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PHILOSOPHY IN THE AGE OF SCIENCE:

Essays by Hilary Putnam

INTRODUCTION:

Hilary Putnam: Artisanal Polymath of Philosophy

by

Mario De Caro and David Macarthur

"Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts." - C. S. Pierce “… even the hugest telescope has to have an eye-piece no larger than the human eye.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Part 1. A Retrospective Overview

The present volume collects the recent philosophical papers of Hilary Putnam

who, in an age that increasingly tends towards specialization, is a genuine renaissance

man of philosophy, combining conceptual imagination, mathematical genius, scientific

erudition, humanistic concerns and moral vision. In this respect he deserves to be

compared with Aristotle, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and

Bertrand Russell. In our time perhaps only Jürgen Habermas is of a comparable

philosophical breadth and stature. Putnam has justly been called “the history of recent

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philosophy in outline”1 but he also represents its possible future, as the present volume

attests.

A striking feature of this new collection, the first in seventeen years, is that we

find Putnam returning to some of his very first enthusiasms in philosophy such as

mathematical logic, philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of quantum mechanics.

This return is to be welcomed for, as Whitehead said, “Fundamental progress has to do

with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.”2 We also find Putnam’s latest reflections on the

perennial problems of realism, the fact/value divide, skepticism and naturalism.

Since the present volume represents the sixth collection of Putnam’s philosophical

papers it is a fitting occasion to cast a retrospective eye over the long and winding road

that Putnam has travelled in his various re-thinkings and re-conceivings of the problems

of philosophy and what he considers to be the most fruitful responses to them. Putnam’s

notorious ‘changes of mind’ are, first and foremost, evidence of a powerfully imaginative

philosophical intelligence that is more concerned to manifest the virtues of curiosity,

imagination and honesty than the questionable virtue of intellectual steadfastness.3

Nonetheless, philosophers reading Putnam often see these ‘changes’ as requiring some

apology as though it was agreed on all sides that the proper role of a philosopher is to fix

on some position and then, ever after, to defend it against all objections. In contrast to this

1 Passmore, John. Recent Philosophers. (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1988), 97. 2 Quoted in Auden, W. H. & Kronenberger, Louis. The Viking Book of Aphorisms. (New York: Viking, 1966) 3 Sidney Morgenbesser is reputed to have perceptively joked: “Putnam’s the quantum philosopher. You can’t understand him and his position at the same time.” The suggestion is that Putnam is such an advanced thinker that no one else can keep up with him. By the time we have understood his position he’s moved to a different one! In other words, he’s always one or two steps ahead of us.

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legalistic conception of philosophy, Putnam’s tendency to constantly return to reconsider

the (motivations or grounds or intelligibility of) the problems and what the (presently)

best replies to them are, is to be celebrated as exemplifying an open-minded inclusive

conception of philosophy, a form of fallible democratic experimentalism, to be judged by

its fruits on a trial and error basis.

This conception represents Putnam’s absorption of the insights of Dewey’s

approach to epistemology, which sees inquiry at its best as characterized by various

ethical or political virtues such as fair-mindedness, openness to criticism, toleration of a

wide range of alternative points of view and so on. These democratic virtues bring to

light a Platonic analogy between self and society, applying equally to one’s own

intelligent self-reflections and to the social realm of one’s debates, exchanges and

collaborations with others.

A word of warning: Deweyian experimentalism in philosophy should not be

confused with the movement called “experimental philosophy” which sees philosophy as

a generalized form of empirical inquiry.4 Putnam does not follow W.V. Quine’s

naturalism in collapsing philosophy as a whole into the sciences. In contrast to Quine,

Putnam is happy to acknowledge the existence of conceptual truths and the importance of

such truths in the relatively a priori business of conceptual inquiry. Putnam’s approach to

philosophy can be better appreciated by seeing that, as he puts it, “philosophical tasks are

never really completed” and that “there are no last words in philosophy”5; that is, we

4 Such work includes Stephen Stitch’s comparison of the epistemic intuitions of college students in Western and Asian countries. See, e.g., Nichols, Shaun, Stich, Stephen, & Weinberg, Jonathan. 2001. "Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions," Philosophical Topics, 29 (2001): 429–460. 5 See [this vol.] ch.31, 19.

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must always allow for the possibility of there being new insights, new perspectives, new

conceptual and empirical possibilities to take account of.

Apart from following the relationships between the many ‘Putnams’ as

represented by the many doctrines and movements of thought he has defended at one

time or another, another difficulty in reading a Putnam paper is to understand what its

dialectical point is. The smoothness and beguiling conversational tone of Putnam’s

writing often belie the complexity and nuance of his philosophical moves. Consider, for

example, the well-known model-theoretic argument. This is not uncommonly read as a

sceptical attack upon the notion of reference überhaupt. It is as if the argument

demonstrates that since “one can ‘Skolemize’ absolutely everything”, as Putnam puts it,

we must conclude that

It seems to be absolutely impossible to fix a determinate reference (without appeal

to nonnatural mental powers) for any term at all.6

This reading then seems to gain further credibility from the apparent alignment of Putnam

with Quine’s notorious inscrutability of reference thesis. So we find a recent

commentator in the authoritative Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy writing,

Putnam's general goal in the model-theoretic argument is to show that our

language is semantically indeterminate—that there's no fact of the matter as to

what the terms and predicates of our language refer to.7

6 Putnam, H. Realism and Reason. Philosophical Papers, vol. 3. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 16.

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This stunning misreading, which effectively turns Putnam into a skeptic (or at the

very least an antirealist8) about reference, is paradoxically the very opposite of Putnam’s

own position, which is decidedly realistic about relations of reference between words and

world. Missing Putnam’s dialectical strategy, the author completely misses Putnam’s

philosophical point. Putnam’s actual strategy in the model theoretical argument is to

suppose, for the sake of argument, that a metaphysical realism which assumes an

interface between the cognitive realm of language-using minds and the causal realm of

the extra-mental world can explain reference from a God’s-eye-point-of-view. The idea,

then, is that the success of the physical sciences is supposedly explained by the fact that

the terms used in those theories typically refer to such and such mind-independent

(metaphysically privileged) ‘objects’ with which we causally interact. Putnam’s argument

then shows that this meta-theoretical “explanation” of scientific success (including its

satisfaction of various operational and theoretical constraints) is consistent with

antirealist theories of truth and reference.9

The point of this argument is not to argue against any determinate notion of

reference, as this commentator and others suppose, but only to argue that metaphysical

realism has not furnished one (and is, in fact, consistent with semantic indeterminacy).

7 Bays, Timothy. “Skolem’s Paradox”. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), ed. Zalta, E. N. URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/paradox-skolem/ 8 Michael Devitt writes, “Hilary Putnam ingeniously derives anti-realism from just about everything.” The reference, fairly clearly, is to the model theoretic argument. Cf. his Realism and Truth. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), vii. 9 The endgame of this argument concerns the viability of the causal realist’s (e.g. Devitt’s) claim that a determinate reference relation is fixed by causation itself. Putnam regards this move as metaphysical pie in the sky. Cf. his Words and Life. Ed. Conant, James. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), ch. 14.

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Since Putnam takes for granted that our terms enjoy determinate reference to things in

the world he takes the argument as a whole to provide us with a reductio ad absurdum of

metaphysical realism. Given our situated perspective in the world, which crucially

includes our cognitively engaged perceptual relatedness to external things, there is, in

general, a fact of the matter about what our terms refer to on Putnam’s view.

We have presented Putnam’s ‘changes of mind’ as manifesting various

intellectual virtues and exemplifying a pragmatist conception of philosophy but there is a

sense in which the usual response to these changes is, in any case, somewhat of an over-

reaction. It is important to see that Putnam’s shifts in position are not arbitrary or

temperamental but represent sustained efforts at self-criticism – a philosophical ideal! –

that manifest underlying patterns or commonalities of intention, concern and

commitment. Tracing the outlines of these patterns we discern five themes that provide a

useful map to help the reader negotiate the relations between Putnam past and Putnam

present, and between the technical and the non-technical, and the theoretical and the

practical in this complex and wide-ranging field of evolving discussions.

