NORMATIVE INQUIRY AFTER WITTGENSTEINFIRST LOOK†

Narve Strand, 01/15/13

Werde ich es sagen, endlich laut sagen dürfen, daß sich mir die

Geschichte der Philosophie, je länger desto mer als ein

Drama entwickelte, worin Vernunft und Sprache die Menächmen

spielen? Dieses sonderbare Drama, hat es eine Katastrophe, einen

Ausgang; oder reihen sich nur immer neue Episoden an?

(F. R. Jacobi, Allwill, 1792, pp. 252-3)

1.1. BASIC PROBLEMATIC

The title of this dissertation might seem a bit strange.

Wittgenstein isn’t exactly known for being a great believer in normative

exchange. He’s more commonly taken as saying our lives are

everywhere straight-jacketed by what we just happen to say or do. This

tends to deprive language of any real funds that would allow us to

† This is a shorter version of chapter 1 of my doctoral dissertation. The pagination and

the footnote-numberings don’t correspond.

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question our own views or to engage with those of others, especially as

this bears on differences between language-games or forms of life. That

way, too, we easily miss the normative potential of our everyday

language Wittgenstein himself arguably recognized.

Alice Crary provides an excellent expose of this standard line of

Wittgenstein research. She calls them “inviolability interpretations”,

covering right-wing and left-wing followers alike.1 Saul Kripke is perhaps

the most clear-voiced defender of this strongly internalist strain where

the social group or community, being made incorrigible, becomes

the norm.2 These de facto claims to infallibility are worrisome because

they would, if true, severely limit the scope of reasonable debate. This

has clear political implications across the board. Economic elites, power

groups and even whole cultural complexes would now remain forever

shielded from outside critique, having been made unaccountable. This

skeptical denial of the possibility for critical exchange between different

individuals, social groups, or life-styles isn’t confined to communitarian

interpreters of Wittgenstein either. Even a self-proclaimed universalist

like Apel thinks Wittgenstein operates with an insular view of language-

games or forms of life like this. That’s why he thinks it’s necessary to

take the side of reason in its struggle against ordinary language.3

A much more helpful approach is suggested by Cavell in his book

The Claim of Reason.4 Here, basically, he shows Wittgenstein is neither

a skeptic nor a dogmatist on the normative question. Of special worth is

2

his defense of what I take to be the native possibility of reasonable

disagreement over publically recognizable criteria within a particular

language-game or form of life.5 Add to that the limited scope of criterial

rationality itself, and Wittgenstein’s stance is seen in a wholly different

light. Cavell gives us a highly engaging Wittgenstein who’s more alive to

the constructive potential, indeed political value, of normative exchange.

The term ‘criterial rationality’, is Putnam’s.6 In a nutshell,

someone who’s a criterialist thinks of human reason and/or ordinary

language as being somehow self-sufficient. This conviction may take

one of several forms. The most intellectual, certainly the most common

among philosophers, involves thinking we can discuss and settle an

issue with necessary and sufficient reasons. This may be seen as

relying on a second, more explicitly linguistic form, viz. thinking it’s

always possible to track our words and deeds by giving definite criteria

for them. In this second version public, institutionalized norms always

and everywhere limit and fix what’s rationally acceptable, or what

passes for acceptable behavior, from what isn’t. Be they shared

responses, attitudes, or rules these norms always give us a way of

telling whether something is or isn’t the case, is better or worse than

something else, is in line with national interest or the common will—in

principle at least.7 There’s apparently no dispute these norms can’t help

us settle. The criterialist thinks there’s no way to impugn, much less

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reasonably reject, the basic competence or adequacy of the specific

type of norms that he or she just so happens to favor.

Cavell’s Wittgenstein isn’t a criterialist in either these senses.

Taking exception to specific reactions, attitudes, or rules is something

he thinks is internal to any responsive language-use. There’s no way a

further appeal to criterial rationality is helpful in foreclosing this kind of

exceptionability. Our very capacity to project words into new contexts

defies the traditional dichotomies between nature and convention,

freedom and necessity—the “subjective” and the “objective”. There are

also times when talk of criteria, and not just rules, is beside the point.8

Saying criteria “must” exist even here but that they somehow haven’t yet

been “discovered” or put to “good use” by us is hardly informative. So a

good case can be made for why criterial rationality is neither a

necessary nor a sufficient condition for normative language use.

Of course at the end of the day Cavell himself seems much more

interested in personal ties than in socio-economical realities or politics.9

The danger with adopting a strongly colloquial reading here: One is

tempted to deny institutionalized behavior has any real pull in our lives.

Sometimes, it even looks as if informal judgments are invoked by him to

act as substitute grounds for criteria or rules.10 These normative

attitudes might still be taken as flexible enough to allow for reasonable

disagreement.11 Though it is hard to see how criterial rationality or public

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discussion could play more than a token role on Cavell’s informalist

reading of Wittgenstein.12

This is where Putnam comes in. Further strengtheing the appeal

of the so-called Harvard School of Wittgenstein interpretation, he’s much

more open to those aspects of human life that seem all but muted in

Cavell.13 While it’s true that both thinkers aim for a genuinely non-

reductive reading of Wittgenstein, at the end of the day Putnam’s the

more even-handed of the two.14 He’s familiar, first of all, with the history

of norms, values and facts, calling attention to the real-life effects that

much of the thinking surrounding these issues has had on our society. 15

Not turning a blind eye to the essential role of rules and principles is also

in line with giving a more active role to criterial reasoning.16 Then, too,

his apology for reasonable disagreement between language-games or

forms of life holds the promise of finally getting past the stand-off

created by a simple insistence on universally valid norms (Apel) and its

wholesale, skeptical denial (Rorty & co).17 While this might seem to

detract from Putnam’s ability to give a faithful portrayal of Wittgenstein’s

own thought this, I’ll argue, is mistaken.

There is real warrant for saying Wittgenstein ultimately favors a

non-reductive, multilateral approach to the normative; and this in a way

that doesn’t mean sacrificing either our shared responses and attitudes

or our capacity for reason-giving. Who’d want to deny that a non-formal

spirit and style runs throughout his works, in the later ones especially.

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This, I think, is because Wittgenstein is bent on acting as a much-

needed corrective to a tradition that’s always tended to exaggerate the

worth of criterial rationality.

On a “top-down” criterialist reading, normative inquiry is about

reasoning from and about rules, principles, or laws (“regulism”). Only

when the right rules have been picked and given a critical role does the

regulist stoop to look for attitudes or responses, which he or she sees as

discretional and second-rate.18 The later Wittgenstein’s stress on the

more casual aspects of human interaction, and on how our practices

might be said to be inherently open-ended, is meant to combat the

immediate appeal of this overly formal way of modeling normativity. Yet

this doesn’t necessarily mean Wittgenstein thinks a “bottom-up” reading

works any better. This seeks to reduce formal rules or principles to blind

responses or to sheer regularity (“regularism”),19 or to reasoning from

normative attitudes to propositions, rules, or principles again

(“inferentialism”).20 How can we possibly trust our attitudes to have the

kind of overweight or traction that even a more moderate informalist like

Cavell arguably thinks they have? Only Putnam’s Wittgenstein, I submit,

allows us to assume a truly balanced view of criteria.

Cora Diamond sometimes comes close to saying something

similar.21 Yet for all of her non-reductionism she isn’t really interested in

a reconstructive reading of Wittgenstein. What I mean is she confines

herself mainly to suggesting how Wittgenstein isn’t blind-sided by

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reactions, rules or reasons, stopping there and not moving on to tell a

more integrated story where the interplay between our attitudes and our

other normative resources is attested to and explored. It’s this I see

Putnam is alone in doing, even supplying us with more positive

argumentats for why this kind of exchange and interplay might be

possible in the first place. That’s basically why I think we must follow

Putnam’s lead if we want to think more profitably about normative

inquiry in the wake of Wittgenstein.

A few more words on my choice of basic terms. Putnam himself

tends to prefer axiological language (‘value’, ‘valuation’, ‘valued’,

‘valuings’, ‘valuable’, ‘evaluation’, etc.).22 The reason I stress the

normative qualifier is I want to narrow in on the political implications of

the kind of dialectic Putnam rightly detects in Wittgenstein. But as we’ll

see, this doesn’t mean normativity is insular or that it holds priority over

the evaluative. The normative basically involves evaluation.23 I offer

‘normative evaluation’ as a kind of middle term for the process of sorting

out, talking through, and implementing the values that are relevant

to everyone, and therefore ought to be of some concern to all,

from those that aren’t.

