Philosophical Review

Pragmatism: An Open Question. by Hilary PutnamReview by: Richard RortyThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 105, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 560-561Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2998436 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

The Philosophical Review, Vol. 105, No. 4 (October 1996)

PRAGMATISM: AN OPEN QUESTION. By HILARY PUTNAM. Oxford: Black- well, 1995. Pp. xii, 106.

It is a relatively rare, and very welcome, event when an original, brilliantly imaginative analytic philosopher takes a fresh look at earlier figures in the history of philosophy and proceeds to tell a story that ties in their work with his own. Analytic philosophy's greatest disability remains its lack of historical resonance, and Hilary Putnam is one of the few who have worked hard to help it overcome this handicap. His discussion of the great Amer- ican pragmatists has made it possible for students to see past the dismissive attitudes that Russell and Ayer, for example, adopted toward James and Dewey. Advancing along lines sketched out some decades ago in Morton White's prescient Toward Reunion in Philosophy, Putnam has helped us see in detail how Quinean skepticism about the language-fact and essence- accident dualisms ties in with James's and Dewey's skepticism about many other traditional dualisms.

Those hoping for further light on Putnam's way of updating pragmatism will, however, need to supplement this slim volume with his recent large, and rich, collection of papers, Words and Lif--and also with his recent Dewey Lectures. These other recent writings reach deeper levels than do the lectures that make up Pragmatism: An Open Question. These three lec- tures do not attempt a comprehensive oversight of the thought of Peirce, James, and Dewey, or of Putnam's own views. Rather, they mingle staccato criticism of Putnam's contemporaries with rather brief, and sometimes cryptic, claims about the proper interpretations of various doctrines put forward by James, Dewey, and Wittgenstein.

Lecture 1, "The Permanence of WilliamJames," says thatJames's holism (the claim that "fact, value and theory are ... interpenetrating and inter- dependent") presupposes and is presupposed by his direct realism (the "doctrine that perception is (normally) of objects and events 'out there' and not of private 'sense data' ") (7). This is an exciting and controversial claim, but the reader will have to go to the Dewey Lectures to find it laid out in any detail. The claimed relations of presupposition are not made sufficiently clear in this book. It is not clear why abjuring private sense- data (which almost everybody since the days of Austin has been eager to do) should be given the importance Putnam now wishes to find in it, nor how much of James's "radical empiricism" he wishes to take over. The latter doctrine was a sort of neutral monism, and presumably Putnam does not want to endorse fully that sort of metaphysics.

Lecture 2, "Was Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?" contains some very enlight- ening remarks on the later Wittgenstein's relation to Kant, but it does not

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BOOK REVIEWS

do much to link the Philosophical Investigations up with James or Dewey. A lot of this chapter consists of brief, snappy criticisms of those who Putnam thinks have misunderstood Wittgenstein (Michael Williams, Peter Hor- wich, Peter Winch), and not much time is spent speaking to the title ques- tion. This is a pity. Nobody doubts that there are pragmatist-sounding doc- trines scattered through Wittgenstein's later work, but we could use a clear- er account than Putnam gives us of just how and why these doctrines are central to Wittgenstein's overall philosophical outlook.

The final lecture, "Pragmatism and the Contemporary Debate," does not focus sharply on any particular single debate. Mild rebukes are admin- istered to Ian Hacking, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty, and Rudolf Carnap, but these critical remarks are not woven to- gether so as to suggest a positive alternative position.

In sum, this book is a useful supplement to Putnam's other recent work, especially for those of us who read everything he writes and are anxious to get clearer about his position. But it is not a good place for a beginner to start her study of Putnam, nor her study of pragmatism.

Anybody who wants to defend pragmatism these days has to say some- thing pretty clear and definite about how you can be holist and anti-dualist about practically everything, and yet avoid making truth so dependent on consensus as to endanger "our realistic intuitions"-the intuitions that many contemporary philosophers think it a sacred duty to preserve invi- olate. Putnam makes clear in the preface to this book that he wishes to steer us away from what he calls "fashionable versions of antirealism and 'postmodernism'" (xii). But he is better at demolishing dualisms than at explaining how those fine old intuitions are to be preserved.

He is aware, and annoyed, that some of the voguish writers he attacks cite his own criticisms of scientism and of "metaphysical realism" in order to enlist him as an ally. But he has not yet clearly marked the spot at which his path diverges from theirs. We need a more detailed account than he has so far given us of how to preserve a doctrine of what he calls "sub- stantive" truth (as opposed to the "merely emotive" view of truth he at- tributes to Rorty) while eschewing, with James and Dewey, the traditional dualism of subject and object.

RICHARD RORTY University of Virginia

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