Realism with a Human Faceby Hilary Putnam; James Conant;Renewing Philosophyby Hilary Putnam

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Realism with a Human Face by Hilary Putnam; James Conant; Renewing Philosophy by HilaryPutnamReview by: Barry AllenCanadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Dec., 1994), pp. 665-688Published by: Canadian Journal of PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40231893 .

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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 665 Volume 24, Number 4, December 1994, pp. 665 - 688

Critical Notice1

HILARY PUTNAM, Realism with a Human Face. James Conant, ed. Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990. Pp. lxxiv + 347.

HILARY PUTNAM, Renewing Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992. Pp. xii + 234.

In his Introduction to the latest collection of papers, James Conant cites John Passmore's remark about Hilary Putnam: 'He is the history of recent philosophy in outline.' That is perfectly true. The work in these two volumes provides a glimpse at the conscience of professional philosophy in America today.

Realism with a Human Face is a collection of twenty-two papers written between 1979 and 1990. The selections are divided into three parts. Part One (Metaphysics) includes papers defending Putnam's 'internal' (or 'pragmatic') realism. He reconsiders his metaphysical and methodological differences with Kripke, and unfolds a critique of efforts (partly inspired by Putnam and Kripke) to reduce reference to causation. In the lecture that gives the book its title Putnam elaborates his argument against a 'god's-eye view' in metaphysics, and offers his most sustained discussion of Rorty's views. The papers gathered in Part Two (Ethics and

1 Parenthetical references to works by Putnam are abbreviated as follows: MFR The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle: Open Court 1987) PP Philosophical Papers, vol. 3: Realism and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press 1983) RHF Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press 1990) RP Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992) RR Representation and Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1988) RTH Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981).



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Aesthetics) mainly concern Putnam's effort to say something reasonable about the objectivity of value judgments, and to confute the errors of relativism. Part Three (Studies in American Philosophy) collects papers on James and Peirce, and a pair each on Goodman and Quine.

Putnam's 1990 Gifford Lectures are now published as Renewing Phi- losophy. The lectures touch on all the main points of his recent work, from Meaning and the Moral Sciences (1978) to Representation and Reality (1988). Chapters on artificial intelligence, evolutionary epistemology, and Fo- dor's theory of reference elaborate his critique of current trends in philosophical psychology. Other chapters are written against the 'absolute conception of the world/ and against deconstruction and relativism. Putnam's final chapters elaborate his ideas about what a renewed practice of philosophy might be like. His 'suggestions for renewal' point back to the later Wittgenstein, and to the American pragmatists. Those who appreciate Putnam's scientific knowledge and his accomplishments in mathematics and mathematical logic may be surprised to learn that Peirce is not his exemplary pragmatist philosopher. Realism with a Human Face includes an appreciative paper on Peirce's place in the history of logic, but it is to James and Dewey that Putnam looks for the 'weight' - the humanism and broader, integrating sense of purpose - he finds missing from philosophy today.

Since Reason, Truth, and History (1981), Putnam's defense of an 'internal' or 'pragmatic' realism has mainly been an attack on the so-called metaphysical realism into which he gathers all the tendencies of the realist tradition that he opposes. This effort has led to a gradually more radical attack on tendencies and assumptions in a lot of recent analytic philosophy. Now he thinks that 'the present situation in philosophy is one that calls for a revitalization, a renewal, of the subject.' With Renew- ing Philosophy Putnam 'offers a diagnosis of the present situation in philosophy as a whole' (RP.ix). The diagnosis is that analytic philosophy today is a swamp of reductive, scientistic, methodologically uncritical speculation. It is 'dominated by the idea that science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective' (RP.ix). It is 'hell-bent on eliminating the normative in favor of something else, however problematic that something else may be' (RP.79). Where philosophy today is not like that, the departures from business as usual lead to a dead-end (Rorty's relativism) or a sterile nihilism (deconstruction).

But in both books Putnam reserves his strongest language for his colleagues in English-speaking analytic philosophy. He deplores their 'extreme deductivism' (RHF.181). He observes how their professional- institutional dialectic 'forces analytic philosophers ... [into views] more and more bizarre, and which have lost all interest outside of the [professional] philosophical community' (RHF.51). Putnam mocks the methodological naivete with which some practitioners operate with their



Critical Notice of Hilary Putnam Realism with a Human Face / Renewing Philosphy 667

'intuitions' (RHF.67, 180, 307; RP.138-9). The habit is common to moral theory and metaphysics. Thinking of Nozick, he says our moral theorists 'are proud of giving ingenious arguments - that is what makes them "analytic" philosophers - and curiously evasive or superficial about the relation of the premises of these arguments to the ideals and practices of any actual moral community' (RHF.180). Thinking of David Lewis and technical metaphysicians of his ilk, Putnam says, 'contemporary analytic metaphysics has no connection with anything but the "intuitions" of a handful of philosophers. It lacks what Wittgenstein called "weight"' (RP.197). It is 'fundamentally frivolous.... Most constructions in analytic metaphysics do not extend the range of scientific knowledge, not even speculatively. They merely attempt to rationalize the ways we think and talk in the light of a scientistic ideology' (RP.141).

I Antirealism

The realism Putnam opposes ('metaphysical' realism) is defined by three theses: (1) The world consists of a fixed totality of mind-independent objects; (2) there is exactly one true and complete description of 'the way the world is'; (3) truth involves some correspondence between words or thoughts and things (RTH.49). In Putnam's view these three claims are mutually supporting and should be discussed as a package (RHF.31). Ian Hacking wonders if any historical philosopher can seriously be said to hold all three.2 Perhaps not. But some of Putnam's colleagues in analytic philosophy come amazingly close; for example, Richard Boyd, Michael Devitt, Hartry Field, Jerry Fodor, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and Bernard Williams. The differences among these philosophers mostly concern details about the first-class language whose inventory of objects, relations, and powers would be the (absolutely) correct one, the one that would correspond to what Putnam derisively calls nature's 'semantic preferences.'

Putnam connects 'metaphysical' realism with the idea of a god's-eye view or an 'absolute conception.' He says, '[the] whole content of Real- ism lies in the claim that it makes sense to think of a God's-Eye View (or, better, of a "View from Nowhere")' (RHF.23).3 More so than in earlier writings he emphasizes arguments against this vision of totality from the

2 Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983), 94

3 Despite the allusion to Thomas Nagel's The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986), Nagel does not believe that a fully objective view from absolutely no perspective is humanly attainable. He only wishes it were.



