassion means, and of how to live compassionately. In the reply to Copp, Putnam (2006) adopts a contrary position to Putnam (1984) by remarking, “I am a naturalist in Dewey’s sense”; that is, in the sense of non-­supernaturalism. This goes with a change in his religious outlook. Now he denies what he formerly accepted—­namely, that God has an ontological real­ity outside ­human experience. It also goes with anti-­Platonism: ­whether we say numbers exist is a conventional m ­ atter that concerns which optional language we adopt. ­There is no metaphysical fact of the m ­ atter ­whether numbers exist. So Putnam is a quietist at least about this metaphysical debate—­ arguably another feature of his liberal naturalism.2 2. ­Here I am referring to an understanding of liberal naturalism according to which it is committed to metaphysical quietism; see David Macarthur, “Pragmatism, Metaphysical Quietism and the Prob­lem of Normativity,” Philosophical Topics 36, no. 1 (2008): 193–207.

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In response to Copp’s summary of his position, Putnam notes that when another phi­los­o­pher spells out one’s position, one w ­ ill have “inevitable reservations”—­tensions that are part of what keeps the conversation ­going. ­There is also an in­ter­est­ing clarification of Platonism: it is not simply a ­matter of quantifying over abstract entities, as many have supposed. Instead, it involves something more contentious, such as a quasi-­causal story about how we interact with such entities. For instance, Moore’s “intuitionism” offers a quasi-­perceptual account of how we know “non-­natural” moral properties. Putnam is happy to call this a “pseudo-­explanation,” which reveals an alliance with the logical positivist view that metaphysical explanations often are pseudo-­explanations. In another paper it is suggested that conversation can be an exploration of mutual misunderstandings [Mark Timmons]. About realism we read that “in any sense of ‘in­de­pen­dent’ that I can understand [i.e., causally, or logically], ­whether the sky is blue is in­de­pen­dent of the way we talk”—­which corrects a widespread misreading of Putnam (but one he is partly responsible for) as committed to the view that the existence of every­thing depends on a choice of conceptual scheme. In this reply he also notes, against ­those who prefer to think of philosophy in formal quasi-­logical or quasi-­mathematical terms, that ­there is an indispensable role for “­mother wit”—­a reference to Kant on Mutterwirz3—­when applying rules in logic, science, and ethics. Putnam explic­itly uses the phrase “the conversation of philosophy” when discussing Rorty, who himself champions “conversational philosophy,” although in his case (but not in Putnam’s) this contrasts with analytic philosophy.4 Putnam describes Rorty as a lifelong friend with whom he continuously “chats,” though always with a mix of admiration and reservation. This text also resonates with Putnam’s response to West, when he writes, “The politics of the Left is a politics of hope.” But he joins forces with Rorty in regarding the revolutionary left (as opposed to the reformist left) as “a collection of dangerous and outdated illusions.” When Putnam argues that Rorty “reject[s] the notions of truth, objectivity, ­etc.,” he is at his most strident and It is impor­tant to note that Putnam is not a consistent metaphysical quietist, however, as shown by his late endorsement of a reformed “metaphysical realism” consistent with conceptual relativity. See Hilary Putnam, “From Quantum Mechanics to Ethics and Back Again,” in Philosophy in an Age of Science: Physics, Mathe­matics, and Skepticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 51–71. 3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A133, B172. 4. Richard Rorty, “Analytic and Conversational Philosophy,” in The Rorty Reader, ed. C. J. Voparil and R. J. Bern­stein (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2010), 195–203.

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questionable (especially given his concession to Margolis on the topic of Rorty interpretation). On the m ­ atter of religion we read the marvelous line: “nor . . . ​should one hope that philosophy of language, or analytic philosophy, ­w ill be able to tell one ­whether religious language makes sense and, if so, what sort of sense it makes” [Elizabeth Anscombe and Cora Diamond]. As Putnam sees ­things, the meaning of religious language—­such as the meanings of “atheism,” “religion,” and “spirituality”—­falls outside of traditional approaches in semantics. The latter are too coarse-­grained, too unsubtle, to do justice to the depths and elusiveness of the religious life. ­There is also a sympathetic but nonetheless critical discussion of Rosenzweig’s metaphysical theology which is compared to Putnam’s own naturalistic theology, according to which God is a “­human construct” [Franz Rosenzweig].

CHAPTER 25

Martha Nussbaum: On Moral Rules and The Golden Bowl (1983)

Part 1

Martha Nussbaum is surely right in stressing that values can conflict (and rules can also conflict, and ­there can be conflicts between values and rules). I know that Martha Nussbaum admires Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good, and so do I; and the emphasis on seeing as meta­phor of choice for moral cognition in that book is one that would have been congenial to Henry James. (We should learn to see moral situations as a “sensitive novelist” would see them, according to Murdoch.) What trou­bles me is the derogatory attitude ­toward rules and t­ oward the “Kantian account.” What is wrong with a derogatory attitude t­ oward rules was well expressed by my colleague Arthur Dyck (in a recent conversation). “The prob­lem is not to let the exceptions become the rule,” as Dyck put it. If one is sensitive to the ever-­present danger that “all rules have exceptions” ­w ill Putnam’s reply to Martha Nussbaum, “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Lit­er­a­t ure as Moral Philosophy,” New Literary History 15, no. 1, Lit­er­a­t ure and / as Moral Philosophy (Autumn 1983): 25–50.

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become a license for an absolutely empty “situation ethics” (itself a ratification of the idea that anything goes as long as one is “sensitive”), then one should be able to see that the very notion of an exception to a moral rule is meaningless ­unless the exception is carefully “hedged.” Someone who thinks that torture is morally impermissible, and who is serious about this view, w ­ ill not suggest torture (or go along when someone e­ lse makes the suggestion) even if it is a case of finding where a bomb is g­ oing to go off before innocent lives are lost (imagine nuclear terrorists), Dyck pointed out. If the idea of tricking the terrorist rather than torturing does not occur to one; if, at worst, one does not consider sodium pentathol rather than torture; if one is not too scrupulous about w ­ hether one is sure one has caught a terrorist and that the explosion is imminent—­then one’s “princi­ple” of non-­torture is just talk. Even if one regards the case I have just evoked as a hopeless moral dilemma rather than as an exception, the same point applies. Since “hopeless dilemmas” often turn into “exceptions,” the decision that a situation is a dilemma for a rule had better be made only in situations that are strongly hedged. But to think in terms of hedging exceptions is thinking in terms of rules. One reason that Kant comes in for a lot of abuse is that Kant took such an extreme position on certain ethical issues. In par­tic­u­lar, Kant’s refusal to allow one ever to tell a lie (even, so to speak, to the Gestapo) is always cited. But it is just wrong to conclude that Kant did not realize that moral rules can be complex, or that he thought that such rules can decide all one’s life choices for one, or that he thought that phi­los­o­phers can simply write down a final set of moral rules from an armchair. (Yirmiahu Yovel’s fine book Kant and the Philosophy of History is an excellent corrective to such ideas about Kant.)1 Even the reason why Kant took an extreme—­and, I agree, mistaken—­view on the Princi­ple of Truth-­Telling is instructive. Kant believed that in a just society (and Yovel’s book stresses the extent to which Kant anticipates Hegel and Marx by thinking in social rather than individual terms), the fundamental princi­ple is that the maxim of one’s action should be one to which o ­ thers can be i­ magined as consenting. (John Rawls’s recent Dewey lectures bring out the connection between 1. Yirmiahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1980).

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this and Rawls’s own “Kantian conception of Justice,” as well as the connection between such a conception of justice and the demo­cratic ideals of the French Revolution.) What is bad about lying is that it violates the fundamental premise of a society based on mutual consent; it treats ­others in a way in which they would not conceivably consent to be treated. Kant was wrong in thinking that the ethical rules of an ideal society can simply be transferred to a society in which some ­people violate the very fundamentals of such a society, and do so intentionally; but certainly the reasoning is morally serious, and the light it throws on our practice of telling “white lies,” “harmless lies,” “lies of con­ve­nience,” “lies for security reasons,” and so forth is intense. If stopping to think: “Is this lie ­really justified? How is the exception hedged? Is ­there ­really no alternative?” is “moralistic” thinking, then we would seem to need more and not fewer moralistic ­people around us. The prob­lem with thinking in terms of “values” and “conflicts” rather than in terms of “rules” and “exceptions” (and rules to prevent the exceptions from becoming rules) is that the meta­phor of balancing quickly gets the upper hand. To think of all moral prob­lems in terms of “trade-­offs” is precisely not to think morally at all. Aristotle was right in thinking that it is difficult to discern where courage ends and where recklessness begins; in this kind of case it is true to say, as Aristotle did, that “the judgment lies with perception.” But Aristotle did not question the need for certain moral rules; for example, he did not think that it is sometimes right to disobey one’s officers in b ­ attle and simply run away to save one’s life. Not every­ thing is a m ­ atter of trade-­offs. And if not every­thing is to be thought of in terms of trade-­offs, then the insights of Aristotelian ethics and the insights of Kantian ethics need not conflict. Rules (from the Decalogue to the ERA) are impor­tant ­because they are the main mechanism we have for challenging (and, if we are successful, shaping) one another’s consciences. Martha Nussbaum is right in thinking that works of fiction can also shape our conscience but in a complementary way (much as Kantian ethics and Aristotelian ethics can be seen as complementary rather than as contradictory). The complementarity is nowhere better expressed than in a remark George Eliot makes about the miserable Bulstrode (Middlemarch, chap. 61): “­There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-­ seated habit of direct feeling with individual fellow-­men.” The implication

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is that we need “general doctrine” checked by “direct fellow-­feeling with fellow-­men,” not that “general doctrine” is unnecessary or dumb. It may be, however, that I have radically misunderstood Nussbaum’s references to the “Kantian account.” It may be that her target is not Kant himself but a certain con­temporary phenomenon, namely, the rash of moral phi­los­o­phers who are ready to solve con­temporary prob­lems for us—­ ready to resolve issues concerning vegetarianism, animal rights, nuclear deterrence, and our obligations to ­f uture generations, among ­others—by means of arguments that, so to speak, prove too much. T ­ hese arguments are typically aprioristic in style, and yield conclusions far stronger than any consensus reasonable men and ­women are able to arrive at ­today. I share a deep distrust of this style of moral philosophy, with its philosophical extremism and its remoteness from the kinds of individual and collective experiences that do shape and produce a consensus. As Durkheim told us a hundred years ago, a new consensus cannot be arrived at “in the quiet of the study”; moral phi­los­o­phers would do better to reflect on the conditions that make it increasingly difficult for many ­people to feel any sense of social solidarity at all than to issue overly elaborate arguments from unconvincing premises. Framing rules to cover issues that we cannot see to the bottom of can be premature. What is wrong is to think that the sort of unrealistic thinking and aprioristic thinking just described is typical of Kantian procedure (which is not to say that Kant never fell into such thinking). When Kant writes about a World State in Perpetual Peace, for example, he does not simply reason a priori. He describes con­temporary conditions with genuine moral outrage: If we compare the barbarian instances of inhospitality referred to with the inhuman be­hav­ior of the civilized, and especially the commercial, States of our continent, the injustice practiced by them even in their first contact with foreign lands and p ­ eoples fills us with horror, the mere visiting of such ­peoples being regarded by them as equivalent to a conquest. Amer­i­ca, Negro lands, the Spice Islands, the Cape of Good Hope, e­ tc., on being discovered, ­were treated as countries that belonged to nobody; for inhabitants ­were reckoned as nothing. In the East Indies, ­under the pretext of intending merely to plant commercial settlements, the Eu­ro­ pe­ans introduced foreign troops, and with them oppression of the

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natives, instigation of the dif­fer­ent States to widespread wars, famine, sedition, perfidy, and all the litany of evils that can oppress the h ­ uman race. . . . ​A nd all this has been done by nations who make a ­great ado about their piety, and who, while drinking up iniquity like ­water, would have themselves regarded as the very elect of the orthodox faith. The central purpose of Kant’s ethical writing, in fact, is not to issue detailed rules at all, but to give us a normative picture of the activity of arriving at such rules. In Kant’s picture t­ here are two princi­ples which guide us in arriving at moral rules: the formal (categorical) imperative, which directs us to act so that the maxim of our action might be one to which ­others could be ­imagined as consenting, and the princi­ple of the highest good, identified first with my own private virtue and happiness and eventually with the happiness of all mankind in a world governed by just institutions. What is all-­important, for Kant, is that pursuit of the summum bonum not be allowed to degenerate into a consequentialist ethics: “So much depends, when we wish to unite two good ­things, on the order in which they are united!” The formal imperative always takes pre­ce­dence, for Kant, over the material imperative (to seek the highest good). Our duty is not to pursue a utopian vision by manipulative, dishonest, or cruel means, but to pursue an idealistic vision by moral means. While the Idea for a Universal History conceives irrational forces as the driving force of history (much like con­temporary French structuralism!), Yovel calls our attention to the manner in which such ­later discussions as Theory and Practice, What Is Enlightenment?, and Religion come to conceive the moral ­w ill as a force in history. And what is the point of acting in history at all if one does not think t­ here is this idea? To be sure, Kant was a man of his time, and also a depressed and neurotic man. When he came to spell out details he could be magnificently prescient or intolerably quirky. But let me say at once that I see nothing essentially “sick,” repressive, or reactionary in Kant’s normative picture. Quite the contrary. Kant’s picture sheds a rich light on how morality works at its best and on the ways in which a fine morality can interconnect with both personal choice and social destiny. Where Kant’s picture is defective, the prob­lem lies with Kant’s dualistic conception of happiness. Morality is governed by two princi­ples, and

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corresponding to t­ hese two princi­ples ­there are two sorts of gratification: the gratification of the “moral ego” and the gratification of the “sensuous ego.” The goals of the latter are a part of the total personality and cannot be ignored (contrary to some readings of Kant’s ethics); but the dualism of a transcendental and an empirical self results in a portmanteau conception of happiness, happiness as moral “gratification” plus satisfaction of the “inclinations.” This obviously ­w ill not do. In contrast, Aristotle’s picture is strong precisely where Kant’s picture is weak. For Aristotle an adequate conception of happiness (eudaimonia) involves an adequate conception of our biological and social nature, an adequate conception of reason (nous), and an adequate conception of virtue; and ­these are interdependent. Aristotle is centrally concerned with the connection between happiness and character and with the vicissitudes that can shape character. For this reason it is natu­ral that his position would be congenial to a phi­los­o­pher who is also a talented student of lit­ er­a­ture. But ­there are dangers in becoming wedded to just one picture of our moral life—­and not least in the reading of literary works. Part 2

Martha Nussbaum is right in stressing the extent to which The Golden Bowl describes the replacement of an infantile morality by a morality which requires “improvisation,” a morality in which t­ here is, as she writes, “no safety at all.” Just as The Ambassadors shows a strug­gle between a repressive conception of morality (personified by Mrs.  Newsome, whose presence is almost overpowering even though she never “appears” in the novel) and a conception which leaves one f­ ree to “see” how ­things actually are and ­free to accept actions which breach Mrs. Newsome’s (and Lambert Strether’s own) “rules,” so The Golden Bowl shows the limits of being “right.” But I would not go so far (and I am not sure Nussbaum wants to go so far) as to identify improvisation with balancing, or to conclude that for Maggie at the end of The Golden Bowl (or for Lambert Strether—­the protagonist who is so similar in age to Henry James at the time he was writing this novel—at the end of The Ambassadors) morality has simply become a ­matter of “conflicts between values” and “trade-­offs.” Let me suggest a way of reading The Golden Bowl which incorporates much of what Nussbaum

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(as well and Patrick Gardiner) say about this novel, but which moves away from the conception of morality as a balancing act. In the first half (“The Prince”), the two “­couples” that are not married—­ that is, the Ververs, considered as one ­couple, and Charlotte Stant and the Prince considered as the other—­are alike in impor­tant re­spects . . . ​Both ­couples are manipulative, and both ­couples believe they are behaving “beautifully.” As critics have always noted, the “good” characters are far from perfect and the “bad” characters are not r­ eally evil (although their actions are described as “evil” by Fanny Assingham, who is considered James’s spokeswoman). If we stop with ­these observations, however, we are in danger of missing every­thing. What the Ververs do is open and aboveboard: they make clear what their motives and intentions are, they broadcast them to all and sundry (including the parties involved), and they secure the consent of Charlotte and the Prince to what they do at each stage. In contrast, what Charlotte and the Prince do is done in secret, and it depends on a fundamental violation of a community in which one does not treat ­people in ways to which they would not consent. The be­hav­ior of the Ververs is in many ways wrong, as well as immature, and the magnitude of the temptation to which the Prince and Charlotte are subjected is g­ reat (although stressing this too much can lead one to miss the “tigerish” aspect of Charlotte, the sense that she is the sort of character James calls a “headlong fool,” or better, a power­f ul animal—­the meta­phor in connection with the crystal cage). But t­ here remains, on my reading, a fundamental asymmetry between the two ­couples. The same asymmetry continues into the second half of the novel (“The Princess”). Maggie does lie to Charlotte by denying that she suspects Charlotte of anything. She insists to Charlotte’s face that she thinks Charlotte is “splendid.” But consider the situation: Charlotte’s love affair has been broken off by the Prince (who has learned from Maggie that she “knows”). Charlotte is miserable, and wishes to be accused by Maggie so that she, Charlotte, can create an accusatory scene—­a scene which can only rupture all of the relationships (if Maggie is right; and Maggie’s almost telepathic perception of what is ­going on inside Charlotte and the Prince is the central force in this novel). Maggie’s lie is in no way a violation of the idea of community; it is a lie which saves what can be saved of a community, told to a person who, at that point, is out to rupture the community (like an

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animal that has broken out of a crystal cage). I have to agree with Patrick Gardiner that the reasons Maggie has to lie “are clear and compelling,” and I share his doubt that it is appropriate to think of Maggie as “taking on conscious guilt” for the “badness” of her actions. That moral rules can guide us but not decide exactly how we are to act is certainly something that James saw as impor­tant to many of his artistic concerns; but I think it is just wrong to see Maggie as balancing two standards, loyalty to a friend and telling the truth, and regretfully having to violate one in the situation just described. Part 3

Are works of fiction also works of moral philosophy? Both Wollheim and Raphael give carefully guarded responses to this question.2 (Kuhns’s fine reading of Michael Kohlhaas is also relevant in reminding us that fiction can wear its moral significance very far from its sleeve.)3 The disagreement between Martha Nussbaum and myself, if it is a disagreement, suggests that Wollheim is prob­ably right: the work of fiction must not be confused with the “commentary,” and it is the commentary that is (or can be) a work of moral philosophy. I can think of an answer that Nussbaum could give to this, but it would require her to be more tolerant of moral philosophies other than the Aristotelian. As long as moral philosophies are thought of as theories which tell us what the “foundation” of morality is, or ­else as “methodologies”—­methods for deciding what to do in concrete cases—it seems quite clear that a work of moral philosophy is one ­thing and a work of fiction is quite a dif­fer­ent ­thing, no m ­ atter how much moral insight went into the creation of the 2. I am referring ­here to Richard Wollheim’s response to Nussbaum’s article: “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and the Plausibility of Lit­er­a­t ure as Moral Philosophy,” New Literary History 15 (1983): 185–192; as well as to D. D. Raphael’s contribution, “Can Lit­er­a­t ure Be Moral Philosophy?” (ibid., 1–12). It is perhaps worth remarking that Cora Diamond offers some extremely penetrating observations on this general topic of the relation between lit­er­a­t ure and moral philosophy in her remarks on D. D. Raphael’s piece, in Diamond, “Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is,” New Literary History 15 (1983): 155–170; also reprinted in her volume of collected papers entitled The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 3. Richard Kuhns, “The Strangeness of Justice: Reading Michael Kohlhaas,” New Literary History 15 (1983): 73–91.

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latter. I suspect that both the ontological pretensions and the epistemological pretensions of philosophy have failed, however—­a nd not only in moral philosophy. I ­don’t mean that it has become clear that it’s all Marx-­ cum-­Lacan, or all physicalism-­cum-­cultural-­relativism ( pace Richard Rorty). If the ­great pretensions of philosophy have collapsed, so have the equally g­ reat tensions of t­ hose who would debunk the prob­lems of philosophy. A ­great philosophical picture, one might argue, should be viewed as we view ­great artistic creations: as something which does not simply copy a ready-­made world, but rather as something which creates a world—or even, as Nelson Goodman has put it, a “world of worlds” If such a view of philosophy can be elaborated and defended, then it may be that we have to view all philosophy as having an expressive component: as being concerned to reveal (or conceal) an author as much as to “solve prob­lems.” The gap between works of fiction and works of philosophy might then appear considerably narrower. (The commentary on a work of fiction can require a commentary, too.) Martha Nussbaum may be right: but it would take an enormous amount of further work to show that she is right.

CHAPTER 26

David Wiggins: On Semantic Externalism (1994)

On the History of Hydrosemantics

Recently Dan Warren has pointed out to me a striking anticipation of my doctrines in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I cannot resist quoting the passage (from A 728) in full: To define, as the word itself indicates, ­really only means to pre­sent the complete, original conception of a ­thing within the limits of its concept. If this be our standard, an empirical concept cannot be defined at all but only made explicit. For since we find in it only a few characteristics of a certain species of sensible object, it is never certain that we are not using the word, in denoting one and the same object, sometimes so as to stand for more, and sometimes for fewer characteristics. Thus in the concept of gold one man may think, in addition to its weight, colour, malleability, also

This is a response to David Wiggins, “Putnam’s Doctrine of Natu­ral Kind Words and Frege’s Doctrines of Sense, Reference, and Extension: Can They Cohere?,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Bob Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 201–215.

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of its property of resisting rust, while another ­will perhaps know nothing of this quality. We make use of certain characteristics only so long as they are adequate for the purpose of making distinctions; new observations remove some properties and add o ­ thers; and thus the limits of the concept are never assured. And indeed what useful purpose would be served by defining an empirical concept, such as, for instance, that of ­water? When we speak of ­water and its properties, we do not stop short at what is thought in the word, ­water, but proceed to experiments. The word, with the few characteristics which we attach to it [the ste­reo­type?] is more properly to be regarded as a designation than as a concept of the t­ hing. Ah well . . . ​Kant keeps stealing my ideas! Frege and Semantic Externalism

The view I defended in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” has come to be known as semantic externalism, ­because it holds that the “external world” contributes to the fixing of reference. (The term is unfortunate, ­because it contrasts what is “inside the mind” with the “external” world; I would prefer to think of the mind as itself a system of object-­and-­quality-­involving abilities. On this conception it is not only true that meanings are not in our heads, as I put it in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” but—as John McDowell has long put it—it is also true that our minds are not in our heads.) Most of Wiggins’s paper is devoted to showing how a broadly Fregean scheme should be modified to accommodate semantic externalism, and I find his discussion extremely valuable in this regard. ­W hether Frege would have accepted Wiggins’s suggestions is a difficult textual question. Two reasons for pos­si­ble doubt occur to me: 1. Concepts which are partly fixed by t­ hings and qualities of t­ hings in the way in which acid, uranium, ­water, and horse are may (and usually do) have vague bound­aries. (Is U235 uranium? Are hydrogen ions an acid? Is heavy w ­ ater w ­ ater? Was t­ here a “first h ­ orse”?) Given Frege’s well known hatred of fuzz, could he have accepted such a way of fixing concepts? 2. Are such concepts “transparent” to reason, as Frege insisted concepts by nature are? I ­w ill not attempt to decide this historical issue. In

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any case, even if Frege would not have accepted Wiggins’s amendments and adjustments, he should have. Note, by the way, that Wiggins’s in­ter­est­ing distinction between a concept and a conception of that concept seems also to be anticipated by Kant’s talk of concepts and characteristics we attach to them. The Possibility of Experts

Wiggins does make two small criticisms, to both of which I can reply very quickly. 1. He holds that, since I notoriously cannot tell elms from beeches, ­there is something I d ­ on’t know about the meaning of “elm” and “beech.” I still resist this way of speaking; but I agree that to possess the concept of gold I have to have the beginnings of an identificatory ability. And I do; I have an identificatory ability b ­ ecause I know to defer to experts (and I can find an expert if I need one). 2. The criticism in the last line of Wiggins’s paper (“the necessity of experts”) baffles me. Not only did I never say that experts are “necessary” in connection with words like “horse” and “­water,” but I explic­itly said “ ‘ ­Water’ did not exhibit it [the division of linguistic ­labor] at all prior to the rise of chemistry.”1 This does not mean that “­Water” changed its extension when experts (physicists and chemists) appeared on the scene: the contrary is the ­whole point of semantic externalism. Again, I wish to repeat that, like all of Wiggins’s work, this is a profound discussion, and w ­ ill repay repeated reading.

1. “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” reprinted in my Mind, Language and Real­ity, vol. 2 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 228.

CHAPTER 27

Jürgen Habermas: On Moral Philosophy (2002)

J

ürgen Habermas is always a brilliant reader of the work of o ­ thers, even if his readings—­like ­those of ­every ­great philosopher—­frequently have a polemical “bite,” and his reading of my own work displays both the brilliance and the bite. I am delighted that he has read so much of my work, and that he has thought about it so carefully. Nevertheless, I need to contest his “Putnam-­interpretation” at a number of points, for to concede his interpretation would be to concede his criticisms. My Main Criticism of Habermas’s Position

Before I try to specify the points at which I have difficulty recognizing myself in the picture that Habermas paints of me, I want to make one general remark about his “Kommentar.” The remark is that Habermas nowhere replies to my main criticism of his position! That criticism is summarized in my final assertion in the lecture on which he is commenting: “[O]ur

Putnam’s reply to Jürgen Habermas, “Werte und Normen: Ein Kommentar zu Hilary Putnams Kantischem Pragmatismus,” in Hilary Putnam und die Tradition des Pragmatismus, ed. M. L. Raters and M. Willaschek (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 280–305.

