0674749456.Harvard.University.Press.Realism.with.a.Human.Face.Mar.1992

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Realism with a Human Face
Hilary Putnam
Edited
by
James Conant
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and
try to love the
questions themselves
like locked rooms
and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue
...
Live
the questions now. Perhaps you will then grad-
ually, without noticing it, live along some distant day
into the answer.
-Rainer Maria Rilke,
Letters to a Young Poet
Let us be human.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Culture and Value
Copyright
©
1990 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 1992
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Putnam, Hilary.
Realism with a human face / Hilary Putnam; edited by James
Conant.
p. ern.
ISBN 0-674-74945-6 (paper)
-l.
Realism. 2. Metaphysics. 3. Ethics. 4. Aesthetics.
5. Philosophy, American.
I.
Conant, James. II. Title.
B835.P87 1990
89-78131
149'.2-dc20
CIP
Preface
The essays that James Conant has selected for this volume represent
a central part of the thinking I have been doing since I drew my now
well-known (some would say "notorious") distinction between two
kinds of realism ("metaphysical" and "internal") in a presidential
address to the American Philosophical Association in 1976. Although
they do not in any sense represent a giving up of the position I called
"internal realism," I have chosen to emphasize a somewhat different
aspect of that position than the one I emphasized in
Reason, Truth,
and History.
In
Reason, Truth, and History
I was primarily concerned to present
. a
conception of truth
alternative to both the classical metaphysical
realist conception (truth as correspondence to "mind independent
objects") and to relativist/positivist views. (My reasons for treating
relativism and positivism as two sides of a single coin are discussed
in "Why Is a Philosopher," Chapter 7 of the present volume.) Accord-
ing to my conception, to claim of any statement that it is true, that
is, that it is true in its place, in its context, in its conceptual scheme,
is, roughly, to claim that
it could be justified were epistemic condi-
tions good enough.
If
we allow ourselves the fiction of "ideal" epis-
temic conditions (as one allows oneself the fiction of frictionless
planes in physics), one can express this by saying that a true statement
is one that could be justified were epistemic conditions ideal. But this
has opened me to a misunderstanding which I very much regret, and
which Chapter 2 ("A Defense of Internal Realism") tries to set
straight.
Many people have thought that my idealization was the same as
Peirce's, that what the figure of a "frictionless plane" corresponds to
is a situation ("finished science") in which the community would be
in a position to justify
every
true statement (and to disconfirm every
Vlll
Preface
Preface
IX
false one). People have attributed to me the idea that we can sensibly
imagine conditions which are
simultaneously ideal
for the ascertain-
ment of any truth whatsoever, or simultaneously ideal for answering
any question whatsoever. I have never thought such a thing, and I
was, indeed, so far from ever thinking such a thing that it never
occurred to me even to warn against this misunderstanding when I
wrote
Reason, Truth, and History,
although I did warn against it in
the volume I published after that,
Realism and Reason.
But let me
repeat the warning: There are some statements which we can only
- verify by failing to verify other statements. This is so as a matter of
logic (for example, if we verify "in the limit of inquiry" that
no one
ever will verify or falsify p,
where
p
is any statement which has a truth
value, then we cannot decide the truth of
p
itself, even in "the limit
of inquiry"), but there are more interesting ways in which quantum
mechanics suggests that this is the case, such as the celebrated Case
of Schrodinger's Cat. Thus, I do not by any means
ever
mean to use
the notion of an "ideal epistemic situation" in this fantastic (or uto-
pian) Peircean sense. By an ideal epistemic situation I mean something
like this:
If
I say "There is a chair in my study," an ideal epistemic
situation would be to be in my study with the lights on or with day-
light streaming through the window, with nothing wrong with my
eyesight, with an unconfused mind, without having taken drugs or
been subjected to hypnosis, and so forth, and to look and see if there
is a chair there. Or, to drop the notion of "ideal" altogether, since that
is only a metaphor, I think there are
better and worse
epistemic situ-
ations
with respect to particular statements.
What I just described is
a very good epistemic situation with respect to the statement "There
is a chair in
mystudy,"
It
should be noted that the description of that
epistemic situation itself uses material object language: I am "in my
study," "looking," "the light is on," and so on. I am
not
making the
claim that truth is a matter of what "sense data" we would have if
we did such and such. Internal realism is not phenomenalism all over
again. Even if what I were offering were a definition of truth (and,
for a variety of reasons, it isn't), the point that it makes about truth
operates
within
whatever type of language we are talking about; one
cannot say what are good or better or worse epistemic conditions in
quantum mechanics without using the language of quantum mechan-
ics; one cannot say what are good or better or worse epistemic situ-
ations in moral discourse without using moral language; one cannot
say what are good or better or worse epistemic situations in com-
monsense material object discourse without using commonsense
material object language. There is no reductionism in my position; I
am simply denying that we have in any of these areas a notion of
truth that totally
outruns
the possibility of justification. What both-
ered me about statements of the sort I rejected, for example, "There
really are
(or 'really aren't') numbers," or "There
really are
(or 'really
aren't') space-time points," is that they outrun the possibility of veri-
fication in a way which is utterly different from the way in which the
statement that, say, there was a dinosaur in North America less than
a million years ago might outrun the possibility of actual verification.
These former statements are such that we cannot imagine how
any
creature with, in Kant's phrase, "a rational and a sensible nature"
could ascertain their truth or falsity under
any
conditions.