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philosophy of science, especially quantum mechanics. On his telling, 'there is no quantum mechanical theory of the whole universe' (RHF.4), and no way 'to restore the God's-Eye View conception of physics while continuing to accept the framework of quantum mechanics' (RHF.9). He explains the philosopher's demand for physical totality as the result of 'a certain metaphysical picture suggested by Newtonian or Galilean physics [which] has been repeatedly confused with physics itself (RP.19). His rejection of the presumption of totality 'springs from a need to separate scientific and metaphysical questions' (RHF.39). 'Quantum mechanics has no realist interpretation at all, which is why it is an embarrassment to materialists (generally they write as if quantum mechanics did not exist).... The ontology - the Weltbild - of a materialist metaphysics is, remember, the ontology of the universe-as-a-closed-system-from-a-God's-eye-view' (RHF.86). He thinks philosophers should abandon this vision of totality, stop dreaming the 'great dream [of philosophy] ... the dream of a description of physical reality as it is apart from observers, a description which is objective in the sense of being "from no particular point of view'" (RHF.ll).

In a paper in Realism with a Human Face ('Objectivity and the Sci- ence/Ethics Distinction'), and at more length in Chapter 5 of Renewing Philosophy, Putnam attacks a well-known statement of the realism he opposes, Bernard Williams's idea of the 'absolute conception of the world.' Putnam's arguments make a shambles of Williams's effort to breathe life into the seventeenth-century distinction between primary and secondary qualities. He exposes the 'sheer dogmatism' of Williams's assumptions about scientific knowledge, especially his claim that it is destined by its very concept to converge upon an absolute view. Without 'the postulate that science converges to a single definite theoretical picture with a unique ontology and a unique set of theoretical predicates, the whole notion of "absoluteness" collapses' (RHF.171).

It is not only quantum mechanics that makes Putnam an opponent of metaphysical realism. Another argument (the better known, developed at length in earlier publications) is Putnam's model-theoretic 'Skolemi- zation of absolutely everything.'4 One lesson he wants to draw from both arguments is that the question what objects does the world consist of? 'is a

question that it only makes sense to ask within a theory or description'

4 Putnam first advanced this argument in 'Models and Reality' (1977), where he says: 'one can "Skolemize" absolutely everything. It seems to be absolutely impossible to fix a determinate reference (without appeal to nonnatural mental powers) for any term at all' (PP.16). Hacking has wise words of caution about the limitations of Putnam's argument; see Representing and Intervening, 105-8.




(RTH.49). 'Nature, or "physical reality" in the post-Newtonian understanding of the physical, has no semantic preferences. The idea that some physical parameter or some relation definable in terms of the fundamen- tal parameters of physics ... [maps] our signs onto things has no content at all' (RHF.83). It therefore makes no sense to demand that a true or good theory be adequate in the sense that the realist wishes, that is, not from 'inside' the theory (trivially, by semantic ascent), but externally and absolutely.

A further line of antirealist argument invokes something Putnam calls 'conceptual relativity/ The idea is not exactly new, but he has a new sense of its value as a critical argument against realism - he speaks of 'a shift from emphasizing model-theoretic arguments against metaphysical realism to emphasizing conceptual relativity' (RHF.x). Whenever we ask questions about what there is, or count or describe things, we must use some language or theory. But different languages and theories return different answers to what is nominally the same question, especially when the question can be framed with the elementary syntax of quanti- fication: What is there? How many things are there? Does ... exist? But the 'phenomenon' of conceptual relativity is not simply the fact that how things are, or the descriptions they fall under, or how many there are, are relative to often optional criteria. The principle of conceptual relativism is that 'the number and kind of objects and their properties can vary from one correct description of a situation to another correct description of that same situation' (RP.122). Not only have we then no understanding 'of the "existence" of things or of the "truth" of statements that [is] independent of the versions we construct and of the procedures and practices that give sense to talk of "existence" and "truth" within those versions' (PP.230). The 'metaphysical notion of "all objects" has no sense' (RP.120). 'The totality of objects in some scientific theory or other will [never] turn out to coincide with the totality of All The Objects There Are' (RR.120).

Conceptual relativism is obviously akin to Goodman's relativity of Tightness to versions. One implication Putnam emphasizes is that it is impossible to separate 'purely formal' from 'material' elements in knowledge - the bit that is conventional and the bit contributed by something natural, physical, real. 'While there is an aspect of conven- tionality and an aspect of fact in everything we say that is true, we fall into hopeless philosophical error if we commit a "fallacy of division" and conclude that there must be a part of the truth that is the "conventional part" and a part that is the "factual part'" (RHF.x). Instead, 'elements of what we call "language" or "mind" penetrate so deeply into what we call "reality" that the very project of representing ourselves as being "mappers" of something "language-independent" is fatally compromised from the very start' (RHF.28).



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Putnam introduces a new line of antirealist argument with the critique he began in Representation and Reality of reductionist ideas in current philosophy of mind. The chapter on Fodor in Renewing Philosophy makes three points against his attempt to define reference in causal terms or, as he now likes to say, in terms of 'asymmetrical dependence.' Putnam thinks that the supposed asymmetry relies on implausible counterfactual reasoning, that Fodor's counterfactual assumptions cannot sustain the 'realistic' interpretation of their truth conditions which he presupposes, and that Fodor operates with an unscientific concept of causation, one whose use is implicitly conditioned by normative and intentional presuppositions that render it useless for the reduction he envisions.

Putnam argues that the philosopher's idea of causal necessitation - the idea that a state does not merely precede but actually produces its successor - 'introduces an element which physicists have long rejected as a metaphysical addition to the contents of physics itself (RHF.50). In other words, 'causation' is not a respectably physical notion. It does not function in formal physical theory, and ordinary talk of causes depends on practical, typically forensic interests that spoil the concept for the reductive purposes that usually inspire theorists to devise a 'causal theory' of something.

Putnam makes a similar point about counterfactual reasoning. The truth-value of a counterfactual sentence depends on whether the conse- quent follows from the antecedent 'in those situations that it would be reasonable to regard as compatible with the intentions of the speaker who uttered the counterfactual' (RP.54). A counterfactual statement being determinately true or false thus 'ineliminably presuppose[s] the point of view of reason' (RP.55). Apart from us, then, and the contexts and interests of our practice, there is no determinate fact of the matter about what would be were things different than they are. Putnam criti- cizes Lewis's possible-world semantics for representing counterfactual truth-values as if they were 'determined' independently of the contextual assessment of their plausibility by interested parties. Lewis's 'language of worlds being "closer" and "farther" away from the actual world ... conceals what needs to be brought out, that what is actually being judged is not the distance of objects from one another in a hyper- space but the relevance of hypothetical situations, and the relevance of situations to a judgment is an essentially normative matter. What using the language of "closeness" does is to make a normative judgment, a judgment as to whether it is reasonable to regard something as relevant, sound like a description of a "value-neutral fact'" (RP.63-4).

