METAPHILOSOPHY Val. 1 3 , No. 2, April 1982

REVIEW

HILARY PUTNAM Meaning and the moral sciences London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Pp. ix-145.

This slim volume collects together Putnam’s 1976 John Locke lectures at Oxford, a paper from New Literay, and two unpublished lectures. Although the title suggests that the topics discussed will be both meaning and the moral sciences, in fact the latter are not mentioned until half way through, and then in a very sketchy and cursory way. Meaning, truth, reference and realism are the real topics under discussion. The debate is very up-to-date, starting off from a recent article by Hartry Field, and alluding frequently to unpublished work by Michael Dummett, Paul Grice and Judy Baker, John McDowell, Alan Garfinkel, Richard Boyd and Stephen b e d s .

The first lecture in the John Locke series of six, which carry the overall title of ‘Meaning and Knowledge’, is about truth. Hartry Field tried to advocate a ‘physicalist’ theory of reference, that would account for it as part of the causal order. Uneasy with this, Putnam is prepared to make a partial concession and treat realism as an empirical hypothesis. In lecture I1 he argues that scientists act on the belief that their work refers and that their theories are approximately true. Unless we make realist assumptions all we will end up with is warranted assertability, and this does not (lecture 111) very well explain the behaviour of scientists or of the public that accepts scientific findings. Putnam thus wants a kind of sociological theory of reference in which the explanandum is the behaviour of people who do and accept science, but he finds there is a problem in knowing what it is we want to explain. To ask why a professor is naked in a girl’s dormitory at midnight is not to ask for an explanation that appeals to his inability to move at the speed of light; to ask why a square peg went through a square hole but not through a round hole is not to ask for an account of all the possible trajectories the peg could have travelled; for a bank robber to say he robs banks because that is where the money is may be an answer to a fellow robber’s question of why he robs banks, but it is hardly an answer to a priest’s (or judge’s) why question. So explanations are interest-relevant.

A further complication is there may be several factors involved in an explanation yet their necessity and sufficiency be unclear. For example, a heart attack can be explained as being brought on by excessive eating and drinking; it can also be explained by high blood pressure. And both expla- nations can be right. So there are various causal processes at work in the world. This is still further true in the social world, where actors’ own accounts of why they do things count for something (p. 47). Hence in explaining the

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behavior of scientists and those who accept scientific results there may be both indeterminacy of reference, and problems of interest relevance.

The last two Locke lectures return to the attack on Field. Pinning down notions like explanation, translation or reason is of a different order from the progress made in the social sciences so far (Marx and Freud are instanced on p. 59). The empirical fact of our opacity (inexplicability) may be constitutive of what a human being is and so not eliminable from our explanations. It may be, for example, that the shortest deduction of what I will do five minutes from now would take more than one thousand years to compute (p. 64). Just as a project for mechanical translation would involve us in specifying and then simulating full human capacity, and that is utopian, so the notion of reference, while perfectly usable in everyday life and science, cannot be made scientifically precise and hence Field’s hope for a physicalistic theory of it is scientific utopianism. It is almost certainlyimpossible to ‘model’ a language-speaker without modelling full human functional organization. But the latter may well be unintelligible to humans when stated in any detail. The moral is that we cannot study ourselves the way we study hydrogen atoms

Only at p. 66, lecture VI do we get to the methods and character of the social sciences. Addressing the problem of the extent to which, if at all, the methods of the natural sciences can be the methods of the social sciences, Putnam presents a defence of Verstehen that moves from an argument that we cannot justify a translation inductively to the conclusion that the social sciences cannot be like physics. Indeed, in its reliance on the use of language, physics too relies on implicit understandings, on Verstehen.

The chapter, ‘Literature, Science, and Reflection’ treats literature as a sort of thought-experiment in the social sciences, both by historical reconstruction and utopian projection.

Two slightly more technical lectures conclude the volume: “Reference and Understanding” is part of the running private conversation Putnam is having with Michael Dummet because he has ‘the most viable’nonrealist position I know of (p. 109). Putnam thinks reference and truth are different matters. That reference, understanding a language, is explained by using it. Some kind of truth or correspondence might, however, be required to explain our success; not so much our success in using language as our success in such tasks as building bridges. Putnam tries to construct a fallibilistic inductivism: that somehow we only know about invisible objects by inductive inference from known objects and that idealist attempts to deny reality some sort of status as regulating our attempts, and to replace the concept of truth with something else can always be defeated by a fallibilistic manoeuvre that shows that the substitute for truth might still be possessed and yet the claim be not true. This is one of the oldest argumentative strategies against arguments against truth, and Putnam gives it the latest linguistic twist.