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imperfect but in­def­initely perfectible ability to recognize the demands made upon us by vari­ous values is precisely what provides ‘Kantian’ (or ‘discourse’) ethics with content.” It was spelled out in the body of the lecture in the following way: I argued that ­there is no reason to believe that the outcome of an ideal and sufficiently prolonged discussion of ethical questions would inevitably be correct. In explaining the reason for my skepticism, I used the following example: A ­father engages in psychological cruelty by teasing his child, while denying (­either b ­ ecause he is obtuse or b ­ ecause of a streak of sadism) that the child’s tears, e­ tc., are ­really “serious.” “He has to learn to take it,” the f­ ather says. I then asked, ­ ill the w W ­ hole community come into agreement that this constitutes cruelty? Must they come into agreement, even if the speech situation is “ideal”? . . . ​Suppose most of the members of the community, or even a significant minority, share the f­ ather’s obtuseness in the case described. They are not, we suppose, bad ­people, in most other re­spects. They genuinely want to do what is right, and they love rational argument. Indeed, they regard the question as to w ­ hether the case is a case of “cruelty” as a fascinating one, and they discuss it endlessly. No one tries to manipulate anyone ­else, and every­one listens patiently to every­one ­else’s arguments. But we can perfectly well imagine that the ­father and ­others like him never “get it.” T ­ here is no consensus, although on a straightforward construal of the requirements of an ideal speech situation (speaking honestly, trying one’s best to say what is true, trying one’s best to say what is justified, trying to win one another over by the force of argument and not by manipulation of any kind, e­ tc.), the speech situation may well be “ideal.” I then stated the point I wanted to make with this example: What is wrong with the discussants in the above situation i­ sn’t that they a­ ren’t obeying the norms of discourse ethics. What is wrong is stateable using the thick ethical vocabulary appropriate to the par­tic­ul­ ar ethical prob­lem. They are “obtuse” (the opposite of having “Menschenkenntnis”), they have a “trace of sadism,” ­etc.



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To describe what an “ideal discussion situation” would be in this case, one would have to use (and presuppose one’s audience had mastered) thick ethical concepts. In brief, my main claim was that the notion of an “ideal speech situation” is empty in the absence of thick ethical concepts. U ­ nless statements containing thick ethical concepts are admitted to be capable of “validity” tout court, of being right, and not merely “vernünftig” given the “conception of the good” shared by a par­tic­u ­lar community, then discourse ethics, like Kantianism überhaupt, ­w ill be an empty formalism. (As Hegel might have put it, the Categorical Imperative has content only against the background of Sittlichkeit.) I hope that on some f­ uture occasion Habermas w ­ ill address the challenge I have put to him head on. Is Habermas a “Minimalist Moral Phi­los­o­pher”?

Very early in my lecture I discussed a pos­si­ble response to the criticism just explained which I called the “minimalist” response. At that point I was discussing Kantians like Christine Korsgaard, and I pointed out the if the Categorical Imperative is a directive to choose maxims that we can make into universal laws, then we have to face the prob­lem that our “maxims,” and the “laws” that we impose upon ourselves by universalizing them, themselves contain value terms, in par­tic­u­lar the so called “thick ethical words,” such as “kind,” “cruel,” “impertinent,” “sensitive,” “insensitive,” ­etc. For instance, it is a rule of conduct (implicitly if not explic­itly) for e­ very decent ­human being (one that none of us succeeds in always obeying, perhaps, but nonetheless a rule of conduct that we aspire to living up to) that one should treat ­those one deals with, and especially ­those in distress or trou­ble, with “kindness,” u ­ nless t­ here is an overriding moral reason why one should not. Similar rules of conduct direct one to avoid “cruelty,” to avoid “impertinence,” to avoid “humiliating” ­others, to be “sensitive” to the thoughts and feelings of o ­ thers, ­etc. If the laws that “reason” legislates are allowed to contain ­these words, while at the same time ­these words are regarded as possessing denotation only relative to par­tic­u­lar communities, ­those laws could still possess formal universality, but their content would be anything but universal. Relativism of any kind with re­spect to value terms cannot leave the objectivity of “norms” unaffected.

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The response I suggested Habermas might make to this criticism (which is just another version of my main criticism) was to limit the deontological validity that he is so anxious to defend strictly to “discourse” ethics. Even “Do not be cruel” w ­ ouldn’t be universally valid, on such an interpretation: only “Discuss the question w ­ hether or not you should be cruel, and the further question as to what counts as cruelty, in the way that discourse ethics prescribes” would be universally valid. (­Because “Discuss ­every question in the way discourse ethics prescribes” is supposed to be universally valid.) And I expressed my rejection of so extreme a minimalism when I said, “Can it be the case that the only universally valid ethical rule is Keep talking? Answer “yes” . . . ​a nd you have “minimalist ethics” with a vengeance!” Since Habermas did not discuss this part of my lecture, I repeat this challenge as well: Jürgen, are you ­really a minimalist? The Position Habermas Ascribes to Me

Habermas has certainly read my work with care, and he discusses it sympathetically, for which I am indeed grateful. Moreover, he writes with his usual exemplary clarity. Precisely b ­ ecause he is so clear, however, one can see that he is taking certain notions for granted throughout his discussion—­ notions which I do not accept—­and see, moreover, that he is restating my position in terms of t­ hose very notions. For example, he assumes (1) that all correct empirical statements have one and the same kind of “validity,” and (2) that the word “true” is a name for that kind of validity. Moreover, he accuses me of thinking (3) that all ethical statements (i.e., both norms and judgements of value which do not have the form of universal “­oughts”) have that sort of validity. [“Putnam behauptet natürlich nicht, dass Werturteile denselben deskriptiven Sinn haben wie empirische Urteile. Gleichwohl, möchte er evaluativen Aussagen den realistichen Geltungsinn von wahren empirischen Aussagen sichern.”] In this connection, I am described as a moral realist “auf ganzer Linie” (does this mean that I am supposed to think that truth can be recognition-­transcendent in ethics as well as in empirical science?!).1 But (1), (2) and (3) are misinterpretations. 1. In fact, I d ­ on’t think all statements in “empirical science” possess recognition-­ transcendent truth. The truth of the statement that ­there are mountains in Australia, for example, is not recognition-­transcendent. (Cf. my “Pragmatism,” Proceedings of the Aris-



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The Position I Defend

In order to explain the position I defend, I begin by listing again the positions that Habermas e­ ither ascribes to me directly or assumes that I agree with, but that I do not in fact agree with: (1) A ll correct empirical statements have one and the same kind of validity. (2) The word “true” is a name for that kind of validity. (3) A ll correct ethical statements (i.e., both norms and judgements of value, which do not have the form of universal “­oughts”) have that same sort of validity. I ­shall discuss ­these one at a time. Re (1): Correct “empirical statements” are not a homogenous class. They do not “correspond to real­ity” in one and the same sense. They figure in a host of dif­fer­ent language games.2 Thus, I reject the idea that all genuinely true statements work in one and the same way. I am h ­ ere using the term “empirical” statement as a more or less ordinary term (“ordinary”—at least in some contexts—­notwithstanding its philosophical origins!) for such statements as “cats catch mice,” “­Water is H2O),” “Mary is in love with John,” ­etc. . . . (where what the “­etc. . . .” stands for is somewhat vague). I assume that an “empirical statement,” in this loose sense, contains terms which refer to ­things, events, ­etc. (where the “­etc.” is, again, vague). But, like Wittgenstein and James, I do not believe that “refer,” “denote,” “extension,” and such terms stand for one and the same relation between a term and the t­ hings that “correspond” to it in each case. ­There are many kinds of “agreement” (as James pointed out); ­there are many dif­f er­ent “methods of projection” (as Wittgenstein pointed out). “Referring” to someone’s passion for m ­ usic is very dif­fer­ent from “referring” to ­tables and chairs, and both are very dif­fer­ent from “referring” to someone’s cruelty, or to the manipulation of public opinion. (Even referring to “the blue of the sky” may be a dif­fer­ent ­thing depending on ­whether I totelian Society 95 [1994–1995]: 291–306, for a discussion of which sorts of empirical statements are and are not susceptible of recognition-­transcendent truth.) 2. This does not mean that some of them are only quasi-­statements, as Simon Blackburn has suggested. This quasi-­realist stance shares with Habermas’s the assumption that I reject, that all genuinely true statements have the same kind of “validity.”

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am a painter or I am simply worried about ­whether it ­w ill rain.) I further assume that an “empirical” statement, in this loose sense, is corrigible. But ­these criteria may be difficult to apply: for example, is “­Water has boiled at least once in the history of the world” ­really corrigible? (In On Certainty, §555, Wittgenstein uses a similar example.) Is this an “empirical statement” or a “framework princi­ple” or neither? This looks like an “empirical statement,” but epistemologically it is very dif­fer­ent from “­Water has been boiled at least once in this kitchen,” which it superficially resembles. But space does not permit me to elaborate on ­these differences ­here. In any case, I do not believe that all empirical statements in this loose sense are scientific statements or can be checked by some one method. (Moreover, I d ­ on’t think all statements in science can be checked by any one method!)3 Wittgenstein’s examples (Philosophical Investigations, Part II, p. 228), of such assertions as the assertion that someone’s expression of emotion is genuine, or the assertion that someone is ­really “smitten” with love (voila ce que peut dire un coeur vraiment épris) are not checkable by gathering statistics or performing experiments or by applying scientific formulas (Wittgenstein says that they can be verified by “imponderable evidence” and that not every­one has the Menschenkenntnis required for this).4 H ­ ere I believe that Habermas assimilates my position to what he takes to be John Dewey’s, and I also believe that he misinterprets Dewey’s use of the term “scientific method.”5 But however that may be, I have never found it useful to go along with Dewey’s suggestion that we widen the term “scientific method” so that it applies to each and ­every use of intelligence. A particularly impor­tant case is that of such statements as “The treatment of native populations by Eu­ro­pean colonizers was frequently cruel.” Such statements are, in my view, si­mul­ta­neously empirical statements (in the wide sense in which “John is smitten with love for Mary” and “Henri3. For my skepticism with re­spect to talk of the “scientific method” see “The Diversity of the Sciences,” in my Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 463–480, and “Strawson and Skepticism,” in The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson, ed. Lewis Hahn (Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1988), 273–287. 4. And this itself breaks into a number of pos­si­ble cases: genuine as opposed to being feigned; or genuine as opposed to being “merely conventional,” for example. 5. For a very dif­fer­ent interpretation of Dewey than Habermas’s, see Marie-­Luise Raters-­Mohr, Intensität und Widerstand: Metaphysik, Gesellschaftstheorie, und Asthetik in John Dewey’s Art as Experience (Bonn: Bourier, 1994).



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etta’s emotion is genuine” are included in the class of “empirical statements” without being “scientific”) and value judgements. But that does not mean that I think “One should never engage in deliberate acts of cruelty ­towards innocent persons just for the plea­sure of it”—­a universal deontological statement if ­there ever was one!—is “empirical.” As far as I can see, the only reason Habermas has for thinking I lump all value judgements ­ hole class together with scieninto one single class (and that I lump that w tific statements) is that I am willing to use the word true for correct judgments of all ­these dif­fer­ent kinds. But what that shows is not that I think norms are judgements of (non-­deontological) value or that judgements of value (deontological or not) are all “empirical statements” or that all empirical statements are scientific statements, but simply that I do not agree with Habermas that “true” is a validity notion in his sense, a term for the type of validity peculiar to “empirical statements” (conceived, as Habermas seems to, as a metaphysically distinguished natu­ral kind). Habermas keeps saying that I am an extreme (metaphysical) “moral realist.” I prefer to say that I am a thoroughgoing pluralist. But I am the kind of pluralist who recognizes that t­ here are correct statements in many dif­fer­ent sorts of language games. And by “correct” I d ­ on’t just mean “correct if you share the proj­ect of such and such a community.” Re (2): ­Here I have to describe briefly a f­ amily of positions in analytic philosophy of language with re­spect to the grammatical predicate “true” that Habermas simply does not take account of. This ­family is generally referred to by the term “disquotational” accounts of truth, but, as I argued in my Dewey Lectures, t­ here are at least three very dif­fer­ent versions of disquotationalism: a “deflationary” version, represented by Carnap (and by such con­temporary analytic phi­los­o­phers as Paul Horwich and Hartry Field); a Fregean version; and the version I defend (and attribute to the ­later Wittgenstein).6 First, let me say what ­these accounts have in common. What they share is the stress they lay on the princi­ple that Dummett has called “The Equivalence Princi­ple” (an obvious anticipation of Tarski’s “Convention T”), namely that to state or judge that it is true that snow is white or that 6. ­These are collected as Part I of my Threefold Cord: Mind, Language and Real­ity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). The w ­ hole of the third Dewey Lecture deals with the topic of truth.

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it is true that murder is wrong or that it is true that two is the only even prime (or what­ever the example might be) is equivalent to judging, respectively, that snow is white or that murder is wrong or that two is the only even prime.7 If one assumes that judging that it is true that snow is white (­etc.), is the same as judging that the sentence (in what Tarski called the “object language”) “Snow is white” is true—­this is one of the issues that distinguished Frege from Tarski—­then one may express the Equivalence Princi­ple by writing with Tarski: (T) “Snow is white” is true if and only if Snow is white. When I say that all versions of disquotationalism “lay stress” upon some version of the Equivalence Princi­ple, what I mean is the following: (1) Disquotationalists hold that when “true” is applied to a statement S that is explic­itly given, the word is eliminable. In certain places, for example, Frege appears to hold that the metastatement “It is true that snow is white” and the object-­statement “Snow is white” express one and the same judgement. If we used “true” only in sentences of the form: “S is true,” where S is the quotation of a sentence, or in sentences of the form, “It is true that p,” where p is a sentence, then the word would be unnecessary. Of course, this means that “true” is not the name of a kind of validity peculiar to certain statements! If it w ­ ere it could hardly be unnecessary! (2) The reason we need “true” and its synonyms in our languages is that we need to be able to use “true” in sentences of the form “x is true” where “x” is a variable of quantification and not, say, a sentence in quotation marks. For example, if I say, “One of the sentences John wrote on page 12 is true” [in Predicate Calculus notation: (Ex)(x is written by John on page 12 & x is true)], then I can “eliminate” the word true if and only if I know what sentences John wrote on page 12. E.g., if I know that the only sentences John wrote on page 12 are “Snow is white,” “Murder is wrong,” and “Two is the only even prime,” then I know that this statement has the same truth-­value as: “John wrote ‘Snow is white,’ ‘Murder is wrong,’ and 7. Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, 1973), and The Interpretation of Frege’s Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Alfred Tarski, “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages,” in Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938, trans. J. H. Woodger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).



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‘Two is the only even prime’ on page 12, and ­either snow is white or murder is wrong or two is the only even prime,” and this latter sentence does not contain the word “true.” But if I do not know what sentences John wrote, then I cannot construct a materially equivalent sentence which does not contain the word “true.”8 In sum: a predicate with the logical property of true (the “disquotation property”) is necessary for logical reasons, not for descriptive reasons. The differences between the dif­fer­ent versions of disquotationalism are very roughly as follows:9 For Frege, “true” is a predicate of “Thoughts” and Thoughts do not consist of words. W ­ hether they are platonic objects or w ­ hether they defy the platonic–­non-­platonic dichotomy is a m ­ atter of controversy among Frege scholars; in any case, ­there is a metaphysics of “Thoughts” presupposed by Frege’s version. For Tarski, at the opposite extreme, “true” is a predicate of sentences, and sentences are mere sequences of marks on paper (or rather types of such sequences). For Wittgenstein (and myself) “true” is a predicate of sentences used in certain ways—­that is, of objects, which are neither merely syntactic (like Tarski’s sentences) nor totally in­de­pen­dent of the use of syntactic objects in a par­tic­u ­lar language-­community. But space does not permit me to elaborate on ­these impor­tant differences ­here.10 I need to explain one more point, however, in order to show just how and at what point Habermas actually “talks past me” when he thinks he is meeting me head on. For someone with a “logical” conception of the notion of truth (i.e., a conception which descends from Frege and Tarski, what­ ever the differences between them), the reason that we need one notion of truth, a single notion applicable to judgements of epistemologically and metaphysically dif­fer­ent sorts, and not one notion applicable to “norms,” another notion applicable to “empirical statements,” a third notion applicable to “mathematical statements,” as Habermas seems to advocate, is 8. More precisely, I cannot construct such a sentence without employing the complex set-­theoretic procedure Tarski described in “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages,” and even that w ­ ill not work if I do not know what language John wrote in. For a discussion of what Tarski’s procedure does and does not accomplish, see my “A Comparison of Something with Something Else,” New Literary History 17 (1985–1986): 61–79, collected in my Words and Life, 330–350. 9. For details, see my third Dewey Lecture, cited in note 6. 10. They are the subject of the lecture cited in the previous note.

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that logic, starting already with the Propositional Calculus, combines ­these dif­fer­ent sorts of statements into single molecular utterances, and allows inferences to be drawn from such combinations. For example, (1) If John studies more diligently, he w ­ ill play the piano better. (2) John has studied more diligently. (3) [therefore] John now plays the piano better is a valid inference, notwithstanding the fact that the antecedent of (1) is a descriptive sentence and the consequent is a value judgement (of the “mixed” empirical-­evaluative kind). ­Here is Habermas’s comment on a similar example: Als Realist auf ganzer Linie (sic) sucht Putnam dies Bifurkation der Vernunft und eine entsprechende Differenzierung der Geltungsdimension (in Wahrheits-­und Sollgeltung) zu vermeiden. Fur die Unteilbarkeit der Geltungsdimension (sic) hat er gelegentlich auf Beispielsätze wie “Hätte Peter intensiver studiert wäre er ein besserer Philosoph geworden” verwiesen. In der Tat stellt die Logik zwischen allen Ausdrücken, gleichviel aus welchen semantischen Bezirken sie stammen, Verbindungen her. Aber die logische Verknüpfung von Teilsätzen bedeutet, wie das vemeintliche Gegenbeispiel zeigt, keine Einebnung in der illokutionären Modi, weil für den gesamten Sprechakt jeweils ein Modus in Fuhrung geht.11 Habermas obviously supposes that I am arguing against a “Bifurkation der Vernunft und eine entsperechende Differenzierung der Geltungsdimension (in Wahrheits-­und Sollgeltung).” But that was not the point of the example at all! (Although I do deny a ­simple bifurcation into just two Geltungsdimensionen, of course). It is my supposed desire to ignore the fact that the antecedent and the consequent of “If Peter had studied more intensively, he would have been a better phi­los­o­pher” belong to dif­fer­ent “Geltungsdimensionen” that Habermas thinks the example serves; and it is my alleged belief in just one kind of Geltung that makes me a “Realist auf ganzer Linie.” But the point of the example was simply to emphasize a 11. Jürgen Habermas, “Werte und Normen,” in Raters and Willaschek, Hilary Putnam und die Tradition des Pragmatismus, 297.



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fact that Habermas himself notes in passing (but whose importance he fails to see), namely that die Logik stellt zwischen allen Ausdrücken, gleichviel aus welchen semantischen Bezirken sie stammen, Verbindungen her. Since “true” is the logical notion in terms of which the central semantical notions of consequence and validity are defined, the very fact that Habermas mentions requires “true” to apply to all genuine statements in the logical sense of “statement” that is, to all “Ausdrücken” to which logic applies. Re (3): “All correct ethical statements (i.e., both norms and judgements of value which do not have the form of universal “­oughts”) have the same sort of validity as empirical / scientific statements.” As I have just explained this is a m ­ istake (one apparently based on my defense of the universal applicability of “true” and “false”). In fact, I ­don’t think ­there is “Geltungsmodus” common to all empirical statements or to all scientific statements, and I am perfectly aware of the difference between “shoulds” and ”ises” (as well as of the fuzziness of the boundary between them in many contexts). Habermas on Value-­Pluralism

I agree with Habermas that ­there are value judgements that one should not be “pluralistic” about. The wrongness of treating other persons as mere means to be manipulated is not something concerning which one can recognize other opinions as equally “legitimate” or equally “valid” (except, of course, in the minimal sense that as long as ­those opinions are merely opinions they are entitled to the rights of “freedom of speech” and “freedom of expression” in a healthy demo­cratic regime). ­There are ­things that it would be wrong to prohibit by law but which are nonetheless wrong. But recognizing a wide range of ­matters about which one thinks the state has no business legislating is not saying that t­ here is no right and wrong about ­those ­matters. The brazen instrumentalization of o ­ thers is, as Habermas claims, a violation of a universally valid norm. But what of norms that have exceptions (as most norms do, in fact), and of values that ­aren’t norms? ­Here Habermas seems afraid that to speak of an objective rightness or wrongness would somehow violate the pluralism that is part of an enlightened modern consciousness. He also believes that it presupposes a metaphysical view that he calls “moral realism.” But are ­these fears justified? I believe that they are not.

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With re­spect to the issue of pluralism: “Pluralism” is, to be sure, a stronger princi­ple than mere toleration. I tolerate views that I do not regard as worthy of re­spect at all, including views that are extremely intolerant, as well as views I respectfully disagree with. But what is “pluralism”? The following claim is at the heart of my own pluralism: One cannot be a consistent pluralist and accept (or act as if one accepted) the claim that one way of life, or one religious tradition, or one sexual orientation, e­ tc., is “light” and the o­ thers are all “darkness.” But this claim defines only a “minimal pluralism.” A stronger form is defined by the claim, which I also accept, that at least some of the ­people who have other ways of life, religious traditions, sexual orientations, e­ tc., than mine have insights that I do not have, or that I have not developed to anything like the same extent, precisely ­because they have t­ hose other ways of life, religious traditions, sexual orientations, e­ tc. But this does not seem to be Habermas’s understanding of pluralism. It does not seem to be Habermas’s ­because to speak of insights is to say that ­there are t­ hings that members of t­ hose other communities believe that are true, and that members of my community could profit from learning. To take the case of religious traditions: Buddhists, for example, have been meditating on the meaning of compassion for more than two millennia, and living a way of life which focuses that meditation and provides concepts for it. To suppose that they have failed in all that time to see anything about what it means to live a compassionate life that Jews and Christians and Moslems and atheists h ­ aven’t seen is arrogance and worse than arrogance—it is a form of blindness. For Habermas, however, it seems that I can only question or endorse a value judgment made by a member of another community in two ways: (1) I can ask ­whether it is deontologically permissible, in the sense of not violating any of the (minimalist?) universal norms that Habermas emphasizes; and (2) I can ask w ­ hether it is conducive to a life proj­ect or a collective-­life proj­ect which is in the interest of all ­those affected by the proj­ect. But this is an extremely narrow (and I think unrealistic) view of what a­ ctual discussions of conflicting life ideals is ­really about.



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­Here is one example: ever since the beginning of the sexual revolution that has been accelerating in the West for over a ­century, ­there has been enormous disagreement about the value of chastity. Some communities—­ traditional Christians and Jews and Moslems, for example—­insist both that chastity is an impor­tant value and that the traditional understandings of that value are the only right ones. ­Others, including myself, believe that the contrast between chastity and promiscuity catches something impor­tant to living a moral life, but that that contrast cannot be fitted into the Procrustean bed of traditional religious understandings. Still o ­ thers see this as a mere prejudice, one which cripples f­ ree ­human sexuality. I disagree with both the first and the last of ­these three views; and my disagreement is not just a disagreement about how certain practices “affect all ­those concerned”; it is part of an attempt to work out a rich and perceptive conception of the good life. As I argued at the beginning, the “objectivity” of terms like “chastity” and ”cruelty” and “rich” and “perceptive” (and, for that m ­ atter, the terms needed for discourse ethics itself—­“re­spect of ­others,” “non-­manipulation,” “sincerity”) is presupposed not for the “validity” of the “universal” norms of discourse ethics, but for their contentfulness.12 With re­spect to the issue of “moral realism”: For Habermas the only “post-­traditional” conception of validity available for moral statements is “allgemeiner Annerkennungswürdigkeit.” In my view, this is at best a purely formal criterion. If the validity of this criterion is supposed to follow from the correctness of a Peircean definition of truth (or a Peircean conception of truth for moral statements), then I have nothing to add to the criticisms of this I made in the paper on which Habermas comments. If not, then I simply point out that we are not, in fact, ­going to get universal agreement on anything, not even the statement that the world ­isn’t flat! And if I am reminded that it is not allgemeine Annerkennung that is at stake, but Annerkennungwürdigkeit, then I have to say that the question ­whether a moral judgement is worthy (würdig) of allgemeine Annerkennung is (tautologically) just the question w ­ hether it is right; nothing is added by talking 12. I do not have space to discuss the significance of the supposed “starke kulturelle Grenzen zwischen verschiedenen Kollektiven” of which Habermas speaks ­here. For criticisms of this way of seeing the issue, see Michele M. Moody-­Adams, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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of “Annerkennung” u ­ nless one supposes that the Peircean picture of truth and convergence to truth is ­really right. But that is something I find unbelievable. Conclusion

In spite of our disagreements, I continue to admire Habermas’s unparalleled breadth of knowledge, profundity, and demo­cratic vision. What Habermas distrusts and fears in my own ways of defending that same demo­cratic vision is my belief that views can be right and wrong even though we ­shall never all come to one view as to which they are. To him this seems to force me into an extreme moral realism, a kind of Platonism, which would indeed be incompatible with my Pragmatism. But that belief does not stem from Platonism. It stems, rather, from a belief which is si­ mul­ta­neously a Pragmatist and a “Wittgensteinian” belief, the belief that ­there is no God’s Eye View from which we can say that some of the statements that we regard as correct and offer reasonable arguments for are not even in princi­ple susceptible of “universal validity” but only of some kind of community-­relativity reasonableness.13 The question that divides us, and that remains for further discussion in the f­ uture, is ­whether Habermas’s attempt to divide value judgements into ­those that are and ­those that are not susceptible of “allgemeine Annerkennungswürdigkeit” is or i­ sn’t an attempt to speak from such a God’s Eye View.

13. H ­ ere I rely on the anti-­relativist reading of Wittgenstein that I defended in “Wittgenstein on Reference and Relativism,” in my Gifford Lectures, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 158–179.

CHAPTER 28

David Copp: On Morality and Mathe­matics (2006)

I

n many ways, David Copp’s essay seems to me the model of what a critical examination of a philosophical work should be. It is exemplary in its clarity, incisive in its criticism, and yet constructive in spirit. I s­ hall take up Copp’s points in roughly reverse order, beginning, thus, with the last part of his essay and working t­ owards the beginning. The very last sentence of Copp’s essay refers to a supposed “familiar technical sense” of “represent.” Well, I suppose I understand what it is for a sentence to be about something—in fact, I once proposed a formalization of that notion.1 But I ­don’t think ­there is a familiar technical sense of fact—­w ith Quine, I think the identity conditions for “facts” are extremely unclear. I ­don’t propose to ban the word “fact” from philosophy articles ­because of that. But the thesis that this or that sentence “represents a fact” ­doesn’t say anything to me except that the sentence is (purportedly) true.