The five themes are these: 1) the sympathetic critique of Logical Positivism

(including the work of the “honorary” positivist, Quine); 2) the enduring aspiration to be

realistic about rational (or conceptual) normativity in philosophy; 3) anti-essentialism

about a range of central philosophical notions; 4) the reconciliation of fact and value and,

more broadly, the reconciliation of the scientific worldview and humanistic traditions of

thought; and 5) the movement from reductive scientific naturalism (in early Putnam) to

liberal naturalism (in recent Putnam).

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Let us make some remarks about each theme, the point of which is not to put

Putnam in a nutshell – which, in any case, would be an impossible task.10 Our aim is to

cast light on certain aspects of Putnam’s work that are often overlooked or poorly

understood in order to help the reader find his or her way about in these powerful but

sometimes elusive writings. And part of their elusiveness is that Putnam has no single or

simple philosophical vision. He is, as we want to put it, a philosophical artisan who, like

a highly skilled craftsman (e.g., a Japanese carpenter), has no all-purpose tool for every

problem but chooses from a large array of tools the right tool for the job at hand. Even

when the problems are more or less the same that does not imply that the same ‘tool’ is

appropriate: “the fact that the difficulties are in a sense the same, does not mean that they

do not require special treatment in each case.”11 Putnam’s methods and tools in

philosophy are always, to some extent, purpose-built. Looking at the craftsman-at-work it

can be hard to see ‘the method in the madness’, but you can trust Putnam that there

always is!

1. The Critique of Logical Positivism

Logical Positivism, understood broadly to include the writings of Quine,12 was arguably

the most important philosophical movement of twentieth century Anglo-American

philosophy. As a student of both Hans Reichenbach and Rudolph Carnap, and a colleague

of Quine’s, it is hardly surprising that many strains of Putnam’s thought can be best

10 In his teaching Putnam would say, “Any philosopher that can be put in a nutshell belongs there!” [DM]. 11 See [this vol.] ch. 22, 3. 12 Putnam has written, “I am inclined to class Quine as the last and the greatest of the logical positivists.” Realism with a Human Face. Ed. Conant, J. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 269.

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appreciated as a kind of Socratic dialogue between Putnam and representative positions

of Logical Positivism or updated versions of these. Consider, for example, his work on

the nature and limits of a priori and analytic truth, the viability of a fact/value distinction,

the failure of the project to formalize inductive logic, the failure of the project to unify the

sciences, conceptual pluralism, and the phenomenon of conceptual relativity in

theoretical discourses. Putnam’s attitude to this philosophical legacy is best characterized

by appeal to G. W. F. Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung, a concept which perfectly captures

Putnam’s attempt to sympathetically engage with Logical Positivism in order to both

criticize its shortcomings and actively recover and inherit its deepest insights.

Putnam’s treatment of metaphysical questions in the present volume provides a

telling case study to assess this complex dialectical relationship with the positivist

tradition. Putnam follows the positivists in rejecting incoherent and irresponsible

metaphysics (that is, metaphysics with no links to what has weight in our lives) but he

does not agree with them that this spells the end of metaphysics as such. Far from it!

Putnam is the first to insist that the life of philosophy depends on encouraging vigorous

metaphysical discussion, which is, of course, consistent with finding some metaphysical

disputes relatively fruitless (e.g. recent Analytic Ontology). Certain metaphysical issues,

such as those raised by critical reflection on contemporary physics (e.g. concerning the

reality of its latest theoretical posits, or the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics,

or the status of string theory) are, in fact, unavoidable. But for all his sympathy with

metaphysical discussion Putnam wants to resist the metaphysical impulse to demand final

once-and-for-all answers to such questions.

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Furthermore, in those cases where metaphysics is found wanting, Putnam’s

nuanced account of occasion-sensitive sense-making allows for a more sympathetic

approach to its potential insights than the positivists’ verificationist theory of

meaningfulness, which flat-footedly equates metaphysics with cognitively meaningless

pseudo-statements – allowing them only an ‘emotive meaning’. Turning the tables on

positivism, Putnam is of the view that the positivists’ own theory of meaningfulness in

terms of conditions of empirical verification is metaphysical in spite of itself.

Paradoxically, the deniers of metaphysics often turn out to be unwitting metaphysicians

themselves. To give another example of this Putnamian insight: despite Hume’s anti-

metaphysical ambitions some of his anti-metaphysical arguments depend crucially upon a

disputable metaphysical construal of experience, which problematically equates

experience with sensory impressions (or images) in the mind.

Putnam was himself a verificationist during his internal realist period, but his

notion of verification was never simply taken over from the positivist tradition. Putnam’s

notion of verification-in-principle made allowance for a very liberal conception of “ideal”

(or, simply, good enough) epistemic conditions for warranted assertion. It is also worth

pointing out that Putnam’s motivation for verificationism was not, as it was for the

positivists, to formulate an empiricist theory of meaningfulness. Rather his concern was

to avoid positing metaphysically mysterious conceptions of truth or truth-makers, which

made no genuine contact with the human practice of employing the term “true”.13

13 For Putnam’s recent thinking about the relation between truth and verification and his view that our grasp of empirical concepts depends upon our perceptual verification abilities, see “Pragmatism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 95 (1995): 291-306.

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2. A Realistic Attitude to Rational Normativity

Putnam is famous for endorsing, at different stages in his philosophical career, a diversity

of ‘realisms’ including scientific realism, metaphysical realism, internal realism, and

common sense (or pragmatic or natural) realism. One might be forgiven for thinking that

Putnam is obsessed about how best to philosophically capture some intuitive idea of a

mind-independent reality but that would be to misunderstand his motivations. To see this

consider Putnam’s reaction to Michael Devitt’s purely ontological formulation of

metaphysical realism in terms of the mind-independence of various common-sense and

scientific entities.14 Putnam’s response is to emphasise that when considering the realism-

antirealism debates there is no avoiding the semantic issues of truth and reference as

Devitt attempts to do. To maintain his semantic agnosticism, Devitt is forced to put his

faith in an undefined notion of mind-independence that cannot do the work required of it

[more on this below]. The moral for Putnam (who echoes Frege here) is that these issues

must be conducted in a semantic key.

We do more justice to Putnam’s thought if we see these changes from one form of

realism to another as reflecting an underlying commonality of purpose, a lifelong

meditation on, and attempt to articulate, the indispensable normative dimension of our

actual practices of rational criticism including our use of central normative terms such as

“truth”, “justification”, “reference”, and “meaning” as they function in one or other

domains of discourse.15 This commitment lies behind some of Putnam’s most famous

14 Devitt, Realism and Truth. 15 It seems to us that this theme takes precedence over the theme of thought’s intentional directedness to reality, which Maximillian De Gaynesford treats as Putnam’s leading concern. There is, of course, a close relationship between the two – but only in those cases where talk of a ‘reality’ makes sense. In any case, it is a mistake to think there is a

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ideas including his Twin Earth thought experiment for semantic externalism, his

indispensability arguments, and his defence of the stability of reference across theory

change (e.g. Niels Bohr’s use of “das Elektron” to refer to the very same electrons

despite large shifts in his embedding theory). What this shows is the extent to which

Putnam is a post-linguistic-turn philosopher for whom issues of truth, meaning, reference,

and understanding (or sense) are at the heart of, and so put significant constraints on, all

philosophical reflection.

One important exception to this treatment of Putnam’s realisms is scientific

realism which is an ontological doctrine concerning the real existence of the

“unobservable” theoretical entities that pull their weight in successful scientific

explanations, those of physics in particular. The no-miracles argument that Putnam

defends in chapter 1 [and of which more below] is a causal argument that does not

depend on substantial semantic assumptions16. Indeed Putnam’s commitment to scientific

realism remained constant before, during and after his famous internal realist period.17

We might say that scientific realism is a local ontological realism and that it was always

held in concert with, and sometimes not clearly distinguished from, other more general

forms of semantically inspired realism that Putnam advanced at different times.

It is worth remarking that Putnam’s concern with core normative phenomena is

itself shaped by a deep problematic involving normativity, a problematic that animates

the following remark,

single “key” that unlocks Putnam’s thought in its entirety. Cf. De Gaynesford, Maximillian. Hilary Putnam. (Durham: Acumen, 2006). 16 Although it is worth noting that causation is an intentional notion on Putnam’s view. See, e.g., The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 137-150. 17 See [this vol.] chs. 2 and 3.