I don’t think I’m being wholly untrue to the spirit of Putnam’s

project when I say that norms, in the widest sense, are simply values

and so intimately linked with our criteria, responses, attitudes, and rules.

More concretely, norms are partially marked off from other more societal

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or existentially oriented values in that they’re explicitly meant to have a

wider appeal. Is, or should, a value really be a norm? Has the value in

question been properly gauged or warranted in public? Was its

implementation on the up-and-up? Did it or could it have the right kind of

consequences? Did it on the whole protect or enrich the lives or

enhance the functioning of those affected? It’s this kind of back and forth

which I take to be basic to the whole political process, in democracies

especially. This is normative inquiry.

All we really need is a relative distinction between values and

norms, and a pragmatic division of labor between existential, societal,

and political concerns. And we have no good reason to suspect this

dialectic, and the kind of meaningful disagreement it sponsors, can’t

happen across different language-games or forms of life. Putnam is, as

far as I can see, the only one who’s really shown how this can be. That

way, too, our being situated agents is affirmed while leaving us enough

space to deal with more globalizing issues.

1.2. MAIN STYLES OF ARGUMENTATION

It might perhaps be thought that the kind of interactionist

sensibility urged here begs too many questions. Isn’t philosophical

analysis bound to become rather trivial once actual give and take has

been claimed to be the most important thing? What kind of service is

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philosophy capable of rendering if, as it turns out, criterial rationality is

too narrow to cover everything? What’s the point of engaging in

philosophical work anyway if we can’t even expect to deal with

normative behavior in a rigorously way—where’s the fulcrum?

Three sets of philosophical arguments go a long way in

answering these worries, each one giving further support to the

moderate sensibility I find in Putnam’s writings. What they all have in

common is an overarching concern with weaning us away from picturing

either reason or language as self-sufficient; as essentially closed

systems. His basic wager is that we don’t really need the criterialist

defense, and that such a defense is self-defeating and even harmful. If

anything it’s only when we’ve been disabused of this whole idea that we

become truly qualified to give free reign to normative inquiry.

The first mode of philosophical criticism is also the most indirect,

being self-consciously negative. It’s designed to expose some of the

leading assumptions underlying most claims opposed to the medial

conception itself. Again, traditional responses usually break off into a

simple dogmatic insistence on, or a skeptical repudiation of, the global

reach of norms. For the communitarian, for instance, there’s no way to

really make sense of, much less reasonably resolve, major differences

in responses, attitudes, or rules between different traditions or political

cultures. If there should be a clash of values then it’s a case of thy blood

or mine—or live and let live according to the importance of the

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difference, or the relative strength of our opponent.24 The universalist

rightly finds this mind-set excessive, yet he overreacts when he feels

obligated to insists a principled agreement across specific language-

games or forms of life is always a given.25

On Putnam’s view, either one of these ways of modeling

normative conflict is too extreme. Being quite unrealistic in their hopes

for how little or how much philosophy can and should do, they even

threaten our access to the normative resources our ordinary language

arguably possesses.26 To better free ourselves from the grip of these

unprofitable pictures he draws heavily on Wittgenstein, exposing the

kind of defective vision of language, usually unarticulated, that underlies

them. The issue is about defensibility though, not merely whether or not

these pictures or schemes are deluded or ill-advised.27

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong-headed or suspect about

wanting to factor our concepts, our words and deeds, into a factual, an

evaluative, and a normative component. Most philosophers after Kant, in

fact, have wanted to do something along these lines. Either one feels

obligated to insists on a categorical cut between facts and values, or

one goes all the way with Kant defending a full-blown “trichotomy”.28 It

would be quite hard to show that this desire, or the schemes following

from it, is somehow logically inconsistent or psychologically inherently

flawed. That would require us to assume the adequacy of an idea still in

question anyway, viz. criterial rationality.

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Let’s ask rather what it would mean to be able to pull off this kind

of dichotomizing, and also what it would take to defend it on

philosophical grounds. It won’t make much sense to claim, say, that

norms or facts are wholly free of evaluative force or content; or that if

they’re ever in conflict, norms or facts should always take priority over

values; or that there’s simply no such thing as either a fact or a value or

a norm, if this sortal act itself isn’t justified. But this only begs the

question, By which means? Five basic ways, I believe, have been tried

here and/or could be foreseen.29

The most sanguine involves saying categorical distinctions are

brought out by means of formal-deductive reasoning or proof. This

means justifying them in an axiomatic, rigorously systematic way. One

might very well come to doubt whether this is really doable, saying

instead that philosophy ought is able to effect a principled conceptual

elucidation or disambiguation of the different components. On this

model, too, philosophy is basically a self-sufficient, a priori form of

activity. This is so even if you’re perfectly satisfied all that’s really

being done here is clarifying notional relations with no direct claims

to full deductive force, or inductive applicability, vis-à-vis the real world.

In the eventuality that both proof and elucidation should fail, some

might still want to fall back on a strictly semantic, or pragmatic

version of this strategy.

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What makes Putnam so interesting here is he shows how we

have no good reason to expect any of these four responses to work.

Proof, for instance, is really only plausible if conceptual, semantic, or

pragmatic elucidation works. So if there should be no way to explicate

the dichotomizing between facts and values, or between values and

norms, conceptually then demanding formal-deductive proofs would be

unreasonable too. Even better, if it can’t be brought out in our language

use (pragmatically), then by implication the other ways would be non-

starters too. This, I think, is Putnam’s overall strategy.

The main reason why the criterialist argument comes to grief is

that it goes ordinary language.30 If criterial rationality is of limited value,

then we have no real reason to expect there will always be a sure way

of telling whether something is what it is, means what it means, or does

what it’s supposed to do. How can we fight for a clear-cut

separation between three basic forms of language use if even a notional

defense is unrealistic. Genuine disagreement always being a concrete

possibility here, how can the philosopher insist on sufficiency and still

claim to be saving the phenomena?31 Telescoping or tying down our

words and deeds, once and for all, only leads us to overtax and

seriously misrepresent them.

It’s at this point it’s tempting to go to the other extreme. The

universalist is afraid that chipping away at these justifying schemes

means we don’t ever get to criticize wrongful practices or defective

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forms of life, either our own or those of others. If it’s really the case that

norms (or facts) aren’t separable from contingent and context-involving

values then there are no real safeguards against error and prejudice.

And if there are no unfailing procedures or completely neutral points of

view, there are no absolute guarantees to be had in normative inquiry—

democracy as a whole. Since the consequent is clearly unacceptable,

we have to deny the antecedent too.32 The communitarian, by contrast,

is slightly less worried. Being a relativist to boot, he finds all this

supposed impossibility of arguing with others yet another reason to deny

normative inquiry has any transitive, context-transcending force.33

To react in either these ways, though not in itself unreasonable, is

still a bit rash. Loosening the grip of a picture of normative inquiry as

being either identical with our practices, or wholly outstripping them, is

the first step. Exposing false choices, dichotomizing, is liberating work

also because it helps us look around for a more nuanced articulation. Is

normativity essentially prior to specific value-sets or forms of life or

wholly relative to them?34 If it should turn out that the whole question

was badly phrased, we would no longer be obligated to treat these

answers as seriously meant really.

Maybe dichotomies aren’t that useful or meaningful to begin with,

yet that doesn’t mean the relativist is right. From the fact that a

distinction between facts, values, and norms cannot be drawn in all

cases it doesn’t follow that it’s not valid where it can be drawn. Ordinary

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distinctions are distinguished from metaphysical dichotomies in that they

have ranges of applications, and we’re not surprised if they don’t always

apply. It’s only a confused thinking which imagines that unless

a distinction can be made rigorous and absolutely precise it

isn’t a distinction at all.35

The second mode of criticism is slightly less negative in nature. It

suggests normative evaluation follows once dichotomies and non-

distinctions are shown to be unworkable. This is where Putnam’s so-

called indispensability arguments come into play. It stands to reason

that if the five basic ways are dead ends, the burden of proof has shifted

and it’s now be up to our opponent to show how normative evaluation

might still be avoided in the future. Proving others wrong isn’t the same

as having shown our own position is the only possible, or right, or better

one even. Though it is hard to imagine real alternatives at this point.

