The book is an outgrowth of a 1998 conference
held at the Nicholas Copernicus University
in Toru (Poland), for which Hilary
Putnam
was the keynote speaker. It contains
eleven
papers with responses by Putnam, and
is divided
into two parts, one on pragmatism and
one
on realism. Each part is prefaced by
a short
and well-focused introduction by Urszula
M. Zeglen, which may be useful for
those
who did not keep up with the development
of Putnam’s thought since the late
seventies.
Some papers are directly addressed
to Putnam,
seeking to challenge or support him
on particular
points, but more of them aim at developing
themes on which Putnam has a view.
I will
discuss only some of the papers; the
others
will be listed at the end of this review.
Ruth Anna Putnam’s “Taking pragmatism
seriously”
and Hilary Putnam’s own “Pragmatism
and nonscientific
knowledge” survey the issues with respect
to which the latter claims to be an
heir
to classical pragmatism. The most important
of these are as follows:
(1) Philosophy should not lose contact
with
general human concerns. What this means
is
that the common man’s views which are
integral
to human practices should not be brushed
aside as if they were necessarily inferior
to the sophisticated technical doctrines
of professional philosophers. Even
though
the commonly held views may not be
right
as they stand, the philosophical views
which
are opposed to them – such as skepticism
about the external world, indirect
realist
theories of perception, denial of the
cognitive
status of ethics – are more suspect.
It follows
then that one important task for a
philosopher
who takes pragmatism seriously is to
expose
the fallacies underlying those philosophical
doctrines, which seem incredible for
the
layman. No wonder that Wittgenstein
and Austin
are just as much philosophical heroes
for
Putnam as Peirce, James and Dewey.
(2) Rejection of the sharp separation
of
theoretical and practical concerns
and the
fact/value dichotomy. Many philosophers
tend
to exalt science and regard it as pure
inquiry,
completely detached from rather than
continuous
with nonscientific knowledge. As a
part of
this picture they maintain that science
is
unaffected by value considerations.
Scientific
knowledge is supposed to be the product
of
experience and certain methods, which,
as
a matter of fact, lead to truth or
high probability.
Putnam rejects this attitude. He maintains
that scientific methods cannot be applied
in a blind, mechanical fashion. Their
application
presupposes judgments about coherence
and
simplicity, which are value judgments,
just
like the judgments in ethics. As result,
knowledge of facts depends on knowledge
of
values. The dependence goes in the
other
direction as well: knowledge of values
presupposes
knowledge of facts.
(3) Value judgments can be objective.
This
is a straightforward consequence of
the previous
point. Since factual claims are infected
by values, the subjectivity of values
would
entail the subjectivity of facts. But
what
does objectivity mean here? For Putnam
a
claim is objective if it is free of
personal
idiosyncrasies, and the way to weed
out idiosyncrasies
is rational argumentation. In the final
analysis,
objectivity is what rational argumentation
delivers. However, rational argumentation
should not be equated with a particular
set
of practices, for two reasons. First,
rationality
is manifold. Different issues call
for different
ways of argumentation. Second, rationality
is not static. We may develop new ways
of
arguing and we may also revise our
previous
practices. (This is another point where
Putnam
is indebted to Wittgenstein.) This
picture
of objectivity brings us to the second
main
theme of the book, realism and truth.
Putnam
is famous for rejecting metaphysical
realism,
the view that the character of reality
is
wholly independent of human practices,
and
truth means capturing what is out there
independently
of how anyone would regard it. He has
recommended
two pictures for its replacement, first
‘internal
realism’, best summarized in Reason,
Truth
and History (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), then ‘natural
realism’,
which was first spelled out in his
Dewey
lectures (“Sense, Nonsense, and the
Senses:
An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human
Mind”,
Journal of Philosophy 91
(1994): 445-517, reprinted as Part
I The
Threefold Chord: Mind, Body and the
World,
New York: Columbia University Press,
1999).
Internal realism is a modest version
of
verificationism, maintaining that the
truth
conditions of statements are not independent
of their verification conditions, as
a result
of which truth is epistemically constrained.