These complementary claims about causation and counterfactuals have a methodological implication. 'From the fact that a statement is not explicitly about anything mental it does not follow that none of its presuppositions make any reference to our cognitive interests, our way




of regarding different contexts, or our intentional powers' (RP.57). On the contrary, 'the intentional intrudes even into our descriptions of the non-intentional ... [T]he intentional (or, better, the cognitive) is to some extent ubiquitous' (RP.59). Philosophers should therefore not look to 'the causal structure of the world' for a relation that will attach the word 'cat' to the cats (and not the *cats of a non-standard model). They should not regard plausible reasoning about what would be were things different than they are as hints about an order that is not the artifact of any language or theory but original to nature or reality 'itself.' And they should give up the idea that some of what we say is 'determined' (or 'made') to be true by a corresponding reality which 'is what it is' quite apart from us.

It might seem possible for a theorist to anticipate an evolutionary account of intentionality or a causal theory of reference without enter- taining the fantasy of an absolute conception or a god's-eye view. Is there a connection between Putnam's antirealist arguments and the critique of reductionism in philosophical psychology? Reductionism and realism do share the idea of what Putnam calls a first-class language, one whose terms delimit nature according to its own preferred semantic categories. For instance, Dennett thinks that the sentences of so-called folk psychology are never just plain true; at best they are 'true cum grano salis.'5 Terms such as 'believe' or 'desire' are like mathematical abstracta (equator, center of gravity): Unlike the 'illata' of a first-class language they do not designate anything real. The sentence 'George Bush desired reelection' is not simply true, but its verisimilitude to one who follows the politics cannot be dismissed as an illusion (like mistaking primary and secondary qualities). Instead it is misunderstood as a computation.

The theoretical situation is as old as Plato's puzzle about the planets. Given what no scientific person can deny - that circular motion is the best and geometry the first-class language - how may we reduce the flagrantly non-circular motion of the planets to something respectably circular? Substitute 'intentionality' or 'reference' for 'planetary motion' and substitute 'respectably physical' for 'respectably circular' and you arrive at a leading problem of analytic philosophy of mind, which carries on the work of adding footnotes to Plato. These philosophers may argue about details of the first-class language, but behind the disagreement lies the assumption that there is an Inventory, 'all the things there are' - that vision of totality which Putnam called the 'great dream' of philosophy. From the belief that some languages or theories are truer than others, in

5 D.C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1987), 71-3



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the sense that their categories and concepts accord with nature's semantic preferences, it is perhaps a short step to the idea of a god's-eye view, the view of a mind that has mastered this most natural language and enjoys an absolute conception of the world.

Putnam makes the important point that it is not a commitment to science that motivates reductive projects in philosophical psychology. Practitioners like to believe that opposition to their agenda or methods is antiscience, about which nothing more need be said, but Putnam sees through the ruse. 'Dennett is saying - and Fodor often says - that pessimism about the power of computational models is skepticism about the possibility of "cognitive science." But the hidden premise in both thinkers' minds is a reductionist one. There is, in fact, an enormous amount of cognitive psychology that is not at all reductionist. There is no [scientific] reason why the study of human cognition requires that we try to reduce cognition either to computations or to brain processes ... The idea that the only understanding worthy of the name is reductionist understanding is a tired one, but evidently it has not lost its grip on our scientific culture' (RP.18).

II 'What's Your Theory?'

All of the argumentation I have surveyed is destructive, its conclusions negative: There is no absolute conception of the world; truth is not correspondence to reality; no realist interpretation of physics is tenable; causation is not a physical concept; nothing determines the truth-value of a counterfactual apart from informal judgments of relevance and plausibility; rationality is not reducible to a rule; reason cannot be 'surveyed.'

One reaction to this wave of negativity would be to say, 'Enough about what intentionality is not! What's your theory?' Or one might accept Putnam's critical arguments, with their deflationary and destructive conclusions, but suspect that he will have no more success transmuting them into a theory than Fodor does conjuring reference out of causes. One might also feel that by repeatedly asserting the 'irreducibility of the normative' Putnam mystifies things, reifying abstractions and then in- sisting on their difference from anything known to science. And indeed there is something reifying and mystifying about an expression like 'the existence of such a thing as "warrant"' (RHF.22); or: 'there is ... a fact of the matter as to whether ... [statements] are warranted' (RHF.21); 'there is such a thing as reason' (PP.245); 'there is no eliminating the normative' (PP.246); 'reason is both transcendent and immanent' (PP.247); 'we are




... committed ... to a property dualism ... the irreducibility of the intentional' (PP.302).

I understand these reactions (they were mine), but they miss the point. We should think again about Wittgenstein's remarks on the use of the word 'game.' Was the point to teach the truth about meanings or concepts? Perhaps that their nature is to have a 'family-resemblance' structure? That would be almost as useful as saying that their nature is to lack a nature, or that they are structurally unstructured. Derrida likes para- doxes like these. But Wittgenstein does not teach the truth about meanings or concepts. He does not have a theory. Instead he is making a comparison, suggesting an analogy, giving philosophers a needed reminder of the obvious, a particular reminder. 'Wittgenstein was primar- ily thinking not of words like game, but of words like language and reference ... what Wittgenstein is telling us is that referring uses don't have an "essence"; there isn't some one thing which can be called referring' (RP.167).

No philosopher is going to reveal the physically respectable relation intentionality and reference are really nothing but. That is not to say they are physically unrespectable, 'metaphysical' relations. Putnam does not know how to answer the question, What (one thing) is reference (intentionality, rationality)? T don't think we can even sketch a theory of actual warrant (a theory of the "nature" of warrant), let alone a theory of idealized warrant ... At a very abstract level, the debate between metaphysical realism and idealism is a standoff. Each side can truthfully say to the other, "You don't have a theory!'" (RHF.42) This remark may suggest that the difficulty is lack of something really hard to get, as elsewhere: 'we might try for a grand theory of the normative in its own terms, but that project seems decidedly overambitious' (PP.247). To put the matter that way, however, only makes the reductive project more seductive, and anyway it is not the point. Putnam's critical arguments show in close detail why the question, What one thing is reference (intentionality, rationality)? is probably not one that can be answered in the way philosophers who pose it imagine it might be, not even by a 'general theory of the normative,' which is not merely an overambitious aim but a confused and impossible one. 'There is no scientifically describable property that all cases of any particular intentional phenomenon have in common ... there is [no] scientifically describable "nature" that all cases of "reference" in general, or of "meaning" in general, or of "intentionality" in general possess' (RR.2). There is no one thing there, no unitary 'phenomenon' - call it intentionality or reference or rationality - about which to have a serious theory.