Putnam’s reply to David Copp, “The Ontology of Putnam’s Ethics without Ontology,” Con­temporary Pragmatism 3, no. 2 (2006): 39–53. 1. “Formalization of the Concept ‘About’,” Philosophy of Science 25 (1958): 125–130.

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And . . . ​my account of truth is a “deflationist” one, albeit one that I distinguish from both Carnap’s and Horwich’s.2 “Putnam’s View”

Copp understands my view of moral truths pretty correctly (given my inevitable reservations, of course). 3 When he writes, “[Putnam’s view] holds that t­ here are moral truths even though t­ here are no moral properties ­because it holds that moral truth is constituted, roughly, by the standards of practical reason, given the concerns of the moral life,” 4 I want to say, “Take out the words, ‘even though ­there are no moral properties’ (why that ­isn’t a correct account of what I think ­w ill be the subject of the next subsection), and carefully refrain from construing ‘standards’ as ‘procedures’ in the sense of decision procedures (and recognize the need for Mutterwitz), and you are close to my view.” Why this is still only “close to” my view is that it also needs to be added that I think that rational discussion of the concerns of the moral life as they have developed in history, is pos­si­ble, although certainly ­there is no fixed rulebook for such discussion. And with re­spect to the nature of such discussion, I am indeed a “quietist” in David Copp’s sense: “quietism holds that moral reasons can be given to explain the truth of a true moral claim but that no other kind of explanation is available. Assume, for example, that one o ­ ught morally to keep one’s promises. The quietist would be content with a standard kind of moral explanation for this, an explanation of the kind we might give in a moral discussion. A quietist would reject any kind of philosophical or metaphysically ambitious explanation such as an explanation that postulated a special kind of fact or property.”5 Although none of my commen-

2. I defend a form of what is sometimes called “disquotationalism” in my third Dewey Lecture. I have since found that some authors use “disquotationalism” and “deflationism” in just the opposite way from the way I used them in that lecture! I now accept the description of myself as a “deflationist,” provided it is clear that my form of “deflationism” is the one I attribute to Wittgenstein in the Dewey Lectures, and not the form defended by Carnap or Horwich. 3. Prob­ably no phi­los­op ­ her ever accepts another phi­los­o­pher’s account of what (s)he thinks without some reservations. 4. Copp, “The Ontology of Putnam’s Ethics without Ontology,” 50. 5. Ibid., 40.

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tators discusses part II of Ethics without Ontology, I think my criticism of Bernard Williams’s skepticism on precisely this point is impor­tant h ­ ere.6 On ­whether I am a naturalist or a non-­naturalist, I would reply that I am a naturalist in John Dewey’s sense. Our fallible ability to decide what is reasonable is part of our evolving h ­ uman nature, not something super­natural. It is, however, a ­mistake when Copp concludes that, on my view, “a moral truth is ‘nothing but’ a warranted conclusion about what would be reasonable given the concerns of the moral life and given the appropriate standards of practical reason.”7 The reason this is a m ­ istake is a s­ imple logical one: truth (­whether construed disquotationally or in some more metaphysical way) is tenseless and warranted assertability is tensed and relative to a par­tic­u ­lar epistemic situation. To make this point less abstractly, recall that a central emphasis of The Collapse of the Fact / Value Dichotomy (the book of mine that preceded Ethics without Ontology) was what might be called the ­triple entanglement of facts, theories, and values.8 Someone may believe that a course of action is morally right when it i­ sn’t ­because they have accepted a false description of the situation (usually one which itself contains thick ethical words, and thus exhibits “entanglement”); and they may be warranted in accepting that false description (perhaps they w ­ ere misled by ­people they had reason to trust, or perhaps ­later evidence ­w ill show that the evidence—­which they had good reason to trust at the time—­was partly false). They may also have a moral point of view—­I give “macho ethics” as an example in Ethics without Ontology—­which they w ­ ill come to see (sometimes by contemplating the lives of exemplary ­human beings) are unreasonable or lacking in compassion or other­w ise defective. What is in fact reasonable to believe is something we are highly fallible about. In no area does truth coincide with being a “warranted conclusion” at a time. The w ­ hole of part II of Ethics without Ontology stressed the importance of fallibilism.

6. See my Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 22–29. 7. Copp, “The Ontology of Putnam’s Ethics without Ontology,” 49. 8. Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact / Value Dichotomy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). The term “­triple entanglement” was suggested by Vivian Walsh.

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“Putnam Seems to Deny the Existence of Moral Properties”

What leads Copp to say that I deny the existence of moral properties is that he assumes that what I fault G. E. Moore for was quantifying over them. Not at all. I think the real issue, in this case is one that Carnap put his fin­ger on very nicely when he wrote: “Relations of the causal type can indeed hold only among physical objects (or states or pro­cesses), not between a physical object and an abstract entity. It seems typical of Platonism . . . ​that it speaks of relations of this causal type (called ‘commerce’ or ‘intercourse’ or the like) as holding between physical objects (or persons or minds) and abstract entities.”9 (Carnap was emphatic that merely quantifying over numbers, sets, and the like did not make one a “Platonist.”) What makes Moore an Inflationary Ontologist (what Carnap called a “Platonist”) is not that he quantifies over such entities as “Good,” but that he posits a special faculty by which our minds can acquaint themselves with Good, a faculty that he himself analogizes to perception. This is a paradigm case of a pseudo-­explanation of our ability to make true value judgments. “Putnam Appears to Think That Numbers Do Not Exist”

Not at all . . . ​what I have been trying to do in the philosophy of mathe­ matics is defend the view that “numbers exist” is the right answer if we choose one optional language and “saying they exist is a façon de parler” is the right answer if we choose another optional language, but t­ here is no fact of the ­matter as to which is the “right” optional language ­here. As evidence that I think numbers do not exist, however, Copp cites my saying that mathematical truths are not “made true” by any set of “objects.” Well, yes. I d ­ on’t like calling numbers “objects.” I also d ­ on’t like talk of “making true,” ­unless that talk be interpreted in a deflationary way, as suggested by Crispin Wright in Truth and Objectivity.10 But that d ­ oesn’t mean I am not prepared to say numbers exist, when I use the normal language of number theory. 9. The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1963), 924–925. 10. Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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Copp also accuses me of believing that the modal logical picture gives the real truth conditions for statements about numbers (which is why he thinks I am a sort of reductionist in anti-­reductionist clothing). But I have emphasized from “Mathe­matics without Foundations” on that I see the objects picture and the modal logical picture as equivalent descriptions. Metaphysically, I see them as two ways of saying the same ­things. Saying that mathe­matics is objective ­because mathematical necessity is objective is just as much a pseudo-­explanation as saying that mathe­matics is objective ­because ­there ­really are mathematical objects. I can give reasons why we ­ought to conclude that mathe­matics is objective (no m ­ atter which of the equivalent pictures you prefer). The reasons I gave in “What Is Mathematical Truth?” still seem right to me. But on the question of the supposed need for a “metaphysical explanation” of the objectivity of mathe­matics, I am a “quietist”: modifying Copp’s definition by replacing the word “moral” with “mathematical,” I can say that “quietism holds that mathematical reasons can be given to explain the truth of a true mathematical claim but that no other kind of explanation is available.” I am guilty of “deflationist, reductionist Ontologizing” only in Copp’s imagination. Atheism

I agree with Copp that a general rejection of what I call “deflationary” or “reductionist” Ontologizing does not entail that atheism is wrong (and theism is right by default). Whereas Inflationary Ontologizing of the kind to which I object to seems to me to violate the norms of good (or, often, even of intelligible explanation—­G. E. Moore’s comparison of Good to a “­simple quality” like yellow is a case in point)—­some ontological beliefs do need to be eliminated. I would, however, point out that it all too often happens that the atheist and the religious person simply talk past one another. I have described myself by saying that, “speaking for myself, I do not find that I need to think of God as having an ‘ontological’ real­ity outside of h ­ uman experience.”11 To some that makes me an atheist; to o ­ thers a religious “liberal.” I re­spect principled atheism, but I re­spect it more when the atheist understands that not all religious p ­ eople are fundamentalists. 11. Reply to Pihlström, “Replies to Commentators,” Con­temporary Pragmatism 3, no. 2 (December 2006): 71.

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Still, if eliminationism is sometimes justified, what becomes of my attack on “Deflationary Ontologizing”? What I was thinking of in chapter one is this: when a phi­los­o­pher says that properties do not ­really exist, ­etc., this typically makes no difference to the way (s)he talks outside of the lecture hall. That is what makes what t­ hese phi­los­o­phers say a case of “language idling”—­a good pragmatist meta­phor if ­there ever was one. “Putnam Might Respond That He Does Not Deny That ­There Are Numbers, Not ­Unless the Claim That ­There Are Numbers Is Made ‘with Inflationary Metaphysical Earnestness.’ It Is Not Clear What This Means, However.”

What it means is that if a mathematician says, as it might be, that Eduard Cech was the first person to describe the homology of a subnormal bicompact space, what (s)he says is perfectly in order; when a metaphysician says that the objectivity of mathe­matics is explained by the fact that it describes “real objects,” what (s)he does is offer a pseudo-­explanation. In short, t­ here is a difference between a metaphysical use of “describe” and an ordinary mathematical use. (I do not assume that “dif­fer­ent use” implies dif­fer­ent meaning.) Further, I think that this par­tic­u ­lar metaphysical use is bad metaphysics, for the reasons I give in the third chapter of Ethics without Ontology. I suspect Copp anticipated some such reply when he wrote, “But this, again, is an example of deflationary Ontology. It seems, in fact, uncomfortably close to Blackburn’s quasi-­realism, which Putnam rejects.”12 I ­don’t see the similarity, since Blackburn’s quasi-­realism, as I understand it, says that, from a correct metaphysical point of view, mathematical sentences do not have objective truth values (­unless, perhaps, they can be proved or disproved—in which case, their “truth” consists simply in their assertability”), whereas I claim—­a lthough this was only alluded to, but not gone into in detail—­that the entanglement of mathe­matics and physics is such that anyone who rejects antirealism about physics—as both Blackburn and I do—­should also reject it about mathe­matics.

12. Copp, “The Ontology of Putnam’s Ethics without Ontology,” 47.

CHAPTER 29

Mark Timmons: On Morality (2006)

I

appreciate the warm friendliness of Mark Timmons’s reply, and I too have nostalgic memories of the NEH summer seminar that I conducted twenty years ago at which we met. And I am glad that Mark agrees with me on the impor­tant theme of fact / value entanglement. Nevertheless, t­ here are differences between our positions (­unless they turn out to be mutual misunderstandings). The purpose of this reply w ­ ill be to explain where I feel my position has been misunderstood, and to explore the significance that the misunderstanding has, or may have. A Terminological Point

But first, a point at which I have felt it necessary to change the terminology I employ. As Timmons describes my “lower octane version of ontological relativity,” it maintains that “the objects and properties—­the facts ­there are are (in the relevant sense) scheme dependent.” That language seems

Putnam’s reply to Mark Timmons, “Ethical Objectivity Humanly Speaking: Reflections on Putnam’s Ethics without Ontology,” Con­temporary Pragmatism 3, no. 2 (April 2006): 27–38.

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to me way too metaphysical. Already in 1992, in one of the replies in The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, I explained that my talk of “scheme dependence” was meant as a material mode of speech for the following: (1) the notion of an object is an inherently extendable one; we extend it in a reasonable way, I think, when we speak of the weird entities of quantum mechanics as “objects”; we extend it in an unfortunate way, I think, if we refer to mereological sums as “objects”; and we s­ hall undoubtedly continue to extend it in the f­ uture. B ­ ecause the notion of “object” is inherently open in this way, the very notion of a “totality of all objects” is senseless. (2) Certain ­things are paradigmatically objects, for example ­tables and chairs, but other uses of the term “object” are, to a greater or lesser degree, optional. (3) As a consequence of (2), apparently incompatible schemes—­for instance, a scheme that quantifies over mereological sums and a scheme that denies that ­there are any such ­things may serve equally well to describe one or another state of affairs.1 ­These three ­theses are ones I still believe. But the thesis of my Reason, Truth and History to the effect that all “objects”—­including t­ ables and chairs—­a re “internal” to conceptual schemes, a thesis which was connected with the “verificationist semantics” I advocated in that book, I have long repudiated. Indeed, as I explained in Words and Life: Talk of “in­de­pen­dent existence” makes ­little sense when what is at stake is neither ordinary causal nor ordinary logical in­de­pen­ dence. That the sky is blue is causally in­de­pen­dent of the way we talk; for, with our language in place, we can certainly say that the sky would still be blue even if we did not use color words. And the statement that the sky is blue is, in the ordinary sense of “logically in­de­pen­dent,” logically in­de­pen­dent of any description that one might give of our use of color words. For t­ hese reasons, I have, especially in recent years, tried not to state my own doctrine as a doctrine of the dependence of the way ­things are on the way we talk. In any sense of “in­de­pen­dent” I can understand, ­whether the sky is blue is in­de­pen­dent of the way we talk.2 1. Hilary Putnam, “Reply to David Anderson,” Philosophical Topics 20, no. 1: The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. Christopher S. Hill (1992): 366–367. 2. Hilary Putnam, “The Question of Realism,” in Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 301.

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Re: “Procedures and Standards”

A misunderstanding for which (as I s­ hall explain shortly) I feel partly responsible, occurs when Timmons, ­a fter correctly quoting me to the effect that (in propositional calculus and quantification theory) “­there are standards that logically valid inferences have to meet and that logically true statements have to meet, but ­these are not the standards we apply to descriptions,” goes on to describe my supposed conception of “methodological objectivity” thus: M1: If some claim C in discourse D is objectively true, then ­there are standards and procedures governing the ac­cep­tance of claims (judgments) in D that C meets and ~C does not. It seems clear that Timmons takes it that a methodological conception of objectivity is the same as a verificationist conception, and also believes that I hold such a conception in the philosophy of mathe­matics (“for Putnam, this same general conception of objectivity applies to mathematical discourse”). But in Ethics without Ontology, and just six pages ­a fter the sentence that Timmons quoted, I wrote: In a sense, what I want to say about mathematical truth has already been indicated, but t­here is a complication to be noted which is that whereas all truths of at least the elementary logic of quantifiers, so-­called “quantification theory,” are provable, t­ here are good reasons for believing that provability in pure mathe­ matics is not coextensive with truth. I have in mind, of course, the Gödel Incompleteness Theorems, but not only t­ hese formal results. ­These theorems do not, by themselves, tell us ­whether we should say of sentences in pure mathe­matics that can neither be proved nor disproved (Gödel’s Theorems showed that t­ here are such sentences) that they can be true or false. But, as I have argued elsewhere, none of the philosophies that try to identify mathematical truth with provability . . . ​none of t­ hese “finitist,” or “intuitionist,” or “quasi-­realist” philosophies of mathe­matics accords at all with the application of mathe­matics in physics.3 In par­tic­u­lar, if 3. In the Appendix to “Was Wittgenstein ­Really an Antirealist about Mathe­matics?,” in Wittgenstein in Amer­i­ca, ed. Timothy McCarthy and Sean Stidd (Oxford: Oxford University

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one is unwilling, as I am, to be any sort of “instrumentalist” about physics, then the attempt to be an antirealist about mathe­matics while trying to be a realist in any sense about physics w ­ ill run into fatal trou­ble.4 So I said in t­ hese very words that “provability in pure mathe­matics is not coextensive with truth.” But Timmons’s M1 says that mathematical truth is coextensive with meeting the “standards and procedures” for the acceptability of mathematical claims—­and what is that if not provability in pure mathe­matics? Did I then simply contradict myself? I certainly ­didn’t think so, b ­ ecause immediately a­ fter the paragraph just quoted I wrote: “Nevertheless, I think we can say with re­spect to mathematical truth what I just said about logical truth—­that we learn what mathematical truth is by learning the practices and standards of mathe­matics itself, including the standards of applying mathe­matics.”5 So Timmons, although right in saying that I d ­ on’t think objectivity in logic and mathe­matics is explained by reference to platonic objects, is wrong in thinking that I believe we must accept a verificationist philosophy of logic and mathe­matics. But, I do feel partly responsible for the misunderstanding, b ­ ecause I now see that the sentence he quoted could bear a verificationist reading. What I should have said is that I think that logical necessity, logical validity, logical truth, are notions which we acquire as we learn to “do” and to apply logic, and similarly for mathematical truth and mathematical necessity. That does not mean ( pace Dummett) that the practices we acquire when we learn ­either mathematical or empirical language exhaust the notion of truth e­ ither in mathe­matics or in empirical discourse.

Press, 2001). The gist of the argument was already in “What Is Mathematical Truth?,” in Mathe­matics, ­Matter and Method, vol.  1 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 74–75. 4. Hilary Putnam, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 65–66. 5. Ibid., 66.

Mark Timmons

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Some Words on What I Do Believe about Logic and Mathe­matics

The m ­ istake in Timmons’s account of my view may begin, I suspect, with his distinction between descriptive statements, which “conform to the demands of the ontological conception of objectivity” and statements which conform to “the methodological model” (which sounds overly sharp). For, of course, ­there are also standards that descriptively true statements have to meet. Yet, as I argued in my third Dewey Lecture,6 it does not follow (pace Dummett), that truth for descriptive statements (my example was “Lizzie Borden killed her parents with an axe”) coincides with being verified. For the standards themselves are not stateable in a vocabulary which is epistemologically prior to the vocabulary of the statements in question (as the Carnap of the Aufbau hoped), nor is it the case that our grasp of ­those standards is simply grasp of verification procedures (as Dummett formerly thought).7 It was the point of my third Dewey Lecture to argue that we acquire the ability to understand what it is for statements to be true as we acquire the use of the relevant parts of language, and that reductionist accounts of that ability are failures. I believe the same ­thing is true in the case of mathematical language. I learn arithmetic, I learn what a prime number is, I learn that the sequence of natu­ral numbers can be continued in­def­initely, and I come to understand the Goldbach Conjecture: “­There are infinitely many twin primes (pairs of primes whose difference is 2).”8 No one knows ­today ­whether this statement can be proved or disproved. But I certainly believe it has a truth-­value.9 6. See Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 44–59. 7. I write, “as Dummett formerly thought,” b ­ ecause in his Truth and the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), he modifies this view as far as statements about the past are concerned. I discuss the modified view in “Between Scylla and Charybdis: Does Dummett Have a Way Through?,” in The Philosophy of Michael Dummett (Chicago: Open Court, 2007). 8. Some examples of “modal logical” translations of such statements about natu­ral numbers are given in “Mathe­matics without Foundations,” in Mathe­matics, ­Matter and Method, 43–59. 9. H ­ ere I disagree with the thrust of some of Wittgenstein’s unpublished Remarks on the Foundations of Mathe­matics. I argue that Wittgenstein was wrong in ­these remarks in

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Kant writes,

Kant

If it [“general logic”] sought to give general instructions how we are to subsume ­under ­these rules, that is, to distinguish ­whether something does nor does not come ­under them, that could only be by means of another rule. This in turn, for the very reason that it is a rule, again demands guidance from judgment. And thus it appears that although understanding is capable of being instructed, and of being equipped with rules, judgment is a peculiar talent which can be practiced only, and cannot be taught. It is the specific quality of so called mother-­w it [Mutterwitz]; and its lack no school can make good.10 ­Here Kant refers to a capacity to know what good sense requires, as opposed to the knowledge of a rule; without such a capacity—­“­mother wit”—­ neither science nor ethics are pos­si­ble.11 The denial of the objectivity of judgments of reasonableness must quickly become denial of all objectivity. But I see no mention of such judgments in Timmons’s essay; only of “standards and procedures.” And that neglect, ­whether accidental or intended, underlies a criticism he makes of Scanlon’s constructivism with which I cannot go along. Before I turn to that, however, I must mention that “­mother wit” is also needed in logic. For, without application logic becomes meaningless formalism. But the application of logic—­the knowledge, for example, that if you ask me, “Was it a good play?” and I answer “It was and it ­wasn’t,” I have not contradicted myself, the ability to follow the countless “conversational implicatures” of which Paul Grice spoke—is not governed by any formal rules we have yet been able to write down. the Appendix to my “Was Wittgenstein ­Really an Antirealist about Mathe­matics?,” and in more detail in “Wittgenstein and the Real Numbers,” in Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond, ed. Alice Crary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 133, B 172. 11. A fine discussion of this aspect of Kant’s thought is Juliet Floyd’s “Heautonomy and the Critique of Sound Judgment: Kant on Reflective Judgment and Systematicity,” in Kants Ästhetik / Kant’s Aesthetics / L’Esthétique de Kant, ed. Herman Parret (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998).

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Timmons’s Criticism of Scanlon

In What We Owe to Each Other, Thomas Scanlon discusses the normative and motivational force of ethical assertions and the complexity of the connections between valuing and desiring. On Scanlon’s “contractualist” theory, the moral motivation par excellence is the desire to avoid an action if the action is such that any princi­ple allowing it would be one that other ­people could reasonably reject. And Scanlon responds to the question, “Why accept this account of moral motivation?” by saying, According to the version of contractualism that I am advancing ­here, our thinking about right and wrong is structured by . . . ​the aim of finding princi­ples that ­others, insofar as they too have this aim, could not reasonably reject. This gives us a direct reason to be concerned with other p ­ eople’s point of view: not b ­ ecause we might, for all we know, actually be them, or ­because we might occupy their positions in some other pos­si­ble world, but in order to find princi­ples that they, as well as we, have reason to accept.12 . . . ​ [T]­here is on this view a strong continuity between the reasons that lead us to act in the way that the conclusions of moral thought require and the reasons that shape the pro­cess by which we arrive at t­ hose conclusions.13 I believe that Scanlon has well described how one sort of ethical claim can have motivating force in any community which shares one of the basic interests of morality. And the explanation he gives does not presuppose anything we o ­ ught to regard as metaphysically “queer.” “But the motive Scanlon describes ­won’t motivate anyone who is indifferent to what ­others believe and desire!” someone—­perhaps Timmons—­ will object. True, but the demand that an “objectivist” account of ethics must demonstrate that ethical utterances should motivate even ­those who are indifferent to the interests and beliefs of ­others is one for which I believe no good reason has been offered. Ethical utterances do have vari­ous

12. Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and “initial position” are what Scanlon is referring to. 13. T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 191.

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kinds of motivating force, and I believe that Scanlon has well illustrated how one kind of motivating force can be accounted for.14 It may be that Timmons agrees with me ­here, ­because he distinguishes between Scanlon’s “contractualism” and what he calls Scanlon’s “constructivism.” This “constructivism” is supposed to lead to relativism: The constructivist views of Rawls and Scanlon are not meant to be versions of or imply ethical relativism, but I ­don’t see how they avoid it. . . . ​[T]he gist of the argument is this. In order for the vari­ous standards and procedures to yield a relatively rich set of moral princi­ples with relatively determinate implications, ­those norms and standards w ­ ill have to be morally loaded. This, by the way, is a lesson Putnam teaches us. But reflecting on cases of moral symmetry—my favorite is the Putnam / Nozick dispute over the morality of social welfare as described by Putnam (1981, 164–165)—­strongly supports the conjecture that ­there is a plurality of standards and procedures that express dif­fer­ent and conflicting moral outlooks (e.g., consequentialist, deontological) which, when viewed from a morally disengaged standpoint are on equal footing.15 My response to this argument is that the notion of a “morally disengaged standpoint” begs the question. Morality, in my view, is concerned with finding reasonable ways to act on interests that are complex, evolving, and occasionally (though not always or even usually) in conflict. If a “morally disengaged standpoint” involves not having (or pretending not to have) any of ­those interests (a sort of moral “veil of ignorance”), then what is “on an equal footing” from such a standpoint is irrelevant. But all a­ ctual standpoints I am aware of, including t­ hose of real live consequentialists, Kantians, ­etc., do share a good many of ­those interests. As far back as 1978, I reported with approval views of Grice and Baker according to which “dif­fer­ent and conflicting moral outlooks” can be reasonably judged: 14. Where I differ from Scanlon is in rejecting (1) the idea that t­ here is a unique motive for ethics, and (2) the idea that all ethical judgments depend on “princi­ples.” 15. Timmons, “Ethical Objectivity Humanly Speaking,” 32.

Mark Timmons

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Moral reasoning (I wrote) does not take place in a Cartesian vacuum, it takes place in the context of ­people trying to justify ways of life to other p ­ eople, trying to criticize the ways of life of other ­people, ­etc., by producing reasons that have some kind of general appeal. . . . ​The question ­whether ­there is one objectively best morality or a number of objectively best moralities which, hopefully, agree on a good many princi­ples or in a good many cases, is simply the question w ­ hether, given the desiderata that automatically arise once we undertake the enterprise of giving a justification of princi­ples for living that ­w ill be of general appeal, then, ­w ill it turn out that ­these desiderata select a best morality or a group of moralities which have a significant mea­sure of agreement on a number of significant questions.16 It is my experience that, in fact, only a tiny minority of reflective ­human beings regard e­ ither absolute consequentialism or absolute deontology as reasonable moral stances. (Prob­ably the large majority of that tiny minority are philosophers—­which may explain why professional phi­los­o­ phers are inclined not to count “wide appeal” as a desideratum for an answer to Baker and Grice’s three word question: “How to Live?”—­but the professional phi­los­o­phers are, in this re­spect, unreasonable.) It is also my experience that the “moral stances” that actually divide p ­ eople in large numbers are deeply entangled, both with frequently erroneous factual beliefs and with frequently irrational religious beliefs. But all of t­ hese beliefs are ones that it is pos­si­ble and impor­t ant to discuss. Talk of “relativism” ­here is a discussion stopper. Not that Timmons wishes us to embrace relativism! I can, in fact, agree with pretty much all of his 1–5, apart from a disagreement about his 2, with which I ­shall close.17 But I suggest that the use of the unfortunate word “expressivism” (given the history of that term) in Timmons fits ill with his insistence that “descriptivism,” in his sense, is compatible with 16. Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 84. Among such desiderata, Baker and Grice listed (1) the morality should be one that p ­ eople could, in fact, live by; (2) it should have wide appeal; (3) it should allow us a good deal of “discretionary” space. All of ­these are desiderata for a reasonable morality. Unfortunately, the manuscript by Baker and Grice was never published. 17. See Timmons, “Ethical Objectivity Humanly Speaking,” 35.