Is this positivism? Am I not saying that statements that are "unver-
ifiable in principle" are cognitively meaningless? What keeps this
from being positivism is that I refuse to
limit in advance
what means
of verification may become available to human beings. There
is
no
restriction (in my concept of verification) to mathematical deduction
plus scientific experimentation.
If
some people want to claim that
even metaphysical statements are verifiable, and that there is, after
all, a method of "metaphysical verification" by which we can deter-
mine that numbers "really exist," well and good; let them exhibit that
method and convince us that it works. The difference between "veri-
ficationism" in
this
sense and "verificationism" in the positivist sense
is precisely the difference between the generous and open-minded atti-
tude that William James called "pragmatism" and science worship.
Although my view has points of agreement with some of the views -.
Richard Rorty has defended, I do not share his skepticism about the
very existence of a substantial notion of truth. In the Kant Lectures
that constitute Chapter 1 of this volume, I try to explain not only
how the metaphysical realist perspective has broken down in science
itself, but also how Rortian relativism cum pragmatism fails as an
alternative to metaphysical realism. Rorty's present "position" is not
so much a position as the illusion or mirage of a position; in this
respect it resembles solipsism, which looks like a possible (if unbe-
lievable) position from a distance, but which disappears into thin air
when closely examined, Indeed, Rorty's view is just solipsism with a
"we" instead of an
"I."
If
some readers of my work have been worried about how I can
distinguish my views from Rorty's, others have asked why we
should
x
Preface
Preface
Xl
give up metaphysical realism. One school, represented by such "phys-
icalist" philosophers as Richard Boyd, Michael Devitt, and Clark Gly-
mour, has suggested that there is no problem about how words "hook
on to the world"; the glue is just "causal connection," they say. In
Chapter 5 I reply to this suggestion by trying to show that the notion
of "causality" on which these philosophers rely is not a physicalist
notion at all, but a cognitive one. Fundamentally, they are offering an
account of reference in terms of
explanation,
and explanation is as
much a cognitive (or "intentional") notion as reference itself. Another
school, represented perhaps by Daniel Dennett, agrees that intention-
al notions cannot be reduced to physicalist ones but contends that we
need only give up metaphysical realism with respect to the intentional
realm; we can still be hard-line metaphysical realists with respect to
physics. Still other philosophers (for instance, David Lewis) contend
that we should be metaphysical realists about both the intentional
realm and about physics; we just need to recognize the need for at
least one primitive notion not drawn from physics itself for the
description of intentional phenomena (for example, Lewis's notion of
a "natural" class).
What is wrong with these views, besides the inability of their meta-
physical realism to do justice to the most fundamental physical theory
we have (quantum mechanics), is that they all fail to do justice to a
pervasive phenomenon that I call "conceptual relativity"; and
if
there
is any feature of my thought that is stressed throughout all the parts
of this book, it is the importance of conceptual relativity. The doctrine
of conceptual relativity, in brief, is that while there is an aspect of
conventionality and an aspect of fact in everything we say that is true,
we fall into hopeless philosophical error if we commit a "fallacy of
division" and conclude that there must be a part of the truth that is
the "conventional part" and a part that is the "factual part." A cor-
ollary of my conceptual relativity-and a controversial one-is the
doctrine that two statements which are incompatible at face value can
sometimes both be true (and the incompatibility cannot be explained
away by saying that the statements have "a different meaning" in the
schemes to which they respectively belong). I defend this controversial
corollary against Donald Davidson's objections in Chapter 6; but
examples of conceptual relativity occur in every part of this volume.
Indeed, it might be said that the difference between the present vol-
ume and my work prior to
The Many Faces of Realism
is a shift in
,
tenable. This is argued in greatest detail in Chapter 11, "Objectivity
and the Science/Ethics Distinction," but all of these essays except
Chapter 14 are concerned to show that internal realism provides not
just a more theoretically tenable but a more human wilY to view eth-
ical and aesthetic disagreement.
If
the criticism of metaphysical error
did not lead to a more human and a more sensible way to think about
the issues that matter most in our lives, taking a stand on such hope-
lessly abstract issues would hardly have a point, in my view.
All of these ideas-that the fact/value dichotomy is untenable, that
the fact/convention dichotomy is also untenable, that truth and jus-
tification of ideas are closely connected, that the alternative to n.eta-
physical realism is not any form of skepticism, that philosophy is an
attempt to achieve the good-are ideas that have been long associated
with the American pragmatist tradition. Realizing this has led me
(sometimes with the assistance of Ruth Anna Putnam) to make the
effort to better understand that tradition from Peirce right up to
Quine and Goodman. That effort is represented by the essays in Part
III, many of which represent work that is still in progress. Both James
Conant and I felt it was important to include this work in the present
volume, because it represents the direction in which my interests are
presently turning and also because we want the most significant tra-
dition in American philosophy to be more widely understood in all
its manifold expressions.
Hilary Putnam
emphasis: a shift from emphasizing model-theoretic arguments
against metaphysical realism to emphasizing conceptual relativity.
For me the importance of the debate about realism, relativism, pos-
itivism, and materialism has always been that one's position in meta-
physics largely determines one's position about the nature and status
of "values" and in our time the most popular versions of all these
traditional positions have been used to support a "fact/value dichot-
omy." The essays in Part II of this volume concern ethics and aesthet-
ics. They are largely, though not entirely, metaphilosophical in char-
acter' their aim is to show that the fact/value dichotomy is no longer
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