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On the one hand our understanding of our concepts, and our employment of

them in our richly conceptually structured lives, is not a mystery transaction with

intangible objects, a transaction with something over and above the objects that

make up our bodies and our environments; yet as soon as one tries to take a

normative notion like the understanding of a concept or Wittgenstein’s notion of

the use of a word, and equate that notion with some notion from stimulus-

response psychology (“being disposed to make certain responses to certain

stimuli”), or a notion from computational psychology, or a notion from the

physiology of the brain, then the normativity disappears, and hence the concept

itself disappears.18

The concern of this passage, and a significant part of the motivation for Putnam’s focus

on ‘realism’ of one sort or another, is an attempt to explain the objectivity that attaches to

central normative notions such as truth, justification and understanding. The shifts in

Putnam’s realist allegiances attest to the difficulty of steering clear of the twin threats of

the hyperbolization or subliming of objectivity in metaphysical thinking (e.g. the Platonic

or mathematical realist notion of “intangible objects”) and the denial or denigration of

objectivity in sceptical thought (e.g. psychological or physicalist reductionism). The

criticism of this oscillation between subliming and ridiculousness, as we might put it, is

played out again and again in Putnam’s writings from his attacks on the metaphysical

realists’ notion of truth or reference (subliming) to his critiques of postmodern nihilism

18 See [this vol.] ch.22, 00-00

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and Rorty’s relativist conception of justification (ridiculousness). The moral is: these are

not our only options, nor are they our best.

Putnam’s major achievement here is to show that we do not need to accept the

appearance of a forced choice between an inhuman objectivity (“the view from

nowhere”) and no objectivity at all (“nihilism” or “skepticism”). It might be noted in

passing that this attests to an important difference between Putnam’s neo-pragmatism and

that of Rorty, who effectively accepts the appearance of the forced choice and opts for the

second alternative: no objectivity.

Putnam’s vision of objectivity is one of his most important contributions to

philosophy although it has not received the attention it deserves. And, once again, it is

easy to misunderstand Putnam’s position when he writes, “We have… better and worse

versions, and that is objectivity enough”19. This might just seem to raise the question of

objectivity all over again: Better or worse for whom? Better or worse in what respect?

To explain Putnam’s thought here is helpful to employ the Rawlsian distinction

between concept and conceptions.20 The concept of objectivity is what all conceptions of

objectivity share in common, namely, the abstract idea that there are better or worse

answers or responses to our questions. But this tells us very little unless we know what

sense we are to attach to these terms and how to apply them. This is what we have

conceptions of objectivity for. In the history of philosophy there have been many

conceptions (pictures or models) of objectivity to provide the ideas of better and worse

19 Putnam, H. The Many Faces of Realism. (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987), 77. 20 This distinction is taken, adapted somewhat, from John Rawls: “Roughly, the concept is the meaning of the term, while a particular conception includes as well the principles required to apply it.” Political Liberalism. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 14, fn. 15.

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with more or less specific content and guide us in to how to apply them. Some of the

more important conceptions include: 1) the account of objectivity in terms of objects (e.g.

Plato’s Forms, metaphysically realist ‘objects’, empiricist sense-data, perceptual objects);

2) the Kantian account of objectivity in terms of rules of judgment; and 3) the

conventionalist account of objectivity in terms of linguistic conventions or intersubjective

agreement. In Putnam’s way of thinking our conceptions of objectivity are plural and

ever-expanding but we make a profound mistake if we treat any one of them as what

objectivity really is. Much of his efforts have been directed against the object-based

account of objectivity (in the philosophy of mathematics and ethics, in particular21) but

his general lesson is that each of these different conceptions applies well to some, but not

to all, aspects of our lives.

Regarding the concept of objectivity, Putnam is trying to get us to see that the

core idea of a better or worse that transcends the speaker is presupposed in our everyday

practices of adjudicating disputes even if we spell out the notion of better or worse in

different ways on different occasions. This is as true in science and mathematics as in

such notoriously problematic areas such as ethics and aesthetics where reasonableness

and rational argument do not guarantee agreement. One important task for the

philosopher, on Putnam’s account, is to show what particular conception of objectivity,

hence what conception of reason and argument, is appropriate to each of the

problematical situations we actually confront in our lives. Once again this is an example

of the artisanal approach to philosophy at work.

21 Putnam, Hilary. Ethics Without Ontology. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

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It is worth noting, however, that Putnam’s interest in conforming to our actual

practices of judgment, criticism, translation and so on is not a matter of attempting to

exhaustively describe the ordinary use of terms, say, in the manner of ordinary language

philosophers. Putnam reveals an important aspect of the influence of his positivist

teachers in aiming for “mild rational reconstructions” 22 of our normative notions, ones

that might diverge for theoretical reasons from everyday practice even if practice remains

an important constraint on such constructions.

3. Anti-essentialism

Anti-essentialism about truth is a familiar doctrine from the writings of Rorty as is anti-

essentialism about language in the writings of Wittgenstein. But it is too little appreciated

that Putnam has extended this Wittgensteinian and pragmatist move to a range of central

philosophical notions including, in addition to truth and language, meaning, reference,

knowledge, reason, objectivity, and (moral) goodness. The consequences of this radical

anti-essentialism ramify very widely in Putnam’s thought. It is this aspect of his thinking

that is to the fore in his curious and oft-repeated insistence that he is not offering a

“theory” of some topic of philosophical interest: a remark that is somewhat mystifying

unless we realize that he is talking about the traditional notion of an essentialist theory,

one that assumes that the phenomenon being theorized is fixed and substantially unified.

Putnam’s work, then, is to help deepen our understanding of the “rough ground” of the

variegated and ever-extendable phenomena under investigation.23

22 Putnam used this expression in his teaching. [DM] 23 The reference is to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remark, “Back to the rough ground”. Philosophical Investigations. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958/1953), #107.

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To give an example, although Putnam accepts that the reference of empirical

terms have causal constraints he has denied, contrary to what many critics have thought,

that he is offering a theory of reference. This does not mean that Putnam is adopting a

“quietist” conception of the role of philosophy in this area. It can be better understood as

saying that reference has no essence, hence there is no single thing that is the relation of

reference although there is, of course a single predicate “refers”.24 On Putnam’s

alternative picture there is an extendable family of uses of the term “refers” which are

different in different cases depending on the ‘object’ in question: referring to tables and

chairs is a different thing from referring to numbers, which is different again from

referring to subatomic particles and so on.25

The ramifying importance of this radically anti-essentialist perspective, however,

comes more clearly into focus if we consider that it is brought to bear on meaning itself.

This is an important point of alignment between Putnam’s thought and that of

Wittgenstein (and also, of Austin26). On Putnam’s view, the radical implications of which

have largely been missed or ignored (with Charles Travis being a notable exception)27,

what a grammatically well-formed sentence composed of standard English words means

is not settled simply by dictionary definitions and grammatically well-formed

24 Putnam follows Peirce in thinking of reference as a triadic predicate: Person P refers to object O by Symbol S. 25 Putnam usefully remarks, “what we can refer to depends on how we are situated in the world, what our identificatory abilities and practices actually are.” “Replies,” 396; see also 382-384. 26 Of major philosophers, Putnam is one of the few to continue to turn to Austin for philosophical insight. Another is Cavell, with whom Putnam also shares interesting commonalities of outlook and purpose. For example, Cavell’s definition of philosophy as “the education of grown-ups” is Putnam’s definition of choice. See the chapter of this title in the present volume (ch.30). 27 Travis, Charles. The Uses of Sense. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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construction. To determine the meaning as employed by a speaker in some real-life

situation – which, to aid clarity, Putnam calls the “sense” in contrast to the dictionary

“meaning” of a word – depends on all sorts of features of the occasion of use: who is

speaking? to whom? after what? under what circumstances? and so on. Put otherwise, the

sentence by itself has no single well-defined meaning (or truth-condition) but an

indefinitely extendable range of occasion-sensitive senses (or reasonable understandings).