That’s why we’ve earned the right to ask: How is that picture or

stance intelligible that would have us say that even if we’ve always failed

to prove it or make sense up till now, we might still be able to do so in

the future? It’s this general lack of good proposals, this deficiency in

imagining real alternatives, Putnam thinks, which authorizes us to

conclude that normative evaluation has been shown to be inevitable.36

A third and final mode of philosophical criticism is also expedient

once the former two have been put into play. We might call this style the

most constructive one. It takes the shape of possibility arguments,

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basically, yet without any transcendental pretense. Once our confidence

in the criterialist has been shaken, it’s important to offer some more well-

defined grounds for how normative evaluation might actually work. Here

Putnam thinks less is more, reminding us how little is actually required

to get this type of inquiry off the ground.

To demand, for instance, that we must always be talking about

the same things in the same way (synonymy); or that we must be able to

track the same meanings or uses across all or even most language-

games or forms of life (strong transitivity); or even that it must always be

possible to arrive at the same set of norms after a shared process of

inquiry (total decidability) is to ask too much of ourselves and of our

situated capacity both for reason and language.37 One thing is it tends to

make normative exchange appear much more sublime and involved

than it strictly speaking has to be. That way, also, our stance is all too

easily charged with being biased or slanted, brushed aside as being

completely out of step with political realities or with our sense of

intellectual honesty and fair play. Worst case scenario, neglecting

workability threatens to turn normative evaluation into a game of mere

symbolic satisfaction.38 This is clearly unacceptable to someone like

Putnam who’s got a more pragmatic, participant view in mind.39

Absolute guarantees against flukes, errors, or illusions aren’t only

indefensible or ill-advised; they’re actually quite needless. All we really

need to do, if we think the matter through, is to make the best case for

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the possible global reach of normative evaluation. One good way to do

this is to argue trans-contextual intent of contending claims. We don’t

need synonymy or identity of language use to be able to interpret one

another’s beliefs, desires, and utterances so that it all makes some kind

of sense.40 We can perfectly well understand other valuings and still

reasonably disagree which deserve to become the norm. The basis for

this is secured by the notion of mutual normative entailment.41 Contrary

to what some might think, it’s by enlarging the scope of reasonable

disagreement, and reasonable rejection as well, that real headway is

made towards insuring a fair-minded resolution of conflicting claims and

so of objective warrant too. That is as far as the philosophy can or

should go on the minimalist view. The most viable project always

remains actually working out our similarities and differences in a more

piecemeal fashion, there and then.42

1.3. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND

PROGRESSION

In trying to come up with a more convincing sketch of normative

inquiry I’ve found myself drawing on some key historical figures, as well

as correcting a few important mistakes and omissions in the literature.

The line of thinkers I believe leads to a more moderate view or

sensibility goes from Kant, via Kierkegaard, to Wittgenstein and

16

Putnam.43 Just a few remarks on this string of thinkers and why a

discussion of their strengths and weaknesses will further enhance our

understanding of the notion of normative evaluation.

As hinted at, Putnam has spent considerable time and effort

exploring the historical background of the dichotomy between facts and

values, and between values and norms, suggesting the negative impact

this kind of thinking has had on our scientific, economical, social and

political behavior. To forget that philosophy and culture mutually reflect

one another and to lose sight of this interplay is highly unfortunate

because it would blind us to the potential for reform. While philosophical

thinking can be said to have had a negative effect on our lives, it’s also

shown the capacity for self-examination and a desire to change its ways.

If only to avoid the impression we’ve taken our theme out of thin air, we

need to deal more with this process of internal criticism.

The two first versions of criterial rationality (apodictic proof and

conceptual elucidation) were most widespread before the advent of the

so-called linguistic turn. It was often thought linguistic considerations

could be dispensed with altogether. The main thing was laying out an

axiomatic system of nature, society or mind, or at least giving a

complete conceptual analysis of them. If language did have a role to

play, it was as an artificial extension of human consciousness, a social

interface between the introspective world of the individual and

quantifiable physical reality. It’s this outlook, together with the two

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conceptions of philosophy that seem tailor-made to it, that ultimately

underwrites the categorical distinction between facts and values.

Before Kant, Continental Rationalism (e.g. Leibniz) and British

Empiricism (e.g. Locke) were both strongly committed to this dichotomy.

Whereas the former sought an adequate relation between facts and our

representations of them on deductive grounds, the latter did so in a

conceptual and/or inductive way. What Kant realized is that if Berkeley

and Hume are right and the very of idea of an internal relation between

mind and reality is incoherent, talk of representing external reality is

hopelessly confused.44 This produces a crisis in philosophy which

threatens to make a mockery of the progress of the new sciences. For

what happens to facts after we’ve admitted that speaking of ideas as

conforming to things is absurd? If this is so, what are we to

say about values—norms?

Enter Kant’s so-called Copernican Revolution, and the need for

an inventory and internal critique of reason’s uses. Classical

representationalism is incoherent because it assumes our mental

representations must be answerable to an outside reality we can’t ever

have direct, perceptual access to. It hardly makes sense anyway to want

to compare our immaterial ideas with something categorically different

(i.e. material reality), much less with something wholly unknown. How

then can we reasonably posit a necessary relation between them? If we

say instead that external reality always already corresponds to our

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understanding of it then it might still be possible, ex hypothesi, to mount

an adequate defense of the dichotomy between representations and

facts. We might no longer be able to speak of facts as being radically

mind-independent or, inversely, of our ideas as somehow trying to reach

out to this reality beyond. Yet there’s still a world of difference, Kant

thinks, between the realms of natural science and formal logic,

something which is preserved if we internalize the dichotomy. Instead of

an ontological cut between the material and the immaterial, we ground a

categorical separation between facts and ideas in the synthetic and

analytic judgments or uses of reason.

It’s to Kant’s great merit to have seen that neither facts and ideas,

nor values and norms, should be conflated; and, further, that the

normative plays a key role in human inquiry as a whole.45 This incipient

pluralism is momentous because it opens the door to a more fine-

grained modeling of political behavior.46 A distinction between values

and norms allows us to gauge what’s more proper to particular

individuals, social groups, or cultures from what’s less so. Only then can

we really discuss a normative exchange between them. This Kantian

move is of the greatest importance to the kind of approach I’m trying to

defend with basis in Putnam.

Too bad Kant insists on maintaining the old idea of sufficient

reason (proof + elucidation).47 His near total neglect of the language

question is very telling and comes, as we’ll see in the next chapter, at a

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high cost.48 What are fruitful and potentially very rewarding distinctions

are turned under his transcendental gaze into grand metaphysical-

epistemological dichotomies. Then, too, his sense that norms are self-

authenticating—values are mere inclinations on this picture—means he

likens normative inquiry to a kind of discovery procedure. Here it’s his

heavy reliance on formal or representational devices like

universalization that gets in the way. All this talk of sufficient reason

threatens to overshadow the incipient pluralism Putnam gleans in his

work, blocking the path to a more multi-faceted take on normativity.49

What makes Kierkegaard such an important figure in this story is

he’s realized just how damaging Kant’s insistence on rational sufficiency

is to his call to philosophy to defend the primacy of the practical.50 By

sticking with this normative intent, purifying it of Kantian hyperbole,

Kierkegaard is remarkably loyal to the spirit of the Kant’s project. This is

also clear from his satirical take on Hegel.51 Kant at least was on the

right track. He tried to take human existence seriously without tying it

down to a specific political culture or historical epoch and so forgetting

its fundamentally normative, self-transcending orientation.52 Kant’s real

failure, rather, lies in not following this insight through. He seems to

have thought it’s enough to have reason critique itself, drawing limits to

its theoretical (i.e. synthetic and analytic) use. Kierkegaard points

out that a truly honest look at who and where we are would mean

going beyond reason as a whole.