It is discussed in two papers, Nicholas
Rescher’s
“Knowledge of the truth in pragmatic
perspective”
and Wolfgang Künne’s “From alethic
anti-realism
to alethic realism”. Rescher takes
Putnam
to be tempted to identify truth with
verification
and claims that the identification
will not
work. For actual verification may not
give
us the truth, and ideal verification
is so
far from where we are now that truth
becomes
as elusive as it is according to the
correspondence
theory, which he, like Putnam, rejects.
It
seems to him that Putnam has no better
solution
for closing the gap between verification
and truth than suggesting that we ignore
it and seek refuge in the democratic
consideration
that we are all in the same boat. Rescher’s
own approach is to keep truth conceptually
independent of verification and close
the
gap in the following way. We should
estimate
truth relying on our methods of verification
and then assess these methods themselves
by asking whether the views these methods
favor ‘provide materials for successful
prediction
and effective applicative control’
(73).
In his response Putnam explains where
Rescher
got him wrong, which is useful because
he
is often understood in Rescher’s way,
i.
e. as if he were proposing to reduce
truth
to verification rather than emphasizing
the
mutual dependence of the two. But misunderstandings
of this kind are excusable for it is
not
easy to follow how Putnam has struggled
with
the concept of truth. Künne’s paper
does
a very nice job of clarifying that.
It also
contains a new version of Fitch’s argument
against the idea that truth is epistemically
constrained. What makes this version
interesting
is that it makes relatively weak assumptions.
It talks of ‘justified belief’ rather
than
‘knowledge’, does not use logical principles
which the intuitionists would reject
and
does not involve substitution into
modal
contexts.
Putnam’s more recent natural realism
differs
from internal realism in two respects.
First,
verificationism becomes even more modest.
He used to hold that truth and verification
are conceptually linked. Now he does
not
believe this is true for all statements.
There are indeed many statements whose
truth
conditions we cannot understand without
knowing
what would verify them, but not all
statements
are of this kind. The second and more
important
difference is that Putnam has become
a direct
realist about perception. The picture
he
rejects is this. The process of perception
divides into a causal and a cognitive
part.
The things affecting our senses bring
about
mental or physical items in the mind
or the
brain (sense data, qualia, or representations,
which are outputs of sensory modules),
and
it is to these items that we have cognitive
access to. In Putnam’s opinion, however,
cognition does not end within the mind
or
the brain but extends all the way to
the
object. This is not a call for a change
in
terminology; what Putnam wants is not
to
reclassify the causal part as cognitive.
He rejects that there are two parts.
Perception
is a direct transaction between the
mind
and the thing, and there is no interface
between the two. This view is challenged
from different directions by John Haldane
and Tadeusz Szubka. Haldane’s “Realism
with
a metaphysical skull” initiates a new
round
in his ongoing exchange with Putnam.
They
agree that metaphysical realism creates
an
unbridgeable gap between the mind and
the
world, but they disagree about the
way of
closing it. Haldane suggests we go
back to
Aristotle: in perception the mind takes
on
the form of the thing perceived. Since
the
very same form is present in the mind
and
in the thing, there is just no gap.
He welcomes
Putnam’s new position as a step in
the right
direction, but he believes that the
sort
of Aristotelian epistemological realism
Putnam
has adopted cannot be sustained without
the
support of Aristotelian metaphysics.
The
mind cannot touch reality unless there
is
something the mind and reality have
in common,
and that item must have all the important
characteristics of Aristotelian forms.
Putnam,
not surprisingly, would have no truck
with
forms, which he finds completely unintelligible.
What he particularly dislikes about
Haldane’s
suggestion is its essentialism, the
idea
that things can be individuated and
ordered
into kinds only in one specific way.
In his “The causal theory of perception
and direct realism” Szubka argues that,
contrary
to what Putnam says, the causal theory
of
perception is compatible with direct
realism.
Putnam is right only about the reductive
versions of the causal theory, which
hold
that we can give an exhaustive account
of
perception in causal terms and can
safely
dispense with unreduced intentional
notions.