One immediate consequence of this outlook is that the project of giving a theory

of meaning, in so far as this assumes a fixed and unified subject-matter which can be

considered independently of the messy business of pragmatics, is a fantasy. So, too, for

similar reasons, is the project of attempting to analyze the concept of, say, knowledge

into necessary and sufficient conditions. A key aspect of Putnam’s recent work here has

been to reject a facile contextualism that tries to domesticate this Wittgensteinian

approach to meaning by re-instituting the idea of a fixed and stable subject-matter (a core

semantic meaning or truth-condition) on the grounds of the supposition that there is a

fixed set of contextually varying parameters which can be filled in as needed.28 Putnam’s

dismissal of this business-as-usual response is to demonstrate, through detailed

consideration of many examples, that there is no fixed set of parameters of the sort

imagined; the aspects of things we must take account of in order to determine what we

understand by our words on occasions of their use is itself variable, open-ended and ever-

extendable.

28 For example, this is the position of Michael Williams regarding the use of the term “knowledge”. See [this vol.] ch. 28.

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4. Reconciling the Scientific Worldview and the Humanistic Tradition

The overcoming of the positivist fact/value dichotomy and the attempt to reconcile the

scientific image(s) of the world with those aspects of our lives denigrated by the

positivists as non-cognitive, or by Quine as second-class (e.g. ethics, aesthetics, religion,

intentionality), marks Putnam as an inheritor of central teachings of classical pragmatism.

Putnam has recently published works on these themes so there we will only comment

briefly on them here.29

One point, however, is worth repeating. Putnam’s denial that there is a unique and

complete description of the world in some metaphysically privileged vocabulary (say, the

language of the natural sciences) reflects his commitment to conceptual pluralism. For

example, a chair can be usefully and truthfully described in the language of physics, or of

carpentry, or of furniture design, or of etiquette, etc., without it being the case that these

vocabularies are reducible to some favoured or fundamental vocabulary.

One of Putnam’s most important insights regarding the question of fact and value

is to see that if one has a subjectivist attitude towards moral values, according to which

they are incapable of genuine truth and justification,30 then consistency dictates that one

must adopt the same subjectivist attitude towards the cognitive values of consistency,

reasonableness, simplicity etc. These values are presupposed by reason in the areas of

science, epistemology and logic that the metaphysician takes for granted. So if all values

were subjective then so, too, would be all the “facts”.

29 Putnam, H. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Ethics Without Ontology. 30 As Putnam explains, this will typically be held on disputable metaphysical grounds.

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Putnam has confronted his scientistic opponents with an acute dilemma: either

concede his point or treat these paradigmatically cognitivist domains as non-cognitive,

effectively sawing off the branch upon which they are sitting since surely no-one will

argue that all discourses are non-cognitive, incapable of genuine truth and justification.

The present volume presents Putnam’s latest reflections in his long-standing

attempt not to make an idol out of science and not to impose scientific (or mathematical

or logical) modes of reason or clarity or knowledge on every area of our lives. It is

significant also in having Putnam’s most sustained reflections on contemporary physical

theory as well as more abstract issues concerning the crucial interpretative role of

philosophy in the sciences. A key concern of Putnam’s throughout is to argue for the

need and importance of philosophy to the sciences to counter the baleful influence of

leading scientists who themselves often betray a dismissive attitude towards philosophy.31

Another key concern is to argue for the need and importance of philosophy to modern

society in a time of academic specialization, which often loses touch with the broader

human and cultural concerns that have always driven thinking people towards

philosophical reflection in the first place.

5. The Movement from Scientific Naturalism to Liberal Naturalism

Putnam’s earliest papers already reveal a commitment to scientific realism that remains in

force today. [More on this below.] But they also reveal a commitment to a reductive or

31 For example, in a newspaper article, Richard Feynman – echoing Barnett Newman’s quip about aesthetics – is reported by Steven Weinberg to have said, “Philosophy of science is to scientists what ornithology is to birds.” Overbye, Dennis. “Laws of Nature, Source Unknown.” New York Times, Dec 18, 2007.

20

scientistic form of naturalism. Indeed, in a 1958 paper titled “Unity of Science as a

Working Hypothesis” (co-written with Paul Oppenheim),32 Putnam famously supposed

that all sciences could be reduced to the language of physics. But for several decades

since then Putnam has been a staunch critic of this kind of scientism and its various

expressions such as the project to naturalize reason or intentionality and the Procrustean

imposition of scientific or mathematical models of rationality across the board. The

tendency of scientism to attack normativity by denial or attempted elimination or

reduction, has led Putnam to say that “scientism is… one of the most dangerous

contemporary intellectual tendencies”.33

The present volume is the clearest and fullest expression of Putnam’s commitment

to a liberal naturalism that combats the scientistic tendency that often finds expression

under the banner of the term “naturalism”.34 Liberal naturalism contests scientific

naturalism, especially those narrow or reductive forms that recognize only the natural

sciences (or sometimes only physics!) as legitimate and irreducible. Liberal naturalism

wants to allow for the conceptual possibility of non-scientific understanding and

knowledge but from a perspective that still earns the right to the title of naturalism insofar

as it rejects all forms of supernaturalism and is centrally concerned to take the sciences

32 Putnam, H. & Oppenheim, P. “Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis.” In Concepts, Theories and the Mind-Body Problem, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science: vol. 2, Feigl, Herbert, Scriven, Michael & Maxwell, Grover (eds.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958) 3-36. 33 Putnam, H. Realism and Reason. Philosophical Papers, vol. 3. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 211. 34 For elucidation and discussion of the philosophical promise of liberal naturalism, see the two collections edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur: Naturalism in Question, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Naturalism and Normativity, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

21

seriously (which, for Putnam, involves extensive familiarity with the methods and results

of contemporary science, e.g., quantum mechanics).35

Moral or aesthetic or religious understanding would all count as non-scientific on

Putnam’s view since they are not in the business of prediction and control on the basis of

discerning causal patterns or laws in the world. Such forms of understanding also make

ineliminable reference to a subjective or agential point of view for which there is no

plausible scientific account in the offing. A slogan for Putnam’s position might be:

scientific realism without scientific imperialism.

Liberal naturalism also makes room for at least the possibility of admitting a non-

scientific non-supernatural ontology such as “values” or the “abstract objects” of

mathematics. Many think Putnam is committed to just such “entities” because of his well-

known sympathy for Quine’s indispensability argument, which reasons from the

indispensability of mathematics in the physical sciences to a realist interpretation of

mathematics. But there are two importantly different ways to interpret this realism: 1)

ontologically, as a commitment to there being a domain of “objects” that provide

referents for logically regimented terms in the discourse – this is Quine’s way; or 2)

semantically, as a commitment to there being fully-fledged truths of the relevant sort (in

this case mathematical truths) without this committing one to “intangible objects” – this

is Putnam’s way.

As has become clear in recent work, including work in the present volume,

Putnam does not think that the objectivity of mathematical and ethics, to take two prime

examples, requires positing a special domain of ‘objects’ for each of these regions of

35 See [this vol.] ch. 4. .

22

thought and talk to be about.36 It is enough that they are rational discourses which involve

their own normative practices for establishing and justifying claims to truth even if it is

not easy to say what it is to ‘think in the right way’ in non-mathematical discourses such

as ethics.

Another important aspect of Putnam’s liberal naturalism is his advocacy of a

realist attitude towards the sciences themselves, that is to say, he wants philosophers to

adopt a broadly empirical attitude to the evident plurality and disunity of the sciences

(including the human or social sciences) rather than being happy to rely on largely

armchair speculation about what the sciences are or must be. Again, a large part of

Putnam’s mission here has been to try to overcome the hidden metaphysical legacy of the

positivist attitudes to science such as reductionism, anti-realism and monism.

