Pragmatism and Realism
Hilary Putnam Cogan University Professor
Emeritus, Harvard University
Reviewed by: Gábor Forrai
University of Miskolc Notre
Dame Philosophical Reviews 2002.07.11
Conant, James and Zeglen, Urszula M. (eds.),
Routledge, 2002
256pp, $80.00 (hbk), ISBN 0-415-25605-4.
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Hilary Putnam, one of the most important
American philosophers of the Post-World War
II generation, has also been one of the most
prolific. His corpus includes five volumes
of collected works, seven books, and over
200 articles, on an astonishing variety of
topics ranging over philosophy of science,
philosophy of language, philosophy of mind,
philosophy of logic and mathematics, metaphysics,
ethics, and politics. In many of these areas,
he has proved to be not only an active participant,
but a foundational thinker.
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.
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