Wittgenstein asks himself, 'Where does our investigation get its im- portance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving



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behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand/6 Clearing it up for what? To show the fly the way out of the bottle. Then there would be mental peace. But it did not turn out that way, not for Wittgenstein or for philosophy. Instead, the new technical philosophy of the logical positivists was successfully trans- planted, institutionalized, and professionalized in the post-war English- speaking research university.7 In these circles the later Wittgenstein was not and is not now much appreciated. The assumption today seems to be that whatever Wittgenstein said that is true has been absorbed and perfected, and whatever was defective subsequent developments have corrected. To show otherwise, and to do so in terms that our technical philosophers can understand and take seriously, would require the unlikely combination of a philosopher perfectly comfortable with their most technical methods yet discontent with business as usual in contemporary analytic philosophy. Putnam is this unlikely man. His critical arguments, whether against realism, or the god's-eye view, or reductionist projects in philosophical psychology, are a series of carefully focused Untersuchungen for analytic philosophers who thought they no longer had to take Wittgenstein seriously.

It would not be true to say that Putnam offers nothing but destructive arguments, a practice he deplores (RP.133). Neither does he share Wittgenstein's wish for post-philosophical peace of mind. He is vague about what the discipline of philosophy might be like when it forsakes the reductionist fantasies and metaphysical absolutism he attacks. He even suggests that it is not his problem: a 'philosopher ought to leave it more problematic what is left for philosophy to do' (RHF.118). Yet I see a certain broad constructive tendency in his work of the last ten years or so. To describe it summarily: a shifting of concepts (truth, objectivity) and problems (realism vs antirealism) from metaphysics and epistemol-

6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell 1967), §118

7 Putnam observes that 'the "motor" of analytic philosophy was logical positivism ... not because all analytic philosophers were positivists, but because the arguments pro-and-con positivism were what kept analytic philosophy in motion. Analytic philosophy has already begun to lose shape as a tendency with the disappearance of a strong ideological current at its center7 (PP.303). Consider in this light Steven Schiffer's recent frankness: 'I do not know how to give an interesting answer to the challenge to say what I do for a living. I do not know how to define myself professionally ... Maybe the answer lies in some alliance with cognitive science' (Remnants of Meaning [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1987], 271).




ogy to ethics, and a new understanding of truth's value not as 'correspondence' with reality but ethically, as a dialogic Tightness in our relationships with others.

Objectivity with a Pragmatic Face

It is possible to distinguish Greek from modern (or Kantian) objectivity. Greek objectivity is a relation between an intellectual product (a speech) and the being of beings: telling It like It is.8 This onto-loeic mystified Kant; what is this mysterious relation to an object, he asked. He suggests that objectivity should be thought of as a certain conceptual unity of experience, which is, in a sense, ultimately subjective, or at least subject- centered. Kant sought to limit the subjectivism of his epistemologically reconstructed objectivity by claiming to have discovered universal or necessary conditions on any experience of an object, or in other words by positing a universal subject whose synthetic powers 'constitute' all those objects. An 'objectively valid' concept is one in which everything particularizing, local, personal, or idiosyncratic about the knowing subject has been washed out, leaving only what is common and essential to the operation of understanding itself applied to intuitions. Yet once philosophy sets out on this path (already suggested by Descartes at the conclusion of the Meditations), the lack of a method producing univer- sally agreed upon results becomes the criterion of non-objectivity, which is interpreted not as an error about what is, but as an undisciplined, irrational, idiosyncratic intrusion of subjectivity.10 The inevitable result is to make any judgment that purports to be objectively valid, whether

8 '[As] in the most contemporary idiom so in Homer and Sophocles: The man who speaks the truth "tells it like it is," and the liar tells it otherwise ... truth depends on some point of similarity or agreement between ... what is said or thought ... [and] what is or what is actually the case ... [T]his is the ordinary Greek notion of telling or knowing the truth, from Homer to Aristotle' (C.H. Kahn, The Verb 'Be' in Ancient Greek [Dordrecht: Reidel 1973], 363).

9 'How then does it come about that we posit an object for these representations, and so, in addition to their subjective reality as modifications, ascribe to them some mysterious kind of objective reality?' (Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith [London: Macmillan 1933], A197/B242)

10 This may be the answer to Putnam's question why 'philosophers, of all people, should be the ones to think that the fact that certain ideas are intrinsically contro- versial indicates that there is no being objectively right or wrong about those ideas' (RHF.35). Interpret 'objectively right or wrong' as 'empirically (or scientifically) right or wrong' and one has Kant's own position.



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in science or morals, a sitting target for relativism, which need only suggest that without any lapse of contextual or cultural rationality, someone somewhere might disagree.

Putnam proposes a pragmatic alternative to Greek and Kantian views. For a judgment to be objective is for it to be made in a context in which in principle (a deliberate idealization) it can be evaluated, correctly and fairly, for its Tightness for that context. When certain conditions of logical grammar are satisfied this Tightness may be called truth (it is a sufficient condition). The evaluation of the truthfulness of a statement is an 'objective' problem of estimation or appraisal because it is possible for it to be performed more or less reasonably. 'We have ... better and worse versions, and that is objectivity' (MFR.77). To 'think of reference as internal to texts (or theories)' is not incompatible with the demand for objectivity 'pro- vided we recognize that there are better and worse texts.' Such questions of Tightness are 'not subjective ... not just a matter of opinion' (RHF.114). Rightness is 'objective'; as Putnam likes to say, 'there is a fact of the matter' about rightness, justification, and so on. This fact is not Kant's fact of (subject-centered) reason. Neither is it Parmenides' fact that being is. The rightness ideally available in each dialogic exchange is the fact of 'the position we are fated to occupy in any case, the position of beings who cannot have a view of the world that does not reflect our interests and values, but who are, for all that, committed to regarding some views of the world - and, for that matter, some interests and values - as better than others' (RHF.178).