Finally, in ‘Realism and Reason’, Putnam explains his own realism in such a way as to try to dodge Dummet’s objections. He espouses internal realism,

(P. 65).

MEANING AND THE MORAL SCIENCES 163 which is the view that speakers successfully mirror the world, in that their actions are successful, including their actions of constructing theories that are convergent on earlier theories. This is an empirical hypothesis. Metaphysical realism, by contrast, postulates a WORLD which any correct theory is related to. The latter is incoherent because if this WORLD can be broken into infi- nitely many pieces and, if any theory says there are infinitely many things, then every piece can be mapped to correspond to everything, so no theory can ever fail to correspond, i.e. be true. This apparently is replacing a ‘non- realist’ semantics of verification and falsification with a species of verficationist semantics. Other objections to metaphysical realism are that there are equivalent descriptions (lines can be seen as points, extension, or line segments with rational end points) and there are nonequivalent interpretations of one theory in another:

if what is a unique set of things within a correct theoly may not be a unique set of things ‘in reality’, then the very heart of the picture is torn out (1 35)

No apology is necessary, in the pages ofMetaphilosophy, for confining one’s critique of this book to the metaphilosophical level. A further reason for such confinement is that Putnam has not come up with any positions from which I would wish to dissent philosophically. And a final reason for being meta- philosophical is because the book is metaphilosophical. It reads much like notes of a private dialogue between a group of frisnds, the sort of notes you might later draw on when writing articles for refereed journals where arguments and references will have to be spelled out and where the format of piecks d’occasion is unacceptable. Hence, when Putnam describes, comments on, utilises and criticises the unpublished work of his colleagues, the reader and reviewer is nonplussed. Having no access to the sources, he cannot flesh out arguments and ideas. Yet he cannot engage the material either because Putnam merely alludes to it knowingly, although he must know that few if any are privy to all of it in the way he is.

Perhaps in explanation of this, Putnam in his Preface hopes that he has conveyed that he had a good time writing the lectures; but his hope that the reader will have a good time reading them also, is forlorn. I daresay there are few of us who would fail to have a good time being a top Harvard professor and being able to ‘fulfil a great many donnish fantasies’ while being lionised at Oxford University. I suspect the reason Putnam makes these points is this. His view of philosophy is that it is an exciting technical subject in which there is vigorous current debate that is making something like cumulative progress. Putnam is at the centre of the profession, and tries to keep up with the literature. So much so, that he sees and reads people’s manuscripts before they are published and as his ideas flow from his pen they constitute a dialogue with these current issues and persons. One can have no quarrel with this so long as it takes the form of lectures or seminars or con-

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versatiom or correspondence. I am not sure about when it comes to books. Like those other social institutions, a book is a sociological phenomenon; but a book is a special sort of sociological object that performs a different function. Lectures, seminars, conversations and correspondence are all, to different degrees, private. Books are public. Lectures, etc. are all low-cost, books are costly to publish, to buy and, to read. It is, then, some sort of criticism of this book to say that it is semi-private, unfinished and costly.

Another way the book is unfinished, apart, that is, from preserving the diffuse and chatty lecture style, is that no effort is made to connect the book to the state of the debate in the moral sciences, by which it is clear Putnam means the social sciences. Winch is mentioned in passing, but that book is twenty years old. So Putnam has not undertaken to master the philosophy of the social sciences, or the relevant material in the social sciences. This is inconsistent with what I take to be his commitment to being in the thick of up-to-date material in philosophy. It also means that those things he says about the social sciences have a dated and out-of-touch air to them. And his examples (professor caught nude in dorm., etc.) are pre- posterous. Marx, Mill, Freud and Winch do not between them constitute the literature on the moral sciences. In so far as he argues that science, as a language-using activity by human beings, must rely on hosts of implicit understandings, he might find the whole project well-developed in the social studies of science of the post Kuhn-Polanyi era.

In fact, what I am saying is that the sociological turn that Putnam’s linguistic concerns seem to lead him towards, should be reflexive. He needs a sociological perspective on the hermetic world of’ Harvard-Oxford philosophy if he ever is to break out of it. That he is arguing himself out of it is fair enough, even if he does not vouchsafe us near enough detail to assess his progress. But that there is something odd about ever having got oneself into the position of imagining the main problems on the horizon are provided by Quine, Dummett or Hartry Field is a conclusion Putnam has perhaps yet to reach.

YORK UNIVERSITY, TORONTO I . C. JARVIE