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objectivity.18 I sense a tension in Timmons’s position, and I suggest that it comes from, first, the confusion of methodological objectivity with verificationism, and, second, failure to see the importance of the informal notion of reasonableness. (As well as the under-­thematization of the entanglement of fact and value.) In sum, ethics, like every­thing e­ lse, needs Mutterwitz. My Disagreement about 2

Timmons has me wrong when he identifies the difference between descriptive and evaluative uses of ethical words with the “thick / thin” distinction. I d ­ on’t think the difference is between two kinds of sentences (or two vocabularies) at all. It is between two sorts of uses of sentences. A sentence that contains thick ethical words may have both descriptive and evaluative uses, and, very importantly, it may have both si­mul­ta­neously. I used “Vlad the Impaler was an exceptionally cruel monarch” as an example of a sentence which uses thick ethical concepts but which would typically have a primarily descriptive use in a present-­day work of history. The same sentence, uttered by the w ­ idow of one of Vlad’s victims, would undoubtedly have had an evaluative use. (Sentences that contain thin ethical words also have descriptive uses; they are not absolutely thin in many contexts.) Timmons does say that sentences containing thick ethical words typically have primarily evaluative uses, but that also seems wrong to me. What they have are entangled uses—­that is, they are often si­mul­ta­neously evaluative and descriptive. Trying to parcel out descriptive and evaluative uses of language by assigning one sort of use to one sort of sentence and the other sort of use to another sort of sentence is reinstating, not overcoming, the fact / value dichotomy.

18. Ibid., 36 n. 3.

CHAPTER 30

Elizabeth Anscombe and Cora Diamond: On Religion (1997)

[. . .] ­there are many dif­fer­ent conceptions of what it is to understand the concept “God.” On some conceptions the concept “God” is straightforwardly definable in familiar terms: to be God is to be power­f ul, knowing, good, ­etc., without limit, where the terms “power­f ul” (i.e., able to bring about what one “­w ills”), “knowing” (i.e., having justified true beliefs),1 ­etc., mean in the Divine case just what they do in the ­human case. But such conceptions have long been challenged by religious thinkers, including, of course, Alfarabi, Avicenna, Maimonides, and Aquinas. On my own view religious language and the languages of ordinary empirical description and scientific theorizing are, in a way, incommensurable.2 This is an excerpt from: “Thoughts Addressed to an Analytic Thomist,” The Monist 80, no. 4: Analytic Thomism (October 1997): 487–499, 490–492. 1. N.B. God does not have Gettier prob­lems! 2. Cf. chaps. 7 and 8 in my Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). My use of the word “incommensurable” h ­ ere is not meant to be an invocation of Kuhn’s or any other “theory” of science or of language; the prob­lem of understanding the phenomenon I refer to is the prob­lem of understanding religious discourse itself, and that is not something one achieves by theorizing about language. See Renewing Philosophy, pp. 148–153.

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282 Morality, Politics, and Religion

The religious believer (qua religious believer) is not—or should not be—­ engaged in the prediction of empirical phenomena, and religious faith is not refuted by this or that empirical happening or scientific discovery. To suppose, as many p ­ eople nowadays do, that “science has refuted religion,” is to have a deeply confused understanding of what real religious belief is. As I emphasized in Renewing Philosophy (168 ff.), this does not mean that religious belief is immune from criticism (although I am saying that one sort of criticism is utterly misguided). One may find what the believer says unintelligible: for instance, one may find that it violates one’s sense of what life means; or one may find that religious belief has lost its hold on one (or one has lost one’s hold on it), and it now appears as something strange and alien; but what one should not do is claim that one’s view, what­ ever it is, is mandated by “pre­sent day science.”3 Nor—or so I argued in Renewing Philosophy—­should one hope that philosophy of language, or analytic philosophy, ­will be able to tell one ­whether religious language makes sense and, if so, what sort of sense it makes. T ­ here is simply no uncommitted place to stand with re­spect to the religious dimension of h ­ uman life.4 This thought was beautifully expressed to me as long ago as 1960 by Elizabeth Anscombe, when, in the course of a conversation, she compared the difference between the atheist view of religion and the view of the believer to the difference between “seeing the stained glass win­dows from the outside and seeing them from the inside.” But the fact that religious language is in this way incommensurable with ordinary descriptive language does not mean that it is simply a self-­enclosed “language game.” On the contrary, as Cora Diamond has written, criticizing this very idea, The questioning expressed in [­great religious questions] is anyone’s; the possibility of such questions belongs to language itself, and not to any par­tic­u ­lar language game. The tendency to ask them does not depend on any form of life other than speech itself; it is as much something primitive, something given . . . ​a s responding to other p ­ eople (and indeed found in small ­children).5 3. Cf. my “God and the Phi­los­op ­ hers,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy [21, no. 1 (September 1997): 175–187]. 4. This paragraph and the one that precedes it are adapted from my “[On] Negative Theology,” in Faith and Philosophy [14, no. 4 (October 1997): 407–422]. 5. Cora Diamond, “Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle,” reprinted in her The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 287–288.

Elizabeth Anscombe and Cora Diamond

283

Putting together ­these remarks—­Elizabeth Anscombe’s and Cora ­ iamond’s—­I am inclined to say something like this: that while the potenD tiality for religious language, the possibility of making it one’s own, is a basic ­human potentiality, the exercise of that potentiality is not a real possibility for e­ very ­human being at ­every time. For some ­human beings it seems never to be a possibility (although something deeply spiritual in them may find another mode of expression). I myself believe that it requires something experiential and not merely intellectual to awaken that possibility in a ­human being. Indeed, if I met a person who had been a diehard atheist, and who one fine day came to believe in God simply on the basis of a metaphysical argument, I do not know what I should think. It could be, of course, that the metaphysical argument was simply the trigger that released something deeper. But what if the belief in God ­were simply a belief in the strength of a certain philosophical argument? (As David Lewis claims to firmly believe in the existence of real pos­si­ble but not-­ actual worlds on the basis of a philosophical argument?) On the supposition that that is all that was ­going on, I would say that this was not belief in God at all, but a metaphysical illusion. To say that ­there is this sort of gap between what the believer means and understands and what the secular critic thinks he means and understands, does not, of course, mean that no fruitful dialogue between a religious thinker and a secular thinker is pos­si­ble. It may be perfectly appropriate for an atheist phi­los­o­pher and a religious phi­los­o­pher to explore together the arguments that each offers. Indeed, it seems to me an impor­ tant task, not just for religious phi­los­o­phers but for religious intellectuals generally, and one that John Haldane performs extremely well, to try to show secular phi­los­o­phers of a so-­called “naturalist” bent that their attempted “naturalizations” (i.e., reductions) of such notions as “intentionality,” “causality,” “justification,” “truth,” are failures in their own terms. In the same way, it is appropriate for a secular thinker to try to convince a religious thinker that some of his or her views are indefensible in the thinker’s own terms. But that is a very dif­fer­ent ­thing from trying to explain what it means to be religious in a purely intellectual way.

CHAPTER 31

Richard Rorty: On Po­liti­cal Hope (1998)

R

ichard Rorty is remarkable not just for being a gadfly to analytical phi­ los­o­phers, but for his im­mense reading, his lively prose, and his obvious moral engagement with the issues. Yet he is also “notorious” for having recommended that we stop worrying about objectivity and “­settle for solidarity” with our cultural peers, for having described “true” as merely a “compliment” we pay to views we like, and for having proclaimed that all that is left for philosophy is “to continue the conversation.” I never read anything by Rorty without being si­mul­ta­neously stimulated and appalled. Yet the conversation of philosophy would be much poorer without him . . . Some years ago I was chatting with Rorty, and I remember saying that we need Rawls’s A Theory of Justice ­because responsible politics requires at least a few guiding princi­ples. Rorty looked quite shocked, and replied, “I d ­ on’t think good politics needs princi­ples. What it needs is stories.” [. . .] The politics of the Left is a politics of hope. Such hope must not be based upon illusions about the pre­sent or past state of ­things. But neither

“A Politics of Hope,” review of Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, Times Literary Supplement no. 4964 (May 22, 1998): 10.

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Richard Rorty

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must one allow one’s awareness of all the bad ­things that selfishness and sadism have wrought in one’s country to lead to the conclusion that reform is hopeless. A “party of hope” cannot afford the pessimistic induction that “­things have always been rotten, so they w ­ ill be rotten in the f­ uture.” The alternative Rorty sees is to proj­ect a ­f uture in which our ideals for social justice are realized. Such a move has the aspect of a “faith” (Dewey, who is one of Rorty’s heroes, spoke of a “demo­cratic faith”), but a faith that knows itself for a faith, for a proj­ect.1 We can be proud of our country b ­ ecause we see its best moments—­and t­ here have been moments when the cause of justice was furthered—as emblems of what could be. But this “could be” is not empirically verifiable; so what is its epistemological status? Rorty’s answer is that its status is that of a moralizing story. The role played in his own upbringing by learning of the achievements of g­ reat fighters for social justice, black and white, poor and upper class, activists and legislators alike, illustrates the power that stories of heroic strug­gles (and of their heroes) can have in shaping a social conscience and keeping it alive [. . .] What Rorty is arguing for, as he was arguing during the chat that I described having had with him long ago, is that we need moralizing stories and not princi­ples (or “objective truths”). But the opposition, it seems to me, is a false one. For dif­fer­ent morals can be drawn from the same story. The story of how coal miners valiantly stood up to goons and hired police can be told, as Rorty tells it, to support the “reformist Left,” but it has also been told to support the sort of revolutionary leftism that Rorty regards as a collection of dangerous and outdated illusions. The minute you tell a story to support a po­liti­cal program, you begin to derive a princi­ple. Sadly for Rorty’s version of “pragmatism,” one might say, imitating a famous dictum of Kant’s, that stories without princi­ples are blind and princi­ples without stories are empty. But we owe Rorty thanks for a lot of good po­ liti­cal sense, even if the idea that it all depends on rejecting the notions of truth, objectivity, e­ tc., is hard to find intelligible, let alone compelling.

1. John Dewey, “The Demo­cratic Faith and Education,” The Antioch Review 4, no. 2 (1944): 274–283.

CHAPTER 32

Franz Rosenzweig: On Religion (2016)

I

n this article I w ­ ill discuss Rosenzweig’s Büchlein but I d ­ on’t want to simply interpret the “­little book”—­that I did in chapter one of my Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life.1 I want to talk about the issues that Rosenzweig raises as they affect my own very personal manifestation of Judaism. So my discussion ­will range more widely than just the contents of the “­little book,” and also say more about aspects of Rosenzweig’s thought that I find problematic than I did in my book. To do that, I w ­ ill begin by looking at three notions that are often used in connection with the sorts of issues Rosenzweig raises: atheism, religion, and spirituality. Atheism, Religion, and Spirituality

The terms “atheism,” “religion,” and “spirituality” are terms just about every­one thinks they understand. Yet all of them have many meanings. To A response to Franz Rosenzweig, Das Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy [1921] (New York: Noonday Press, 1953; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), with an Introduction by H. Putnam. 1. Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

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Franz Rosenzweig

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the Greeks and the Romans, “atheism,” for example, meant disbelief in the gods (in the plural), and to the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, denial of the existence of “God” (in the singular), but “God” too has many pos­si­ble understandings. (The situation is not improved by the fact that some ­people insist that their own understanding of ­these terms is the only right one.) For example, for most traditional Jews, Christians and Muslims, God was conceived of as a person or personality who was aware of and sometimes answered petitionary prayers. In other words, he was a super­natural being who could and sometimes would help you. The football player who crosses himself when he runs out to the field is acting as if he believed in such a God, and perhaps he does. From his point of view, someone who ­denies that is an atheist. Yet t­ here are g­ reat theologians, including Maimonides, who thought that belief in a “magic helper” God is, in effect, idolatry although the traditional Jewish petitionary prayers are, nonetheless, obligatory, according to them, not ­because they affect God in any way, but ­because of their positive effect on the person who utters them. (Of course, Maimonides’s theology was, in many ways, intellectually elitist: only ­those capable of philosophical meditation are capable of receiving God’s “overflow,” according to this ­great medieval Jewish sage.) For Maimonides, it is thus the “worshipper on the street” who is an atheist—an atheist without knowing it, since all idolaters are atheists without knowing it, in traditional Judaism. One person’s “atheism” may be another person’s “belief in God”! “Religion” is another term with many understandings. For many years, I was a member of what corresponds to a “religion department” at Harvard, the interdisciplinary “Committee for the Study of Religion,” and in that committee, as in, as far as I know, all religion departments in non-­ denominational schools in the United States, Confucianism is one of the faiths that is studied, along with Buddhism, Taoism, and many ­others. The Committee avoids speaking of “religions,” however, preferring a finer-­ grained subdivision of what are often referred to by that term into “religious traditions” and “communities of faith” within t­ hose traditions. I once heard the ­great chairman of the Committee at the time I became a member, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, make the bold claim that “I could show you as much variety in Methodist communities in London in 1815 as is supposed to exist among the ‘world religions’.” Yet Confucianism is not theistic at all, nor are many va­ri­e­ties of Buddhism. Yet all of ­these are unmistakably forms of spirituality. But what is “spirituality”?

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What I am referring to by that term has two aspects. One I w ­ ill illustrate with a reference to a French scholar who I doubt very many of you ­w ill have heard of, Pierre Hadot. A mutual friend who was very close to Hadot and also a former student of mine, Arnold Davidson, made me aware of Hadot’s remarkable writings about the history of philosophy many years ago, a se­lection from which Arnold edited ­under the title Philosophy as a Way of Life; Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, and reading Hadot made me aware that ancient phi­los­o­phers in par­tic­u­lar saw philosophy not as a set of propositions to be discussed and criticized—­a lthough, to be sure, they did that too—­but as a regimen of spiritual exercises, or as he puts it “a mode of existing-­in-­the-­world, which had to be practiced at each instant; and the goal of which was to transform the ­whole of the individual’s life.”2 Referring to the practices involved in such a “mode of existing in the world” as spiritual exercises point to another aspect that they have: that the transformation in question is experienced as putting the individual in touch with something (or somethings) higher than herself. While that “something higher” may be conceived of as God, it also may not be. The “way of heaven” of which Confucianism speaks is not God, nor is the Tao, nor the mystical “emptiness” (which is somehow also a fullness) of Zen Buddhism, nor the natu­ral forces and powers of paganism and neo-­paganism. A Digression about My Own Religiosity

As I explain in the Introduction and the Afterword to Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, my own religious life involves saying the Jewish prayers and studying Jewish texts, including the Jewish bible (the “Tanach”) and the Talmud as well as Jewish philosophy. And I conceive of this study and prayer as a system of spiritual exercises in Hadot’s sense. But I do not believe that the Jewish Bible, or any book, for that m ­ atter, is “the word of God.” I am aware that the God I pray to is a ­human construct, although, in

2. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 265. I quote t­ hese words on p. 14 of chapter one of my Philosophy as a Guide to Life.

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my view, we construct our vari­ous versions of “the available God”3 in response to deep h ­ uman needs that we do not “construct.” I say this b ­ ecause this is absolutely not the view of Franz Rosenzweig. The idea that God is a ­human projection was anathema to Rosenzweig, and when he found it in some of Buber’s early writing, he denounced it as “atheistic theology.” Yet, even if mine is an “atheistic theology,” I find much of value in Rosenzweig, as well as in Buber and Levinas, whom I also wrote about in my book. For me they are examples of dif­fer­ent but wonderful expressions of the ­human need for a spiritual dimension to life. And the very diversity of t­ hose expressions is of value for me, as it is for another Jewish thinker I very much admire, Jonathan Sacks, who wrote The Dignity of Difference while he was Chief Rabbi of ­Great Britain.4 But I digress. Coming back to Rosenzweig, the very fact that Rosen­ zweig did not approve of the kind of theology, naturalistic theology, that best reconciles my own spiritual needs with my critical intelligence, has led me to ask just how Rosenzweig managed to reconcile, or at least to combine, the existentialist side I describe with sympathy in my book, and what I w ­ ill call his “metaphysical theism.” Let us consider Rosenzweig’s Understanding the Sick and the Healthy (Büchlein vom guten und kranken Menschenverstand, in German). That means, of course, that I am ­going to think about ­things in Rosenzweig that I disagree with, and not only about ­things I admire. Rosenzweig’s “Little Book” (Büchlein)

Since few if any of you w ­ ill have read Understanding the Sick and the Healthy itself, and not every­one w ­ ill have read chapter one of my book, the one that discusses it, I ­will briefly sketch the contents of Rosenzweig’s Büchlein. The “illness” that Rosenzweig imagines the “patient” to be suffering from is philosophy. (The likening of philosophy to an illness is the similarity between Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein, that I also discuss in my chapter.) And Rosenzweig explains that although the number of phi­los­o­phers is

3. Available God is from Gordon Kaufman, In the Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 4. Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (London: Continuum, 2003).

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small, the philosophical disease is capable of striking non-­philosophers too, at any time. But what is the philosophical disease? The philosophical disease that Rosenzweig attacks throughout the Büchlein is looking for “essences”: wanting to know the “essence” of the world, the “essence” of the h ­ uman being (“Man”) and the essence of God. And in the vari­ous chapters of the Büchlein, Rosenzweig wittily describes and attacks all the philosophical positions known to him, especially but not exclusively in German philosophy. The strategy is to show that each of the metaphysical theories reduces its supposed subject—­the world, the ­human being, God—to something so utterly dif­fer­ent from what “common sense in action” takes the world (or anything in it—­say “a slab of butter”), a ­human being (say, one’s beloved), or God—to be, that, for all intents and purposes, the world turns out to be nothing, the par­tic­u­lar ­human being turns out to be nothing, and God turns out to be nothing. For example, the empiricist philosopher-­scientists whom Rosenzweig knew about held that statements about m ­ atter are, when properly understood, statements about sensations. For ­g reat German scientists like Mach and Boltzmann—­a nd this was true of the analytic phi­los­o­phers of the time, especially the logical positivists, as well—­science does not describe an in­de­pen­dently existing real­ity, it just tells you that “if I have such and such sensations, then I expect such and such sensations to follow,” e.g., if I (seem to myself to) put a burning match to a piece of paper (or have visual impressions of ­doing that), then I can expect to have visual impressions of the paper burning. [­Here I have expanded on an argument on p. 69 of the Büchlein.] In other words, science itself, according to its g­ reat positivist representatives, does not even pretend to tell you the essence of physical real­ity; it only tells you about appearances. To ask for more is to talk “nonsense” according to the positivists. And the idealist phi­los­o­phers (Hegel and Co.)? For the Hegelians, the empiricists’ and positivists’ “sensations” are aspects of Mind. But what is Mind? If the world is Mind, it obviously cannot be just my Mind, that would be too solipsistic. So it must be “consciousness in itself,” or perhaps “consciousness for itself”—­something we do not experience the world or anything in it as. The phi­los­o­phers’ world ends up being nothing, or at least nothing that common sense in action is aware of. This w ­ ill have to serve to give you the flavor of Rosenzweig’s critique of metaphysics, minus the wonderful language and the lightly worn erudition. I have to skip over Rosenzweig’s critique of phi­los­o­phers’ accounts

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of the essence of “Man” for reasons of time. The critical point comes when Rosenzweig comes to phi­los­o­phers’ account of the nature (or “essence”) of God. Rosenzweig has no trou­ble disposing (to his satisfaction) of what he calls “mysticism” (by which he means one con­temporary German variety of mysticism), a doctrine which insists that God is “wholly other.” Like the doctrines that make the world and its ­matter into Mind, and Mind into consciousness-­in-­itself, this makes God “nothing,” according to Rosenzweig. And idealism, which makes God, Man and World all into Mind (= “nothing”), and Spinozistic pantheism which makes God into Nature (= “nothing”), are all convicted of making God into “nothing” as well. What makes philosophy a disease, in Rosenzweig’s eyes, is that while it starts from something valuable—­namely, “won­der,” that is, a sense of the miraculousness and mystery of the existence of the world, of ­humans, and of God—it freezes that won­der by turning it into philosophical wheel-­spinning. [A critical remark: Rosenzweig seems to believe that accepting any of ­these philosophical conceptions of God is incompatible with a meaningful spiritual experience of God’s real­ity, but I ­don’t believe this is true. Maimonides, for example, thought that God has no properties, that is, no predicate that applies to anything e­ lse applies to God. Even “exist” does not apply to God. Nor does “not-­exist.” Nor does “­either exist or non-­exist”—­God does not have to obey the Law of the Excluded ­Middle! This should make Maimonides’s God a “nothing” for Rosenzweig (who does not discuss this negative theology, as far as I know). Yet anyone who has read The Guide to the Perplexed must know that Maimonides did feel a profound sense of spiritual connection with God, an “overflow” from God, as he describes it. And I am sure that many 19th ­century and early 20th ­century Idealists found spiritual and not only intellectual sustenance in the Hegelian idea that every­thing that exists, including one’s own consciousness and the world outside it, is part of God. It is just not true that one has to have the “right” theology, if t­ here is such a t­ hing, to have a meaningful spiritual life.] Existentialism

In my book, I refer to Rosenzweig, Buber, and Levinas as “existentialists,” ­because I take the heart and soul of religious existentialism, beginning with Kierkegaard, to be a ­battle against turning religion into mere dogma.

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That is not to say that a religious existentialist must lack a creed; Kierke­ gaard was, ­after all a Christian, and one with Christian beliefs. But for him, if Chris­tian­ity becomes only a set of beliefs, then it is no longer a religion, no longer Chris­tian­ity, no longer of any value at all. What the Eu­ro­pean bourgeoisie of Kierkegaard’s time regarded as Chris­tian­ity he viewed with much of the same disgust as Nietz­sche did. In Chris­tian­ity, although not in Judaism, the dichotomy between “faith” and “works” is fundamental, and Christians have spilled a lot of the blood of fellow Christians over disputes about “salvation through faith” versus “salvation through works.” But from Kierkegaard’s point of view, the 19th  ­century bourgeois “Christians” misunderstood both “works” (which they understood as “good deeds” and “faith” which they understood as “belief”). For an existentialist, Christian or Jewish, the “transformation of the ­whole of an individual’s life” of which Hadot speaks involves a transformation of both the notion of “faith” and the meaning of “good deed.” Faith ceases to be equated with belief in some propositions, and good deed ceases to be equated with some conventional notion of ­doing one’s duty. I say this, ­because if Rosenzweig had accepted such doctrines as “Torah misinai” (the Torah was dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai), this would not in itself have been incompatible with his being an existentialist. But what makes him a difficult thinker—­and makes his disgust with theologies according to which God is a h ­ uman projection, theologies which he denounces as “atheistic theology,” while insisting on certain fundamental ­theses about God and Redemption, problematic—is the difficulty of determining just why and how he tolerates certain deviations from traditional belief and not o ­ thers. If we can determine that, then I think we ­w ill get a better picture of this complex thinker. Rosenzweig’s Toleration of (or Indifference to?) Certain Traditional Beliefs

­ ere are some examples of Rosenzweig’s non-­traditional side. I discuss H ­these in the second chapter of my book, the chapter (mainly) on Rosen­ zweig’s The Star of Redemption.5 I point out that although, in a letter to the 5. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1985).

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leaders of the ­Free Jewish Institute of Learning of which he was one of the found­ers, he dismisses text-­critical approaches to Judaism (Wellhausen), psychological approaches (William James and Freud), and so­cio­log­i­cal approaches (Weber), he does not say that the text-­critical scholars are wrong (as Hertz, does, for example, in many of the comments in his widely used edition of the Pentateuch). What he says is that “we” (practicing Jews) know Judaism “differently.” And he goes on: “What do we know when we do? Certainly not that all t­ hese historical and so­cio­log­i­cal explanations are false. But in the light of the d ­ oing, the right d ­ oing in which we experience the real­ity of the Law, the explanations are of superficial and subsidiary importance.”6 So the truth or falsity of the doctrines of the infallibility and divine origin of the Bible, which text-­critics like Wellhausen call into question, is “of superficial and subsidiary importance!” Nor does Rosenzweig believe in reward and punishment in an afterlife (which he never mentions). Both in the last chapter of the Büchlein and in the first part of The Star of Redemption, death is something to be faced bravely, not something to be “eluded.” Nor does redemption, in Rosen­ zweig, involve a ­f uture Messianic or post-­Messianic era. In one sense, redemption is simply God’s love, which we can experience now. Redemption is a pre­sent event. In another sense, we do perhaps anticipate redemption in some form in the f­ uture, but what that means we do not know and do not need to know. “Thus man may act unconcerned with the outcome; he may act according to the requirements of the world as it is ­today. That day, the day when action is required, lets him understand what he must perform. The realm of time is the proper arena for his action. He does not need to wait ­until truth has risen from the depths.”7 Putting This Together

On the positive side, Rosenzweig insists on the real­ity of God, World, and Man. Each is “something,” and not the vacuous “nothing” that the phi­los­ o­pher substitutes. The world is the world, and not “appearance,” or “consciousness an und fur sich,” or mere “as-­i f”; Man, the name-­g iver, is the 6. Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 245. 7. Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 93.