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It’s easy to miss the seriousness and rigor of Kierkegaard’s

critique of Kant and Modern philosophy. He certainly does more than

merely point out an assimilation of individual existence or action to either

cognitions or concepts has comical side-effects or is ill-advised. His

aims are ultimately more ambitious than that. Actually, he means to

excavate the most cherished assumptions underlying the Modern

paradigm as a whole, assumptions that go unquestioned even in

thinkers like Kant and much of post-Kantian philosophy; all this with the

intent of subjecting these to an internal criticism.53 What Kierkegaard

does, basically, is coming up with a Berkleyan-inspired reduction

argument against the self-sufficiency of human thought as a whole.

Suppose we want to keep the Kantian claim that the normative is

irreducible and shared while still claiming human reason is self-

sufficient. To be able to do this we would first have to show how a sharp

separation between what is of human thought and what isn’t makes

sense. What if it should turn out that this involves a fallacy of division—a

punishing paradox? If there’s no way to think the difference between

thought and reality, how can the transcendental philosopher claim his

categorical distinctions between cognition, facts, values and so on are

absolutely binding? If everything’s assimilated to thought, how can Kant

expect to be taken seriously when he talks about our concrete, practical

lives? How is this making the normative irreducible? Kierkegaard

doesn’t think Kant’s attempt to internalize rational sufficiency is

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coherent. Salvaging the sufficiency of thought by having us bypass

representational talk and bivalent logic altogether, as Hegel does, won’t

work either. Such a draconian move would be even less binding. We

might just as well stick with the principle of non-contradiction and

ask why we wouldn’t be better off giving up the whole pretension to

cognitive sufficiency instead.

This internal critique of the sufficiency of human reason marks, I

believe, the real transition-point point between pre-linguistic philosophy

and the so-called linguistic turn. Before Kierkegaard it was always

respectable to sidestep the language problematic by insisting on the

primacy of the reasoning and conceptualizing subject. Kierkegaard is a

decisive thinker in that he simply assumes the truth of this notion and

thinks it through to the end, showing us how it is self-reducing. The

feeling we’re obviously meant to be left with is that the claim to cognitive

sufficiency is much more than misguided: It actually inimical to

our normative existence.

That’s not all. To want to reduce all meaningful language to

representing things, or expressing human consciousness or mental

events, means the act of communication itself, and a fortiori the persons

involved in it, has been forgotten. So Kant’s cognitivism is also

incapable of accounting for the role of intercommunication in normative

exchange. Remaining true to Kant’s grounding insight about the priority

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of practical, normative interest means we must refuse the primacy of the

cognitive subject as a whole.54

So far so good. Kierkegaard himself, regrettably, seems to have

gone to opposite extremes. It almost sounds as if he wants to replace

the cognitivist’s simple identification of existence with thinking with an

equally sweeping disjunction between them. What I find troublesome is

a presumption that seems to be operative throughout the corpus, viz.

that the normative is (a) completely neutral or non-ambiguous; or if not,

that it’s (b) not really open to debate or negotiation; of if this be granted

too, that it (c) somehow pulls its own weight in a way that our shared

cognitive practices don’t.55 Some form of sufficiency, I submit; some

variant of Kant’s dichotomy between the normative and the evaluative is

still being entertained here. This also because he seems to claim the

same traits (a-c) for the kind of thinking he’s engaged in. And this after

he’s said the connection between our concepts and the normative

dimension of our lives is inherently paradoxical!

So Kierkegaard, like Kant, can’t really afford to accommodate

normative evaluation. Ironically, it’s his wish to offer a compelling

personalist corrective to Kant’s cognitivism that lures him on and which

prevents him from questioning Kant’s dichotomy between values and

norms. The only real difference between the two thinkers: Where Kant

thinks norms can be equated with rule-based reasoning, Kierkegaard is

convinced the normative is identical with certain existential attitudes.56

23

There can be no doubt Wittgenstein owes a great deal to

Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the limits of reason and language. He calls

him the most profound thinker of the 19th century.57 For all that,

he would still take issue with the latent claims to semantic sufficiency in

his thinking. If this is really what Kierkegaard is driving at then he’s guilty

of a non sequitur. It’s hard to tell sometimes, the ties between

conceptual elucidation, meaningful language, and the common world

are never explicitly stated or fully explored; and little of real significance

has been contributed by the scholarship here.58 Regardless of this the

moral of the Tractatus is, I think, clear: If the relationship between

language, thought, and reality is as paradoxical as Kierkegaard seems

to be saying, then not even Kierkegaard’s indirect or negative defense

thought’s sufficiency would work.

The way I see it, a third stage in the internal criticism of criterial

reason (the semantic) was undertaken as early as in the Tractatus. (The

final (the pragmatic) is found in the later writings.) I don’t think this path

from Kant, to Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein has really been explored

yet. Take the debate on nonsense. Scholars don’t seem to appreciate

fully how Kantian and Kierkegaardian dichotomies are transposed in the

Tractatus only be become the subject of a self-reducing semantic

movement that ends in ultimate indecision or paralysis.59

24

Kant himself is satisfied a systematic cut between synthetic a

posteriori judgments (: the sensical (Sinn) and analytic a priori

judgments (: the senseless (Sinnlos) is a must if we want to keep talking

about a dichotomy between facts and ideas in the wake of Berkeley;

and, also, that a justification of this theoretical distinction as well as the

more practical dichotomy between societal values and moral norms is

possible if and only if the philosopher is able to make sense of all this

without getting involved in any incoherence.60 This effectively commits

him to the meaningfulness of a third, mediating form of judgments:

So-called synthetic a priori propositions. Kant thinks it’s the main task of

critical philosophy to explicate and justify these. Had he been

successful, the challenge to philosophical reason posed by Berkeley

and Hume would finally have been met. Kierkegaard’s been chipping

away at the rationale of these judgments by attacking the underlying

idea that thought can coherently act as a mean between itself and non-

thought. What the Tractatus does is to recast this internal criticism in a

rigorously semantic form, showing by way of a general language critique

(Sprachkritik) how and why the crystalline purity of Kant’s

architectonic is only a mirage since his categorical distinctions are all

exposed to semantic incoherence.

How do you draw a hard-and-fast line between what makes

sense, what’s senseless, and patent nonsense anyway? Just for the

sake of argument, let’s assume these distinctions are meant to be

25

systematic, sharp. If it’s denied that this trichotomy is itself nonsensical,

then semantic sufficiency is maintained. This attempt to dodge

nonsense won’t do. At some point, a choice between incoherence and

eternal regress will have to be made. (“If the trichotomy is neither

nonsensical, sensical, nor senseless, what is it then?”) Besides, it

would violate both the spirit and letter of the Tractatus.61 Let’s agree

therefore that trying to avoid nonsense doesn’t make sense. Then on

this hypothesis, and assuming for the moment we don’t want to claim

sufficiency in an indirect or underhanded way, what could we

possibly say now that wouldn’t either be empty, or rhetorical, or in any

case less than cogent or statutory? Kant’s cognitive distinctions,

we conclude, aren’t semantically viable. And the same can be

said, mutatis mutandis, for Kierkegaard’s anti-cognitive dichotomy

between thought and normativity.

This kind of wholesale dichotomizing, I submit, has kept

philosophers from dealing more successfully with normative issues. It

might even be claimed it’s had a bad effect in a more practical,

democratic setting. A way of modeling practical behavior that would

have it be free of any evaluative force or normative content is flawed

because it encourages acting on the mistaken belief that a certain way

of life is beyond question, or that there’s really no need, or point in

critically evaluating socio-economic relations or public policies. The later

Wittgenstein’s attention to the vagaries of language use is a great aid

26

here in finally disabusing us of any residual philosophical aversion to the

concrete, the many-faceted, the practical.

1.4. SOME MAJOR IMPLICATIONS

This brings us to Putnam and his rethinking of normative inquiry

in light of Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn. Hopefully, my treatment

will by have hinted at a broader framework and historical rationale for

Putnam’s own thinking of the ties between norms, values and facts.

These are a staple in most if not all inquiries of an economical, social,

and political orientation. When Putnam’s arguing against extreme or

facile solutions here, he’s working out the implications of a long drawn-

out struggle. True to the general flow of this line of thinkers, he thinks

the ultimate task of the philosopher is to bring us back to where we were

in the first place—our everyday lives.