Judgments acquire objectivity by a relation to practical reasoning, to contextually conditioned reasonableness. The rightness that objectivity and truth posit 'goes beyond justification' (RHF.114), or at least beyond justification-on-present-evidence. The rightness sufficient for truth is 'idealized justification' (RHF.115), or 'right assertability' (PP.239). The reasonable or objective determination of this value in cases does not depend criterially upon intersubjective agreement. 'What it is right to say in a given context cannot always be established to everyone's satis- faction; but it is nonetheless the right thing to say' (RP.77). With this retreat (comparable to that of Habermas) from Kant's transcendentalism and his subject-centered conception of reason to a dialogic or communi- cative account, Putnam is able to appreciate the historical character of reasoning and knowledge. T do not believe ... that rationality is defined by a set of unchanging "canons" or "principles"; methodological principles are connected with our view of the world ... and change with time .... [TJhere is no fixed, ahistorical organon which defines what it is to be rational' (RTH.x). 'Our norms and standards of warranted assertability are historical products; they evolve in time' (RHF.21). 'There have been revolutions in methodology as there have been revolutions in everything else' (RHF.126). Reasonableness and objectivity are thus subjected to




history, their 'determinacy' a matter of local and interested practice: 'the judgment of better or worse ... expresses] only a "local" truth, a truth in a language game which presupposes the interests and practices of some social world or other' (RP.187).

To understand objectivity in this way means giving up 'a certain metaphysical picture of objectivity/ but it does not mean giving up 'the idea that there are what Dewey called "objective resolutions of problematic situations" - objective resolutions to problems which are situated in a place, at a time, as opposed to an "absolute" answer to "perspective- independent" questions. And that is objectivity enough' (RHF.178). Unlike Greek objectivity Putnam's interpretation requires no 'real' relation to an object (thing in itself), while unlike Kantian objectivity it does not posit a universal or transcendental subject. Putnam's pragmatic alternative makes the objectivity of judgments rely on intersubjective, historically conditioned, and ultimately ethical ideals of Tightness in how we respond to the speech of another. He interprets objectivity as an ethical quality of our conversations, of our dialogic relationships to other people, and to ourselves at our best.

Ill A 'Substantial Notion of Truth'?

One of the most confusing expressions Putnam uses is that of a 'substantial notion of truth.' If right assertability is a sufficient condition for truth, and truth 'only a local truth, a truth in a language game,' how 'substantial' can truth a la Putnam be? An answer to the question can be found in what Putnam regards as the truth in realism.

'That truth is a property - and a property which, unlike justification, or probability on present evidence, depends on more than the present memory and experience of the speaker - is the one insight of "realism" that we should not jettison' (RHF.32). The truth in realism is the 'real difference' between what Parmenides called 'the motionless heart of well-rounded Truth' and 'the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true reliability.' Parmenides was not a Davidsonian. He did not think that truth is immanent in belief 'as a kind of leaven leavening the lump of error. Belief is mere belief, and consequently sheer error. Truth is quite different from it, and is under no obligation to come to terms with it.'11 Putnam finds something right about this most philosophical of all dual-

11 Parmenides, fragment 1; and R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1945), 69



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isms, opinion and truth. The problem for him is how to hold it and avoid the Scylla of metaphysical absolutism and the Charybdis of reductive relativism. How, for example, 'to keep the idea that statements are true or false, that language is not mere noise and scribbling and "subvocali- zation," without being driven to postulate mysterious relations of correspondence' (RHF.93).

Elsewhere he suggests that 'what makes speech more than just an expression of our momentary subjectivity is that it can be appraised for the presence or absence of this property - call it truth, or Tightness, or paying its way' (RHF.106). The Parmenidean truth in realism requires a 'real difference' between being right and thinking one is right (RHF.139), or between the truth and what passes for true. Putnam's antirealism rules out the Parmenidean account of what makes this difference real: the presence of What Is. His alternative first reinterprets the 'justification' of a statement as its ']ustification-on-present-evidence,' and then asserts the 'real' difference between beliefs or assertions being justified-on-present-evidence and their being ideally justified, that is, being justifkWe 'were epistemic conditions ideal' (RHF.vii). It is important that the quality (justification) be ideal. That not only ensures that truth 'is a normative notion.' It secures the difference between what is true and what is justified by the evidence known at a given time and thus passing for true. But remember of what truth is an idealization: the actual practices of justification such as we happen to have them. Putnam does not allow 'that we have ... a notion of truth that totally outruns the possibility of justification' (RHF.ix) - which possibility is one of practice, possible as a move in a language game, but one whose normativity resists reduction to a recursive rule.

With Putnam's notion of truth before us I can return to the question whether it is a 'substantial notion.' The best gloss on this expression occurs in a remark directed against Quine's disquotationism. Quine is said to be 'abandoning the idea that truth is a substantial notion, [that is,] the idea that truth-or-falsity is a genuine parameter with respect to which we appraise one another's utterances and writings' (RHF.93). I assume that a 'genuine' parameter for the evaluation of speech acts is a pragmatic parameter, that is, one whose appraisal is a practical possibility for somebody. To say that truth is a genuine parameter, then, is to say that the difference between true and false 'substantially' or to practical effect enters into the evaluation of assertive speech acts. What if anything is 'substantial' about truth comes from the difference its presence or absence can make to somebody's practice. But what working purchase have we on this difference when we evaluate what people say? How, in what guise, by what criterion does truth 'substantially' enter into the evaluation of speech?




That is where 'ideal acceptability' comes in. To say 'a true statement is one that could be justified were epistemic conditions ideal' (RHF.vii) is supposed to redescribe truth in terms of a genuine parameter for the evaluation of truth: not justification-on-present-evidence, but ideal justification, which Putnam does not understand as the 'last' justification (at the 'end of inquiry') but the best justification reasonable for the context and subject matter. It is not surprising that Putnam should reject Quine's disquotationism. To say that a statement is true is not merely to affirm it by the indirect route of semantic ascent (as in Quine). What the predication of truth adds to an asserted content is the further claim that that content is justified and will remain justified as the conditions of its evaluation more and more approximate the ideal reasonableness im- plicit in the context. That makes the claim to truth something one can be wrong about even when one is right in assessing a statement as fully warranted in the light of the available evidence. The truth in realism and, I think, the cash value of Putnam's 'substantial' notion of truth is that truth is something we can realistically aim for, although the aim (when we care for truth) is not to correspond with reality, but to achieve what would be right under the best or ideal conditions (as we understand them) for a reasonable evaluation of the matter in question.