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bridge between God and the world; and God is simply God. The non-­identity of World, God (no form of pantheism is tolerated by Rosenzweig, any more than idealism), and Man (who is both a part of the world and more than a part of the world) is absolute. ­These are, I claim, philosophical dogmas for Rosenzweig, however much he denounces philosophy. He may say that ­these dogmas, indeed the ­whole of Part I of the Star, are of secondary importance, not worth anything by themselves, what is impor­tant is “experiential philosophy,” the “new thinking”; but experiential philosophy is, it seems to me, a name for a set of spiritual exercises for ­those, and only for ­those, who accept t­ hese fundamental premises. One ­thing that Rosenzweig’s non-­traditional side enables him to do is maintain the irrelevance of science and empirical studies generally to his religious faith. Psy­chol­ogy of religion, sociology of religion, text-­critical and other historical studies of the history of Judaism are ­free to discover what they may. It is all “of superficial and subsidiary importance.” (This separation of the spheres is helped by Rosenzweig’s positivistic understanding of science as just concerned with regularities in the “appearances,” on which I remarked e­ arlier.) At the same time, what I have called Rosenzweig’s “religious existentialism” enables him to preach and teach, to experience Judaism and teach ­others to experience Judaism as (in Hadot’s language) “a mode of existing-­in-­the-­world, which had to be practiced at each instant; and the goal of which was to transform the ­whole of the individual’s life.” I have not concealed the fact that it is with his religious existentialism that I sympathize, and not with the residual philosophical dogmas. A Question I Would Put to Rosenzweig, if I Could

Rosenzweig criticizes so many philosophies of religion as making God a “nothing,” that I cannot help wondering, what justifies Rosenzweig in thinking that his “God is something” ­really makes God more than a mere “nothing”? What he tells us is that regarding God as “something” is not to be understood as a claim about God’s essence, it is an expression of a return to “common sense in action.” We are to use the name “God,” and the other names we have for God, including YHWH and “elohim,” without thinking about or seeking a theory of God’s essence, to use t­ hese names as “healthy ­human understanding” (guter Menschenverstand) requires.

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But just how does “healthy ­human understanding” require us to use the name “God”? We are supposed to realize that God loves us; that is the heart and soul of Rosenzweig’s faith experience and his theology. And it is, apparently, to be taken literally—­Hands off! You phi­los­o­phers! But does that mean that God thinks about us? Does God have feelings? Do God’s thoughts and feelings occur in time? No doubt Rosenzweig would say that when we ask t­ hese questions we have moved from “common sense in action” to “philosophy,” from won­der at God’s love for us to “frozen” speculation. But is the idea that we can think of God as loving (and think of that as simply true, ­every bit as true as that what I bought at the grocery was a piece of butter) while not thinking any of ­these “philosophical” thoughts about God ­really plausible? Like Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig wants a sharp line to separate “healthy” uses of words and “unhealthy” ones, but I am suspicious of the idea that such a sharp line exists.

PA RT V

P UT N AM ’ S P HI LOSO P H ICA L FORBEAR S

The two phi­los­o­phers that figure most prominently in this section of Putnam’s philosophical forbears are Wittgenstein and Quine; and a ­g reat deal of what is at stake in t­ hese discussions is how to read each of t­ hese ­great phi­los­o­phers. Putnam discusses how it is best to approach reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in light of a “no chickening out” reading originally formulated by Cora Diamond [Juliet Floyd, Ludwig Wittgenstein].1 According to this reading, Wittgenstein’s famous remark “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be s­ ilent” does not mean that ­there are ­things that cannot be said but can only be shown.2 To think that ­there is a ­viable said / shown distinction is precisely to chicken out. The reply to Dreben is the most explicit statement in the entire volume of Putnam’s dialogical method of philosophizing. It largely concerns two very dif­fer­ent ways of imagining how the conversation between Wittgenstein and Quine would go [Burton Dreben]. ­There is also a portrait of the intellectual scene at Harvard in the 1960s and 1970s, especially of the heated exchanges 1. Cora Diamond, “Throwing Away the Ladder: How to Read the Tractatus,” in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 179–204. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus, ed. C.  K. Ogden (London: Kegan Paul, 1922), 7.

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between the gradu­ate students in the circles of the Harvard Wittgensteinians: Rogers Albritton, Burton Dreben, Stanley Cavell, and, ­later, Warren Goldfarb. Putnam stands a l­ ittle above the fray, remarking: “Although I admire Wittgenstein, I have never considered myself to be a ‘Wittgensteinian.’ ” Regarding his philosophical exchanges with Dreben, Putnam writes, “Burt and I quarreled about philosophy for more than thirty years, and a vital part of my own philosophical development was bound up with ­those quarrels. Moreover, I want to keep Burt alive, and the only way I know to do that is to keep on quarreling with him—in my mind, and, now, in public.” Putnam continues, “I would not ­really be arguing with him if I did not continually hear his voice responding to my arguments. . . . ​I have thought of a reply on Burt’s behalf, and a reply to that reply . . . ​a nd so it ­w ill continue!” In the text on Quine, Putnam distinguishes two radically dif­fer­ent sorts of philosophical genius: ­those who create believable systems of thought, and ­those who create unbelievable systems of thought. In Putnam’s mind, Quine belongs to the latter group. Part of Putnam’s way of d ­ oing justice to the greatness of Quine is to acknowledge the skeptical radicality of his thought, which is tantamount to saying that his conclusions—­particularly, ontological relativity and the indeterminacy of translation—­a re reductios of his arguments. Nonetheless, Putnam is happy to acknowledge that Quine has forced upon us questions about translation, meaning, and understanding that ­w ill go on for a very long time. Quine also has done us the ­great ser­vice of showing the limits of “naturalism” (i.e., scientific naturalism) when pushed to its logical conclusions. The last paper concerns phi­los­o­phers whose influence on Putnam through the years fits into a story of his philosophical development: Morton White, W.  V.  O. Quine, Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap, Paul Ziff, John Austin, Richard Boyd, James Conant, Michael Dummett, Richard Rorty, John McDowell, and Stanley Cavell. But t­ here are other phi­los­o­phers who had a profound but more pervasive influence on Putnam’s philosophy that do not fit neatly into a developmental account, including Noam Chomsky, Cora Diamond, Nelson Goodman, Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, Charles Travis, and Vivian Walsh.

CHAPTER 33

Ludwig Wittgenstein (Juliet Floyd): On the Tractatus (1998)

L

et me begin by saying that I greatly admire Juliet Floyd’s finely crafted paper. I, too, read the Tractatus as a dialectical work which is meant to undermine, not endorse, solipsism, the notion that t­ here are “limits” to language and thought, and the notorious “say / show” distinction. The interpretation she has presented to­night takes seriously and quite literally Wittgenstein’s famous statement that the propositions of the Tractatus are themselves “nonsense” (unsinnig), and the reader who understands Wittgenstein aright (not the reader who understands the propositions in question aright!) must “throw away the ladder.” In this re­spect, her interpretation follows Cora Diamond in “not chickening out.”1 But t­ here are many difficult passages in the Tractatus which have to be explained in a way that goes against the ste­reo­t ype of what Wittgenstein is supposed to have

Originally published as “Floyd, Wittgenstein and Loneliness,” in Loneliness, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 109–114. 1. Cora Diamond, “Throwing Away the Ladder: How to Read the Tractatus,” in her The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 179–204.

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believed when he wrote that work if the “no chickening out” interpretation is correct, and to­night Juliet Floyd has done a brilliant job of dealing with perhaps the most difficult such passages. I ­shall begin this comment by saying a ­little more about what “not chickening out” means. ­A fter that I w ­ ill turn to some ideas in the Tractatus that I (and Wittgenstein himself, in his l­ ater philosophy) found more problematical, and that I find to be in some tension with the ideas Juliet Floyd discussed. Lastly, I ­will say a brief word about a question which I am sure is in your minds, namely, “What does all this have to do with loneliness?”2 Limits and the Tractatus

Let me begin with the reasons for “not chickening out.” “Chickening out” ­here—­Cora Diamond is the one who introduced this term in this connection—­means saying “Sure, Wittgenstein’s propositions cannot be said, but what they mean can be shown. Thus “not chickening out” means denying that the say / show distinction is coherent, or, to put it more clearly, it means that one maintains (1) that the talk of what can be “shown” but not “said” in the Tractatus is itself included in Wittgenstein’s final revocation of the propositions of his book; and (2) that (as Jim Conant has put it)3 one refuses to say that ­there are two kinds of nonsense, “deep” nonsense and “plain” nonsense (“Deep” nonsense being, supposedly, nonsense that “shows” what it cannot “say”). But why should one not say that t­ here is such a t­ hing as “deep” nonsense? Well, for one ­thing, notice that the Tractatus explic­itly maintains that what cannot be said cannot be thought. This is already clear in the passage from the Preface that Juliet Floyd quoted. Thus, if ­there ­were something that could only be “shown,” it would be something one could not think. (Nor could one think, of such an X, “I am ­going to show this person X,” for the thought of X is an essential constituent of the thought that one is g­ oing to show one’s interlocutor X.) “Seeing” such an X (if it can be “shown” I ­shall assume it can also be “seen”) would then seem to be the

2. The topic of the lecture-­ series to which Juliet Floyd’s paper belongs was “Loneliness.” 3. James Conant, “Must We Show What We Cannot Say?,” in The Senses of Stanley Cavell (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989).



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sort of utterly inexpressible experience that Plotinus and Porphyry claim to have had. But that c­ an’t be right e­ ither, as a reading of the Tractatus. Not only is Wittgenstein’s religiosity, so far as we know about it, quite ­free of Neoplatonism as far as we know), but the ­things that, according to Wittgenstein’s “propositions,” can be shown but not said are too prosaic for such an “elevated” reading. One c­ an’t, for example, according to Wittgenstein, refer to facts (facts a­ ren’t objects, not even in the sense in which a property or a relation may be a Tractarian object). So all the propositions about “facts” in the Tractatus, including the so-­called “picture theory of meaning,” are unsinnig. But if what they fail to “say” is a something that can be “shown” it is an awfully discursive something. Ramsey’s remark that “If you ­can’t say it you ­can’t whistle it ­either” would be a devastating—­and devastatingly obvious—­refutation of the Tractatus if that reading w ­ ere right. Thus the “no chickening out interpretation,” in addition to agreeing with Wittgenstein’s own revocatory statements in the work, is also the one that agrees with the princi­ple of charity in interpretation. But the supposed “solipsism” in the Tractatus is couched precisely in the language of “limits,” and of what we “cannot say in logic.” The illusion of a “truth” in solipsism is part and parcel of the illusion that ­there is something that cannot be said (about “the limits of my world”) that we can nonetheless meaningfully “show.” Wittgenstein’s purpose was not to endorse a sophisticated (or sophistical) version of solipsism, but to convict it of being “simply nonsense.” Troublespots in the Tractatus

I said above that t­ here are ideas in the Tractatus that I find problematical, and that may be in some tension with the ideas Juliet Floyd discussed. I ­w ill mention just two of ­these: (1) the idea that what can be expressed in language equals what can be expressed in scientific language (one encounters that in the phrase quoted by Floyd, “what can be said, i.e., the propositions of natu­ral science”); and (2) the related idea that t­ here ­aren’t any true propositions about (in Juliet Floyd’s phrase) “what is evil and what is good.” The first of ­these (and, by implication, the second as well) seems to me the target of much of Wittgenstein’s ­later work. Once Wittgenstein ­really freed himself from the Tractarian picture of language as picturing

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facts, where facts are conceived of as configurations of objects, and of the idea that all meaningful language is, at bottom, description—­a nd, in my view, it was one t­ hing for Wittgenstein to realize that that picture explodes upon itself, and quite another t­ hing—­indeed, a task that required many years of thought and many false attempts—to find a dif­fer­ent way of looking at language—he also (rightly) rejected the idea that t­ here is any one function that all language which is susceptible of truth and falsity, of rational discussion, of justification and objectivity, ­etc., must subserve. (Obviously I cannot defend this ­here.) And I find this identification of meaningful language with propositions of natu­ral science in tension with the rejection of the idea of limits of language, ­because the strongest argument for the rejection of such limits, it seems to me, is precisely the unforeseeability of the uses to which language may be put in the ­f uture. Once we have ­limited meaningful language to “propositions of natu­ral science” we are on a slippery slope which ends with Bernard Williams’s notion of an “absolute conception of the world.” This is not the occasion to expand upon this remark. What All This Has to Do with Loneliness

The topic of this lecture series is “Loneliness,” and Juliet Floyd did make one remark—­a fascinating one!—­connecting her discussion with that topic, namely that her theme to­night was “a metaphysical version of loneliness— or, better, a metaphysical attempt to overcome the possibility of loneliness, namely, solipsism.” I want to say a word about the intimate connection between what used to be called “the egocentric predicament,” a supposed predicament that led a number of famous phi­los­o­phers to the edge of (some would say “over the edge” of) solipsism and to a certain metaphysical loneliness, leaving it to Juliet Floyd to expand on the way in which solipsism can be seen as an “attempt to overcome the possibility of loneliness.” One of ­those phi­los­o­phers was Rudolf Carnap. In the Aufbau Carnap presented a reconstruction of “the propositions of natu­ral science” in which all t­ hose propositions ­were supposed to be “reduced” to propositions about “the given.” 4 The “given” was identified with the Eigenpsy4. Rudolf Carnap, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (translated as The Logical Construction of the World) [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967].



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chisch, i.e., with the sense-­experiences of the individual. So, if (contrary to Carnap’s explicit intentions, of course) we take the system of propositions presented as the reconstruction to be an “ontology,” the world is just the experiential world of the individual who constructs or employs the system. Carnap, who did not want to take the system ontologically in this sense, referred to his procedure as “methodological solipsism.” It might seem that “methodological solipsism” (as opposed to “ontological” solipsism) is harmless, and that is certainly how Carnap viewed it. A ­ fter all, did he not say that a reconstruction in which the propositions of natu­ral science are reduced to “physicalistic language” is equally pos­ si­ble? However, in an article written in the same period, Carnap also explained that it is the reduction of all the propositions of science to “the given” (or “immediate experience”) that proves the validity of knowledge, and thus solves the prob­lems of epistemology, while the reduction to physicalistic language serves quite a dif­fer­ent function—­namely, showing that all scientific objects fit into a nomological order (“the rule of law”) and thus “intersubjective knowledge” is pos­si­ble.5 But the reduction of the propositions of science to propositions about my experiences can only prove their validity if ­those propositions (including propositions about “intersubjective knowledge”) have no content beyond that shown by their phenomenalist analy­sis. And if the content of science is entirely about my experiences, how am I not a “real” solipsist? (Neurath is supposed to have remarked that the difference between methodological solipsism and real solipsism is “hard to state”).6 5. “The positivist system corresponds to the epistemological viewpoint b ­ ecause it proves the validity of knowledge by reduction to the given. The materialist system corresponds to the viewpoint of the empirical sciences, for in this system all concepts are reduced to the physical, to the only domain which exhibits the complete rule of law and makes intersubjective knowledge pos­si­ble.” Rudolf Carnap, “The Old and the New Logic” [1930–1931], in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 144. 6. In his well-­k nown article “Carnap’s Aufbau Reconsidered” (Nous 21 [1987]: 521– 545), Michael Friedman suggested that the (first-­person) phenomenalist ontology of the Aufbau does not pre­sent Carnap with prob­lems of solipsism, idealism, e­ tc., b ­ ecause the “content” of science, for Carnap, does not lie in the objects quantified over at all, but rather in the structures exhibited by ­those objects. But this does not get Carnap off the hook, for the following reasons: (1) While it is true that the structure of the model is (roughly) preserved if one changes the person who is ­doing the reconstruction, and that in that sense one may speak of an invariant structure that is the object of intersubjective knowledge, it does change if one changes from a phenomenalist to a physicalist basis. The models of the

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Yet Carnap does tell us, in the Aufbau itself, that dif­fer­ent individuals can employ the solipsist reconstruction, and can even communicate by virtue of the isomorphism of the structures of their (incommunicable) private contents. “You are only a logical construct out of my experiences—­but you too can be a solipsist, dear reader.” What is this but a desperate reaching out for an Other who is hidden b ­ ehind the veil of my private experiences? We find something like the same idea of an incommunicable etwas that only the other knows, and this same reaching out for the etwas in some of Bertrand Russell’s writing. Describing Bertrand Russell’s view in “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” Cora Diamond writes,7 . . . ​let us suppose that each of us is acquainted with his or her own self. This is a view Russell is not certain of, but treats as a serious possibility. Now consider a statement about Bismarck. Since we are supposing that Bismarck has direct acquaintance with himself, he ­w ill be able to use the name ‘Bismarck’ so that it directly designates that self. If he makes the statement, ‘Bismarck is an acute diplomatist’ or ‘I am an acute diplomatist’, his self, that he is acquainted with, is actually a constituent of his judgment. But you or I or anyone e­ lse can think about Bismarck only via some description; we are not directly acquainted with Bismarck’s self. If we say ‘Bismarck was an acute diplomatist’, what would come out in an analy­sis of our proposition is that we are not directly designating Bismarck. We designate him via some description. . . . ​ ­Because the object Bismarck is known to Bismarck by acquaintance, but known to us only by a description, the judgment we make about Bismarck is not the same as the judgment that theory are not isomorphic in the latter case. So the “structuralism” that Friedman attributes to Carnap does not provide a notion of content that is preserved when one chooses an alternative basis. (2) Even for me to speak of the structure of someone ­else’s phenomenalist reconstruction assumes that I can speak of other p ­ eople as something other than logical constructions out of my elementary experiences. (On this latter point, see my “Logical Positivism and Intentionality,” collected in my Words and Life, ed. James Conant [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994].) 7. I am quoting from her unpublished Whitehead Lecture at Harvard University, “The Logical Basis of Metaphysics.”



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Bismarck makes about Bismarck. Bismarck has available to him a proposition that he can understand and that we cannot. We can, however, know by description the proposition that Bismarck understands.8 I won­der w ­ hether this idea that other p ­ eople are metaphysically hidden from us might not be the “metaphysical version of loneliness” that Juliet Floyd spoke of in her opening sentence?

8. As Russell himself put it, “. . . ​when we say anything about Bismarck, we should like, if we could, to make the judgment which Bismarck alone can make, namely the judgment of which he himself is the constituent. In this we are necessarily defeated, since the ­actual Bismarck is unknown to us.”

CHAPTER 34

Burton Dreben: On Quine and Wittgenstein (2000)

W

ittgenstein long had a strong repre­sen­t a­tion at Harvard. Indeed, when I moved from MIT to Harvard in the Fall of 1965, ­there ­were no less than three distinguished Wittgenstein scholars on the faculty: Rogers Albritton (who was wooed away from Harvard by UCLA in the early 1970’s), Stanley Cavell, and Burton Dreben. (And since Albritton left, it has had another impor­tant Wittgenstein scholar, Warren Goldfarb.) And for much of the time that I have been at Harvard, the Philosophy Department was riven by disagreements among the gradu­ate students of the “Wittgensteinians.” I say “the gradu­ate students” b ­ ecause Cavell has told me that Burton Dreben always insisted to him “You and I d ­ on’t disagree.” But the gradu­ate students! At times it seemed to me like the debates in the Rus­

A lecture given at a two-­day meeting of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science titled “The Analytic Tradition: A Tribute to Burton Dreben,” October 26–27, 2000. It is a response to two papers of Dreben: “Putnam, Quine—­and the Facts,” Philosophical Topics 20, no. 1: The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. Christopher S. Hill (1992): 293–315; and “Quine and Wittgenstein: The Odd C ­ ouple,” in Wittgenstein and Quine, ed. Robert L. Arrington and Hans-­Johann Glock (London: Routledge, 1996), 39–61.

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sian Social Demo­cratic Party just before that party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (not that I was t­ here, of course!), or perhaps between the split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and the Rus­sian Revolution! One could almost see a February Revolution and an October Revolution beginning to prepare themselves! Feelings ran high, friendships w ­ ere broken off, all kinds of crazy rumors w ­ ere spread. It was a very intense business. Yet it is curiously hard to see what the issue was. I think it is only since Burton Dreben died that I have figured out what was ­going on intellectually (emotionally, of course, a lot was g­ oing on, and a lot of this took place through the 1960’s, when ­people ­were emotionally worked-up about the Vietnam War). What I want to comment on is what was at stake intellectually. It is a prob­lem b ­ ecause, although the students perceived, or thought they perceived, enormous differences between Cavell and Dreben, nevertheless, on the questions that most obviously divide Wittgenstein interpreters—­the criticisms that Cavellians have made of Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker’s interpretation, for example1—it was hard to find disagreements among the “Harvard Wittgensteinians.” They all disagreed with “Baker & Hacker.” And they all felt admiration for Cora Diamond’s work. I should add that I managed to be good friends with all parties. This was easy to do, b ­ ecause, although I admire Wittgenstein, I have never considered myself a “Wittgensteinian.” To extend my po­liti­cal analogy, I guess I was a “confused liberal”—­and in fact that is exactly how Dreben portrayed me in “Putnam, Quine—­and the Facts.”2 Although the subject t­ here is Quine, what he said ­there about my relation to Quine also exactly captures his view of my relation to Wittgenstein. He wrote, “Quine, like Hume, is a truly radical phi­los­o­pher. Putnam is not. He is the liberal—or at least the Girondist. Quine, he proclaims, goes ‘too far.’ Needed Reform. Yes! Total Revolution, No!”3 But I want to stick with my question, “What exactly was this Witt­ genstein-­strife in Emerson Hall that lasted so many years all about?” 1. See, for example, Steven G. Affeldt, “The Ground of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgment and Intelligibility in Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell,” Eu­ro­pean Journal of Philosophy 6, no. 1 (April 1998): 1–31; and Stephen Mulhall, “The Givenness of Grammar: A Reply to Steven Affeldt,” ibid., 32–44. Affeldt was a Cavell student, and Mulhall, although an admirer of Cavell, is a follower of Baker and Hacker. 2. Dreben, “Putnam, Quine—­a nd the Facts.” 3. Ibid., 296.

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Well, the gradu­ate students themselves always expressed the issue in more or less the following language: “For Professor Dreben it’s the end of philosophy.” The phrase “End of Philosophy Interpretation of Wittgenstein” was also on many lips. But the prob­lem is: “What does that mean?” No one analyzed the idea of an “End of Philosophy” reading of Wittgenstein. I have to admit that one did immediately “get that feeling.” But the question is, “What is b ­ ehind that?” And I think that I have figured out what is ­behind that. But to explain what it is, I ­shall have to discuss Burton Dreben’s relation to Quine as well as about his relation to Wittgenstein. For this ­w ill be my thesis: that what Dreben did was to identify the “antimetaphysical” thrust of Quine’s philosophy with the antimetaphysical thrust of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. I ­w ill not conceal the fact that, on my own reading of Wittgenstein, this was a serious error. Thus, what I w ­ ill be d ­ oing ­here is quarreling with Burt. But what e­ lse should I do? Burt and I quarreled about philosophy for more than thirty years, and a vital part of my own philosophical development was bound up with ­those quarrels. Moreover, I want to keep Burt alive, and the only way I know to do that is to keep on quarreling with him— in my mind, and, now, in public. So ­here goes!4 I think that one can see the identification of the antimetaphysical moment in Quine with the antimetaphysical moment in Wittgenstein particularly in two papers: “Putnam, Quine—­and the Facts” and “Quine and Wittgenstein; the Odd ­Couple.”5 This may seem a strange assertion, since “Putnam, Quine—­and the Facts” is not about Wittgenstein at all (it is about Putnam and Quine, and about how Putnam “misreads” Quine and Quine is innocent of all of Putnam’s criticisms), and “Quine and Wittgenstein,” in spite of the title, is mainly about Quine as well. I propose that in fact ­these are the key to seeing the sense in which Burt was an “end of philosophy” phi­los­o­pher. And ­here is the reason. You ­will notice, if you read “Quine and Wittgenstein: The Odd ­Couple” (a lovely title and a very elegant essay), that t­ here is an absolute refusal to concede anywhere (more implicit than explicit, but absolute nonetheless) that t­ here is the slightest disagreement between Quine’s philosophy and 4. Now that I have given away what I am d ­ oing and why, I w ­ ill from now on write “Burt,” and not “Dreben” or “Burton Dreben.” 5. Dreben, “Quine and Wittgenstein: The Odd C ­ ouple.”



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Wittgenstein’s. If you think that Wittgenstein would have regarded Quine as someone whose work deserves criticism, you are completely wrong. You have e­ ither misread Quine or you have misread Wittgenstein or both. I think that this is the key fact about Burt’s philosophical attitude. And I think that Burt had to pay a price for making Wittgenstein totally compatible with Quine. The price he paid for insisting that Quine is metaphysically innocent, and therefore not subject to any sort of Wittgensteinian criticism, is a position which might be summarized as follows: t­ here are ­really only two kinds of meaningful questions.6 First of all, t­ here are serious questions. (This notion of a “serious” question was impor­t ant for him.) For example, ­there are scientific questions. But Burt did not want to say “and the rest are nonsense.” What Burt would have said—­a nd it is impor­tant that he was a very close friend of Rawls, as well as of Quine—is “­either it is a “serious” scientific question, or it is a “serious” practical question,” where “practical question” d ­ oesn’t mean the kind of question that Kant treated in the Critique of Practical Reason. Ethical disputes w ­ ere nonsensical, in Burt’s eyes, ­unless they could be translated into disputes over such issues as “What should our po­liti­cal system be like?,” “What should the constitution of a just society be like?” (­these are serious questions ­because they include such questions as “Would a just society be race-­ blind?,” “If not, why not and how not?,” “Does a just society prohibit or not prohibit abortion?,” and so on). Purely theoretical questions in ethics are not “serious.” Rawls’s work passes the test, ­because it is concerned ultimately with what should we do? (as Rawls himself pointed out in “Justice as Fairness: Po­liti­cal not Metaphysical”).7 From this point of view the questions that have exercised me for over thirty years, “Are the arguments for the fact-­value dichotomy any good?,” “Are the arguments for noncognitivism in ethics any good?” do not even arise. “You are spinning your wheels,” from Burt’s point of view, if you argue on a theoretical level about such questions as “Do value judgments have a truth value?,” “Are value judgments cognitively meaningful?,” “Can ­there be ethical knowledge?” The “serious” question is: What Should We

6. This is not quite a conventional positivism, although in conversation Burt did once declare proudly “I am the last positivist.” 7. John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Po­liti­cal not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (1985): 223–251.