Part 2. The Present Volume

The Theoretical Face

One of Wittgenstein’s key insights is that we typically (often unwittingly) think about the

complex phenomena of the world – people, science, language, politics, art, religion etc. –

by comparison with schematic pictures or models. We want to apply this insight to

Putnam himself and say that we can see many of his past and present works as

responding to a picture of the successful sciences as providing an absolute value-free

conception of the world – a metaphysically sanctified set of ‘objects’ – to underwrite

privileged notions of truth and reference. We can fill this picture out a little more by

seeing these ‘objects’ as impinging on the mind causally, not cognitively. Criticisms of

36 See, in particular, Putnam, Ethics Without Ontology.

23

taking this picture as the literal truth (i.e. hence as a science-inspired metaphysics telling

us how things must be) underlie a good many of Putnam’s positions including conceptual

pluralism, conceptual relativity, direct realism in the philosophy of perception, common

sense realism, and the interdependency of facts and values and of facts and conventions.

Hence the appropriateness of our title, Philosophy in the Age of Science.

There are two further motivations for the title. One is the liberal naturalism

already canvassed above. Another is the acknowledgement that the greatest challenge to

philosophy today is to explain what role philosophy, understood as a relatively distinct

discipline of inquiry, can plausibly have in light of the great successes of modern science

and the technologically dependent consumer society it has made possible. Logical

positivists held that philosophy is essentially a philosophy of the logic of scientific

discourse. Putnam’s vision of philosophy is more complex and less restrictive, seeing

philosophy as overlapping with the sciences but allowing that there are areas of

philosophy such as its interpretative and critical dimension that are distinctive of it.

Moreover, in addition to its theoretical face, Putnam recognizes a moral face of the

subject. But the importance of science to philosophy today can be gleaned from this: that

science and reflections upon science still retain a fundamental role in discussions of both

our theoretical and practical lives.

Surveying Putnamian themes – an artisanal approach to philosophy, a fallibilist

antiskeptical epistemology, the possibility of particular fact/value distinctions but no

global dichotomy, conceptual pluralism, conceptual relativity, the reconciliation of (the

philosophy of) science and ethics including an attempt to do justice to the everyday life-

world, a liberal naturalism, and so on. – it is hard to escape the conclusion that Putnam

24

should properly be regarded as one of the two founding fathers of Neo-Pragmatism; the

other being Richard Rorty. Putnam’s passionate debates with Rorty, particularly over the

right way to think about the normative dimension of, and connection between, truth and

justification, should not obscure the great importance of their joint efforts at articulating a

rejuvenated form of pragmatism for our time that has the power to absorb and build upon

the best insights of both analytic and continental traditions of philosophy – including, of

course, the lessons of Logical Positivism.

An early editorial decision was to leave aside Putnam’s papers on the classical

pragmatists for a separate volume but it is important to see that all the papers collected

here bear the stamp of Putnam’s distinctive brand of Neo-Pragmatism.37

Perhaps the main reason Putnam has not previously called himself a pragmatist is

that this label tends to be associated with a view he has no sympathy with, a so-called

pragmatist ‘analysis’ of truth in terms of practical benefits; so-called because, as Putnam

has helped make clear, none of the classical pragmatists took themselves to be offering an

analysis of truth in terms of a set of necessary and sufficient conditions despite what most

commentators seem to think.38 Pragmatists, like Putnam himself, are anti-essentialists.

To avoid the pejorative connotations of the term “pragmatism” the title Neo-

Pragmatism is particularly fitting. It also reflects the fact that Putnam tends to see

philosophical issues through the lens of a sophisticated practical or use-based philosophy

37 Another significant editorial decision was to leave aside Putnam’s papers on Jewish philosophy and religion for publication in a separate volume. 38 For example, William James distinguishes his account from an analysis by calling it “a genetic theory of what is meant by ‘truth’”, [emphasis added] Pragmatism: New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978/1907), 29.

25

of language, which does not treat semantic notions (truth, reference, content etc.) as

explanatory primitives; and which focuses attention on the agent point of view. It is

plausibly this very neo-pragmatism that answers Putnam’s call for a renewal of

philosophy after a retrograde period of speculative Analytic Ontology, paradigmatically

represented by David Lewis’s work on possible worlds and David Armstrong’s work on

universals.39

Putnam may celebrate the interpenetration of philosophy and metaphysical

questions but, like Peirce, he is a long-time critic of Ontology understood as a

metaphysical theory of the supposedly fixed, explanatorily basic, categories of being. The

artisanal approach to philosophy sets itself against allegedly all-purpose explanatory tools

and ready-made answers (e.g. possible world metaphysics, truth-maker theory, the

Absolute Conception of the world). Sensitivity to the issues at hand and a certain

unteachable good judgment learned through experience and practice are required by

philosophy at its best, no less than by carpenters or concert pianists.

The Moral Face

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant famously proposes that the interests of reason can be

distilled into three questions: “What can I know?” “What must I do?” and “What may I

hope?”.40 Putnam is almost unique in the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy

in having an imaginative vision of philosophy large enough, and a range of detailed and

technically informed responses to philosophical problems wide enough to encompass and

39 Putnam, H. “Replies”. Philosophical Topics: The Philosophy of Hilary. vol. 20 no.1. (1992). 40 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. trans. Norman Kemp Smith. (London: Macmillan, 1929/1787), A805/B833.

26

provide a guide in approaching these questions – as the present volume ably

demonstrates. But without Kant’s substantial but no longer credible notions of synthetic a

priori truth and an autonomous transcendental subject, Putnam sees his relation to these

fundamental questions differently than Kant does. Putnam does not attempt to directly

answer these questions so much as help to free our responses to them from popular

misconceptions such as: skepticism (e.g. postmodernism, scientism); ethical monism (e.g.

Christian ethics, ethical naturalism); and political cynicism (arising from, e.g., the

modern corporate-driven media, and traumatic events such as Auschwitz and the failure

of communism).

Put otherwise, Putnam’s conception of philosophy embodies an ethos of hope and

an orientation towards the good. It is to Dewey that Putnam turns to help articulate this

vision. In a remark Putnam applauds, Dewey writes:

[Philosophy’s] primary concern is to clarify, liberate and extend

the goods which inhere in the naturally generated functions of

experience. It has no call to create a world of "reality" de novo,

nor to delve into secrets of Being hidden from common sense and science. It has

no stock of information or body of knowledge peculiarly its own; if it does not

always become ridiculous when it sets up as a rival of science, it is only because

a particular philosopher happens to be also, as a human being, a prophetic man

of science. Its business is to accept and to utilize for a purpose the best available

27

knowledge of its own time and place. And this purpose is criticism of beliefs,

institutions, customs, policies with respect to their bearing upon good.41

Here is the moral face of philosophy that Putnam endorses. Philosophy is not a higher

authority of reason sitting in judgment on ordinary men and women. Nor it is a special

esotericism with secret knowledge of a deeper reality beyond that of “common sense and

science”. Its job is, as we have put it previously, the artisanal one of skilfully deploying

and extending all that we have learned from past experience and practice to new

problematic situations involving, amongst other things, “beliefs, institutions, customs,

policies,” in order to further the cause of the “good”: not the Good – a fixed, unified,

supernatural? value – but the many and various real-world goods, including the bringing

into being of new goods.

One might wonder about the deference to Dewey in this context. James Conant

has aptly remarked on Putnam’s tendency, especially evident in his teaching practice, of

presenting his latest views through the mouths of a changing pantheon of philosophical

heroes.42 This could strike one as false modesty but it’s not that. Philosophers of a certain

persuasion say that philosophy is a matter of reading and responding to a particular set of

texts but what Putnam’s lecturing and writing offers his readers is a sense of philosophy

as an engagement with actual flesh and blood people with all their actual cares, concerns

and hopes. The problems are brought down to earth, humanized we might say, and the

41 Dewey, John. The Later Works: 1925-1953. Vol. 1: 1925. Experience and Nature. Ed. Boydston, J. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981/1925), 305. Putnam quotes this passage approvingly in Renewing Philosophy, (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 188. 42 See Conant, James. “Introduction,” Realism with a Human Face. Ed. Conant, J. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), xvi-xvii.

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imaginative bedding of the problems is acknowledged: in Putnam’s hands, the

temperament, tastes and cultural outlook of the philosopher shines through the particular

problems and the particular philosophers that he or she is interested in and how she

approaches or reads them. This is a perfect illustration of Putnam’s sense that philosophy

is a way of life as much as it is a theoretical discipline and that, properly practiced, the

philosopher can be an inspiration to others where it is the whole person that inspires us.