To call for a substantial notion of truth is thus not at all to call for correspondence or metaphysical realism. The idea of truth as 'correspondence' involves more than just a relation between a statement and something else. Classical truth requires accuracy, correctness, a meas- ured adequation of speech or intellect to beings in themselves. This Greek or onto-logical interpretation of truth contrasts with what might be called biblical truth. I read that ehmet is the Hebrew word for 'true' and that it also means 'fidelity' and 'trust.'12 There is no suggestion of formal adequation to speechless things in themselves. Biblical truth enjoins not a mimetic relation to 'objects' but a Tightness in our dialogic relationships with other speakers. 'He who tells the truth states what he is sure of, but a lying witness speaks deceitfully' (Prv.l2:17). 'If you have the knowledge, answer your neighbor; if not, put your hand over your mouth' (Sir.5:14). To mention a Christian text, 'The man who claims, "I have known him," without keeping his commands, is a liar; in such a one there is no truth' (ljn.2:4). Greek truth is onto-logical correctness, telling It like It is. Biblical truth is dialogical truthfulness, part of doing right by others in matters of speech.

12 Marcel Eck, Lies and Truth, trans. B. Marchland (London: Macmillan 1970), 103



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I suggest that Putnam's effort to make a place for a 'property - call it truth, or Tightness, or paying its way' (RHF.106) can be seen as an effort to retrieve this older, unGreek and nonmetaphysical understanding of truth from the discreditation of metaphysics (to which Putnam's antirealism is a contribution). To emphasize that 'truth - that is, the Tightness of what is said - is a normative notion' (RP.77) shifts the interesting questions about truth from ontology to ethics, from questions about our adequacy to beings-in-themselves to questions of the Tightness of our relationships with those with whom we speak.

I would be happy to agree with Putnam that the only 'determination' there is for the truth-value of statements they acquire from the determinability of truth among those who produce and circulate them.13 He might add that this 'determinability' is not computational, more generally that it cannot be identified with (reduced to) to any one rule, standard, paradigm, or cultural practice. That is very important to remember. The evaluation of truth in cases may indeed require non- computational competencies. Still, apart from practical determinability however realized there is nothing else to 'determine' what is true and what is not. What passes for true in cases may not always be true, but there is nothing to make the difference between true and false except a contingent practice. Truthful speech presupposes a lot of stage-setting in a language game, but that is all it presupposes, the only kind of 'presupposition' truth makes.

IV Relativism, or Rorty Misprisioned

Putnam's idea of truth as right assertability is a version of Nelson Goodman's idea of Tightness in versions, of which Goodman says 'truth, as Tightness of what is said, is a narrow species.'14 Putnam has two appreciative texts on Goodman in Realism with a Human Face, and de- votes a chapter of Renewing Philosophy to contrasting his irrealism with deconstruction. A passage from Goodman indicates how close their agreement is, and also points to a revealing difference.

13 This is a point I argue in Truth in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1993).

14 Nelson Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1984), 39




We must obviously look for truth not in the relation of a version to something outside that it refers to but in characteristics of the version itself and its relationships to other versions ... Obviously we cannot equate truth with acceptability; for we take it to be constant while acceptability is transient ... But ultimate acceptability -

acceptability that is not subsequently lost - is of course as steadfast as truth ... [and] serves as a sufficient condition for it. And since acceptability involves inductive

validity, which involves right categorization, which involves entrenchment, habit must be recognized as an integral ingredient of truth. Though that may give pause, it follows as the day the night.15

Putnam uses almost all of this: Truth is not a relation between a version and something that is not a version; yet 'obviously' truth is not transient acceptability. To say that 'ultimate' acceptability is as eternal as truth is a safe tautology, but Putnam glosses 'ultimate' as 'ideal' and interprets Goodman's neutral16 but logically sufficient condition for truth prag- matically as a 'genuine/ 'realistic/ practical parameter of assessment for speech acts.

It would be possible to enlist Goodman's 'new riddle of induction' in the argument against an 'absolute conception.' No one has yet explained the reason why we have to project green rather than grue. Goodman's 'solution' is simply to begin with the contingent entrenchment of predicates in some inquiry already underway. 'Rightness of categorization ... derives from rather than underlies entrenchment.'17 To say a predicate is the right one to use in some context is to say that projecting it is what we do. It is difficult to see how future science could be so absolute as to contain the knowledge that its predicates owed their projectability to something more respectable than the contingent habits and history of Homo sapiens. Curiously, though, that is exactly what Putnam does not

15 Goodman, Mind and Other Matters, 38

16 'Any treatment of rightness may, of course, give rise to speculation concerning an

application to moral rightness; but I willingly leave that to others. One point might be pondered though: in the present context at least, relativity of rightness and the

admissability of conflicting right renderings in no way precludes rigorous standards for distinguishing right from wrong' (Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking [Indianapolis: Hackett 1978], 109-10n.). Putnam's interpretation of objective judgment seems to be a development of this point.

17 Goodman, Mind and Other Matters, 38. Neither Williams nor Nagel discuss Good- man's 'new riddle of induction' when they explain their ideas on the absolute

conception or the view from nowhere. It is difficult to see how they could allow Goodman's argument to stand without forsaking the absoluteness of future science. It is even more difficult to see how they could answer it.



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emphasize: the contingency of entrenchment, hence Tightness; its ultimate dependence upon what Goodman calls habit and Rorty calls us.

Putnam recoils from Rorty's anti-anti-ethnocentrism because he mis- understands it. In his mind Rorty is the 'relativist' par excellence. 'I count Richard Rorty as a cultural relativist because his explicit formulations are relativist ones (he identifies truth with right assertability by the standards of one's cultural peers)' (PP.235). Putnam objects to this cultural reduction of truth because in his view 'rationality and justification are presupposed by the activity of criticizing and inventing paradigms and are not themselves defined by any single paradigm' (RHF.125). Thus it must be erroneous to identify truth with the agreement one can solicit by following certain cultural rules or reigning paradigms of discourse.