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Do? What should we do about abortion? What should we do about welfare? What should we do about health care? What should we do about religious fanat­i­cism in the world? What should we do about relations between liberal states and states founded on one and only one religious creed? ­etc. Worry about what to do! And d ­ on’t worry about t­ hese traditional philosophical questions. In fact, the hostility to traditional philosophical questions was read into Quine very explic­itly by Burt. For example, in one of the appendices to “Putnam, Quine—­and the Facts,” we read, “The essential point that is missed again and again about Quine is that his basic position is what he calls ‘empiricism’; prediction is its touchstone. As he has written ‘My position early and late is empiricism, and hence prediction as touchstone. Physics enters my picture only b ­ ecause, in my naturalism, I take the current world picture as the last word to date. If evidence mounts for telepathy or ghosts, welcome. Physicists would go back to their drawing boards. ­W hether to call the resulting theory physics still, on determinationist grounds, is a verbal question.’ ”8 [From Burt’s discussion of this quotation from an unpublished manuscript by Quine, it is clear that he missed the structure of Quine’s first sentence. Burt treated his own quotation as if it read “empiricism equals prediction as touchstone,” and not “empiricism and hence prediction as touchstone.” He did not see Quine as avowing an ideology h ­ ere, although he obviously was. Note, for example, the use of the word “naturalism”—­ Quine is very fond of certain “ism” words.] Now let us quote Burt further: “For Quine a ‘physical predicate’ is any predicate that is successful with re­spect to prediction, that is any theory that yields true observation sentences and no false ones.”9 Burt is sloppy h ­ ere (perhaps he thinks it d ­ oesn’t ­matter), ­because this is not Quine’s doctrine, as he has to know.—­I speak as if Burt is still alive, ­because I want him to still be alive!—­But listen to a ­little more of the passage: “For Quine a ‘physical predicate’ is any predicate that is successful with re­spect to prediction, that is any theory that yields true observation sentences and no false ones. Quine’s primary interest has always been his 8. Dreben is quoting ­here from what he describes as an “unpublished manuscript” by Quine. “Putnam, Quine—­a nd the Facts,” 308 and 315, n. 76. 9. Ibid., 308.



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version of physicalist (naturalist) epistemology. Indeterminacy of translation has never been a primary concern. But just as Quine’s physicalism is not what most phi­los­o­phers have thought ‘physicalism’ to be—­g iving laws that explic­itly reduce any given subject ­matter to physics—so Quine’s physicalist epistemology is not what most phi­los­o­phers have thought epistemology to be. Quine never—at least hardly ever—­resolves a ‘traditional prob­lem’; he dismisses it.” Now, this dismissive attitude is clearly being recommended by Burt in this essay. ­Don’t solve traditional prob­lems, dismiss them! And in “Quine and Wittgenstein; the odd ­couple” we see Quine and Wittgenstein presented as, in effect, just two dif­fer­ent ways of dismissing traditional prob­ lems, e­ ither by careful attention to grammar (Wittgenstein) or, alternatively, by proposing to drop the troublesome locutions from our language and showing us how we can get along without them (Quine). In both cases the purpose is to “dismiss” the traditional prob­lems. In my own writing I have argued in vari­ous places that Quine does have “metaphysical” doctrines, and I have criticized two of ­those doctrines. The purpose of “Putnam, Quine—­and the Facts” is to rebut t­ hose criticisms, and the reading of Quine that underlies them. The two central doctrines in Quine that I have criticized are ontological relativity and indeterminacy of translation. (Of course, I have also been tremendously influenced by other doctrines of Quine’s, notably by his criticism of the overblown notion of “analyticity” that many phi­los­o­phers appeal to, and by his insistence that a sound philosophy of mathe­matics must re­spect the way in which mathe­matics is applied in physics.) Now, with re­spect to indeterminacy of translation, Burt’s strategy was to say that all Quine was ­doing was criticizing the “museum myth of meaning,” that is, the idea that meanings are objects of some kind. Well, first of all, this reading does considerably trivialize Quine’s claim. For Quine is hardly the first phi­los­o­pher to have attacked the museum myth of meaning.10 (Moreover, Quine himself has protested against 10. Cf. R. G. Collingwood’s Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 34 (“The logician’s proposition seemed to me a kind of ghostly double of the grammarian’s sentence”), and Hans Reichenbach’s Experience and Prediction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), Chapter 1, in which Reichenbach says that the theory of meaning concerns two questions: When is a sentence meaningful? and When do two sentences have the same meaning? (i.e., t­ here is no further question as to what meanings “are”).

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“this emphasis on reification” in interpreting his doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation.)11 But if it trivializes the claim, that is grist for Burt’s mill; Quine’s claim is intended to be trivial, Burt claims. But is it? It is part of the force of saying “­there is no fact of the m ­ atter as to w ­ hether p” that p is neither true nor false. To be sure, Quine does not deny the existence of “good translation” in the sense of useful translation (useful for “helping ­people to influence ­others and be influenced by them”)12 but the fact that it may be more useful to equate Dummett’s word “cat” with my word “cat” than with any other word or phrase does not make it the case that “Dummett’s word and Hilary Putnam’s word are correct translations of each other” is true. By saying that t­ here is no fact of the m ­ atter as to ­whether Dummett’s word “cat” is correctly translated by Hilary Putnam’s word “cat,” Quine is claiming that the statement: (S) The word “cat” in such and such a sentence of Michael Dummett’s is correctly translated into Hilary Putnam’s idiolect as “cat.” is neither true nor false. (S) does not have a truth value. And while previous phi­los­o­phers have held that t­ here is no object which is the “meaning” of the word “cat,” no phi­los­o­pher before Quine has held that such sentences as (S) lack truth value. Moreover, Quine makes clear in Word and Object that his doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation applies to attempts to state the bare extension of terms in a 3rd person’s speech; it is not just the rejection of “intensions” that is at stake h ­ ere. Thus, Quine holds not only that the “museum myth of meaning” is wrong, but that “the word cat in Michael Dummett’s idiolect refers to cats” and “The German word Johannisbeern refers to currants” are also statements which lack truth value. I think I know what Burt’s response would have been, had he lived to make it: Hilary, you understand Quine’s ‘­there is no fact of the ­matter’ as a denial that it is true that, for example, Parlez-­vous Francais? means ‘Do you speak French?’ But true for Quine is just disquo11. The Philosophy of W. V. O. Quine, expanded edition, ed. L. E. Hahn and P. A. Schilpp (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1996), 428; his reply to Alston (ibid., 73) begins “Hypostasis of meanings is a red herring.”(!) 12. “Reply to Robert Nozick,” in The Philosophy of W. V. O. Quine, 366.



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tational. Of course, you can say it’s true that Parlez-­vous Francais? means ‘Do you speak French?’, but you s­ houldn’t put any weight on ‘true’ ever. You can say just say Parlez-­vous Francais? means ‘Do you speak French?’ and not bother with the word ‘true’. Quine never denies that t­ here is such a ­thing as good translation.13 Well, ­there are two ­things I want to say to this. ­There is a Quinian distinction that Burt never mentions, the distinction between the only conceptual scheme we can take seriously when our interest is in saying what t­ here truly and “ultimately” is, and the “second grade system” in which we allow ourselves to talk about meaning and good translation. In Word and Object, it is put thus: Not that I would forswear the daily use of intentional idioms [i.e., of meaning-­talk or reference-­talk], or maintain that they are practically dispensable. But they call, I think, for bifurcation in canonical notation. . . . ​If we are limning the true and ultimate structure of real­ity, the canonical scheme for us is the austere scheme that knows no quotation but direct quotation [i.e., quotation of marks and noises, not statements about the sense and reference of expressions] and no propositional attitudes but only the physical constitution and be­hav­ior of organisms.14 This from a supposedly “nonmetaphysical” phi­los­o­pher! This first-­grade system in which we are supposed to “limn the true and ultimate structure of real­ity,” please note, is not just science, but formalized science, science as it is correctly formalized (which means, in par­tic­u­lar, leaving out the term synonymous, the propositional attitudes, and so on). Yet Burt says in the first appendix to “Putnam, Quine—­and the Facts” that “Quine has a very broad conception of science. He even includes history.”15 Come on! History without beliefs and desires? Has Quine written a history book without any propositional attitudes?16 13. “Quine never denies that translation, good translation, takes place.” “Putnam, Quine—­a nd the Facts,” 304. 14. W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 221. 15. Dreben, “Putnam, Quine—­a nd the Facts,” 307. 16. In Ontological Relativity Quine refers to the “propositional” attitudes, e­ tc., we need to speak of in ordinary language (as when we say as “Parlez-­vous Francais? means ‘Do you speak French?’ ” and “I want some more bread”) as forming part of what he revealingly

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­There is an answer that I can imagine Burt giving to all this (and I would not ­really be arguing with him in my head as I do if I did not continually try to hear his voice responding to my arguments), and that is the following: “Hilary, insofar as we do need to talk about ‘same meaning,’ we can substitute for it in our first-­grade conceptual system. We can describe what is g ­ oing on. We can say, well, the reason you say that A has the same meaning as B is b ­ ecause that is part of a strategy of substitution, say (if you are talking to a Frenchman) substituting Parlez-­vous francais? for what you would have said if you had been talking to an En­g lish speaker, ‘Do you speak French?’ It is part of a strategy of substitution which leads to successful communication.” This is the sense in which Quine is supposed to grant that t­ here is such a ­thing as good translation, ­because t­ here are translations (recursive functions from the sentences of one language to the sentences of another) which lead to successful communication. It is high time to recall what I called my thesis that what Burt did was to identify the “antimetaphysical” thrust of Quine’s philosophy with the antimetaphysical thrust of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and my claim that this is a serious error. What I want to bring out is how much of a distortion of Wittgenstein’s aims and methods results if one claims that none of this would be criticized by Wittgenstein. First, t­ here is the supposition that Wittgenstein w ­ ouldn’t criticize the idea that what we do in translation is construct recursive functions defined over the ­whole language! Wittgenstein w ­ ouldn’t criticize that? What is the ­whole of Part I of Remarks on the Foundations of Mathe­matics but an attack on the idea that you can see what mathe­matics ­really is by formalizing it? And if you take an area like translation which in fact no one has successfully formalized (machine translation is at best a very weak approximation to good translation), and treat it as if what is ­really ­going on is machine translation—­Wittgenstein w ­ ouldn’t criticize that?

calls our second-­grade [conceptual] system. Obviously, it is formalized science (“regimented” science), properly formalized science, that is our first-­grade conceptual system. Every­thing ­else is ­either junk or second-­g rade system, the stuff we need for the practical questions. See W.  V.  O. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 24.



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But the ­thing that is astounding is that Burt seems to accept Quine’s claim to have operationalized the notion of “successful communication.”17 Without that claim, t­ here is no notion of “good translation” in the scheme that “limns the true and ultimate structure of real­ity” at all. It is not as if ­there ­were some big story in Quine about how ­there is this difficult prob­lem, “How do we operationalize successful translation?” [or successful communication]. Quine does tell us that a sentence is meaningful in a language if uttering it d ­ oesn’t provoke “reactions sug18 gestive of bizarreness”; but in Word and Object ­there is virtually no criterion for successful translation beyond correct prediction of speech-­ dispositions (a criterion which, of course, leaves correct translation woefully indeterminate—­that is, indeed, the point of Word and Object ). Only in Pursuit of Truth, ­a fter Quine gave up the idea that observation sentences can be equated in meaning if they have the same stimulus meaning for the linguist and for the native, does a “criterion for correct translation appear,” namely, fluency of conversation.19 So, Wittgenstein would leave unchallenged the idea that ­there is a single kind of reaction, an identifiable kind of reaction, that you give when and only when someone utters meaningless words? Or that t­ here is an operational test for “fluency of communication,” one which tells you when what puzzles a speaker is why his or her interlocutor would utter words with ­those meanings in just this situation?” (As opposed to thinking the interlocutor is making perfect sense, but is saying something objectionable, or “crazy” in some other sense?) Can you r­ eally operationalize the notion of finding what is said bizarre on account of its linguistic inappropriateness?, or the notion of finding conversation is not ­going “smoothly” for linguistic reasons—­not to say, do so without already helping yourself to the very notions you want to operationalize? Why would Wittgenstein be supposed to leave all that scot-­free, absolutely unchallenged?

17. Actually, I do not read Quine as ever making such a claim. But for the sake of argument, I accept Burt’s interpretation h ­ ere. 18. W. V. O. Quine, “The Prob­lem of Meaning in Linguistics,” in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 54. 19. W.  V.  O. Quine, Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 43.

316 Putnam’s Philosophical Forbears

­There is ­really something quite amazing about the idea that what Quine is ­really saying and what Wittgenstein is ­really saying ­don’t clash at all. Before I close, I want to briefly look at another Quinian doctrine that I have criticized, the celebrated doctrine of ontological relativity. One of Quine’s own examples is his famous claim that t­ here is no fact of the m ­ atter as to w ­ hether when he speaks of his cat, the word “Tabitha” (the cat’s name) refers to the cat or to the cosmos minus the cat.20 On this view, ­there is no determinate connection (no connection about which t­ here is a “fact of the ­matter” that we can represent in our first-­grade conceptual system) between the word “Tabitha”—or any word or noun phrase—­and any par­tic­ u­lar object. It is in­ter­est­ing that this is a doctrine that Richard Rorty vigorously defends! About this I recently had occasion to write the following: [. . .] Quine is willing to push his own denial that our words stand in [what Rorty calls] a “piecemeal” relation to individual “components of real­ity” quite as far as Rorty, though for very dif­fer­ent reasons. In one place, for example, Quine has written that ­there is no fact of the m ­ atter as to w ­ hether when he speaks of his cat Tabitha he is referring to Tabitha, or the ­whole cosmos minus Tabitha. Yet Quine also insists that he is a “robust realist.” (What this turns out to mean, is that Quine is willing to utter the same “vocables” that we all utter, e.g., “Tabitha is a cat,” and even to say—­w ith the aid of some Tarskian machinery—­“ ‘ Tabitha’ denotes Tabitha.”) Just like the logical positivists, Quine agrees that t­ hese realist-­sounding statements in ordinary language are ones that it would be most unreasonable to deny.21 So he finds an account which allows him to utter [what Rorty calls] the “vocables” that we all use to make t­ hese statements. But on his own account, all he is ­doing when he utters t­ hose “vocables” is uttering sentences which, when conjoined with other “vocables” he utters and with a certain amount of logical technique, ­w ill en20. Ibid., 33. 21. However, the logical positivists did not accept “denotes” and “true” as cognitively meaningful notions u ­ ntil the appearance of Tarski’s “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages” in 1933. This is collected in A. Tarski, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956).



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able him to derive certain “observation conditionals.”22 Moreover, a speaker’s understanding of t­ hose observation conditionals consists simply in the ability to use them as part of a huge linguistic machine which enables the speaker in question to anticipate stimulations of his or her nerve endings (or so Quine’s story runs). Although in a dif­fer­ent way, the story is as solipsistic as the e­ arlier logical positivist story, and just as unsatisfactory.23 Reichenbach, who gave up the positivist view in his Experience and Prediction tried to shake the positivists out of it by saying [I am paraphrasing rather than quoting ­here:] “Look, if that is my picture, why would I buy life insurance?” If my belief that t­ here is a world which w ­ ill exist ­a fter I die is at bottom a set of expectations of the form that I w ­ ill have certain experiences [or certain stimulations of my nerve endings] if I have certain other experiences [stimulations of my nerve endings], would that have the same meaning as far as my practical decisions are concerned?24 I think that the reason that this kind of objection was invisible to Burt is that it is a purely conceptual objection. In offering this objection, I am not speaking to a practical prob­lem of the form “What ­shall we do?” Like Reichenbach, I think that many practical decisions look senseless when we adopt a “methodologically solipsist” perspective on them. And I do think, with Wittgenstein (in On Certainty for example) that some pictures are just pictures that have us in their grip, and that we would be better off without, but other pictures are pictures on which our lives depend, and had better depend. But I am not speaking to a par­tic­u­lar practical prob­lem in the way in which Burt saw Rawls as speaking to par­tic­u­lar practical prob­ lems. And I am not making dif­fer­ent predictions from Quine. I am pointing out a conceptual incoherence in the very heart of this positivist story and not a prob­lem in the details. And I think that for Burt to say that t­ here is a 22. The concept of an “observational conditional” is difficult to explain in a brief space. Roughly, such a conditional says that if A (an observable ­thing or condition) is manifested at any place and time, then B (another observable ­thing or condition) is manifested at the same place and time). (I say “roughly,” ­because strictly speaking it is only the “stimulus meaning[s]”—­a nother of Quine’s concepts—of A and B that are determinate.) 23. Hilary Putnam, “Richard Rorty on Real­ity and Justification,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 82–83. 24. Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), 134–135 and 149–150.

318 Putnam’s Philosophical Forbears

task left for philosophy (I d ­ on’t think it is the only task, but that is not my topic now), a task of conceptual clarification, in a very wide sense of that term, be it local or global, would be seen by him as a betrayal of his very deep loyalty to the heart of Quine’s doctrine. Recall that Burt became a gradu­ate student at just the time that Quine was writing “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Talk about conceptual clarification was seen by Burt as talk about analyticity, and Quine showed that all that is bunkum.25 That is another reason that Burt’s Wittgenstein is so odd. If you suspect all talk of conceptual clarification, how can you understand what Wittgenstein was ­doing? I said that my thesis was that what Burt did was to identify the “antimetaphysical” thrust of Quine’s philosophy with the antimetaphysical thrust of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Why is this such a m ­ istake? B ­ ecause for Quine the sole touchstone in epistemology is prediction, and, by Wittgenstein’s lights, that would surely count as a metaphysical doctrine, even if, like all empiricist doctrines, it claims to be “antimetaphysical.” In addition, Quine was much more than just an epistemologist; he was also a phi­los­o­pher of logic, a phi­los­o­pher of mathe­matics [with re­spect to mathe­ matics, Quine portrayed himself as a reluctant Platonist26], a phi­los­o­ pher of language, and an analytic metaphysician with controversial doctrines. At bottom, if I am right, what many of the gradu­ate students failed to see was that Burton Dreben was not so much interpreting Wittgenstein’s and Quine’s writings as reading into ­those writings his own idiosyncratic way of dismissing the prob­lems of philosophy.27

25. My own position is that ­there is room for a notion of “conceptual truth” which allows for the possibility that scientific discoveries w ­ ill force revision of the putative conceptual truths in question, and which, for that reason among o ­ thers, does not identify them with “analytic” truths in Carnap’s (or, for that m ­ atter, in Kant’s) sense. See my “The Analytic and the Synthetic,” in Mind, Language and Real­ity, vol.  2 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 33–69, and “What Is Mathematical Truth?,” in Mathe­matics, ­Matter and Method, vol.  1 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 60–78. 26. See, for example, Quine’s Theories and T ­ hings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 100. 27. Since writing the above I have thought of a reply on Burt’s behalf, and a reply to that reply . . . ​a nd so it ­w ill continue!

CHAPTER 35

W. V. O. Quine: On Quine’s Radicality (2002)

A

fter Willard Van Orman Quine died at age 92 on Christmas Day, 2000, lengthy obituaries appeared in prestigious newspapers around the world. Although the journalists who composed t­ hese obituaries certainly must have consulted phi­los­o­phers, sad to say, what they wrote was too confused to give any real picture of Quine’s philosophy. A ­great philosopher— one of the greatest of the twentieth ­century—­had died; but what made him so impor­tant (let alone “­g reat”)? The journalists obviously ­didn’t have a clue. A part of the prob­lem—­but only a part—­was, of course, that Quine’s philosophy was “technical.” Along with his lifelong friend, Rudolf Carnap, Quine belonged to the generation that brought the mathematical logic created by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead into the forefront of philosophy. Not only did many of Quine’s arguments and claims employ terms from logic (including “quantifier,” “value of a variable,” “extensional,” and the like) but a central claim of his philosophy was that logic—­t he new logic, as it was then—­was of fundamental

Hilary Putnam, “Quine,” Common Knowledge 8, no. 2 (2002): 273–279.

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metaphysical importance. For Quine, the best guide we have as to the nature of real­ity—­the only guide that deserves to be taken seriously, even if the guide changes its mind from time to time—is science. But science does not wear its philosophical significance on its sleeve, nor is it always clear what is and what i­ sn’t “science.” For Quine, the central job of the phi­los­o­ pher is to rewrite science (or at least t­ hose parts that employ obscure language or other­w ise fall below our highest standards of clarity) in the language of modern logic. When we discover the best way to do this, we w ­ ill have discovered the best available account of real­ity. Obviously, this is not ­going to be easy to explain to anyone who ­doesn’t know what modern logic is. But I said that the technical character of Quine’s philosophy is only part of the difficulty that the obituary writers found in explaining the significance of Quine’s contribution. Another part is that the writers (or the phi­los­o­phers who advised them, perhaps) tried to “tone down” Quine’s radical ­theses, and, in the pro­cess, not only distorted them but (worse) made them sound bland and uninteresting. The enormously controversial ­theses of “the indeterminacy of translation” and “ontological relativity” associated with Quine’s name ­were trivialized and made unrecognizable in the pro­cess. And this toning down reflects, I think, a failure to see that ­there are two radically dif­fer­ent sorts of philosophical genius. One sort of philosophical genius—­A ristotle and Kant ­were, for their respective epochs, ideal exemplars—­proposes a highly believable (at least in its own time), coherent, and profound account of real­ity and a profound criticism of the views of his forerunners as well as of his con­temporary rivals. If one thinks that this is the only sort, one ­w ill assume that to call Quine a “genius” is to claim, inter alia, that his ­theses are believable. But ­there is also a very dif­fer­ent sort of genius—­Berkeley is a famous example—­whose views are not believable (although they are coherent and profound), whose importance lies precisely in the fact that they a­ ren’t believable. How can that be? What made Berkeley so impor­tant was that his arguments seemed to demolish our everyday view of the world (say, that it consists of or at least contains “­matter”), and that ­those arguments w ­ ere not sophisms, but exposed genuine and deep difficulties. For example, ever since Berkeley (and Hume—­a lthough Hume began the pro­cess of “toning down” Berkeley), phi­los­o­phers have been forced to think and rethink the



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question, “Just what do we mean by ‘­matter’?” (As well as “What do we mean by ‘perceiving’ something?”) In my view, Quine was a genius of this second sort. I do not know of any phi­los­o­phers except Richard Rorty and Roger Gibson who both understand Quine’s claims about the indeterminacy of translation in their full radicality and believe them, but the pro­cess of thinking and rethinking what we mean by “translation” (and by “meaning,” and by “understanding what somebody means”) that Quine has forced upon the philosophical world ­w ill, I predict, go on for a very long time—­perhaps for centuries. Quine’s Radical Doctrines

In what follows, I am g­ oing to illustrate the radicality of Quine’s doctrines without assuming or explaining any of the mathematical logic that Quine uses to explain and clarify them. This necessary limitation means that they ­w ill undoubtedly seem even more implausible than they perhaps intrinsically are, but at least they ­w ill not seem ­either bland or completely obscure. In each case, I s­ hall focus on a single example employed by Quine himself. (1) The Indeterminacy of Translation

A linguist, constructing a manual of translation for Jungle Language, observes that the natives say gavagai when she points to a rabbit. She tries the translation “Rabbit!” (or perhaps, “­There’s a rabbit”) and the translation seems well borne out by her subsequent field work. So the manual eventually tells us that what gavagai means in Jungle Language is “­There’s a rabbit.” Could she have translated gavagai as “­There are a bunch of undetached rabbit-­parts” instead? “That’s absurd” is likely to be one’s first reaction. Quine’s radical claim was not that we ­can’t know which of the translations is right; his claim was that it is objectively indeterminate which is right. In this case, whichever the linguist chooses is ­going to be right—­right relative to her translation manual. And that’s as much “rightness” as we are ­going to get! “But suppose the linguist had translated gavagai as ‘dog.’ Surely that would have been wrong?”

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“Indeed, it would have been,” Quine would have replied. “It would have been wrong b ­ ecause it ­wouldn’t correctly predict the native’s speech be­ hav­ior.” By not correctly predicting the native’s speech be­hav­ior, what Quine would have meant is: not telling which stimuli “prompt assent” (where “assent” is to be understood as a kind of be­hav­ior, not a hidden ­mental state) to the utterance “gavagai.” Natives do, a­ fter all, assent to “Gavagai!” when the linguist points to a rabbit, and not when she points to a dog. But they also assent to “Gavagai!” when she points in the direction of a bunch of undetached rabbit-­parts, ­don’t they? “But they c­ an’t possibly be conceptualizing gavagais as bunches of undetached rabbit-­parts. It’s much more plausible that they think of them as rabbits.” To this sort of objection Quine famously replied that t­ here’s no fact as to how the natives (who may be ourselves) are conceptualizing. T ­ here is, in the end, only their publicly observable be­hav­ior to go on, ­whether the question be “What do they mean?” or “How are they conceptualizing?” Of course, t­ here is much more to Quine’s story than this. Not all sentences are linked to observable situations as tightly as “Gavagai!” and “Rabbit!” are, and Quine draws many distinctions between kinds of sentences and extends his doctrine to ­these vari­ous kinds of sentences in ingenious and complex ways. But the basic message remains the same: the ­whole picture of words as having determinate links to determinate chunks of real­ity is a ­mistake. (2) Ontological Relativity

Although the arguments are dif­fer­ent, Quine’s doctrine of “ontological relativity” has a similar upshot. ­Here is an example. Suppose we define “X complement-­drinks Y” to mean that what­ever object [counting regions of space, if necessary, as “objects”] is left when we take away X from the entire physical universe (the “cosmos”) drinks what­ever is left over when we take away Y from the entire cosmos. Quine once had a cat named “Tabitha.” A moment’s reflection suffices to convince oneself that Tabitha drinks milk when and only when the cosmos-­minus-­Tabitha complement-­drinks the cosmos-­minus-­the-­milk. Quine contended that it is objectively indeterminate ­whether, in the sentence “Tabitha is drinking the milk,” the name “Tabitha” refers to the cat and “is drinking” to the act of drinking and “the



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milk” to the milk, or “Tabitha” refers to the cosmos minus Tabitha, “is drinking” to complement-­drinking and “the milk” to the cosmos minus the milk. As he himself put it, We found that two ontologies, if explic­itly correlated one to one, are empirically on a par; ­there is no empirical ground for choosing the one rather than the other. What is empirically significant in an ontology is just its contribution of neutral nodes to the structure of the theory. We could reinterpret ‘Tabitha’ as designating no longer the cat, but the ­whole cosmos minus the cat. . . . ​Reinterpreting the rest of our terms for bodies in a similar fashion, we come out with an ontology interchangeable with our familiar one. As ­wholes they are empirically indistinguishable. Bodies still continue, u ­ nder each interpretation, to be distinct from their cosmic complements . . . ​they can be distinguished in a relativistic way, by their roles relative to one another and to the rest of the ontology. Hence my watchword ontological relativity.1 Again, the upshot is that the ­whole picture of words as having determinate links to determinate chunks of real­ity is a m ­ istake. Two Additional Radical (but Rather Widely Accepted) Quinian Doctrines

To round out the picture, I need to mention two additional Quinian doctrines which, although they seemed equally “radical” when they w ­ ere proposed, have found wide ac­cep­tance. They are (1) The rejection of the idea of “analytic truth,” and with it the idea that philosophy can any longer claim to have a distinctive method or subject ­matter. (2) The claim (which Quine identified with “naturalism”) that the only knowledge worthy of the name we have or can have is what is provided by the sciences.

