Representation and Reality. by Hilary PutnamReview by: Barbara HannonNoûs, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), pp. 102-106Published by: WileyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215905 .

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between (a) both Hany and John think Hany will win the election, and (b) each of the two thinks he himself will win the election. What's identical in (a) is the proposition or, in Reinachian terms, the state of affairs represented by their thoughts; and what is different in (b) is the meaning-content of their thoughts or, again in Reinachian terms, the "'Satz (im logischen Sinne)', i.e. the meaning of a complete declarative sentence" (p. 184). Kunne mentions four differences between propositions and meaning-contents: (i) if hallucinating Macbeth cries "That is a bloody dagger!" his words do not represent a proposition, although they have a content (p. 179); (ii) contents, but not propositions make actions comprehensible (p. 180-1); (iii) the classification of thoughts according to their contents yields psychological properties, but classifying them according to the proposi- tions represented does not, hence propositional attitudes are not psychological properties (p. 182-3); (iv) contents are truth value bearers, whereas propositions are "that in virtue of whose obtaining (Bestehen) a truth is a truth" (p. 184). But how, then, can the content of Macbeth's cry "That is a bloody dagger!" bear a truth value if it does not represent a proposition?

States of affairs are also discussed in Smith's "On the Cognition of States of Affairs" and in Schuhmann's "Johannes Daubert's Kritik der 'Theorie des negativen Urteils' von Adolf Reinach". The latter's paper on Husserl's relation to Reinach as well as George Davie's comparison of Husserl's and Reinach's interpretations of Hume's Treatise are not so easily assigned to either group.

The final part of the volume presents two of Reinach's minor works: a lecture on the fundamental concepts of ethics, reconstructed by Schuhmann, and an obituary of William James, translated by Smith. It ends with an annotated bibliography both of Reinach's writings and of writings on him, again by Smith, and a helpful index.

Most of the essays are in English, but there are four German contributions: Burkhardt's and the three by Schuhmann. I wonder why they have not been translated into English, the more so since the papers by Hoffman and Kunne are translations from the German, and Gardies' paper is even a translation from the French. The editor's policy causes readers unfamiliar with the German language to miss three articles, viz. Schuhmann's, which round off the opening biographical sketch, happily combining historical details with elucidations of Reinach's philosophy.

Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (MIT Press, 1988), XV + 136 pp.

BARBARA HANNON

University of Idaho

Hilary Putnam is, by his own admission, the inventor of functionalism or the computational view of the nature of mental states. In Representation and Reality, Putnam argues against his own former computationalist views and suggests that his arguments show the need for a reorientation in the way philosophers and cognitive scientists typically view mental phenomena.

The thesis of the book is largely negative; only a sketch of a positive thesis is provided. On the negative side, Putnam attempts to show that the functionalist programme of explaining the nature of mental states in computational or computational-

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PUTNAM'S REPRESENTATION AND REALITY 103

cum-physical terms is unworkable. Also on the negative side, Putnam argues that eliminativism has not been shown to be a coherent alternative to functionalism; there are reasons to think that inconsistencies inherent in the eliminativist position render eliminativism as unworkable as functionalism. The positive portion of the book consists of a suggestive gesture in the direction of the metaphysical position, defended elsewhere by Putnam, which he calls 'internal realism' or 'pragmatic realism.'l Internal realism allows us to affirm, for certain purposes, that there really are mental states; the truth of this affirmation need not be undermined by the fact that no reductive theory of the nature of mental states is possible.

Putnam's Arguments Against Functionalism

Putnam concludes that mental state types cannot be identified with computational state types, or with state types defined in computational and physical terms. While a straightforward type identification fails, mental properties are emergent from, perhaps supervenient upon, computational properties.2 Putnam advances several arguments leading to this conclusion.

There are many varieties of functionalism, and Putnam attempts to mount arguments that will be effective against all of these varieties. First, he argues against what we might call naive functionalism, a simple form of functionalism, (such as Turing machine functionalism) that assumes that mental state types are computational state types, computational state types being defined according to purely internal or syntactic parameters. Such a functionalism, being committed to methodological solipsism (the doctrine that mental states have identity conditions, usable for purposes of scientific psychology, that make no reference to states or events outside the head) fails first, according to Putnam, for the very simple reason that methodological solipsism is misguided. Putnam famously believes that mental content, the crucial factor for the typing of psychological states, is in no sense "in the head." We might call this first argument against naive functionalism the argument from the wide individuation of content. According to this argument, mental state contents involve features of the physical environment as well as linguistic and social features. Two mental state tokens could differ in content (be about different things) without differing in internal syntactic (computational) features. Therefore, mental state types cannot simply be computational state types as individuated by the narrow Turing-machine vocabulary.3