Non-reductive causal theories, like
Strawson’s,
escape Putnam’s arguments and are fully
compatible
with direct realism. Even though Szubka
makes
a number of good points, I am not sure
that
he gets right what is at issue between
Strawson
and Putnam. Occasionally, he seems
to take
Putnam to maintain that there are perceptual
experiences within our minds (112,
113),
but these resist reduction. Strawson
would
probably accept this, but Putnam would
not
because it is the very idea of intermediary
entities which he regards as flawed.
Szubka
seems to favor a non-reductionist,
causal,
direct realist view, which, however,
I cannot
clearly distinguish from the purely
terminological
version of direct realism, albeit he
appears
to accept that direct realism should
not
be bought for cheap by means of a simple
linguistic reform (112).
Charles Travis’s “What laws of logic
say”
is one of the highlights of the book.
It
takes up an issue Putnam has grappled
with
throughout his career, the nature of
logical
necessity. Relying on Wittgenstein’s
remarks
in the Investigations (§§96-131) he
sketches
an account the consequences of which
agree
very well with what Putnam says on
this subject.
His central ideas are as follows. A
system
of formal logic is an idealized system
of
inferential relations between linguistic
forms. It is defined by strict rules,
and
it is these rules, which make the inferential
relations described in the system necessary.
So, necessity is intrinsic to the system.
The reason why systems of logic do
not seem
to admit refutations is that they do
not
say much. In particular, they do not
say
that natural language as a whole or
even
a particular segment of a natural language
agrees with the system. If the logical
connectives
as used in a particular stretch of
discourse
fail to behave as the connectives of
a system
of logic (i. e. if we refuse to draw
the
conclusions we should draw if we were
to
apply the system to this stretch of
discourse),
then all that follows is that the system
is not applicable to that particular
stretch
of discourse. It does not follow that
the
system is wrong. The crucial idea is
that
logical form is not inherent in language,
but rather it is imposed on language
if we
choose to view it through a particular
system.
A particular system makes no commitment
with
regard to other systems: it does not
say
that it is the only possible system.
Nor
does it say what other systems must
be like.
And it does not even say that other
systems
must attribute the same logical form
to a
particular statement as the system
in question.
This shows that the connection between
the
meaning of the logical connectives
of ordinary
language and logical systems is looser
than
it is usually assumed. For example,
a particular
way of using the ordinary ‘or’ can
be viewed
through different logical systems,
so the
meaning of the ordinary ‘or’ cannot
be associated
with one particular logic. However,
this
kind of distance between ordinary speech
and systems of logic does not imply
that
logical systems can never prove to
be false.
A system imposes several different
constraints
on the items, which figure in logical
forms.
And it might happen that under the
pressure
the world puts on our discourse we
have to
adopt ways of speaking so that the
different
constraints cannot be jointly satisfied.
On the other hand, we cannot now envisage
what a situation of this sort would
be like.
Apart from the ones mentioned so far
there
are four more papers in the volume.
Richard
Warner describes how pragmatist themes
emerge
in the discussion about legal reasoning.
Robert Brandom seeks to entangle the
relationship
between various kinds of pragmatism.
John
Heil argues that we should not assume
that
for every predicate which holds of
an object
there must be a specific property which
the
predicate designates. Giving up this
assumption,
which was basic to the functionalist
philosophy
of mind, means getting rid of the idea
that
there are higher and lower level properties.
Gary Ebbs sharpens Putnam’s argument
against
deflationism and develops a version
of deflationism
which can escape it.
Putnam is an important thinker, and
this
collection devoted to his work is welcome,
especially because his views have changed
considerably since the last collection
of
this kind was published (Reading Putnam,
edited by P. Clark and B. Hale, Oxford:
Basil
Blackwell, 1994.) This is a rich book,
which
covers the most important themes from
Putnam’s
work in the last 25 years. Those who
work
on Putnam should definitely read it.
But
some of the papers will also be valuable
to those who are interested in the
same issues
as Putnam, even if they are not specifically
interested in his work. |
Evans Experientialism 
Hilary Putnam