This practical orientation of Putnam’s philosophy is rarely if ever

commented upon, or treated with any real appreciation.62 To better get a

sense of how important and highly creative his thinking is, I’ll go back to

the wrangle over rules and attitudes mentioned at the outset, applying it

specifically to a political context. I’ll use Cavell’s distinction between two

major strains in the Western philosophical tradition, with two markedly

different ways of modeling political behavior as a clue. The perfectionist

strain seeks, all other things being equal, to elicit and cultivate a certain

27

set of normative attitudes. The other is legalist in nature, favoring rule-

based reasoning instead. The real strength of Putnam lies in drawing

upon the strengths of both these traditions while avoiding their

weaknesses and inherent limitations. That way he ends up with a truly

moderate view, something no one else has been able to do before him I

think. This involves carving out a middle stance between the two where

rules and attitudes are seen as complementary and of roughly equal

weight rather than as opposed or mutually excluding each other.63

It simply strains credibility, on either a de facto or a de jure

reading, to picture collective action or political institutions in more

complex societies wholly or even primarily in terms of informal attitudes.

A lesson from history. Public criteria and formal rules were

indispensable, first of all, in facilitating the move from tribal society or a

chieftain system based on the superior force of personality or inherited

privilege to a wider distribution of wealth, opportunities, or even rights,

for a subsequent development of a notion of the rule of law, and thus for

the eventual emergence of democracy itself.64 The rise of Athenian

democracy, certainly, is unthinkable without it. We may rightly want to

question whether this distribution was or ever is sufficiently wide enough

of course, even pointing out systemic injustices or structural flaws.65 We

tend to forget though how easily the tables are turned here.

A good case might be made for much of perfectionist philosophy

being a reaction against this new democratic form of life. Plato’s and

28

Aristotle’s vision of politics as based on virtue and excellence was, or so

it could be argued, largely meant as a counterweight against the rule of

the many in the hope of recapturing some of the vitality and glow of that

life which is always better for the best.66 If we agree that there were just

constraints put on these perfectionst aspirations in Athenian Democracy,

the exigencies of collective action in a modern bureaucratic state makes

anything but a fair-minded division of labor between informal attitudes

and rules indispensable.67 I say this less to accuse the perfectionist of

being an inveterate elitist than to remind ourselves of the real-life

issues involved here, and the related need of any responsible

outlook or sensibility not only to change our perception of the

phenomena but to save them as well.

It’s somewhat ironic that one of the main charges made against

the legalist way of modeling political relations today is that it’s too

conservative. When in early modern times the basic vocabulary and

tools were forged, the situation was much more acute and the

motivation of the leading legalists quite revolutionary. Even in Kant’s

time, it must be remembered, representational government was still the

exception rather than the norm. The legalist’s liking for criterial reason

was therefore of real importance in the rise of the Modern state, seeking

to defend the ordinary citizen against potential transgressions. It’s this

tradition or political culture that the contemporary legalist is the inheritor

29

of and feels, all other things being equal, that we’re duty-bound to

preserve and even privilege at the expense of everything else.

Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are perhaps the two most

widely known representatives of this tradition today. I’ll therefore use

them partly as a foil in chapters 4 & 5 to show how Putnam might both

accommodate and complement this strain in political philosophy. There

are significant differences between these two legalist thinkers. Yet

what’s common is that normative inquiry is above all about reasoning in

the form of representational devices. Though it’s rather hard to

disagree with the general thrust of the legalist scheme, the salient

point is what to make of it.

The issue of criterial rationality, first. Habermas, for instance,

clearly invokes it in trying to keep the Kantian project alive. One, he

defends a dichotomy between values and norms. Two, he seeks to drive

a wedge between informal judgments or attitudes and principles or

procedures. Three, he thinks it’s possible to ground the whole legalist

scheme. We’ve already hinted at the indefensibility of such a

dichotomous view of things. One therefore suspects Habermas is

making too much of legalism and its way of modeling political behavior.

The later Rawls’ denial of these stipulations is much more sensible, I

think, also because it makes the legalist more open to other ways of

modeling normative interaction than the strictly representational ones.

The real question now is how much weight to give to legalism.

30

It might seem Putnam’s own allegiances lie with the perfectionist

and that he’s opposed to the legalism. I believe this is wrong. The

occasional polemical remark against legalism and Putnam’s seeming

willingness to excuse the immoderacies of the perfectionist and to write

them off as fitting hyperbole, might give that impression.68 To refrain

from building highly elaborate schemes of public reason and

juridification isn’t the same as favoring an attitude-based approach to

politics however. And if Putnam’s remarks against legalism are at times

adversarial it’s because he, like the later Wittgenstein, feels compelled

to point out that an exclusive or even principled reliance upon

representational devices is in conflict with a prior denial of rational

sufficiency in the strong sense. At any rate, it quickly leads to an

impoverished view of normative inquiry.

You don’t have to invoke rational sufficiency to have the right to

make normative claims. Likewise, you don’t have to resort to

representational devices, or a principal divide between the political and

the non-political, in order to speak well of common interest or objective

warrant. To repeat, all that’s really needed is a willingness to learn

together through trial and error, something which is brought out by

the mutually granted possibility for reasonable disagreement and

reasoned rejection of each other’s schemes—or parts thereof at least. A

philosopher’s ideas or conceptions are no more withdrawn from scrutiny

here than are informal attitudes of specific rules. As long as this is

31

granted, a free-play of the various reflective capacities of ordinary

language isn’t only workable, it’s actually preferable because

it creates a more pluralistic, and so more genuinely demotic

setting for normative inquiry.69

It’s because the two dominant strains in political philosophy have

been obsessed with equating the normative with either rules or attitudes

that Putnam ultimately feels the need to act as a corrective to both

traditions. The kind of essentialism that used to go hand in hand with

philosophical modeling of political behavior may have been effectively

disposed of after the linguistic turn, yet I don’t think the particular biases

or blind-spots of either strain have ever really been seriously challenged,

much less overcome, until Putnam.

To borrow a trope from Kant: Reasons without attitudes are

empty; attitudes without rules are blind. Wanting to privilege cultivating

the right mindset or personal responsiveness is to ignore the integral

role of rule-guided behavior in our moral and political lives. Similarly an

exclusive, or even primary, reliance on representational devices easily

leads to downplaying the participant perspective. A one-sided focus on

either these attitudes or formal devices can’t relieve us of the burden

and the risk of normative evaluation anyway. Of course this doesn’t

mean these attitudes or devices have been shown to be inherently

incoherent, defective, or false. A moderate stance leads us to appreciate

how attitudes are complemented and reinforced by rules, leaving us free

32

to agree there’s still room for a limited division of labor between the

ordinary citizen and the elected official, judge, or bureaucrat.

Politics, from this vantage-point, would be a kind of double

movement; a constant back-and-forth between the formal and the

informal, between rules and attitudes—norms and values. If there’s one

way in which we might still refuse to be impartial it’s because we want to

safeguard and encourage “upward” participation; and where this isn’t

possible, to make sure “downward” accountability isn’t weakened at

least. The toughest challenge is matching normative inquiry with

productive action, expanding the scope of both on the part of the

ordinary citizen. A worthy aspiration, indeed, for a democracy truly

worthy of its name.

33

1 “Wittgenstein’s philosophy in relation to political thought”, in The New Wittgenstein, A.

Crary & R. Read (eds.) (Routledge, 2000), pp. 118-45.

2 Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Harvard University Press,

1982), esp. pp. 60, 79, 89-93, 96, 100-02, 105ff., 135 + n. 47, 78, 82, 83, 86, 87 (p.

146, added in proof) & 88. Kripke thinks Wittgenstein’s key discussion of rule-following

and private language is premised on positing an asymmetric normative relation

between the individual and the community. While the individual depends on the

community for articulacy and correction, the community itself is always seen as being

beyond reproach. So while there’s some room for normative disagreement between

the individual and the community, there’s no way the individual can really criticize or

correct the community itself and be right. This would make Wittgenstein favor a

paternalistic or authoritarian social or political philosophy. Why this is, and why one

community shouldn’t also be open to being criticized or corrected by another

community is assumed rather than explained. He attributes this insular or

conventionalist view to the later Wittgenstein, calling it a skeptical solution. This,

apparently, because Wittgenstein feels that allowing for real normative disagreements

might lead to eternal regress and indecision, which is also why it must be ruled out by

fiat (by way of appeal to the criterial norms of the community). The problem of regress

though is really only problematic to someone who’s already assumed all conflicts must

be decidable. A fallibilist needn’t worry too much here. For a similar construal

of the later Wittgenstein, see Wright, Wittgenstein on the Foundations of

Mathematics (Harvard University Press, 1980); “Rule-Following, Objectivity and

the Theory of Meaning”, in Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule (Routledge & Kegan

Paul, 1981), pp. 99-117.