Putnam's second argument against naive functionalism might be called the argument from the plasticity of mental states. Putnam reminds us of the major insight of functionalism: mental states are constitutionally plastic; that is, the same mental state type might be realized in a variety of different physical state types; there is no type-to- type reduction of mental states to physical states. Now Putnam urges that mental states are computationally plastic as well; the same mental state type might be realized in a variety of different computational states, so there will be no type-to-type reduction of mental states to computational states, either.4

Putnam's argument from the plasticity of mental states against naive functionalism makes the following point: while all beliefs appropriately characterized as having a particular content might share some loose "family resemblance" in functional role, there is no reason to think that all such beliefs will have the same functional role. Putnam puts his finger on the source of much confusion by noting that we possess no clear criteria for sameness and difference of functional or computational states. Without a clearer idea of

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what we are saying when we discuss sameness of computational state, we assert nothing meaningful by asserting that believers of the same proposition must be in "the same" computational state. Certainly, two persons appropriately characterized as believing the same proposition may be in states with different "conceptual roles," if "conceptual role" retains any intuitive sense. For example, two people may both believe that there are a lot of cats in the neighborhood, while having different beliefs about cats, different stereotypes of a cat, and so on.5

After advancing the argument from the wide individuation of content and the argument from the plasticity of mental states against naive, solipsistic functionalism, Putnam turns to a more sophisticated version of functionalism that he calls sociofunc-

tionalism. Sociofunctionalism is not committed to methodological solipsism; socio-

functionalism takes the complex of organism plus environment to be the "computer," and seeks to find something computationally describable that is had in common by all such dual complexes that are correctly described as possessing the same belief.

Putnam argues that, in order to succeed, any version of sociofunctionalism would have to define infinitely many words a physical-cum-computational property whose extension coincides with that of 'refers to' in any physically possible world. (Putnam lists certain strictures on a genuine reduction of one property to another: the reduced property may not be an endlessly disjunctive property, or the reduction fails to be explanatory or to yield a property that can enter into laws.) Putnam argues that principled reasons can be given why a finite empirical definition of intentional properties and relations in terms of physical/computational properties and relations cannot be given.6 These reasons defeat a simplistic version of sociofunctionalism holding that any two systems of an organism plus an environment that may appropriately be described as being in the same mental state must be in the same computational state. The same sorts of reasons defeat a more sophisticated version of sociofunctionalism merely requiring that the states of co-believers be equivalent under some equivalence relation that is itself computable, or at least definable in the language of computational theory plus physical science.7

The type of problem that sinks the simplistic version of sociofunctionalism is the following: it always remains possible that we could discover some human or other creature, embedded in a suitable environment, such that we could appropriately interpret this creature as believing that p. Yet, this creature might not be in any computational state "the same" as the computational states of other recognized believers-that-p. So, even if we could survey all possible believers-that-p (which we can't), there is no reason to think that the resultant computational "reduction" of the notion of believing that p would be more than the infinite disjunction of computational states that Putnam has ruled out as not constituting a genuine, explanatory reduction.

The same objection holds for the more sophisticated version of sociofunctionalism because, in order to discover some equivalence relation R, describable in physical-cum- computational terms, that unites all believers-that-p, we would have to survey all possible believer-that-p, which we can't do. In other words, to have such a relation R, we'd need to have an ideal theory that would tell us in computational terms what it is for two terms or thoughts to be co-referential or synonmous, and in order to have such an ideal theory, we'd have to be able to survey and explain human interpretative practices (rationality) in toto-and there is just no reason to think that such a feat is possible.8 Even if we could survey all of rationality, all of human interpretative practices, "in principle," such a survey could only come up with an infinite disjunction of relations

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PUTNAM'S REPRESENTATION AND REALITY 105

appropriate to different species in different environments. There is no reason to think that there would be any single computational relation R corresponding to the relation of coreference or synonymy, and such a single relation is what is needed for a genuine, explanatory reduction of the intentional notions at issue.9

Putnam's Argument Against Eliminativism

If Putnam's arguments against functionalism are sound, then, given the failure of purely physicalistic reductionism with regard to the mental, propositional attitude notions would appear to be irreducible. At this point, certain philosophers are likely to say, "Well, then, propositional attitude notions belong to an illegitimate, unscientific folk theory and ought to be eliminated; legitimate theoretical notions must be physicalistically or functionalistically reducible."