But is this Rorty's error? He did once claim that 'we can make no sense of the notion that the view which can survive all objections might be false.'18 He has not said it elsewhere or since, and withdrew it in a later clarification of his view about truth.19 He has in fact revised the so-called pragmatic theory of truth into an entirely negative proposition about what truth is not and how we should not think of it: 'pragmatism offers no "theory of truth." All it gives us is an explanation of why, in this area, less is more ... [P]ragmatism, as I have defined it, consists very largely in the claim that only if we drop the whole idea of "correspondence with reality" can we avoid pseudo-problems.'20

Yet Putnam thinks Rorty's relativism runs deeper and cannot be so easily excised. The relativism Putnam opposes is essentially the idea that truth (or justification) can be identified with whatever cultural peers under some definable condition produce or agree with. This cultural relativism is a curious variation on computational reductionism, or at least that is how Putnam attacks it. He thinks that 'in spite of his well-advertised break with analytic philosophy' Rorty is still under the sway of its technical concepts. Tn Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature the idea was that such [normal] discourse is governed by standards on which the speakers of a language are in agreement. In that book (as in

18 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982), 165. As he is the ancestor of all metaphysical absolutism it is worth recalling that for Parmenides the capacity to withstand refutation is the criterion of truth. See David Furley, Truth as What Survives the Elenchus: An Idea in Par- menides/ in P. Huby and G. Neal, eds., The Criterion of Truth (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 1989).

19 See Richard Rorty, 'Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth/ Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991).

20 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 128, 132




his recent Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) those standards were com- pared to an algorithm, that is, to a decision procedure of the kind computers carry out' (RP.67). He thinks it 'likely that the metaphor of an algorithm seduced Rorty into assuming that a verification procedure is something which would give a result if applied, as a matter of objective "computational" fact, independent of who employs the algorithm' (RP.69). This seduction would explain why Rorty does not see that his cheerful ethnocentrism is in reality the commonest sort of self-vitiating Protagorean relativism: 'If one says (as Rorty recently has) that lightness is simply a matter of what one's "cultural peers" would agree to, or worse, that it is defined by the "standards of one's culture" (Rorty compares these to an algorithm), then the question can immediately be put: Do the standards of Rorty's culture (which he identifies as "Euro- pean culture") really require Rorty's "cultural peers" to assent to what he has written? Fortunately, the answer is negative' (RHF.125).

It is of course vitally important to Putnam that 'there is no algorithm for determining whether a given epistemic position is better or worse for making an arbitrary judgment' (RR.115). But I cannot find a passage where Rorty makes an 'appeal to the notion of an algorithm' for the purpose of 'explaining how it is that certain things are true and certain things are false in the language of a community' (RP.67). He does 'construe the line between discourses which can be rendered commensurable and those which cannot as merely that between "normal" and "abnormal" discourse,' and says that T?y "commensurable" I mean able to be brought under a set of rules which will tell us how rational agreement can be reached on what would settle the issue on every point where statements seem to conflict.'21 So when discourse is normal there are rules which govern (if they do not 'survey') decisive evidence. But neither here nor elsewhere does Rorty compare these rules to an algorithm, a rule that an idiot (or a computer) can follow. I do not see why he should object to the suggestion that the understanding of norms governing normal discourse probably requires all of the non-for- malizable intelligence Putnam is constantly emphasizing. Elsewhere Rorty rejects what he calls the logical positivists' idea 'that we all carry around things called "rules of language" which regulate what we say when,' remarking that cultures 'do not have axiomatic structures ... [or]

21 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979), 320, 316. It is even harder to find traces of computationism in Contin-

gency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989). I cannot find a passage in either book that actually says there is an algorithm for truth or

justification.



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"criteria of rationality.'" He suggests that we think of rationality 'not as the application of criteria (as in a tribunal) but as the achievement of consensus (as in a town meeting, or a bazaar).'22 Nor should he reject 'the truth in realism/ which (as Putnam understands it) comes to fallibilism and nothing more.

Rorty thus seems much closer to Putnam's own views than to the cultural relativist Putnam refutes. In a recent discussion Rorty writes: 'I cannot see what "idealized rational acceptability" can mean except rational acceptability to an ideal community. Nor can I see how, given that no such community is going to have a God's eye view, this ideal community can be anything more than us as we should like to be' - which is indeed Putnam's view. Rorty adds, 'identifying "idealized rational acceptability" with "acceptability to us at our best" is just what I had in mind when I said that pragmatists should be ethnocentrists rather than relativists.'23

As a result of this agreement I see little to choose between Rorty's ethnocentric pragmatism and Putnam's 'realism with a human face.' Putnam defines this 'human kind of realism' as 'a belief that there is a fact of the matter as to what is rightly assertible for us, as opposed to what is rightly assertible from the God's eye view so dear to the classical metaphysical realist' (PP.xviii). Elsewhere he describes that same 'human kind of realism' as something 'with which Rorty is certain to disagree' (RHF.21). But 'a fact of the matter for us' is already ethnocentric. When Putnam says 'our criteria of relevance rest on and reveal our whole system of values' (RTH.202), and that 'the notion of truth itself depends for its content on our standards of rational acceptability, and these in turn rest on and presuppose our values' (RTH.215), I doubt that a question of whose standards or which system of values could be answered without an irreducibly ethnocentric reference to us, to what we do.

When Rorty suggests that we 'simply drop the distinction between rational judgment and cultural bias'24 this might look like the reductive relativism Putnam deplores. But Putnam's own view of scientific reasoning seems to imply much the same thing. He remarks, 'a species, to do science ... has to have the right set ol prejudices' (RHF.159). Where did we get the right prejudices, the ones whose entrenchment makes science

22 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 25-6, 217

23 Richard Rorty, Tutnam and the Relativist Menace/ journal of Philosophy 90 (1993) 451-2

24 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 207-8




as we know it possible? Despite Putnam's reference to our species-being, we receive them not from nature but second nature, that is, habit and tradition: 'we are allowed to use our natural judgments of what is plausible and implausible in judging "coherence" (and one cannot reason at all if one tries to stand outside of every tradition of reasoning)' (RHF.157). Without informal feelings derived from entrenched practice 'there would be no such thing as scientific rationality' (PP.299). What Rorty's pragmatist says of politics - that 'he has no ahistorical stand- point from which to endorse the habits of modern democracies he wishes to praise' - is equally true of the scientific rationality Putnam wishes to praise. So long as we remember the perfectly real difference between what we do and ourselves at our best, there is little to choose between Rorty's suggestion that we drop the nominal distinction between rational justification and cultural bias and Putnam's idea that scientific reasoning is impossible apart from 'a tradition of reasoning' - not any tradition, but ours, or one like us.