3 Apel, Selected Essays, vol. I (“Towards a Transcendental Semiotics”) (Humanities

Press, 1994), pp. 34; 40-2; 55-6; 150ff.; 233-4.

4 New edition (Oxford University Press, 1999). For a good introduction to Cavell’s

overall thought, which also aptly brings out its continuity, see Espen Hammer, Stanley

Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (Blackwell, 2002).

5 Cavell (1999), esp. part one, II-II+V, pp. 3-48; 86-125. See also Cavell (1991),

“Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language” in Crary & Read (2000), pp. 21-37;

Must We Mean What We Say?, 2nd Edition (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.

1-43. Another influential account in this vein is that of McDowell, “Wittgenstein on

Following a Rule”, Synthese, 58 (1984), pp. 325-6; “Non-Cognitivism and Rule-

Following”, in Crary & Read (2000), pp. 38-52, himself inspired by Cavell’s

groundbreaking efforts. I’ll keep the focus on Cavell therefore.

6 See, e.g., Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981) (hereafter

RTH), pp. 103-13. The following discussion is, I believe, a faithful paraphrase of

Putnam’s own views contained both in this work and elsewhere.

7 Like Putnam, I use ‘criterion’ here in its idiomatic sense (‘way of telling’)

(“Dreaming and ‘Depth Grammar’”, in Analytical Philosophy, Butler, R. (ed.) (Blackwell,

1966)(hereafter DDG), p. 224, n. 1.

8 Cf. Cavell (1999), esp. ch. V & (2000), pp. 29-37. See also McDowell’s related

warnings against conceiving rules as determining our practices in a super-rigid

way (1984) & (2000), esp. pp. 43ff.

9 See, e.g. Cavell (1991), p. 2: “Perfectionism, as I think of it, is not a competing theory

of the moral life, but something like a dimension or tradition of the moral life that…

places tremendous burdens on personal relationships and on the possibility or

necessity of the transforming of oneself and of one’s society—strains of which run from

Plato and Aristotle to… Kant… and Wittgenstein” (emphasis mine). (See also ibid.,

xxxi.) I’ll have more to say about this personalist reading of Wittgenstein later.

10 Putnam points out that Cavell at times sounds as if he were saying that we, or each

of us individually, were a “ground”” (“Rules, Attunement, and ”Applying Words to the

World”: The Struggle to Understand Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language”, in The Legacy

of Wittgenstein: Pragmatism or Deconstruction, L. Nagl & C. Mouffe (eds.)(Frankfurt

Am Main, 2001)(hereafter RAA), p. 21. He even goes as far as to find criterial

reasoning wholly out of place in normative inquiry (see (1999), ch. XI (“Rules and

Reasons”), esp. pp. 298-9; 304; 307ff.). He goes on to nuance this “Manicheanism”

between attitudes and rules somewhat later on (1991). Still, criterial reasoning remains

the “villain” of the piece. This move is problematic if it’s meant to do more than draw

our attention to the integral role that informal attitudes also play in our practical lives.

11 I’ve borrowed the phrase ‘normative attitude’ from Brandom (Making it Explicit

(Harvard University Press 1994), ch. 1). I take this term to mean the kind of personal

response or mutual recognition within language-games and common agreement or

attunement in informal judgments about forms of life that Cavell loves to talk about.

12 Hammer (2002), esp. ch. 2 (“Skepticism: Criteria and the external world”), p. 57 & ch.

5 (“Ethics and Politics”), pp. 119-47, tries his best to defend Cavell against charges of

unwarranted or underhanded foundationalism. He’s quite successful too. That said, it’s

hard to avoid the impression it’s quite tilted in the end. It’s in this sense that I think

Stroud’s misgivings (1980), esp. pp. 741ff.) about Cavell’s Wittgenstein are still very

much to the point (“Reasonable Claims: Cavell and the Tradition”, The Journal of

Philosophy, 77, 11 (November, 1980), pp. 731-44 (esp. pp. 741ff.). Why should the

strongly personalist reading favored by Cavell necessarily be any less problematic or

immune from skeptical attrition than the kind of myopic focus on formal criteria and

rules it’s trying to combat or be a healthy corrective to? Why, in other words, should

recognitional relations necessarily give us more normative traction than cognitive

ones? In some circumstances, and with specific purposes in mind, it may well be

necessary to doubt the basic competence of attitudes too. A simple disconnect

between normative attitudes and rules, anyway, is assumed rather than argued for.

13 I use this designation faute de mieux. I could instead have used the qualifier

‘therapeutic’ (or even better, ‘non-externalist’) to characterize the kind of readings

pioneered by people like Cavell and McDowell (cf. Crary & Read (2000), pp.1ff.). The

only problem with adopting this exegetical strategy is that the moderate strain in

Wittgenstein interpretation I’m interested in shares the same concern with diagnosis

and critique of externalism with all other branches of the Harvard School. Take the

branch represented by people like Burton Dreben and Warren Goldfarb. This seems to

me on the whole more skeptical—“Humean” if you will (see, e.g. Dreben, “Putnam,

Quine––and the Facts”, Philosophical Topics, 20,1 (1992)(hereafter PHP), pp. 293-

315; “Quine and Wittgenstein: The Odd Couple”, in Wittgenstein and Quine, R.

Arrington & H. Glock (eds.) (Routledge, 1996), pp. 39-61; Goldfarb, “Wittgenstein on

Understanding”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 17 (1992), pp. 109-22. Cf. Putnam’s

“Reply to Burton Dreben” (hereafter RBD), in PHP, pp. 397-9). As a result there are

bound to be subtle differences, too, in how these different branches conceive of the

specific relationship between therapy and critique in Wittgenstein. I’ve therefore used

‘the Harvard School’ as a catch-all terms to denote what I hold to be the most

promising line of Wittgenstein interpretation today, and ‘the moderate strain’ as a

further (normative) specification of this term.

14 Putnam seems to have understood Wittgenstein as denying normative

disagreements earlier on, feeling he was a criterialist. This would make the later

Wittgenstein an ally of ordinary language philosophy and logical positivism, something

which Putnam is the first to admit (see RTH, pp. 107-110, 113). Putnam later came to

reject this view as being too extreme, favoring a reading much closer in spirit and

orientation to that of Cavell instead; a reading he says he came to on his own through

a study of Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Religious Belief as well as his Lectures on

Aesthetics (see The Many Faces of Realism (Open Court, 1987), p. 91 (n. 32):

Renewing Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1992)(hereafter RP), pp. 75-7; 177-8;

RAA, pp. 9, 11, 13, n. 7, 16, 18, 19, 22-3; Realism with a Human Face (Harvard

University Press, 1992)(hereafter RHF), 19, 21, 26, 52, 120-1, 167; Words and Life

(Harvard University Press, 1994)(hereafter WL), pp. 192-3; 299; 515; Pragmatism: An

Open Question (Blackwell, 1995)(hereafter POQ), p. 33; personal communication.

15 See, e.g., The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Harvard

University Press, 2004)(hereafter CFD), preface; pp. 1-2; 7; 28; 45-6; 52.

16 Cf., esp. “Taking Rules Seriously” (RHF, pp. 193-200). For a more detailed

proposal of how judgments and rules or maxims might be said to feed off each other,

see RTH, p. 104.

17 Cf., e.g. RP, p. 106; RTH, pp. 116-21; WL, pp. 190-1, 194;.

18 ‘Regulism’ and ‘regularism’ (see next note) are short-hand expressions that, again,

have been lifted from Brandom (1994), esp. pp. 18-23 & 26-30). I take them to mean

two important variants of the criterialist conception. The regulist either subordinates or

assimilates practices to rules. Kant, say, or the early Rawls (cf. also n. 10, supra), are

fairly straightforward cases of regulists. Kant defines practice as the conforming to a

system of rules at the beginning of On the Common Saying: That may be true in

Theory but is of no Use in Practice (1793). This fits nicely with Rawls’ earlier practice

conception of rules (1955), pp. 24ff.