1. W. V. O. Quine, The Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 33.

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Although Quine argued against the existence of such ­things as “analytic” truths [“analytic” is a Kantian term], that is, of sentences that are true simply by virtue of the meanings of the terms involved, a de­cade before he published the doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation in Word and Object, the non-­existence of analytic truths is, in retrospect, a natu­ral corollary of the latter doctrine. If the ­whole notion of “meaning” is empty (a not unfair statement of the thesis of Word and Object) then of course the notion that some statements are true by virtue of the “meanings” of the terms they convey is likewise empty. However, t­ here are impor­tant philosophers—­for example Jerry Fodor—­who agree ­wholeheartedly with Quine’s attack on the notion of analytic truth in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (a paper Quine published in 1951), but who vigorously disagree that reference is indeterminate in the way that the gavagai example and the example of “Tabitha” are supposed to illustrate. Ever since Kant, the question of what sort of knowledge if any philosophy can hope to give us in a scientific age has been more and more on the minds of phi­los­o­phers. Kant’s own answer, that t­ here are a priori truths that a sufficiently chastened philosophy can teach us without overstepping the bounds of pos­si­ble knowledge, on the one hand, or competing in an improper way with natu­ral science, on the other, collapsed, at least in its original Kantian form, as a number of central Kantian examples of such truths—­for example, the supposed truths of Euclidean geometry and the princi­ple of deterministic causation—­were rejected by twentieth ­century Relativity Theory and quantum mechanics respectively. On the continent, phenomenologists, from Husserl to Heidegger, continued to claim that a special method, eidetic insight, can yield a priori truths (though Husserl and Heidegger disagreed on the subject ­matter and content of ­these truths), but most Anglo-­A merican phi­los­o­phers (including Quine) rejected this as a fundamentally reactionary move. Nonetheless, for a long time, the idea that t­ here are conceptual truths, truths that are ascertained by the analy­sis of concepts rather than experiments, and that t­ hese are (at least a large part of) what phi­los­o­phers are seeking, seemed very attractive, but if Quine is right, this too is an illusion. (I myself have long argued that both the total rejection of the ideas of meaning and analyticity and the total rejection of the idea of conceptual analy­sis by Quine ­were mistaken, although it is obvious that all of ­these notions need to be reconceptualized ­after Quine, but this moderate stance led my beloved colleague, the late Burton Dreben, to



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scornfully refer to me as a “Girondist” compared to the truly revolutionary Quine.) At any rate, if the Wesenschau (intuition of essences) of the phenomenologists and the kind of conceptual analy­sis practiced by classical analytic philosophy from Russell to Ryle both rest on illusions, what is left for philosophy to do? The question becomes especially acute if we accept Quine’s second thesis, the thesis of naturalism, that the sciences are our only source of knowledge. However one answers the question as to what is still left for philosophy to do, we are ready at this point to complete our comparison of Quine’s radicalism with Berkeley’s. I have mentioned that many impor­tant phi­los­o­ phers accept ­these last two ­theses. But what Quine purports to show—­and I think does show—is that if one accepts them, it is an illusion to think that ­there is anything at all to say about the nature of reference or meaning. And if ­there is nothing at all (scientific) to say about the nature of reference or meaning, then, Quine thinks, we may as well scrap the notions. As Quine himself makes a related point, arguing that scientifically speaking, we can dispense with “propositional and attributary attitudes” (such as believing something or hoping for something or ­doing something with such and such a purpose): “Propositional and attributary attitudes belong to the daily discourse of hopes, fears, and purposes; causal science gets on well without them . . . ​a reasonable if less ambitious alternative [to attempting to make them “science worthy”] would be to keep a relatively ­simple and austere conceptual scheme, ­free of half-­entities (sic) for official scientific business and then accommodate the half-­entities in a second grade system.”2 While conceding (­here and elsewhere) that talk of hoping, fearing, believing (as well as meaning such and such) are in practice indispensable (albeit “second grade”), Quine is adamant that we can ignore the second grade system when our interests are theoretical. For, he tells us, “the quest of a simplest, clearest, overall pattern of canonical notation [i.e., for the “first grade system” which is implicit in Quine’s talk of our “second grade system”] is not to be distinguished from a quest of ultimate categories, a

2. W. V. O. Quine, “Ontological Relativity,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 24.

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limning of the most general traits of real­ity.”3 Only (properly formalized) science tells us “the most general traits of real­ity,” or at least what our current best hypothesis as to ­those traits is. And meaning, reference, beliefs, and the like, simply belong to con­ve­nient but metaphysically meaningless ordinary language, to be ignored when we are in search of “ultimate categories.” As Quine points out, the Austrian phi­los­o­pher Franz Brentano [1838– 1917] had claimed that the natu­ral sciences can give no account of “intentionality” (Brentano’s term for all the phenomena of referring, signifying, hoping, believing, e­ tc.). For Brentano, this was an argument against naturalism. But for Quine—­“One may accept the Brentano thesis ­either as showing the indispensability of intentional idioms and the importance of an autonomous science of intention, or as showing the baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a science of intention. My attitude, unlike Brentano’s, is the second.” 4 Brentano’s arguments did not impress naturalistic phi­los­o­phers. But Quine’s power­f ul arguments, coming from a fellow naturalist, cannot be ignored. Just as, a­ fter Berkeley, ­there was a fundamental prob­lem that Berkeley’s opponents, w ­ hether rationalists or empiricists, could not ignore, so ­a fter Quine, ­there is a fundamental prob­lem that Quine’s opponents, ­whether they accept or reject Quine’s naturalist t­ heses (i.e., the two ­theses I listed at the beginning of this section) cannot ignore. ­Either one must contest one or both of the ­theses of Quinian naturalism, or one must show that one can coherently accept them without being driven to the radical t­ heses of indeterminacy of translation and ontological relativity that, I have claimed, virtually no phi­los­o­pher (who understands them in their full radical import) accepts. I do not think ­there is any hope for the latter course, and if that is so, then just as Berkeley in a certain sense showed the limits of classical empiricism by pushing it to its logical conclusions, so Quine has shown the limits of “naturalism.” And that is more than sufficient reason to call him a g­ reat phi­los­o­pher.

3. W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 161. 4. Ibid., 221.

CHAPTER 36

12 Philosophers—­and Their Influence on Me (2008)

T

he explanation of what a Dewey Lecture is that I received read, in part, as follows: The talk i­ sn’t supposed to be “Distinguished Professor X’s latest work on Subject S”; it’s supposed to be a more personal perspective on the life of an impor­tant phi­los­o­pher, a more reflective set of remarks. Someone on the [Dewey] Foundation Board said, “Not a paper I could pick up and read in J Phil or Phil Review, not the lecturer’s latest work that could be published in a standard journal, but something with more historical and emotive content.”

­ eedless to say, I felt both flattered and daunted (especially daunted). ForN tunately, the attached explanation (composed by Karen Hanson), gave me an idea by suggesting that “The lecturer might reflect on the ­people

Dewey Lecture delivered before the One Hundred Fourth Annual Eastern Division Meeting of The American Philosophical Association in Baltimore, Mary­land, on December 29, 2007.

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and issues that led him or her into philosophy and provide a personal perspective on the state of the field ­today.” Accordingly, I de­cided to or­ga­ nize my lecture around a list of a dozen phi­los­o­phers who have influenced me through the years, and to describe just one idea per “influencer” that played an impor­tant role in my life, ­either ­because I accepted it at the time, or ­because it raised a question that I found it fruitful to think about. I cut off the list at a certain point, b ­ ecause I had a one-­hour time limit. And I am aware that I did not describe the ideas of some p ­ eople who influenced me in extremely impor­tant ways, ­because my list was designed to “tell a story” of the development of my thinking, and not to mention all the p ­ eople who influenced me. That is why such impor­tant philosophical friends as Noam Chomsky, Cora Diamond, Nelson Goodman, Martha Nussbaum, Charles Travis, and Vivian Walsh ­were not in the list. (I plan to write a fuller Intellectual autobiography in the coming months in which I can rectify t­ hese omissions.) So ­here we go! 1. Morton White (The Rejection of the Analytic /  Synthetic Dichotomy—­and Consequently of the Fact /  Value Dichotomy)

The phi­los­o­pher at the University of Pennsylvania whose influence on me was the most impor­tant, and who asked me, “Have you thought of applying to a gradu­ate program in philosophy?” was Morton White. I applied to the gradu­ate program at Harvard, as he suggested, where I was admitted and stayed for one year. (I left b ­ ecause Harvard ­didn’t offer me financial support, and went to UCLA.) ­Because Morton White left “Penn” for Harvard exactly the year I went to Harvard, my conversations with him continued past my graduation. What I ­w ill mention from my study and conversation with him at that time is the idea that the analytic-­synthetic dichotomy, especially as developed and used in philosophy from Kant’s time on, was profoundly unsound. Although the credit for this point often goes to Quine, it was, in fact, developed pretty much si­mul­ta­neously (but not in­de­pen­ dently, since they ­were close friends) by White and Quine. What I mean by saying that the distinction is unsound is that as soon as phi­los­o­phers try to go beyond trivial examples of “analytic statements,” such as “All bachelors are unmarried,” and claim that some metaphysically significant



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statements (e.g., “2 + 2 = 4,” or “time travel is impossible,” or “space is infinite”) are “analytic,” they are profoundly in error. In White’s philosophy, though not in Quine’s, the rejection of the analytic-­synthetic dichotomy had a corollary whose importance I only realized years ­later. The positivists distinguished between “observation” terms, “theoretical terms,” and terms which w ­ ere “cognitively meaningless,” in which last class they included ethical terms. But if the analytic /­  synthetic dichotomy is in trou­ble, then the “fact / value dichotomy” is also in trou­ble, White brilliantly argued. For example, [White] remarks, The moralist says that acts of stealing ­ought not to be committed; the theorist of meaning [White is referring to Hempel and Carnap] says “­thing in itself” ­ought not to be called meaningful. The point is that we set up a rule which allows us to give as a reason for calling an expression meaningful the fact that it is observable, just as a moral rule enables us to give as a reason for saying that something o ­ ught not to be done the fact that it is an act of stealing. Incidentally, it would seem that stealing is a fairly clear notion by comparison to being an observable predicate, so that far from sniffing at the obscurity of ethical rules, positivist theorists of meaning should recognize the re­spects in which ethical rules might be even clearer than their own.1 Indeed, d ­ oesn’t the positivists’ supposed knowledge that “steals” is an ethical term (and thus “cognitively meaningless”) and “swims” is an observation term (and thus “cognitively meaningful”) suspiciously resemble the supposed philosophical knowledge of what is and ­isn’t analytic that Quine and White so powerfully criticized? 2. Quine (­Don’t Think about Mathe­matics in Isolation, but as Part of Science as a Whole)

At Harvard I was profoundly influenced by Quine, and I was also influenced by him (even if the influence was at certain times more of a recoil from than an approach to his position) ­later, during the thirty-­five-­year period 1. Morton White, ­Toward Reunion in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 109.

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that we ­were colleagues at Harvard. I have already mentioned one Quinian idea that influenced me, but since I credited White with first “infecting” me with that idea, I can mention another idea that I first learned from Quine—­one of many—­w ithout breaking my rule of mentioning only one idea per “influencer,” and that is the idea that in thinking about the nature of mathematical truth one must constantly keep in mind that mathe­ matics and physics are deeply entangled. Although my so-­called “indispensability argument” is not the same as Quine’s—it is not, for example, an attempt at an “epistemology” of mathe­matics, nor is it an argument for “reluctant Platonism” in Quine’s sense—­what Quine and I agreed about was that it is inconsistent to be an antirealist in one’s philosophy of mathe­ matics and a realist in one’s philosophy of physics. This is, of course, not just am ­ atter of the “indispensability” of mathe­matics to physics, but of the way in which mathe­matics is indispensable to physics, of the fact that mathematical concepts are indispensable for the very statement of the laws and theories of physics, and not just for deriving predictions from them. And this still seems to me an extremely impor­tant point. (One disagreement I have with Quine is that I believe that being a realist in one’s philosophy of mathe­matics d ­ oesn’t require that one believe in “the existence of abstract entities.” What it requires is that one recognize that truth in mathe­matics cannot be identified with, and indeed outruns, provability.) To appreciate the importance of the way Quine reconceived the philosophy of mathe­matics, it is helpful to recall the “menu” of positions that was supposed to exhaust the possibilities before him. A ­ fter the ­demise of Kant’s transcendental idealism and Millian empiricism, the choices ­were supposed to be Brouwer’s Intuitionism, Hilbert’s Formalism, and the ­Logicism of Frege, Russell, and Whitehead. Quine convinced most philosophers—he certainly convinced me!—­that even if Logicism w ­ ere right, it ­wouldn’t help with the prob­lem of the nature of mathematical truth, which would simply be renamed “the prob­lem of logical truth.” He also inspired me to investigate the question of ­whether ­either Intuitionism or Formalism could account for the application of mathe­matics in physics, a question to which I have argued the answer is “no” ever since I published “What Is Mathematical Truth?”2 In sum, Quine replaced the prob­lem of 2. Hilary Putnam, “What Is Mathematical Truth?,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1: Mathe­matics, M ­ atter and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 60–78.



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understanding the nature of mathe­matics in isolation with the prob­lem of understanding the role of mathe­matics within science as a ­whole. 3. Reichenbach (The Importance of Clarifying the Conceptual Content of Scientific Theories)

Hans Reichenbach was one of the most profound formative influences on my philosophical life. I was his student at UCLA for only two years (1949– 1950), during which I wrote my dissertation. But I have never ceased to regard him and his work with admiration and affection. His personal warmth, the friendly and always helpful advice he gave to students, and, by the way, the importance he attached to teaching, ­were absolutely exemplary for me. In Reichenbach’s conception of philosophy, the central theme is that the conceptual clarification of scientific theories is a task to which both scientists and phi­los­o­phers have impor­tant contributions to make. But Reichenbach’s admiration for Leibniz and Kant led him to a somewhat more ambitious interpretation of this “underlaborer” idea than Locke’s. For Reichenbach, physical theories attempt to say something about such tremendous metaphysical issues as the nature of space, time, and causation, and the task for phi­los­o­phers is to make clear just what they say. This idea continues to influence me to this day, especially when I think about quantum mechanics. Where I do not agree with Reichenbach is in his philosophy of language. Reichenbach mistakenly thought that the realist view that the entities spoken about by physical theories are inferred entities and not mere “constructs” was compatible with the positivists’ “verifiability theory of meaning.”3 The view that I advocated in my “The Analytic and the Synthetic” on which the reference of theoretical terms is preserved across most theory change (although what counts as “verification” is frequently changed radically), was my first stab at a “realist semantics” for scientific theories, as opposed to the versions of verificationism advocated by Reichenbach and Carnap.4 3. Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 109. 4. Hilary Putnam, “The Analytic and the Synthetic,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2: Mind, Language and Real­ity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 33–69.

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4. Rudolf Carnap (Inspired Me to Work on Recursive Inductive Logic)

In 1953 I arrived in Prince­ton on a one-­year appointment as Assistant Professor. (The next year I received the first of two three-­year appointments, and in 1960 I received tenure and was also made a member of the mathe­ matics department, in which I had already been directing Ph.D. students in mathematical logic for some time.) Carnap was then beginning the second year of a two-­year stay at the Institute for Advanced Study, and ­a fter a first meeting he encouraged me to come and talk to him regularly, which I did. He was also a brilliant critic, whose penetrating questions ­were often hard for me to deal with. And he was also a fine raconteur whose stories of his youth and his days in Vienna I regret not having written down. Although ­later I criticized many of his views (and my “What Theories Are Not” attacked the heart of his philosophy of science), he remained warm and supportive.5 In hindsight, Carnap’s most impor­tant influence on me was in impressing me with the importance of the question as to ­whether the theory of “confirmation” functions could ­really be a successful formalization of “induction,” that is, of learning from experience. My negative answer to that question, in my 1963 “Degree of Confirmation and Inductive Logic” and my more mathematical paper, led, I am happy to say, to the now flourishing field of “recursive learning theory.”6 At that time I also made the acquaintance of Vivian Walsh, a philosophically sophisticated economist who had been trained at Trinity College, Dublin, and the London School of Economics, and we formed a friendship which has lasted ever since, and which has led the two of us, more than fifty years ­later, to ongoing work on the relations of economics and ethics. At Prince­ton, ­under the generous mentorship of Georg Kreisel, who had a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in 1955–1957, I

5. Hilary Putnam, “What Theories Are Not,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, 215–227. 6. Hilary Putnam, “Degree of Confirmation and Inductive Logic,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, 270–292; “Trial and Error Predicates and the Solution to a Prob­lem of Mostowski’s,” Journal of Symbolic Logic 30, no. 1 (1965): 49–57.



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developed into a mathematical logician. (I also formed a friendship with Martin Davis, with whom I was to do my most impor­tant mathematical work in the years that followed.) My special area in logic at that time was the theory of recursive functions, and it was the fact that I had ­those two ­careers si­mul­ta­neously, a c­ areer as a phi­los­o­pher and a c­ areer as a recursion theorist, that inspired me to advance the thesis that became known as functionalism: that is, the thesis that our psychological states are not identical with physically characterized brain states, as my good friend J. J. C. Smart and o ­ thers had contended, but rather with computationally characterized brain states. Since my 1985 Repre­sen­ta­tion and Real­ity, I have been a critic of my former functionalism, but I am extremely unhappy when that criticism is represented as a total repudiation. I say, not a total repudiation ­because I still believe that our so called “­mental states” are best thought of as capacities to function, but not in the strongly reductionist sense that that went with the model of ­those states as “the brain’s software.” The reasons I gave up that reductionist “model” are three: 1) it cannot be the case that ­there is a one-­one mapping of such ­mental attributes as believing something, hoping for something, desiring something, ­etc., onto precise kinds of software, as functionalism hoped. If such states are “realizable” in software at all, they are so in infinitely many dif­fer­ent ways. We might call this the computational plasticity of ­mental states; 2) ­according to the “externalist” theory of reference” I developed in “Is ­Semantics Pos­si­ble?” and “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” reference and meaning are not simply in our heads;7 meaning and reference are “transactional,” that is, they depend on both the organism and the environment, and they cannot simply be read off from our brains without looking at the kinds of interactions that take place between the brain, the rest of the organism, and the environment; if they are functional states in some sense (as I believe they are) they are functional states with “long arms,” that is, they are environment-­involving ways of functioning; 3) as a corollary of 1) and 2), the crucial notion of sameness of content between thought cannot be simply a m ­ atter of sameness of “program.” Functionalism was, I still believe, a useful entering wedge into prob­lems about the mind in a postcomputer age, but it was far too scientistic, too “reductionist.” 7. Hilary Putnam, “Is Semantics Pos­si­ble?,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, 139–152; “The Meaning of Meaning,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, 215–271.

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5. Paul Ziff (The Criticism of “Expressivism” as an Account of the Semantics of Ethical Terms)

The next person on my list of impor­tant “influences” in my life may surprise some of you. In 1958 Paul Ziff taught for a year at Prince­ton. In the course of that year, not only did Paul Benacerraf and I develop very strong friendships with Ziff, and not only did the three of us talk philosophy night and day (or so it seems in memory, anyway), but Ziff gave a seminar on what was to be his most impor­tant book, Semantic Analy­sis, that attracted a remarkable group of students and auditors.8 Among the students that I remember as attending e­ very meeting w ­ ere Paul Benacerraf, Jerry Fodor, Jerrold Katz, and a pair of visiting students from Oxford University who ­were l­ ater to have distinguished c­ areers: Christopher Kirwan and David Wiggins. Not surprisingly, the seminar became the locus of philosophical discussions whose intensity I have rarely if ever seen equaled. Jerrold Katz ­later said of Semantic Analy­sis that it is “a pioneer work, in that it is the first to propose an empirically based theory of meaning to deal systematically with the vari­ous topics that are part of the subject of meaning, and to attempt to fit such a theory into the larger framework of structural linguistics.” I think we all had the sense that what Ziff was ­doing was impor­tant and exciting for precisely the reasons that Katz gave. I learned much, and was stimulated to think about many new questions, in the course of that seminar and ­later on rereading Semantic Analy­sis, but, as I said, I only have time to mention one idea from each of the figures I am describing. In the case of Paul Ziff, the idea which continues to be most impor­tant to my own work is one that occupies only a few pages in Semantic Analy­sis. ­Towards the close of that book, Ziff discusses the question ­whether ­there are any good arguments from empirical linguistics for the claim that utterances containing the word “good” are “noncognitive” and such related claims as “They d ­ on’t describe any facts,” “Their function is to commend,” and the like, and argues effectively for the answer that ­there are no such arguments. I thought about this claim for a long time. In fact, a few years l­ ater during my four years at MIT (1961–1965), I gave a seminar devoted wholly to that issue, and came to the conclusion that not only was Ziff right about 8. Paul Ziff, Semantic Analy­sis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960).



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this class of ethical utterances, but, more generally, t­ here are no good arguments simply from linguistics and logic to support “non-­cognitivism” with re­spect to ethical assertions. In recent years I have returned to that issue, and the two books I have published in this ­century, The Collapse of the Fact / Value Dichotomy and Ethics Without Ontology both argue against non-­cognitivism in ethics. 6. John Austin (The Importance of Ordinary Language for Philosophy)

My acquaintance with John Austin was much briefer than I wished it to be. In 1959–1960 he spent a week visiting Prince­ton, and I think all of us in the Philosophy Department w ­ ere powerfully impressed by his mind and his personality. Both are beautifully described by his friend Isaiah Berlin in the latter’s Personal Impressions. I immediately de­cided to spend the first semester of my sabbatical in 1960–1961 in Oxford, and (at Austin’s invitation) to take part in his famous “Saturday morning group”—­I did take part in that group, but alas! Austin had died of a very aggressive cancer by the time I arrived, and the group was led by Paul Grice (with whom I formed a friendship I very much valued). Although I was never “converted” to the idea the principal task of philosophy should be the study of ordinary language, I was convinced by Austin that it can be of g­ reat importance. Against many American analytic phi­los­o­phers, I have long argued that ordinary language is deeply philosophically relevant—in many areas it is the only conceptual tool we have— but against certain ordinary language phi­los­o­phers I have argued that science can and sometimes does indeed correct our ordinary concepts. If asked why I think our ordinary concepts are impor­tant, I would have to respond with a question: If “ordinary language” is just something to be sneered at, then is the ­whole vocabulary we have for describing the world of h ­ uman agents to be e­ ither despised or e­ lse replaced by the “Newspeak” of some social science? To me it seems clear that the descriptions of h ­ uman life we find in the novels of Tolstoy or George Elliot are not mere entertainment; they teach us to perceive and describe what goes on in social and individual life. And such descriptions require the many subtle distinctions that ordinary language has made available to us. The question of the relevance or irrelevance of “how we speak” is not just a question for phi­los­o­phers,

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although it is that too. It is a question for phi­los­o­phers, ­because once ordinary language is laughed out of the room, philosophical theories are no longer held responsible at all to the ways we actually speak and actually live; but it is a question for more than just phi­los­o­phers, ­because, at bottom, contempt for ordinary language is contempt for the humanities. All of the figures I have discussed had influenced me by the time I left Prince­ton to help found what was then known as “the Gradu­ate Program in Philosophy of the Humanities Department” of MIT in 1961. But, obviously, I have to speed up if this lecture is not to turn into a book. So I s­ hall skip over my MIT years, except to say that discussions with Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and Jerry Katz ­were both a lot of fun and tremendously impor­tant for my ­later work in philosophy of language, as ­were discussions with George Boolos and Richard Boyd, who ­were the first two gradu­ate students the program admitted. (Boyd was still an undergraduate when I came to MIT in 1961.) In addition I have to mention the most extraordinary undergraduate student in mathematical logic I have ever had, Harvey Friedman. In 1965 I moved to the Harvard philosophy department, which has been my academic home ever since (although Tel Aviv University, where I teach in the winter months, is becoming a true second home). The influences included my colleagues, of course, and many of the students, but to discuss them all would require a ­whole book, or perhaps several books. ­Today, I w ­ ill talk about only two: Richard Boyd and Jim Conant. 7. Richard Boyd (Formulation of Scientific Realism: “Terms in a Mature Science Typically Refer and Theories Accepted in a Mature Science Are Typically Approximately True”)

I already mentioned that Richard Boyd was one of my students at MIT. In the years 1969–1972 he was an assistant professor at Harvard, and one of my closest friends and favorite discussion partners. At that time I defended—as I still do, to the disgust of some of my friends and former s­ tudents—­the claim that scientific realism is the only philosophy of science that ­doesn’t make the success of science a miracle. As an argument against a sophisticated antirealism such as Michael Dummett’s, or Crispin Wright’s, or the “internal realism” that I mistakenly defended in the 1980s, this was not a good argument—­indeed, as I pointed out in Reason, Truth and History, a sophisticated antirealist need not deny that “terms in a ma-



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ture science typically refer and theories accepted in a mature science are typically approximately true”—­this was Boyd’s characterization of “scientific realism,” which is the idea of his that I was lastingly influenced by.9 “Antirealism” as a theory of truth needs to be rebutted in other ways, as I tried to refute my own “internal realism” in my 1994 Dewey Lectures. But as an argument against such positions as logical positivism and van Fraassen’s “constructive empiricism,” I still believe it. 8. James Conant (One Can Learn an Enormous Amount from Wittgenstein’s Philosophy without Subscribing to the “End of Philosophy” View Attributed to Him)

Like Boyd, Jim Conant was one of my closest friends and a favorite discussion partner for a number of years during his studies at Harvard (I believe he and Boyd just missed overlapping) and also afterwards. I learned a g­ reat deal from our conversations, but the one idea I ­shall mention ­today is that one can learn an enormous amount from Wittgenstein’s philosophy without subscribing to the “end of philosophy” view attributed to him by many of his readers. One can be concerned with the “grammar” of our concepts, and with the ways in which phi­los­o­phers fall into nonsense, without thinking that all of philosophy (or even all of metaphysics) is nonsense. By the way, although some have tried to pin the label “pragmatist” on me, my attitude t­ oward the pragmatists is similar to my attitude ­toward Wittgenstein. I believe we can learn from them without accepting ­every one of the views attributed to them (rightly or wrongly). If ­there is a similarity between my views and Wittgenstein’s, or my views and Dewey’s, or my views and James’s, it stems from the fact that we are all, albeit in dif­fer­ent ways, non-­ reductive and non-­scientistic naturalists. But a similarity is not an identity. 9. Michael Dummett (Clarified the Dif­fer­ent Notions of “Realism”)

In 1976 Michael Dummett delivered his famous William James Lectures at Harvard, and ­t hose lectures had a profound impact upon my work. Indeed, although my philosophical orbit has carried me away from 9. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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Dummett’s position in the last twenty years, I still feel that my encounters with him ­were among the most stimulating and productive of my mature philosophical life. What I learned from his William James Lectures was that what I had been attacking ­wasn’t “antirealism,” in Dummett’s sense of the term, but “reductionism.”10 Reductionism with re­spect to a class of statements, Dummett explained, is the philosophical theory that statements in that class are “made true” by facts described by statements in what is claimed to be some epistemologically or metaphysically more “basic” class. For example, the view (that I had repeatedly attacked) that statements about theoretical entities are made true by facts describable in “observation language” is a reductionist view. If a view is reductionist with re­spect to assertions of one kind only to insist on a “correspondence” notion of truth for statements in the reducing class, then that view is, according to Dummett, metaphysically realist at base. A truly non-­realist view, he said, is non-­realist all the way down. This redefinition of realism (and antirealism) seemed for a time to open a way out of the difficulties I had been having in thinking about the model theoretic argument against metaphysical realism—an argument that had occurred to me before Dummett’s William James Lectures, but that I could not see my way clear to e­ ither accepting or rejecting at that time, which is why I did not pre­sent it publicly ­until 1976. (That argument used the existence of a vast number of dif­fer­ent models for even an “ideal” scientific theory—­models that agree with the intended interpretation of the observation terms and sentences but disagree on the reference of the theoretical terms—to argue against a realist construal of theoretical terms.) I gave up my “internal realism,” as I called my version of Dummett’s position, for a more “realist” position by 1990, as I announced in my reply to Simon Blackburn at the conference on my philosophy at the University of St. Andrews in November of that year.11 Nevertheless, I still attribute 10. Putnam, “What Theories Are Not.” 11. Hilary Putnam, “Comments and Replies,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Robert Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 242–254. The reasons I gave it up ­were explained in Hilary Putnam, “Replies,” Philosophical Topics 20, no. 1: The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. Christopher  S. Hill (1992): 347–408; and The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).