That is demonstrably true of Putnam himself.

We shall now present brief descriptions of each of the sections of the present

volume: i) Science and Philosophy; ii) Logic and Mathematics; iii) Ethics; iv)

Wittgenstein; v) Skepticism; and vi) Mind.

i) Science and Philosophy

This section involves further articulations of important themes such as the criticism of

scientism in all of its multifarious forms, the interpenetration of science and philosophy

without the collapse of philosophy into science, the characterization of scientific realism

and the problems quantum mechanics raises for ontological commitment. Of particular

interest is Putnam’s commitment to scientific realism since it reveals the importance of

being clear about the potentially confusing ways in which the term “realism” is used

across different philosophical debates.

Putnam has always subscribed to the doctrine of scientific realism, understood as

the affirmation of the reality of the theoretical (or “unobservable”) entities of our

successful sciences, especially physics (e.g. electrons). Realism in this context means the

denial of fictionalism about theoretical entities. In particular, Putnam’s realism about the

29

“unobservable” theoretical entities posited by science is a rejection of a positivistic

instrumentalist construal of, say, electron-talk as highly derived talk about the behaviour

of various scientific instruments (e.g. vapour trails in cloud chambers). However, it is

important to note that Putnam does not follow Quine in treating ordinary objects like

tables and chairs as scientific “posits” akin to the theoretical entities of physics. Common

sense objects like tables and books do not await the blessing of science for their reality,

nor can science denigrate their existence, although it may reveal surprising facts about

them.43

What importantly changed over the long period of Putnam’s allegiance to

scientific realism was his conception of the truth of statements about electrons, quarks,

fields, etc., and the relation of such truths to matters of justification: from a

correspondence theory of truth (metaphysical realism); to the identification of truth with

idealized warranted assertibility (internal realism); to the current denial that truth has any

epistemic constraints (common sense realism). Nonetheless, throughout all these changes,

including the internal realist period, Putnam always accepted that the reality of electrons

was causally independent of minds. And he always accepted a thesis of logical

independence too: the existence of, say, electrons neither entails, nor is entailed by, the

existence of minds.

Truths, even on the internal realist picture, were understood in terms of idealized

conditions of verifications, which allowed for truths not actually verified and for which

there may be no humanly possible verification (e.g. truths about volcanic eruptions in the

43 In one of Putnam’s thought experiments what we call “cats” turn out, upon investigation, to be automata controlled by a man on Mars by tiny radio-transmitters located in their pineal glands! See his Mathematics, Matter and Method. Philosophical Papers, vol. 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 238-239.

30

Mesozoic period). Even for the internal realist, then, the world is mind-independent on a

reasonable interpretation of that expression. This bears out one of Putnam’s important

themes: that the metaphysical realist notion of “mind-independence” – which is,

arguably, stronger than the notion of mind-independence the internal realist Putnam

subscribed to – has never been made sufficiently clear to distinguish metaphysical

realism from metaphysical anti-realism; or indeed from common sense realism. Hence

Putnam’s criticism is not that metaphysical realism is false; but that it lacks sense or

coherence. It is not (yet, at least) so much as a candidate for truth or falsehood.

In this section Putnam also defends his no-miracle argument for scientific realism

against various sympathetic critics including Yemima Ben-Menahem, Arthur Fine and

Axel Mueller. To shed some valuable light on this doctrine we shall briefly discuss a

recent criticism advanced by Jack Ritchie.44 Ritchie reads both the indispensability

argument and the no-miracle argument as forms of inference to the best explanation for

the existence of certain problematic entities: abstract (non-spatiotemporal) entities and

theoretical (“unobservable”) entities, respectively. Ritchie claims that inference to the

best explanation is a metaphysical argument, which misrepresents how ontological

commitment actually works in science, and that any plausible naturalist philosophy must

hold to the ontological standards of scientific practitioners themselves.

On Ritchie’s view neither the no-miracle argument nor the indispensability

argument has any force (at least for a serious methodological naturalist), since scientists

do not in fact accept realist interpretations of theoretical or abstract entities on the basis of

44 Ritchie, Jack. Understanding Naturalism. (Durham: Acumen, 2009.)

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inference to the best explanation alone.45 Some specific experimental evidence must also

be available. According to Ritchie, for example, it was only after J.B. Perrin

experimentally verified Einstein's views on the Brownian motion that the scientific

community came to believe in the real existence of atoms.46

However, it is important to distinguish inference to the best explanation as used in

science and as used in metaphysics. Since Ritchie runs these together he ends up denying

any role to inference to the best explanation in science – but that is simply a mistake, as

Putnam has long argued.47 First, important scientists, such as Ludwig Boltzmann and

Einstein (not to mention Galileo and Newton), posited atoms as the best explanation of

phenomena before Perrin’s experiments. Secondly, the pre-Perrin refusal of atomism was,

in part, based on the idea that electromagnetism better accounts for the relevant physical

phenomena than atomism – but this is, arguably, an inference to the best explanation for

the existence of fields! Thirdly, the history of science is filled with examples of appealing

to inference to the best explanation to argue for the existence of some disputed entity:

from the discovery of Neptune to Darwin’s acceptance of some (at the time unknown)

causal mechanisms that were implied by natural selection.

It is also important to see that Ritchie assimilates two different arguments of

Putnam’s involving two different kinds of realism, namely: 1) the indispensability

argument for the truth of mathematical statements (“realism” in one sense); and 2) the

45 Ritchie tends to think of “best explanations” as making no reference to experience or experimental evidence. This is a symptom of his misguidedly treating inference to the best explanation as a purely metaphysical affair. 46 On this issue Ritchie refers to Penelope Maddie’s Naturalism in Mathematics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). 47 For example, see “What Theories are Not” (1962) in Mathematics, Matter and Method, ch.13. For a useful general discussion of the role of inference to the best explanation in science see Lipton, Peter. Inference to the Best Explanation, (London: Routledge, 1991).

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no-miracle argument for the reality – the real existence – of certain theoretical entities in

science (“realism” in another sense). In other words, Ritchie fails to distinguish semantic

realism from ontological realism. The no-miracle argument is a causal argument: its

central claim is that if there are not these theoretical (“unobservable”48) entities causing

these phenomena then that would be a miracle. There is no similar argument for the

reality of mathematical entities. The considerations of the indispensability argument are

not causal at all. Indeed, Putnam actually agrees with Ritchie’s point that the best

explanation of mathematical discourse and practice does not (contra Quine) require

positing mathematical entities (“intangible objects”).

Again the Putnamian lesson is: don’t think inference to the best explanation is an

all-purpose tool with a single function (say, ontological commitment). There are too

many different kinds of explanation (hence too many notions of what “best explanation”

comes to) to make that at all plausible.

ii) Logic and Mathematics

In this section of the volume, Putnam reviews the current discussion regarding the

indispensability argument as it pertains to mathematics, and shows how the conclusion of

the argument has often been misinterpreted. We are also witness to a significant change

in Putnam’s outlook regarding the question of whether it is possible to make progress

with problems in the philosophy of mathematics. The pessimistic flavour of Putnam’s

previous position can be gleaned from the title of a paper he published, “Philosophy of

48 A Putnamian theme is that the instruments of science can enlarge our idea of what is observable: e.g., we can literally see charged particles in a cloud chamber. So the term “unobservable” in these debates is, at the very least, misleading.

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Mathematics: Why Nothing Works.”49 His thinking in this area is now characterized by

newfound hopefulness, a breath of fresh air. In the papers collected here a crucial

methodological step forward is that Putnam now sees more the continuities between the

problems in the philosophy of mathematics and problems in other areas of philosophy

such as ethics; so the approaches to the latter problems, or analogues of them, become

relevant to the philosophy of mathematics as well. Again, it is part of the artisanal

approach that one needs mathematical know-how and experience to apply these strategies

to the philosophy of mathematics.

Early in his career Putnam presented an argument for the thesis that mathematics

should be taken as true under some interpretation (against, above all, the formalist),

which was dependent on considerations internal to mathematics, e.g. its coherence,

fertility, and success. He then developed an argument based on considerations external to

mathematics, to the conclusion that mathematics is true on a realist interpretation (against

intuitionists, operationalists, if-then-ists, and the like). The latter argument is his famous

indispensability argument.

