Scots Philosophical AssociationUniversity of St. Andrews

Meaning and the Moral Sciences. by Hilary PutnamReview by: Leslie StevensonThe Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 115 (Apr., 1979), pp. 176-178Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Scots Philosophical Association and theUniversity of St. AndrewsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2219494 .

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176 BOOK REVIEWS

positions which we are rightly said to know or believe. But then the logic of knowing and believing is not the logic of what is known and believed. Finally, the circumstances in which propositions may be asserted are necessarily ones in which doubt is reasonable for someone. This is the truth in scepticism. Indeed, certainty belongs to propositions only in circumstances where we do not use them (ch. 8).

Some philosophers will not take to Wolgast's thesis that "the right subject of the philosophy of knowledge is 'know' as it functions in ordinary settings and everyday affairs" (p. 205). In fact the thesis appears to be undermined by one of her own insights concerning belief, that it is the exception rather than the rule for belief to be expressed by sentences of the form 'I believe that . .' (p. 114). Applied to knowledge the impli- cation is clear that the subject-matter of epistemology cannot be confined to actual uses of 'know'. Besides, it seems a reductio ad absurdum of this view that it results in our having to pay heed to claims to know that there is a God (p. 46), and claims to know which are uttered in exasperation and indicate that the speaker is "through dis- cussing the matter" (p. 70). For it belongs to whatever is the subject-matter of epistem- ology that one should be able to take it seriously. I cannot believe that Wolgast would herself take such claims seriously; the speaker is simply forfeiting any part in future discussion. But more important than this issue is one which lies behind it. Wolgast is claiming, as I understand it, that much philosophical speculation on ques- tions such as the reality of time, the external world and so forth, is contentless because such questions are raised "out of the blue", with no grounding in context or background. I believe she is profoundly mistaken concerning the absence of background. As Thomas Nagel has observed, there is an analogy here between reflections about value and reflections about knowledge. In both cases it is arguable that one can envisage or even attain a perspective which, although it cannot supplant the everyday perspective with- out rendering a man mad, may in some way transcend it. In the one case it takes the form of appreciating, perhaps, the absurdity of human existence; in the other, perhaps, the emptiness of pretensions to knowledge. Wolgast's stance in the theory of knowledge is analogous to that in the sphere of value which claims that there just is no point of view from which human existence can be seen as insignificant. Answer: there is. It is the human point of view at its most perceptive.

Clearly there is much to discuss and disagree about here. In general the book can be recommended as a challenging and honest presentation of a particular viewpoint of the theory of knowledge.

ALAN HOLLAND

Meaning and the Moral Sciences. By HILARY PUTNAM. (Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1978. Pp. ix+145. ?4.95.)

This short book consists of the six John Locke lectures on Meaning and Knowledge, delivered in Oxford in 1976, plus three more papers on connected topics written about the same period. The range of subjects discussed is refreshingly wide: Putnam manages to make connections between Tarski's theory of truth, realism as an empirical explana- tion of the progress of science, the interest-relativity of explanation, the indeterminacy of translation, the irreducible difference between the physical and the social sciences, practical knowledge and verstehen, and the literary imagination as an aid to under- standing ourselves and our moral perplexities.

The conclusions reached will be congenial to many, no doubt, and it is a considerable feat to have spun a philosophical web linking theories of reference and truth on one side to the moral function of literature on the other. But there will be doubt, I think, about whether Putnam's rather sketchy arguments will be enough to establish the links supporting his reassuringly "humane view of ourselves and our self-knowledge"

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BOOK REVIEWS 177

(p. 77). His style of writing is somewhat slapdash and impressionistic, varying from sketches of results in mathematical logic (pp. 125-6) to the hazarding of guesses about "human cognitive nature" (p. 29). Too often there is assertion rather than argument, and frequently even the assertions are tentative or vague. The use of italics in almost every sentence becomes an irritating mannerism. The John Locke lectures were very stimu- lating to listen to, no doubt, but they needed rethinking and rewriting to be impressive on paper.

The paper "Literature, Science, and Reflection" is especially journalistic, almost totally devoid of argument for the very interesting ideas advanced about ethics, practical knowledge, the arts and the sciences, objectivity and relativity, literature and imagina- tion. The two other added papers-"Reference and Understanding" and "Realism and Reason"-show shifts in Putnam's thinking under the impact of Dummett, in particular of the latter's William James lectures given at Harvard while Putnam was, with neat Anglo-American symmetry, speaking in Oxford. In the last paper Putnam decides that he must distinguish the "internal realism" which he wishes to espouse (as an empirical hypothesis to explain the success of linguistic behaviour) from a "metaphysical realism" which he must withdraw in the face of a chorus of opposition which seems to include Dummett, Quine, Goodman, Peirce, and Kant. But since he has not integrated the thoughts of these three papers with those of the lectures, the book conveys the excitement of work in progress on important topics by a fertile mind, but does not achieve the authority of a fully worked-out philosophical position.