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real importance to the idea I learned from Dummett, that “realism” and “antirealism” have been used to refer to two very dif­fer­ent issues, and that it is of fundamental importance to distinguish them. One cannot refute antirealism in Dummett’s sense simply by refuting the logical positivist’s “verifiability theory of meaning. What does, I think, “sink” Dummettian antirealism in the end is its dependence on the idea that all of a speaker’s knowledge of the meaning of her words must be “manifested” in the ways she would apply and refuse to apply them. Although Michael Dummett insists to this day that his philosophy fully recognizes the essential social character of language, it seems to me that his “manifestation argument,” if correct, would leave us with a solipsistic view of language, a view in which what I mean by my terms now cannot r­ eally go beyond what I count as verifying and refuting their application at the pre­sent time—­a “solipsism of the pre­sent moment,” so to speak—­and this renders the view incoherent. My own “internal realism” tried to avoid the “manifestation” requirement by relying on counterfactuals about what would be verified if conditions ­were epistemically “ideal” (or sufficiently close to ideal), but this only pushed the prob­lem of realism versus antirealism back onto t­ hese counterfactuals. In the end, I am convinced that “internal realism” was a mistaken direction for me to take. 10. Richard Rorty (Inspired Me to Refute His Account of Pragmatism)

Richard Rorty, who died on the 8th  of June, 2007, although famously gloomy of mien, was an affectionate and good-­natured friend. He was also witty, sometimes at his own expense (Habermas reports receiving an email in which Rorty wrote, “Alas I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida.” Habermas adds, “As if to attenuate the reader’s shock, he added in jest that his d ­ aughter felt this kind of cancer must come from ‘reading too much Heidegger.’ ”) Like Carnap, Rorty was a phi­los­o­pher with whom I had many disagreements, but who nonetheless influenced me by raising questions that turned out to be fruitful for me to work on. Sticking to my promise to “mention one idea that influenced me from each of the figures I s­ hall mention,” I have picked a single question about which Rorty and I loved to argue, the question of ­whether it is right to read James and Dewey as opponents of realism. But a l­ ittle background is in order.

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In his famous paper “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Rorty wrote that “the ‘postmoderns’ are philosophically right though po­liti­cally silly,” and part of what he meant by saying that the postmoderns are “philosophically right” was that realism (which he took to calling “repre­sen­ta­tionalism,” in good “continental” fashion) is just a ­mistake.12 What made him a very dif­fer­ent kind of phi­los­o­pher from Derrida, whom he nonetheless admired very much, was that Rorty used “analytic” arguments, arguments he took or adapted from Quine, from Donald Davidson, and from myself, to try to show that “repre­sen­ta­tionalism” is untenable. Rorty was right, of course, to see my “model theoretic argument” as an argument for antirealism (and he regretted my subsequent return to a realist position very much). And I agree with Rorty that Davidson’s arguments for a certain amount of indeterminacy of meaning do open the door to antirealism even if Davidson himself did not agree; and so do Quine’s arguments for ontological relativity.13 However, Rorty and I shared an admiration for James and Dewey. And Rorty attempted to read both of them as antirealists, and ­here I could not agree. Right to the end, Rorty continued to advocate (what he saw as) the pragmatist doctrine that concern with problem-­solving in the interest of ­human happiness (or, in his final version, in the interest of conforming to the local linguistic norms), should replace the old “repre­sen­t a­tionalist” idea of getting closer to the nature of real­ity in philosophy, in ethics, and even in physics. Most phi­los­o­phers sympathetic to pragmatism, including myself, thought he was wrong about what James and Dewey believed, but are extremely grateful to him for calling attention to, and d ­ oing a g­ reat deal to revive interest in, the classical American pragmatists. Beyond the question of ­whether Rorty was ­doing justice to the pragmatist tradition, I see Rorty as failing to distinguish between common sense realism, which I see it as the task of philosophy to clarify and defend, and certain untenable metaphysical versions of realism, versions which presuppose e­ ither medieval essentialism or a Kantian Ding an sich. When

12. Richard Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), 3–20, 18. 13. Hilary Putnam, “Reply to Bernard Williams’s ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’,” Philosophy 76 (2001): 605–614.



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I said this to Rorty, he replied, “Common sense realism is as bad as metaphysical realism. One leads to the other.” The debate went on, of course—­and a very enjoyable one it was for both of us, enjoyable and deeply serious at the same time. And, in a way, it seems it ­w ill continue past Rorty’s death. For Rorty sent me an article about me for the Library of Living Phi­los­o­phers just before he died, knowing that he would not live to see my response. I have not yet brought myself to write that response, but I know that I w ­ ill hear him chuckling at my failure to give up the idea of the “real world.” In this last communication, Rorty calls me a throwback to Parmenides for accepting that idea. I d ­ on’t think he would have been insulted if I had rejoined that he was a throwback to the Sophists. 11. John McDowell (Naïve Realism Can and Should Be Defended)

All of the “antirealist” arguments of analytic phi­los­o­phers that impressed Rorty when he wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature assume in one way or another that we cannot explain how we are able to refer to even the most paradigmatic physical objects, the “ships and shoes and sealing wax and cabbages and kings,” simply by saying that we perceive ­these objects. Such a response, even if correct when appropriately interpreted (that is to say, ­a fter philosophical reinterpretation), is not to be taken at face value (or so it was claimed). For, so taken, it amounts, in fact, to “naïve realism,” and for more than two centuries naïve realism was thought to have been refuted (although ­there was some disagreement about w ­ hether it was phi­los­o­phers or natu­ral scientists who refuted it). The idea that influenced me, and for whose influence I am crediting John McDowell ­today, even though he was not the first from whom I heard it—is that naïve realism has not been refuted and cannot be refuted, ­either by sound philosophical arguments or by the familiar facts about the role of the brain and the sense organs in perception. In fact, a sound epistemology and philosophy of language require a return to some version of naïve realism. It was becoming acquainted, around 1988, with the view of William James that Bertrand Russell characterized as “neutral monism,” that caused me to realize that the idea that naïve realism had simply been

342 Putnam’s Philosophical Forbears

refuted was mistaken.14 On the other hand, although I was persuaded by James and by Russell that naïve realism was still a pos­si­ble option, and although I immediately saw its attractiveness as a way out of the corner into which I had worked myself with my “model theoretic argument,” I could not accept “neutral monism,” ­either in James’s version or in Russell’s more sober version. It was not ­until I became aware of the “disjunctivist” school in the philosophy of perception, of which John McDowell is ­today one of the most distinguished representatives, that I came to see it is pos­ si­ble to defend what James called “the natu­ral realism of the common man.” That was my proj­ect in The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World, and it is a proj­ect I hope to devote more time to in the ­f uture.15 12. Stanley Cavell (The Nature and Importance of “Moral Perfectionism”)

To describe all the ways in which Stanley Cavell influenced me would require a book, not one section of a lecture. And t­ hose ways include not only “ideas” in books and lectures, but also the wonderful but difficult to describe experience of seeing him approach the authors he loves—­particularly Wittgenstein, but also Emerson and Thoreau—­a fresh each time he lectures about them. In par­tic­u­lar, the times that we jointly taught a seminar or a lecture course, or jointly directed the doctoral dissertation of some amazing young scholar, w ­ ere among the most satisfying experiences I have had as a teacher. But I have restricted myself to one idea or question per “influencer.” Although ­there is a rich menu of choices in Stanley’s case, I have de­cided to pick an idea which figures in my recent writing on the g­ reat twentieth-­century Jewish phi­los­o­phers, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Franz Rosenzweig, the idea of moral perfectionism.16 The idea, as he develops it, is that moral perfectionism is neither a moral defect, as some see it (“­Don’t be such a perfectionist!”), nor a perverse aestheticizing of morality, as Rawls thought it to be (in the case of Nietz­sche). Moral perfectionism, as Cavell pre­sents it, is not a “thesis” that

14. Bertrand Russell, The Analy­sis of Mind (London: Allen and Unwin, 1921), chap. 37. 15. Putnam, The Threefold Cord. 16. Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2008).



12 Philosophers—and Their Influence on Me

343

could be part of a moral theory; it is rather a ­whole dimension of the moral life, one which “spans the course of Western thought, and concerns what used to be called the state of one’s soul, a dimension that places tremendous burdens on personal relationships and on the transforming of oneself and of one’s society.”17 ­Here I ­shall pick out just one strand from Cavell’s description of that dimension. Moral perfectionists believe that the ancient questions, “Am I living as I am supposed to live?” “Is my life something more than vanity, or worse, mere conformity?” “Am I making the best effort I can to reach (in Cavellian language) my unattained but attainable self?” make all the difference in the world. Emerson, Nietz­sche, and Mill are three of Cavell’s principal examples. (Cavell also detects perfectionist strains in Rousseau and in Kant.) When Emerson and Mill attack “conformity,” what they object to ­isn’t the princi­ples to which the conformist pays lip ser­vice. What Emerson and Mill tell us is that if conformity is all one’s allegiance comes to, then even the best princi­ples are useless. Such phi­los­o­phers are “perfectionists” ­because they always describe the commitment we o ­ ught to have in ways that seem impossibly demanding; but they are also realists, ­because they realize that it is only by keeping an “impossible” demand in view that one can strive for one’s “unattained but attainable self.” By the way, one t­ hing I heartily approve of in the pragmatists, as I approve of it in Cavell’s work, is their insistence that philosophy can and should ­matter to our moral and spiritual lives. Unfortunately, nowadays it is often claimed that analytic philosophy is a Good T ­ hing precisely ­because it eschews thinking about that sort of stuff. If any philosophy that does not eschew the question of How to Live is not automatically convicted of being a Bad T ­ hing, then at least it is shown to be Bad Philosophy, according to this point of view. (Although, fortunately, not all analytic phi­ los­o­phers agree! Paul Grice, for example, once devoted a highly analytic seminar to precisely that three-­word question.) But reflection on our ways of living, and especially on what is wrong with ­those ways of living, has always been a vital function of philosophy.

17. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1990), 2.

344 Putnam’s Philosophical Forbears

The only argument that I have seen for rejecting the idea that such writers as Emerson, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Marx, and Thoreau belong in philosophy is that they do not give “arguments” (meaning: their writings ­don’t look like logic texts). In addition, I have heard it said, ­there is the danger that such writings may convince someone by “irrational persuasion.” Well, of course ­there is that danger! And it is the responsibility of each reader to avoid irrationality—­but not by relying on a “method.” What the objection overlooks is that philosophy ­needn’t have the sole function of establishing t­ heses, pieces of propositional knowledge, via more or less rigorous argument. When that is the function, the standards of “analytic philosophy” are appropriate. But to read the writings of any of the phi­los­ o­phers I just listed ­isn’t to encounter a series of ­theses; it is to encounter texts which anger, provoke, inspire, transform, repulse, or all of ­these at once; but such encounters are impor­tant b ­ ecause a life which does not encounter such issues and include such reactions is not worth living. What the pragmatists saw is that philosophy can have both of t­ hese functions, and yet o ­ thers besides. We d ­ on’t need to erect firm bound­aries around philosophy to keep the “illegal aliens” out. We need their contribution. One of the ­things that has been so enjoyable about teaching in the same department as Stanley Cavell all ­those de­cades is that he so thoroughly shares this “pragmatist” attitude, and has helped inculcate it in so many of his (and my) students. In Closing

I began by quoting Karen Hanson’s suggestion that “The lecturer might reflect on the p ­ eople and issues that led him or her into philosophy and provide a personal perspective on the state of the field t­ oday.” Well, I have reflected on the p ­ eople and issues that led me into philosophy and into the par­tic­u­lar path that my life in philosophy has taken. As for “a personal perspective on the state of the field t­ oday,” I w ­ ill just say that the field seems ­today more contentious, exciting, and unpredictable than ever, and that that is a wonderful t­ hing.

C R ED IT S IN D E X

Credits

1. “Comment on Wilfrid Sellars,” Synthese 27, no. 3 / 4 (1974): 445–455. Reprinted by permission of Springer Nature. 2. “A Technical Phi­los­op ­ her,” London Review of Books 5, no. 9 (May 19, 1983). 3. “Reply to Noam Chomsky,” Philosophical Topics 20, no.  1 (Spring 1992): 379–385. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Com­pany, LLC on behalf of the University of Arkansas Press. 4. “Reply to Akeel Bilgrami,” Philosophical Topics 20, no.  1 (Spring 1992): 385–391. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Com­pany, LLC on behalf of the University of Arkansas Press. 5. “Comments on Axel Mueller’s Paper,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Maria Baghramian (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 179–181. Reprinted by permission of Tay­ lor & Francis Group. 6. “Thought and Language,” unpublished lecture delivered in 2015. 7. “Reply to George Boolos,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Bob Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 254–256. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. 8. Part 1: “Reply to Charles Travis,” Revue internationale de philosophie 4, no.  218 (December  2001): 525–533; Part 2: “Comment on Charles Travis’s Paper,” in Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism, ed. James Conant and Urszula M. Żegleń (London: Routledge, 2002), 209–210. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Group. 9. “Truth and Convention,” in Realism with a ­Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 96–104. 10. “Reply to Jennifer Case,” Revue internationale de philosophie 4, no. 218 (December 2001): 431–438. 11. “Reply to David Anderson,” Philosophical Topics 20, no.  1 (Spring 1992): 361–369. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Com­pany, LLC on behalf of the University of Arkansas Press.

347

348 CREDITS

12. “Reply to Miller,” Philosophical Topics 20, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 369–374. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Com­pany, LLC on behalf of the University of Arkansas Press. 13. “Simon Blackburn on Internal Realism,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Bob Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 242–254. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. 14. “Michael Dummett on Realism and Idealism,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Bob Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 256–262. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. 15. “Guilty Statements,” London Review of Books 6, no. 8 (May 3, 1984). 16. “Thomas Ricketts on Carnap,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Bob Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 280–281. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. 17. “Comments on David Albert,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Maria Baghramian (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 237–239. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Group. 18. “Comments on Ned Block,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Maria Baghramian (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 319–321. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Group. 19. “Comments on John McDowell’s Paper,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Maria Baghramian (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 347–354. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Group. 20. “Pragmatism Resurgent: A Reading of The American Evasion of Philosophy,” in Cornel West: A Critical Reader, ed. George Yancy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 19–37. 21. “Comment on Robert Brandom’s Paper,” in Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism, ed. James Conant and Urszula  M. Żegleń (London: Routledge, 2002), 59–65. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Group. 22. “Comment on Ruth Anna Putnam’s Paper,” in Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism, ed. James Conant and Urszula M. Żegleń (London: Routledge, 2002), 12–13. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Group. 23. “Crispin Wright on the Brain-­in-­a-­Vat Argument,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Bob Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 283–288. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. 24. “Reply to Joseph Margolis,” Con­temporary Pragmatism 3, no. 2 (April 2006): 74–82. Reprinted by permission of Brill. 25. “Taking Rules Seriously: A Response to Martha Nussbaum,” New Literary History 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1983): 193–200. 26. “Reply to David Wiggins,” in Reading Putnam, ed. Peter Clark and Bob Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 281–288. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. 27. “Antwort auf Jürgen Habermas,” in Hilary Putnam und die Tradition des Pragmatismus, ed. M.  L. Raters and M. Willaschek (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 306–321.

CREDITS

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28. “Reply to David Copp,” Con­temporary Pragmatism 3, no.  2 (April  2006): 88–92. Reprinted by permission of Brill. 29. “Reply to Mark Timmons,” Con­temporary Pragmatism 3, no. 2 (April 2006): 82–88. Reprinted by permission of Brill. 30. Excerpt from “Thoughts Addressed to an Analytic Thomist,” The Monist 80, no. 4 (October 1997): 487–499. 31. “A Politics of Hope,” Times Literary Supplement no. 4964 (May 22, 1998): 10. 32. “Reading Rosenzweig’s ­Little Book,” Argumenta 1, no. 2 (2016): 161–168. 33. “Floyd, Wittgenstein and Loneliness,” in Loneliness, ed. Leroy  S. Rouner (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 109–114. 34. “Dreben on Quine and Wittgenstein (and Putnam),” lecture delivered in 2000 and revised in 2008 (previously unpublished). 35. “Quine,” Common Knowledge 8, no. 2 (2002): 273–279. Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press. 36. “12 Philosophers—­a nd Their Influence on Me,” Proceedings and Addresses of the APA 82, no. 2 (November 2008): 101–115.

Index

conceptual scheme. See conceptual relativity conceptual truth, 25, 47, 76–77, 318n25, 324 contextualism. See semantics: contextualism conventionalism, 152–153 Copp, David, 265–270

Albert, David, 154–157 analytic-­synthetic distinction, 45–48, 128, 153, 323–324, 328 Anderson, David, 101–112 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 281–283 anti-­realism. See realism apperception, 168–171 Austin, John, 115, 335–336

Davidson, Donald, 12, 83–92, 166–167 democracy, 185–186, 190–195, 198–201 Dewey, John, 181–199, 206, 211 dialogue, philosophical. See philosophical dialogue Diamond, Cora, 281–283, 300 division of linguistic ­labor, 15–17, 36–38 Dreben, Burton, 306–318 Du Bois, W. E. B., 199–200 Dummett, Michael, 138–146, 337–339

Berkeley, George, 148, 232, 320–321, 325–326 Bilgrami, Akeel, 36–44 Blackburn, Simon, 120–137, 270 Block, Ned, 53, 55–57, 158–160 Boolos, George, 63–65 Boyd, Richard, 336–337 brain-­in-­a-­vat, 102–103, 217–222 Brandom, Robert, 202–212 Breben, Burton, 306–318 Brentano, Franz, 326 Burge, Tyler, 49–62

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 179–181, 197–199 empiricism, 152–153 epistemic luck, 117–119 ethics: as balancing, 239–246; discourse ethics, 251–254; pluralism, 261–263; quietism, 266; naturalism, 267; fallibilism, 267; moral properties, 268; contractualism, 277–278; constructivism, 278–280; perfectionism, 342–343 Evans, Gareth, 22–26 existentialism, 291–292 expressivism. See non-­cognitivism

Carnap, Rudolf, 46, 84–90, 127–128, 152–153, 302–305, 332–333 Case, Jennifer, 93–100 causal theory of perception, 114–117 Cavell, Stanley, 342–344 Chomsky, Noam, 27–35 Churchman, C. West, 213 coherentism, 166–167 Conant, James, 337 conceptual relativity, 31, 66–74, 79, 85–92, 93–100, 107–111, 122–132, 229–230, 271–272

fact-­value dichotomy, 183, 231, 280 Floyd, Juliet, 299–305 Fodor, Jerry, 57–58, 324 351

352 Index formal logic, 74–75 foundationalism. See transcendental epistemology functionalism, 332–333 Gramsci, Antonio, 192–196, 200–201

natural-­k ind terms, 39–40 natu­ral realist theory of perception. See causal theory of perception nominalism, 11–12 non-­cognitivism, 334–335 Nussbaum, Martha, 239–247

Habermas, Jürgen, 251–264 Hacking, Ian, 147–151 Hegel, G. W. F., 110–111

objectivism, 227–233, 230–234, 273–280 ontological relativity, 316–317, 322–323

idealism. See transcendental idealism indeterminacy of translation, 311–315, 321–322 innate language, 57–58 internalism, semantic: Chomsky’s, 35 internal realism. See realism: internal

perception: repre­sen­ta­tionalism, 158–160; disjunctivism, 162–166; conceptualism, 161–171 philosophical dialogue, 1–4 pluralism, 99–100. See also conceptual relativity positivism, 46, 113 pragmatism: and truth, 139–145, 340–341; prophetic, 181, 197–201; Brandom on classical pragmatism, 202–212; as pluralism, 226–234 projectivism, 130–131 proto-­concepts, 50 proto-­thought. See proto-­concepts Putnam, Ruth Anna, 213–215

James, William, 169, 205–212, 341–342 Kant, Immanuel, 162–166, 239–244, 248–249, 253–254, 276 Kripke, Saul, 17–18, 38–39 language games. See Wittgenstein, Ludwig: on language games Lewis, David, 19 logic: quantum, 75–77; bivalent, 224–226 logical truth, 63–65, 274, 330. See also conceptual truth Margolis, Joseph, 223–234 Marxism, 189–191 McDowell, John, 161–171, 341–342 meaning vector theory, 37–40, 43–44 mereology, 84, 123–125 metaphysical essentialism, 29–31 Miller, Richard, 113–119 model-­theoretical argument, 102, 132–133 moral perfectionism. See ethics: perfectionism ­mother wit, 276, 280 Mueller, Axel, 45–48 Mutterwitz. See ­mother wit narrow and wide content, 42–43 naturalism, 51–54, 132–135, 325–326

qua­dru­ple entanglement. See fact-­value dichotomy quantifiers, 63–65 quantum mechanics, 154–157 Quine, W. V. O., 187; on the analytic-­synthetic distinction, 45–48; on conceptual and ontological relativity, 88–89, 127–128, 131–134; compared with Wittgenstein on metaphysics, 308–318; on indeterminacy of translation and naturalism, 319–326; on mathematical realism, 329–331 radical externalism, 144–145 realism: scientific, 33–34, 130–131, 147–151, 228–331, 336–337; metaphysical, 66–74, 79–80, 102–103, 107–112, 123–126, 128–132, 136–137, 138–145, 222, 338–341; internal, 83–92, 101–103, 109–111, 117–118, 121–123, 139–145; causal, 102–103, 111–112; moral, 230–231, 254, 263–264; mathematical,

Index 230–231, 268–269, 270, 330–331; naïve, 341–342 reference, 32–34, 217–218 Reichenbach, Hans, 331 relativism: robust, 224–234; moral, 278–280 religion: atheism, 269–270; God, 281–284, 286–295 repre­sen­ta­tion, 51–59 Ricketts, Thomas, 152–153 rigid designators, 18 Rorty, Richard, 143, 187, 284–285, 339–341 Rosenzweig, Franz, 286–295 Russell, Bertrand, 23–24, 304–305 Scanlon, Timothy, 277–278 Sellars, Wilfrid, 8, 11–21 semantics: rule-­based, 13–15; contextualism, 59–62; ontology and, 88–92; naturalizing, 133–135; externalism, 218–222, 249–250; ordinary language, 335–336 skepticism, 144–145, 216–222 speaker’s meaning, 60–62 supervenience, 133–134 theory of inquiry, 181–184 Timmons, Mark, 271–280 transcendental epistemology, 182

353

transcendental idealism, 107 translation, 124–126 Travis, Charles, 66–77 truth: disquotational accounts of, 257–261; mathematical, 270–275; verificationism, 273–275 Twin Earth, 16–18 Unger, Umberto, 192–195 unity of knowledge, 127, 136–137 universals, prob­lem of, 66–67 verificationism, 20, 103–107, 118–119 West, Cornel, 177–201 White, Morton, 328–329 wide content. See narrow and wide content Wiggins, David, 248–250 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 255–257, 299–305, 306–308; on language games, 74–77, 282; as “radical internalist,” 141–143, 145–146; and the Tractatus, 299–302; and Quine as antimetaphysical, 308–311, 314–315, 317–318; and the end of philosophy, 337 Wright, Crispin, 216–222 Ziff, Paul, 334–335