This argument's first premise is that physics is true in a realist sense; its second

premise is that mathematics is indispensable to physics; its third premise is that the only

way of accounting for the indispensable applications of mathematics to physics requires

that mathematics is interpreted as true in a realist sense; and it thus concludes that

mathematics is true in a realist sense. "Realism", throughout, is to be understood as

implying that the statements of physics and mathematical statements are either true or

false where these notions are not to be understood in antirealist terms, that is, in terms of,

49 Putnam, Words and Life, ch. 28.

34

say, verifiability or provability. Contra Mark Colyvan50, the argument is not an

ontological one and, in particular, it does not imply any form of Platonism in the

philosophy of mathematics.51 Consequently, many theoretical issues that are currently

debated in connection with Colyvan's formulation of the argument miss their intended

target.

Putnam also addresses several other objections raised against his argument,

including the claims that no physical theory is a good candidate for truth, that this

argument at most proves that some mathematical statements should be considered true,

and that the argument has no force against Benacerraf’s challenge: How can we have

epistemic contact with mathematical entities if they are causally inert? Additionally, there

50 See Colyvan, Mark. "Indispensability Arguments in the Philosophy of Mathematics", The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Fall 2004 Edition), ed. Zalta, E. N. URL = <http://Plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2004/entries/mathphil-indis/>. 51 Colyvan’s misunderstanding of Putnam's version of the indispensability argument may, to some extent, be explained by the fact that Putnam has not always been concerned to distinguish his version from Quine’s. In his 1971 book Philosophy of Logic (reprinted in Mathematics, Method and Mind, ch. 20), Putnam appears to accept a Quinean way of putting the indispensability argument: that since mathematics is indispensable for physics we must take with ontological seriousness our quantification over “abstract entities” (see especially 347). Indeed as late as 1994, in “Rethinking Mathematical Necessity,” Putnam writes,

As I read this and similar passages in Quine’s writings, the message seems to be that in the last analysis it is the utility of statements about mathematical entities for the prediction of sensory stimuli that justifies belief in their existence. The existence of numbers or sets becomes a hypothesis on Quine’s view, one not dissimilar in kind from the existence of electrons, even if far, far better entrenched.

It follows from this view that certain questions that can be raised about the existence of physical entities can also be raised about the existence of mathematical entities—questions of indispensability and questions of parsimony, in particular. These views of Quine’s are views that I shared ever since I was a student (for a year) at Harvard in 1948-9, but, I must confess, they are views that I now want to criticize. (Words and Life, 245-246)

The reader is advised to see ch. 8 for a retrospective assessment of this complicated issue.

35

is Hartry Field’s argument that mathematics is not indispensable for physics and

Penelope Maddy’s claim that working scientists do not in fact believe in the existence of

all entities posited by their best scientific theories.

Furthermore, in this section Putnam addresses the Liar paradox (by discussing

some difficulties in Tarski’s and Parson’s proposed solutions), presents some theorems

concerning set existence, gives a new proof of Craig’s theorem about Ramsey’s

sentences, and discusses Quine’s undetermination thesis. There is also a discussion of

some interesting implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, including a criticism of

Noam Chomsky’s suggestion that all human linguistic and scientific competence can be

represented by a Turing Machine and the proof of a theorem that shows that Peano

arithmetic has no consistent finitely axiomatizable extensions.

c) Ethics

It is fair to say that Putnam’s ethical writings are dominated by his many discussions and

criticisms of the fact/value dichotomy. And there can be no doubt that this emphasis is

well placed since the idea of a metaphysical gulf between “facts” and “values” is a

critical assumption of many contemporary philosophers, as well as having almost

acquired the status of being a matter of conventional wisdom. It is a striking example of

the way metaphysical ideas can shape, even dictate, to our ethical, aesthetic and political

outlooks. And in our world today it is a powerful idea behind various forms of skepticism

about the good of reason, argument, and intelligent criticism: from the crippling

subjectivism behind such familiar “truisms” as “There’s no disputing matters of taste”; to

the apparent paradigm of good sense, “Just the facts Ma’am!” (as if to reason well is to

36

make a point of leaving evaluative matters aside); to the argument-stopper “That’s just a

question of values” (as if pointing out the evaluative nature of an issue is enough to stop

all intelligent discussion of it). No wonder, then, that Putnam is on a crusade. But like any

crusade there are casualties along the way.

Criticism of the fact/value dichotomy, as vitally important as it is, can sometimes

seem remote from current ethical debate within philosophy. A virtue of this section is to

provide some balance to Putnam’s moral philosophy through detailed engagement with

the positions of prominent contemporary ethical theorists such as Simon Blackburn,

Ronald Dworkin, Jurgen Habermas, Ruth-Anna Putnam and Thomas Scanlon. As

evidenced here, some of Putnam’s finest writing is in criticism of his contemporaries.

For example, let us briefly consider Putnam’s response to Scanlon’s

“contractarian” theory of ethics, which puts great weight on a collaborative desire to be

governed by principles that are not reasonably rejectable. Putnam argues that this is but

one of a number of basic interests of morality. On Putnam’s view it is a mistake to try to

rationally reconstruct ethics on any single “foundation” as Scanlon is not alone in trying

to do. Apart from the moral interest Scanlon focuses on there are others no less important

including: respect for the humanity of others (e.g. Kant), equality of moral rights and

responsibilities (e.g. Locke), compassion for the suffering of others (e.g. Levinas) and a

concern to promote human well-being (e.g. Aristotle). Putnam is no moral

foundationalist; nor is he morally utopian.52 He is acutely aware that the moral interests

52 Another sense in which Putnam is not utopian in his ethical thought is that he does not put too much weight on the notion of the “reasonable”. Not only can there be reasonable disagreements in ethics or morality (as Putnam follows Cavell in thinking) but our best attempts to say what is morally at stake in real-life situations are open-ended, and capable of endless improvement – in part because of their depth and complexity. Putnam’s “The

37

he discerns can come into conflict but he hopefully remarks, “ I believe that on the whole

and over time promoting any one of them will require promoting the others.”53

One might usefully compare Putnam’s work in ethics with Wittgenstein’s method

of trying to achieve perspicuous overviews (Übersichten) or useful models of our

concepts to help draw attention to aspects of the highly complex flux of our concepts-in-

action. Putnam’s theorizing here wants to do justice to the highly complex nature of our

concepts of ethics and morality which have inherited a vast, and not readily integrable,

range of influences and ideas over the course of Western history.

In this section, within a Dewey-inspired application of experimentalist problem-

solving techniques to our practical problems, we also have Putnam’s most recent thoughts

about real-world problems such as the potential of human cloning, the picture of the

human in economic theorizing, the idea of a just war, and a sympathetic criticism of the

pros and cons of Kantian ethics. An important background idea shaping these discussions

is Putnam’s capabilities approach to ethics, which is further elaborated here. One of the

concerns Putnam wishes to persuade his readers of, is that “the activity of putting forward

and discussing… ‘moral images of the world’… seems to me the indispensable task of

philosophy”54 – a task which includes moral images of our community and its internal

structure (e.g. the family).

d) Skepticism

Depths and Shallows of Experience” [this vol. ch. 32] appropriates the Kantian notion of “indeterminate concepts” to characterize the ever-not-quite aspect of our moral concepts and descriptions. 53 See [this vol.] ch. 18, 00-00. 54 Putnam, “Replies,” 377.

38

Putnam’s response to skepticism is interesting for several reasons not the least of which is

that it provides an interesting vantage from which to assess his relation to the pragmatist

tradition. Putnam follows James, Peirce and Dewey in thinking that if we are to take

doubt seriously we require an answer to the question, “What positive reason do we have

for doubt in this case?” The mere possibility of doubt does not produce a genuine or

living doubt, as Peirce famously argued. But Putnam goes well beyond this familiar

pragmatist line of thinking in developing a sophisticated semantic criticism of

philosophical skepticism.