One can list a series of philosophical doctrines asserted (or at least sympathetically mentioned) in Putnam's book, and can lay down as a criterion of any definite philo- sophical progress in this area that one must command a clear view of their meaning and of the logical relations between them (such a view is all too lacking from Putnam's writing here; what virtue the book has is that it suggests the importance of such a research programme): (1) Kant's empirical realism and transcendental idealism; (2a) Putnam's internal realism; (2b) Putnam's rejection of metaphysical realism; (3) Dum- mett's verificationism. Putnam suggests affinities between (1) and (2); and Colin Philips (Philosophy, January 1978) finds links between (1) and (3), but it remains to be shown how deep these affinities are. One big difference is that (2a) is supposed to be an em- pirical theory, whereas Kant's realism, despite its name, is not an empirical thesis (he argues for it in a purely a priori way in the Refutation of Idealism). It is also unclear whether (2b) is exactly equivalent to (3), or is implied by it, or bears some looser relation to it.

To continue: (4) Ontological relativity; (5) Inscrutability of reference; (6) Indeter- minacy of translation. These, of course, are Quinean technical terms for Quinean doctrines, but they all appear at least once in Putnam's book. (4), the apparently truistic doctrine that one cannot say what the objects of a given theory are without using the terms of some other theory, is mentioned on p. 133 as "having to do" with (2b), but once again whether it is equivalent to it, or implies it, or what, is not shown. Whether (4) and (5) are the same thing is not made clear by Quine himself; he has, however, said that (5), which applies to terms, does not imply (6), which applies to sentences (Journal of Philosophy, 1970), and Peter Smith has offered reasons for thinking that the converse implication does not hold either (in a forthcoming Ph.D. thesis at St Andrews). Putnam, however, mentions (5) and (6) in the same breath (p. 45) without using any distinction between them.

Now we have (7) Interest-relativity of explanation (pp. 41-5); (8) Indeterminacy of transition from functional organization to psychological description (p. 49); (9) David- son's anomalousness of the mental, i.e., the necessary non-existence of strict psycho- physical laws. Putnam claims that (6) is plausible to the extent that it follows from (7); he also says that (8) is equivalent to (6) (p. 49). It would be nice to know the exact relationship between the similar-sounding (8) and (9); both appear to be in some way

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178 BOOK REVIEWS

based on (6), and both are used to support conclusions about the irreducibility of social science to physical science, yet physiological and functional descriptions are presumably not the same. Are there two different levels of indeterminacy, or merely a disagreement about where to locate it? The unclarity in this area is revealed by Putnam's mentioning another thesis-that functional organization itself is an interest-relative notion (p. 61) -which he does not pursue very far "because I'm unsure and because it's too hairy"! Thesis (7)-that what counts as a good explanation, or even an explanation at all, depends on our interests, on the range of alternatives envisaged to the explanandum- plays a crucial role in his argument. Like his other main premise, (2), it needs a lot more clarification. We may thank Putnam for his stimulating ideas, but point out that much of the hard philosophical work remains to be done.

LESLIE STEVENSON

Physicalism. By K. V. WILKES. (Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1978. Pp. 142.)

In this latest addition to R. F. Holland's well-known series Kathleen Wilkes aims to dissolve the mind-body problem.

The main argument of the book takes the following form. Ch. 1 sets up the mental/ physical distinction via the familiar idea that the mental is to be characterized by in- corrigibility and/or intensionality. Incorrigibility is said to be particularly useful in picking out "sentient" phenomena such as pains and itches, while intensionality picks out "sapient" phenomena, in particular propositional attitudes. Ch. 2 then raises the question of how physicalism can be true if (some) mental phenomena are intensional whereas no physical phenomena are, and this topic is taken up again in ch. 4. Ch. 3 is a very interesting discussion of what exactly, in the working out of the physicalist programme, is to be reduced to or correlated with neurophysiology. Wilkes argues that it is not everyday mental concepts such as 'belief' which are relevant, but more technical psychological concepts such as 'information storage', although she admits that some- thing like our ordinary concepts of 'belief', 'pain', etc., must figure in the technical vocabulary of psychology. Now the shift from everyday concepts to technical psycho- logical concepts does not immediately solve the problem of intensionality, since con- cepts such as 'information' are still intensional, or so at least Wilkes holds. Nevertheless she argues that such concepts are treated by psychologists as if they were extensional, and that the corresponding "harmlessly intensional" descriptions can be "correlated" with the purely extensional descriptions of neurophysiology via the method of structural- functional analysis. That is, the psychologist will speak about such things as the pro- cessing, storage and retrieval of information while the neurophysiologist investigates the nature of the structures which fulfil these functions. I myself think that this is the right sort of account to be given of the relation between psychology and neuro- physiology, but it is not at all clear how such an account favours the thesis of physicalism. One can, as Wilkes says, give a structural-functional analysis of, say, a washing machine but such an analysis can safely take for granted the idea of the purpose of the machine which underpins the ascription of functions to its parts. In Wilkes' terminology the "G-state" of the machine is to be understood in terms of what the machine is used for, but what constitutes the G-states of human beings is much more problematical. There must, presumably, be a close connection between the idea of a human G-state and the idea of a desire or purpose, but then a satisfactory physicalist functionalism must pro- vide a physicalist account of purpose. Wilkes herself tends to associate intensionality with sapience, so that intensional concepts such as desire get misassimilated to the sapient phenomena she discusses, rather than receiving the separate treatment they really require.

In ch. 5 Wilkes notes that the ascription of "sapient" predicates presupposes the

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