19 A regularist is someone who might concede we can’t talk about norms without being

already entangled in social practices. Only, this kind of performance or behavior

needn’t be consciously understood by the agents themselves. Or be expressed in the

form of rules, propositional or otherwise, and thereby become the subject of normative

reasoning or conscious political decision-making (Brandom (1994), pp. 26-27). More

than that though, there’s no real room on this model for reasonable disagreement, and

a fortiori normative discussion, between language-games or forms of life. This is

because the relevant institutional norms are held to be incorrigible, and in this sense

blind. This is roughly speaking the kind of unproductive views ascribed to Wittgenstein

by amongst others Kripke and Wright (cf. n. 2, supra). For a critical notice of this kind

of reading as lacking any real basis in Wittgenstein, see McDowell (1984).

20 This term refers to Brandom’s peculiar attempt, in his own appropriation of

Wittgenstein, to clear the way for a third criterialist stance. (In this he seems to have

been partly influenced by McDowell (1984), p. 342 (ibid., p. 29; n. 46-49, p. 659; n. 52

& 59, p. 660).) Although a great advance on Kripke’s and Wright’s Wittgenstein, I must

confess I find Brandom’s exposition too reductive to be of any real use. He sifts

through the later Wittgenstein to suit his own purposes, coming up with what looks, at

first blush, like a straightforwardly informalist outlook on normative rationality (ibid., p.

62). Like Cavell, he seems to want to give priority to normative attitudes implicit in our

practices (ibid., p. 626). At the same time, though, he insists on assimilating human

inquiry to normative, criterial reasoning. He seeks to diffuse the tension by defending

the pragmatic priority of the propositional by way of a transcendental or structural

argument about its implicitness in all normative attitudes, language-games, or forms of

life (ibid., preface xiv, xviii, xxi-iii; p. 21). To do that he must set aside Wittgenstein’s

own piece-meal understanding of these issues, offering in its place a comprehensive

theory of praxis (ibid., p. 29). That, in turn, means thinking about normative praxis as a

closed system. This is highly problematic enough in light of Wittgenstein’s own forays

against rational sufficiency (see chapters 2 & 3, infra). If this wasn’t bad enough,

Brandom’s inferentialism commits him to cutting Wittgenstein’s fine-tuned account of

rule-following down to a very narrowly defined category, viz. to rules with propositional

contentfulness (ibid., p. 54ff.). This way of pulling a Hegel on Kant and a Heglianized

Kant on Wittgenstein is ultimately more extreme than it’s in the case with Habermas

even (cf. chapter 4.3., infra). For one, his rigorously inferential approach only seems to

tolerate a reflective or expressive role on the part of normative reasoning. A more

active role, after all, would require the ability of normative inquiry to act in a recursive

way on our normative attitudes. I shall therefore not bother further with Brandom’s

inferentialism. For a related critique, see McDowell (1997) & (1999).

21 I base this judgment on Diamond, The Realistic Spirit (MIT Press, 1995),

esp. Introductions I & II and chs. 1, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 15.

22 Even this may be a little hasty. Putnam quite frequently speaks about the

normative, even going as far as to speak of its ubiquity (“Reply to Gary Ebbs”

(hereafter RGE), in PHP, pp. 350-1). This is another way of saying our practices are

normative all the way down. I don’t feel I’m departing from the general orientation of

Putnam’s thought by laying the stress on the normative qualifier therefore. Regardless,

the compound ‘normative evaluation’ is meant to preserve the Putnamian insight that

the normative, while certainly having global reach, is nevertheless a wholly unworkable

concept apart from in situ inquiry.

23 Ibid.

24 These are Lionel Robbin’s words (On the Nature and Significance of Economic

Science (Macmillan, 1932), p. 53), quoted by Putnam in “For Ethics and

Economics without the Dichotomies”, Review of Political Economy, 15, 3 (2003)

(hereafter EWD), p. 396).

25 That the universalist indeed overreacts is shown in chapter 3.3. below.

26 The attempt to strike a mean between universalism and relativism is fully announced

in RTH, but seems implied in earlier works.

27 This, I suggest, is an important difference between Putnam and other

representatives of the Harvard School. See also infra.

28 See, e.g., “Analyticity and Apriority: Beyond Wittgenstein and Quine”, Midwest

Studies of Philosophy, vol. VI (Minneapolis, 1979)(hereafter AWQ), p. 423; CFD,

preface, pp. 1-24, 111-34, et passim; EWD; Meaning and the Moral

Sciences (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978)(hereafter MMS), pp. 1, 85, 92, 94; POQ,

42-5; RTH, pp. 56-9.

29 The following is my own reconstruction and is meant merely to provide the reader

with a kind of shorthand or framework for the kinds of criticisms that Putnam himself

engages in vis-à-vis criterial rationality. More below.

30 AWQ, pp. 433; 436; 439; DDG, p. 235; MMS, p. 6; 99; 100; RTH, pp. 2-3, 18,

20, 24, 52, 52.

31 Cf. DDG, pp. 224, n. 1; 115-6; POQ, pp. 57; 63; RGE, pp. 350-1; RP. P. 104.

32 That the universalist really thinks this follows, see chapter 4.7. infra.

33 As we shall see (chapters 2.2. + 3.3. infra), this is what the position of someone like

Rorty comes down to.

34 Both the relativist and the universalist think of human inquiry as closable and/or as

taking place within self-enclosed systems (cf. RTH, pp. x, 54, 117ff., and Moody-

Adams, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy (Harvard

University Press,1997). The medial conception I’ll be arguing for throughout this

dissertation, strongly opposes this.

35 CFD, pp. 2-3; pp. 9; 11; 19; Ethics without Ontology (Harvard University Press,

2005)(hereafter EWO), p. 118; RBD, p. 395.

36 Although some significant changes in Putnam’s thinking have occurred after RTH his

understanding of so-called indispensability arguments has remained essentially the

same. That they were never intended as quasi-transcendental arguments. In this

sense Putnam was never a criterialist (“sufficientist”). To claim that dichotomizing fails

is not the same as showing that any such defense would be absolutely impossible,

much less that normative evaluation has been proven to be strictly necessary or

binding. For that would indeed mean rational sufficiency has been resorted to in an

indirect or underhanded way. Not only that, one would have committed the fallacy of

deriving a positive from a negative (or a negative from a positive). Who knows, a fourth

value or position may be given in addition to the extreme positions of relativism and

universalism and our medial one. It may even be the case that all of them are wrong.

Showing dichotomizing is untenable, and normative evaluation indispensable, is as

much as to say that from our present vantage point it’s inconceivable that we’re in the

wrong; or, better, that a position superior to ours has been articulated.

37 See also chapter 4.7. below.

38 See also chapters 3.3 & 4.7. below.

39 That Putnam is committed to a workable view can be easily gleaned from his

discussion of the three enlightenments (the Greek, the Modern, and the “Pragmatic”),

the last of which is closely affiliated with names such as Dewey and Wittgenstein

(EWO, pp. 92ff.).

40 See e.g. AWQ, p. 431; RTH, p. 117.

41 See chapter 3.4. below.

42 Ibid. See also chapter. 3.6. infra.

43 It might be thought that casting Dewey in a supporting role is somewhat

unfair, especially since Putnam himself invokes his name whenever discussing his

own views of normative inquiry (see e.g. EWO, p. 105; personal communication). The

main reason for his absence in the two first chapters is that, as far as I can gather,

Dewey isn’t interested in the kind of internal critique that these other thinkers arguably

are interested in, Putnam included. But see chapters 3.7 + 5.6. infra.

44 RTH, pp. 56-9.

45 Cf. POQ, pp, 42-5; 52, for the primacy of the practical and/or the normative in Kant,

Dewey, and Wittgenstein. See also Brandom (1994), ch. 1.

46 POQ, p. 30.

47 This can be readily appreciated from what Kant has to say about philosophy as (1)

transcendental exposition or elucidation, which is seen as preparatory for providing a

transcendental deduction of the specific judgment or use of reason in question

See also chapter 2.2., + 2.4.