Putnam allows that 'my view has points of agreement with some of the views Richard Rorty has defended/ but he thinks they disagree about truth: 'I do not share his skepticism about the very existence of a substantial notion of truth' (RHF.ix). Putnam's use of this term is sufficiently mystifying to lead Rorty to agree: 'The idea of "some kind of correctness which is substantial" is the point at which I break off from Putnam ... I think that the Tightness or wrongness of what we say is just for a time and place ... I cannot give any content to the idea of non-local correctness.'25 But neither can Putnam. 'We do not have [a] notion ... of the "truth" of statements that [is] independent of the versions we construct and of the procedures and practices that give sense to talk of ... "truth" within those versions' (PP.230). "Truth" ... is as context-sensitive as we are. The assertability conditions for an arbitrary sentence are not survey able ... We learn them by acquiring a practice' (RHF.115). 'Generally, what counts as justification is learned as one learns the individual concepts that one uses in a particular enterprise ... To make our knowledge of all this into anything like a "science" seems today like a hopeless dream ... if there is anything we have learned from historicism, it is that there is no external place, no Archimedean point, from which we can do this' (PP.302). '[T]he judgment of better or worse ... expresses] only a "local" truth, a truth in a language game which presupposes the interests and practices of some social world or other' (RP.187).

25 Rorty, 'Putnam and the Relativist Menace/ 459-60; citing Putnam, PP.246



686 Barry Allen

The apparently irreconcilable difference between Rorty and Putnam on a substantial notion of truth disappears once one considers what this notion means for Putnam. He specifies what is in effect a sufficient condition for truth, namely idealized rational acceptability. Truth therefore cannot be any more 'substantial' than that. Despite his statement that what is true must *be warranted on the basis of experience and intelligence for creatures with "a rational and a sensible nature'" (RHF.41), I do not see how the 'ideal' of 'ideal justification' has the least determinability (making it a 'genuine' parameter of assessment for speech acts) apart from the solidarity of historically particular commu- nities, traditions, and discourses. What ideal justification, or right assertability, or truth come to in any case has no 'determination' apart from 'a shared sense of what is and is not reasonable, from people's loyalties to one another, and a commitment to "muddling through" together' (RHF.185).

V From Metaphysical Philosophy to Metaphilosophical Politics

I doubt if the interesting differences between Putnam and Rorty lie in their first-order views on truth and objectivity or relativism. The issue over which they contend seems to be not a 'philosophical' one about those topics but a 'metaphilosophical' one about the practice of philosophy as a discipline.

Putnam likes to associate Rorty with Heidegger's idea of the 'end of philosophy,' but Rorty has never accepted it. What he would like to see, he says, is the end of 'Philosophy 101/

There is a difference between hoping for the end of Philosophy 101 and hoping for the end of philosophy. I am still thought of (as by Putnam at [RHF.19]) as

recommending "the end of philosophy/' despite my explicit rejection of this label on the last page of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and my attempts in subsequent writings to scrape it off. Perhaps it may clarify matters if I say that I

hope that people will never stop reading e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, but also hope that they will, sooner or later, stop trying to sucker the freshmen into taking an interest in The Problem of the External World and The Problem of Other Minds ... I am impatient to see what culture would look like when these issues came to seem as obsolete as do controversies about the nature of the elements of the Eucharist. One thing I like about contemporary "continental" philosophy is that our colleagues beyond the Channel seem to be glimpsing such a culture.26

26 Rorty, Tutnam and the Relativist Menace/ 446-7




The difference between the relativism Putnam refutes and the ethnocentrism Rorty recommends is the difference between the relativist's metaphysical urge to speak the truth about reason and truth, and Rorty's effort to set aside the issue relativists and anti-relativists debate in favor of something less 'philosophical.' He proposes to replace technical questions about the determination of objectivity or the grounds of truth 'with questions like "What are the limits of our community? Are our encounters sufficiently free and open? Has what we have recently gained in solidarity cost us our ability to listen to outsiders who are suffering? To outsiders who have new ideas?'" Rorty may hope people continue to read Aristotle and Hegel, but he does not suggest those who do so will acquire a special competence for the new questions, which are, as he says, 'political questions rather than metaphysical or episte- mological questions.'27 And to suggest that they should displace anything we can recognize as a philosophical contribution is in effect a decision about philosophy as a discipline. Here is where Rorty and Putnam appear to disagree most.

Rorty revises Wittgenstein's wish for post-philosophical peace of mind into the 'utopian' call for a post-Philosophical culture - a version of ourselves without any discipline dedicated to 'asking questions about the nature of certain normative notions (e.g., "truth," "rationality," "goodness") in the hope of better obeying such norms.'28 But Putnam, although profoundly discontent with present practice, envisions some kind of renewed disciplinary role for philosophers - 'disciplinary' in the double sense of professional and correctional. He carefully distances himself from the idea that philosophy is 'a basis, a sort of pedestal, on which the culture rested' (RHF.20). But he also thinks 'there is no reason why we cannot seek to do what philosophers have always done: order and criticize the beliefs and methods on which various departments of human life depend' (PP.302), seeking 'to bring them and the ideals which inform them into reflective equilibrium' (PP.240).

These suggestions are no doubt vague. Unfortunately, Putnam's new books do not say a lot more about the problem of the integrity of philosophy as a discipline today. Perhaps Putnam is no better at saying in detail what a renewed discipline would be like than Rorty is at saying in detail what a post-Philosophical culture would be like. My point, though, is that the difference between them is this metaphilosophical

27 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 13

28 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xv



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and finally political one: How far would they go, what would they give up, to make the future new and different? Here Rorty is more radical, more impatient, possibly more Utopian than Putnam, who would like to see the practice of philosophy as a discipline renewed, not relegated to the past.

I have suggested that Putnam's work of the last ten years or so shifts concepts and problems from metaphysics to ethics, reconceiving of objectivity and truth in terms of an intersubjective, dialogic Tightness in our relationships with others. The timelessness of metaphysics, however, is a quality these concepts and problems lose in the new setting. Like Putnam I too hope there is a future for the practice of philosophy as a discipline. But he abandons himself to wishful thinking when he says that 'philosophy, as culture-bound reflection and argument about eternal questions, is both in time and eternity' (PP.247). He may say that 'the Tightness and wrongness of what we say is not just for a time and a place' (PP.247). But he has no alchemy to transmute this negative proposition into a proof of something eternal for philosophers to contemplate.

Received: August, 1993 BARRY ALLEN McMaster University

Hamilton, ON Canada L8S4K1



Documents

Realism with a Human Faceby Hilary Putnam; James Conant;Renewing Philosophyby Hilary Putnam