Putnam’s discussions of the writings of Stanley Cavell, P.F. Strawson and Barry

Stroud on skepticism reveal, once more, the power of the artisanal approach, which is on

display in Putnam’s careful and penetrating diagnostic thinking. For Putnam, as for

Cavell, skepticism is seen as an attack on the everyday life-world;55 and, at the same

time, it is a deeply human tendency of thought that can never be eliminated once and for

all. But even if there is no eradicating skepticism überhaupt Putnam shows that particular

formulations of skepticism can be undermined on a case by case basis. This involves a

painstaking demonstration of the subtle incoherence of sceptical doubt: a conclusion that

must, if it is to be convincing, do justice to the specific words used in the formulation of

doubt and our prima facie sense of their initial intelligibility.

55 Putnam’s conception of “common sense” and Cavell’s conception of the “ordinary” should not be assumed to be the same, or to be responding to precisely the same concerns. To give a preliminary characterization, we might say Putnam is more concerned with our cognitively-charged perceptual relation to middle-sized objects (e.g. tables, houses) whereas Cavell focuses attention on our general non-epistemic relation to things and articulating the overlooked realm of everyday actions like eating breakfast or walking down the street – actions that are neither free nor unfree, voluntary nor involuntary, justified nor unjustified.

39

One of the over-arching themes of these essays is that skepticism depends on an

untenable self-standing (or internalist) conception of semantics according to which words

(and the thoughts that they are used to express) have their meanings quite independently

of external conditions e.g. features of the world, social norms of linguistic practice.

Following the path blazed by Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell and Travis, Putnam

demonstrates the philosophical power of a world-involving occasion-sensitive approach

to meaning and understanding which repeatedly finds the skeptic subtly stripping his

words of the conditions of their full intelligibility; or making conflicting demands on

language which cannot be brought into a coherent harmony.

Stroud’s derivation of external world scepticism and Hume’s derivation of the

problem of induction, for instance, are revealed not to be unanswerable problems, but

senseless conundrums, which have no solution of the sort philosophers have long craved.

e) Wittgenstein

One of the most interesting recent developments in Putnam’s thought as evidenced by the

papers in this section is a movement beyond a period of close alignment with the

philosophy of Wittgenstein. To approach Putnam’s complex relation to Wittgenstein it is

important to clearly keep in mind that it has never been helpful to regard Putnam as a

Wittgensteinian56 or a Kantian57 or, for that matter, a follower of any philosophical

56 It is worth noting that some of Putnam’s early papers were devoted to criticizing once fashionable neo-Wittgensteinian views of meaning e.g. Norman Malcolm on “dreams”. 57 Putnam has written: “I believe 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” (“Replies,” 366). This is an important comment especially in light of McDowell’s recent sympathetic interpretation and appropriation of transcendental

40

movement which takes a famous philosopher for its title. Indeed, given what we have

called his artisanal approach to philosophy, there is a sense in which it is Quixotic –

expect for local or polemic reasons (as in the case of neo-pragmatism) – to expect to gain

much understanding from attempting to fit Putnam under any philosophical rubric ending

in –ian or -ism.58

Even if he is not a Wittgensteinian, Putnam retains strong sympathies for

Wittgensteinian themes concerning language and mind, especially Wittgenstein’s

occasion-sensitive conception of sense-making and his socially-rooted world-involving

conception of mindedness. But these essays also reveal that Putnam has serious

reservations about Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics.

Putnam wants, first of all, to follow Cora Diamond’s path-breaking work in

helping to free Wittgenstein from a misguided antirealist reading that is widely popular in

the secondary literature: one which often simply takes for granted that the relationship

between the Tractatus (“early Wittgenstein”) and the Philosophical Investigations (“later

Wittgenstein”) is to be explained as a movement from a realist to an anti-realist attitude to

semantics. This is consonant with a good deal of Putnam’s writing in the 1990’s (cf.

Putnam 1990 & 1994), which is involved in the attempt to rescue Wittgenstein from his

interpreters.59

Notwithstanding, Putnam cannot rescue Wittgenstein entirely from a taint of

antirealism in the philosophy of mathematics. For example, Wittgenstein in the late

idealism. Cf. McDowell, John. Having the World in View. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004). 58 Note that Putnam has remarked, “I do not describe myself as a “Wittgensteinian”. In part this is because I do not like sects in philosophy, and I do not like treating mere mortals as divinities.” Wittgenstein and the Real Numbers, [this vol.] ch. 25, 1. 59 Putnam, Renewing Philosophy and Words and Life.

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1930’s and into the mid-1940’s held that a mathematical proposition cannot be true

unless we can decide its truth on the basis of a proof or calculation. But, Putnam argues,

this seems to conflict with our ordinary common sense realism with respect to number

theory. Putnam is also troubled by Wittgenstein’s rejection of set theory and his remarks

on the law of excluded middle. In these and other cases Wittgenstein’s anti-theoretical

stance lapses and Putnam finds him making disputable theoretical claims rather than

following his professed aim of exploring the grammar of mathematical statements. Such

lapses, Putnam argues, are ultimately traceable to Wittgenstein’s relative unfamiliarity

with advanced mathematical practice and mathematical physics.

Another significant interpretative issue is Putnam’s attempt to rebut a widespread

view that Wittgenstein is an end-of-philosophy philosopher. Wittgenstein is not

uncommonly read (by, say, Burt Dreben,60 Paul Horwich61 and Rupert Read62) as simply

engaged in the negative task of showing philosophers that they have, in their

philosophizing, strayed into nonsensical expressions, primarily by attempting to give

their expressions a metaphysical employment. His aim, on this view, is exhausted by

showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. Here Putnam demurs. Wittgenstein is not

just a negative philosopher who equates philosophizing with various pathologies of

reason; he is also most concerned to clear up confusions outside philosophy, e.g., in

science and mathematics. That is to say he is interested in giving us a clearer sense of the

life we lead with our concepts in everyday and philosophical settings.

60 Dreben’s view was presented in his legendary ‘Dreben-ars’ at Boston University in the 1990’s [DM]. 61 Horwich, Paul. From a Deflationary Point of View. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 62 Read, Rupert. "'Discussion': A no-theory theory? Dan Hutto's, Wittgenstein: Neither theory nor therapy", Philosophical Investigations 29, (2006): 73-81.

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f) Philosophy of Mind

The papers collected in this section are representative of Putnam’s recent thinking about

the mind after having given up computational functionalism: the view that models the

mind as the software running on the hardware of a computer – one of his most influential

ideas and one that still has many defenders world-wide.63 Of course, Putnam remains a

functionalist in a broad sense since he continues to understand the mind in terms of its

“functions”, both internal and external. Putnam’s current conception of the mind is as a

“structured system of object-involving abilities,”64 however, builds upon his long-

standing commitment to semantic externalism by taking seriously that there is no

interface between the mind and world in perception or conception. Putnam’s slogan

“Meanings ain’t in the head” now widens to become “The mind ain’t in the head”!

In this section Putnam presents arguments for the enduring importance of direct

realism in the philosophy of perception. In part Putnam’s claim is historical, arguing that

Aristotle should be regarded as a direct realist against the contrary view of Victor

Caston.65 In part it is a matter of arguing for a better interpretation of direct realism,

under the name of “Transactionalism”, which involves discerning the insights and

oversights of disjunctivism (e.g. John McDowell) and intentionalism (e.g. Fred Dretske).

Both intentionalist and disjunctivists fail to do justice to the subjective character of

perceptual experience (e.g. there are differences in what we regard as “pure” colours,

objects may have different “looks” depending on our visual system) although they are

63 Cf. Lycan, William. Mind and Cognition. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), Part 1. 64 Putnam, Hilary. “Replies”. Philosophical Topics: The Philosophy of Hilary. vol. 2 no. 1 (1992): 256. 65 Caston, Victor. “Why Aristotle Needs Imagination”, Phronesis, vol. 41 no.1 (1996): 20-55,

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right not to think of such experience as nothing but “mental paint” (as, say, Block’s

phenomenism recommends).

Coda

Iris Murdoch once wrote, “It is a task to come to see the world as it is”.66 Hilary Putnam

has been carrying on this task courageously, and longer, and with more philosophical

tools and abilities at his disposal than any other contemporary philosopher.

66 Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. (London: Routledge, 1970), 89.

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