48 Cf. CFD, esp. chs. 1 & 5. That Kant himself ignored or severely downplayed the

force of linguistic considerations, and that when he did stoop to deal with language he

subsumed it under reason, see Svendsen. “Kant og Wittgenstein om Tenkning og

Språk”, in Wittgenstein og den Europeiske Filosofien, S. R. S. Fine & L. F. H.

Svendsen (eds.) (Akribe, 2001), esp. pp. 51-59. (Svendsen himself seems to think that

this assimilation is a given (ibid., pp. 67-8).) This disregard for language was a pet

peeve with the German Romantics of course. Hamann, Herder, and Jakobi all in their

different ways called for a meta-critique of reason, aiming to show how reason, rather

than being self-contained presupposes language, as well as history and sentiment. For

an excellent exposition of post-Kantian philosophy that also deals with these issues in

the light of the problem of rational sufficiency, see Beiser, The Fate of Reason:

German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Harvard University Press, 1987), esp. pp. 37-

43, 83-89, 135-153. Frank, “Fragments of a History of the Theory of Self-

Consciousness from Kant to Kierkegaard”, Critical Horizons, 5, 1 (2004), pp. 53-136 is

also relevant here. More on this in chapter 2.5.

49 CFD, esp. ch. 5; EWD, pp. 405ff.

50 We’ve already remarked how for Putnam there’s a line that goes from Kant via

Dewey to Wittgenstein (see also n. 45, supra). I’d like to expand and complement this

line of thinkers by stressing the role of Kierkegaard. Although Putnam himself doesn’t

stress the links between Kant and Kierkegaard that much, he’s very much alive to the

overall fit between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein’s way of thinking, and so to his own

as well (see also RGE, p. 352; RP, pp. 134ff.).

51 No one has done more to open up lines of research on the Kantian connection than

Ronald M. Green (cf., e.g., Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt (State University

of New York Press, 1992); “Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments: A Kantian

Commentary”, in The International Kierkegaard Commentary, Philosophical Fragments

and Johannes Climacus, R. L. Perkins (ed.)(Mercer University Press, 1994), pp. 169-

202; “Developing Fear and Trembling”, in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard,

A. Hannay & G. Marino (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 257-282). His

earliest statements sound a little incautious at times, it’s true. Green’s work has

become more balanced over the years however. Despite the occasional weaknesses

in his presentation, it still remains true that this Kantian scholar has shown

Kierkegaard’s own problematic is in important respects much closer to Kant’s than it is

to that of Hegel. My only real problem with Greene is he fails to extend his analytic

comparisons to the language question and to the political sphere. This is a weakness

shared by more recent interpretations in the Kantian vein (e.g. that of Ulrich Knappe,

Theory and Practice in Kant and Kierkegaard (Walter de Guyer, 2004).) Marino, “The

Place of Reason in Kierkegaard’s Ethics”, in Søren Kierkegaard: Critical Assessments

of Leading Philosophers, vol. 1 (Routledge, 2002), pp. 166-79, has also taken note of

the link to Kant in an important way, as we’ll see in the next chapter.

52 Cf. RHF, pp. 194ff.

53 See chapter 2.5.

54 I am, then, partly dissenting from a very influential view that would have Frege (and

Russell) be the main forerunners of the linguistic turn (see e.g. Dummett, The Origins

of Analytic Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1996). I emphasize Kierkegaard’s

contributions here mainly because I’m convinced he’s been unjustly ignored. Yet, if

forced, I would be prepared to argue that these make Kierkegaard a truer link between

Kant and Wittgenstein. In this I follow Janik & Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna

(Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1996).

55 I follow the lead of Cavell, Marino, and others in pursuing a more critical reading of

Kierkegaard. To highlight Kierkegaard’s relationship to the linguistic turn and gauging

his position from this vantage point will, hopefully, also yield a more nuanced

understanding of Kierkegaard’s relevance to contemporary philosophy. (I find

Weston’s Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy (Routledge, 1994) too

apologetic in this regard to be really helpful.)

56 Although I‘m certainly inspired by Cavell’s reading of Kierkegaard here, I do think

Kierkegaard’s position is problematical for slightly different reasons than he does. He

seems to find Kierkegaard’s reading of the normative aspect of individual existence

especially problematic in its expressly Christian or theological mode (2002), esp.

pp. 170-1, 174-9). I think that this merely highlights a problem with

personalism as a whole.

57 Cf. e.g. Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis (Blackwell, 1967), pp. 68-9, in which he

talks about Kierkegaard’s insights regarding the close affinity between paradox and the

limits of language. See also Wittgenstein, in private correspondence with M. O’Drury,

in Acta Philosophica Fennica, vol. 28, nos. 1-3 (North-Holland Publishing Company,

1976), where he calls Kierkegaard “the most profound thinker of the 19th century”.

58 As far as I know, no one has really worked out what Kierkegaard’s links to the

linguistic turn come down to. I’ve already hinted at the shortcomings of Weston’s

account. I find Peter Fenves’ “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard (Stanford

University Press, 1993) similarly of limited use. Paul de Man makes some interesting

remarks on the relationship between irony, temporality, and language in Kierkegaard

(Blindness and Insights: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd revised

edition (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 208ff.). His remark that faith requires

a leap out of language, I find particularly interesting (ibid., pp. 222-3). (See also The

Concept of Irony, in Aesthetic Ideology (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 163-

84.) Too bad he doesn’t go on to develop this suggestion.

59 The one closest to saying this, I think, is Goldfarb (“Metaphysics and Nonsense: On

Cora Diamond’s The Realistic Spirit”, Journal of Philosophical Research, 22 (1997), pp.

57-73), in his criticism of Diamond (1991) and the proponents of the so-called austere

view of nonsense. I will be recycling some of his critical remarks in trying to develop a

reading of the Tractatus in a more Putnamian spirit (see also “Reply to James Conant”,

pp. 376-7 in PHP; RTH, p. 106.

60 See chapter 2.2.

61 See chapter 2.6.

62 Dictionaries, for instance, either omit to mention his practical or political philosophy

or limit themselves to a brief mention of his involvement in politics as a private citizen.

Cf. also Norris, Realism, Reason and the Uses of Uncertainty (Manchester University

Press, 2002). By far the best reading I’ve come across so far is Bernstein, “The

Pragmatic Turn: The Entanglement of Fact and Value”, in Hilary Putnam,

Ben-Menahem (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 251-66. It’s not

really responsive to the originality of Putnam’s position either. Bernstein doesn’t seem

fully to appreciate how Putnam’s pragmatic realism might constitute a

full-worthy critical counterpart both to Rortyan contextualism and to

Habermasian universalism. More on this in chapter 3.

63 Cf. e.g. CFD, p. 134; EWD, pp. 403ff. Again, we should be careful to state things in a

too categorical fashion. There are clear perfectionist strains in the thinking of Kant, for

instance (RHF, p. 194).

64 A case can easily be made that no society known to historians, archaeologists,

linguists, or social anthropologists ever relies simply, or even primarily, on normative

attitudes in regulating their life together and in negotiating their relations with or view of

the outside world. A satisfactory treatment here would unfortunately take us too far

afield, and must therefore be marked for future research.

65 See, e.g. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species

Membership (Belknap Press, 2006) for the importance to be able to do this.

66 For the most incisive works, see J. Boardman, J. Griffin & M. Oswyn (eds.), The

Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World (Oxford University Press, 2002),

esp. preface and ch. 1; Moses Finley, Democracy, Ancient and Modern (New

Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1973); George Forrest, The Emergence of Greek

Democracy: The Character of Greek Politics, 800-400 BC (Weidenfeld and Nicolson,

1966); Eric Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (J. Cape, 1957); A. H. M.

Jones, Greek Democracy (Basil Blackwell, 1957). See also David Held, Models of

Democracy (Stanford University Press, 1987) and Karl Popper, Open Society and its

Enemies, vol. I (Princeton University Press, 1966).

67 More on this in chapter 3.7.

68 Cf. “Philosophy should not be just an Academic Discipline: A Dialogue with Hilary

Putnam”, Common Knowledge, 11, 1 (Winter, 2005), pp. 126-35. See also n. 10 supra.

69 See esp. chapters 3.4 & 4.5.