It is possible to maintain, against the eliminativists, that the irreducibility of proposi- tional attitude notions does not indicate that we should (or could) eliminate them. Putnam is in general agreement with this, but his argument against eliminativism is interestingly different from the pragmatic incoherence arguments most frequently encountered.

Putnam's objection to eliminativism with regard to mentalistic and semantic notions is just the following: the proponents of eliminativism can't be consistent in their eliminativist attitude unless they are willing to eliminate not only intensional semantic notions such as meaning and synonymy, which go hand in hand with propositional atti- tude notions, but extensional semantic notions also-notions such as reference and truth. And, according to Putnam, no one has shown (or is likely to show) how the notions of reference and truth can be eliminated or replaced by successor concepts. In particular, two different ways have been proposed of explaining the notion of truth in a way that involves no problematic semantic notions: Tarski's theory of truth, and Ayer's "redundancy" or "disappearance" theory of truth. Putnam argues forcefully (his argu- ments are too lengthy to summarize here) that neither of these so-called "disquotational" theories of truth actually succeeds in explaining truth without semantic concepts; nor does either of these theories suggest a plausible replacement concept for the intuitive notion of truth. Until replacement concepts for crucial semantic notions are forthcoming, Putnam believes that our attitude toward eliminativism should be "put up or shut up."10

Evaluation of Putnam's Project

The failure of reductionism and functionalism on the one hand, and the incoherence of eliminativism on the other, may appear to leave commonsense propositional attitude psychology and its embedded mentalistic notions in an odd philosophical limbo. There really are mental states, but we can't explain what they are. This is unsatisfying only if one is already in the grip of a philosophical prejudice, the idea that all notions worth taking seriously must be explicable in some reductive way. Putnam suggests that we liberate ourselves from this prejudice. According to Putnam's internal realism, there can be more than one correct answer to the question, "What objects are there really in the world?" because there can be different linguistic and conceptual conventions adopted for different purposes. There exist no criteria for legislating as to which of these conventional schemes is ultimately "right." Intentional facts, due to our pragmatic inability to experience and describe the world without them, thus possess an acceptable metaphysical pedigree despite their irreducibility to any other sort of fact.

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The notorious failure of philosophical analysis to produce conclusive and interesting results, as well as the lack of evidence in favor of the so-called "unity of science," suggest that Putnam is correct in his general conclusion that reductionism is in trouble. I am in sympathy with Putnam's anti-reductionist sentiments, and my general reaction to his work is great admiration of the depth and originality of his thought. My critical comments are confined to two (rather minor) factors that result in some lack of clarity in the argumentative structure of Putnam's book.

First, Putnam frequently mentions the truth of meaning holism as a general reason why reductionism and functionalism with regard to the mental can't work.11 It is notoriously difficult to say precisely what meaning holism is, and Putnam might have had something enlightening to say about this. Unsatisfyingly, he describes meaning holism rather vaguely and allusively, in terms that at least seem to disagree with other theorists' accounts of the nature of meaning holism, notably Jerry Fodor's. 12

Second, Putnam's argument that Tarski's theory of truth fails to reduce or replace the intuitive concept of truth13 is prohibitively complex in exposition. After several readings, I am still unable to say whether or not I think the argument is successful. This may warrant a negative judgment regarding my mental powers more than it warrants a negative judgment regarding Putnam's argument. But if Putnam is correct about the failure of the Tarskian theory of truth, this is of considerable interest. It is too bad that an average philosopher of mind finds Putnam's argument too convoluted to follow.

Notes 1Putnam defends internal realism in his Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1981); in Realism and Reason, Vol. 3 of his Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and in his Carus lectures, The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987).

2Representation and Reality, pp. xii-xiii 31bid., ch. 2; see also p. 73. 4Ibid., ch. 3; see also p. 74. 51bid., pp. 83-84; also ch. 3. 61bid., pp. 78-80. 7Ibid. 8Ibid., pp. 84-89. 9Ibid., p. 93. 10Ibid., ch. 4. Putnam actually uses the phrase "put up or shut up" in another context, see p. 79.

But it is appropriate to Putnam's intent to attribute the general sentiment to him in the anti- eliminativist context.

" See for example Ibid., pages xiii, 8-9, 36-37, 81-82. '2Jerry Fodor's definition of meaning holism is given in Psychosemantics (Cambridge: MIT

Press, 1987), p. 56. According to Fodor, the truth of meaning holism would entail that no two systems are ever in the same intentional state, except maybe by some rare accident. Putnam surely does not believe that the truth of meaning holism entails this. Rather, Putnam holds that when two systems are in the same intentional state (which they quite often are) they do not necessarily have anything in common that is describable in non-intentional terms.

l3Representation and Reality, pp. 61-66.

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