Putnam and Truth

Análisis, vol. 5 no. 1, 2018

In this paper I present a positive progressive picture of Putnam's philosophy. According to this way of seeing things, Putnam is a normative cartographer of our linguistic practices who has over time refined his understanding of the concepts of truth and verification and their complex relationship from discourse to discourse. Looked at in this way Putnam is primarily a philosopher of objective normativity, who explores the various conceptions of objectivity with which we operate as well as resisting the excesses of both metaphysics and skepticism which do violence to our ordinary and scientific practices. However, Putnam also sees himself as a philosopher of 'reality' focused on " the realism issue " , a metaphysically inflationary way of thinking that, I argue, stands in the way of his deepest insights.

2000

Since 1976 Hilary Putnam has drawn parallels between his ‘internal’, ‘pragmatic’, ‘natural’ or ‘common-sense’ realism and Kant’s transcendental idealism. Putnam reads Kant as rejecting the then current metaphysical picture with its in-built assumptions of a unique, mind-independent world, and truth understood as correspondence between the mind and that ready-made world. Putnam reads Kant as overcoming the false dichotomies inherent in that picture and even finds some glimmerings of conceptual relativity in Kant’s proposed solution. Furthermore, Putnam reads Kant as overcoming the pernicious scientific realist distinction between primary and secondary qualities, between things that really exist and their projections, a distinction that haunts modern philosophy. Putnam’s revitalisation of Kant is not just of historical interest, but challenges contemporary versions of scientific realism. Furthermore, Putnam has highlighted themes which have not received the attention they deserve in Kantian exegesis, namely, the problematic role of primary and secondary qualities in Kant’s empirical realism, and the extent of Kant’s commitment to conceptual pluralism. However, I argue that Putnam’s qualified allegiance to Kant exposes him to some of the same metaphysical problems that affected Kant, namely, the familiar problem of postulating an absolute reality (Ding an sich), while at the same time disavowing the meaningfulness of so doing. In conclusion I suggest that Putnam might consider Hegel’s attempts to solve this problem in Kant as a way of furthering his own natural realism.

There are not different sorts of truths

A criticism of Huw Price

What makes deflationary views about truth deflationary? One familiar answer is this: according to deflationists, truth is not really a property. Call this metaphysical deflationism.

anale.fssp.uaic.ro

This paper assumes as a starting point Putnam's arguments from "In Defense of Internal Realism" and "Realism with a Human Face". I try to present some important aspects of Putnam's thesis on internal realism. My analysis insists upon the way in which the American philosopher connects the ideas of impossibility to map a language-free reality and of impossibility to have a God's Eye View with the idea of idealized rational acceptability. I follow Putnam's assertions as he tries to avoid both what he calls metaphysical realism and relativism. His efforts to preserve concepts as truth or objectivity inside his version of internal realism raise a few important difficulties as well as criticism from philosophers as J. R. Searle or Richard Rorty.

2008

The nature and possibility of humans understanding and representing the world through thought, language, and perception has been at the center of western philosophy since at least Descartes. Accounting for the possibility of true representations was one of Kant’s most explicit concerns. Firmly situated in this tradition, Hilary Putnam has long grappled with the nature and implications of how language hooks onto the world. Putnam’s views on these issues have changed radically over his career from a kind of realism to a kind of antirealism. According to the realist view, the mind essentially attempts to mirror the world through its representations. Truth consists of a correspondence between language and a world whose nature is independent of our representations. Call this form of realism alethic realism. According to the antirealist view, the mind does not simply mirror the world; rather, it somehow contributes structure and content to the world. Language and reality are not cleanly separable as the alethic realist believes. Putnam abandoned alethic realism due to perceived problems with its being able to account for true representations of reality. Putnam became convinced that alethic realism leads to skepticism; since mind/representation and world are separable, it is theoretically possible that even an ideal theory or description of the world could be false. Further, because alethic realism holds that the world is representation-independent, Putnam takes it to imply that there is only one true description of the world. Conversely, if there is more than one true description of the world, then the world is not representation-independent. Putnam’s continued rejection of alethic realism is due principally to his argument from conceptual relativity. The central idea of which is that the “same” state of affairs can be described in incompatible but equally true ways. Putnam denies that the incompatibility is such that the descriptions are contraries; nevertheless, he holds that they cannot be simply conjoined into a single description. Over the years Putnam has illustrated conceptual relativity with a number of different examples, but there is one that he returns to repeatedly. It involves the purported possibility of being able to describe what Putnam calls three “individuals,” x1, x2, x3 (three marbles, say) as either three objects or seven objects. If one countenances mereological sums, i.e., the idea that the sum of any two things is itself an object, then there are supposed to be seven objects. That is, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd objects are each of the three individuals, the 4th the sum of x1 and x2, the 5th the sum of x1 and x3, the 6th the sum of x2 and x3, and the 7th object is the sum of x1, x2, and x3. But if one denies that there are mereological sums, then there are only three objects. According to Putnam, the realist will insist that both counts cannot be right, since she is supposed to be committed to a fixed totality of representation-independent objects. Against this, Putnam claims that we can choose to talk either way and still speak truthfully. However, we cannot simply conjoin the descriptions into one description the way we can “John’s hair is brown” and “John’s eyes are green.” The descriptions need to be non-conjoinable because they are supposed to be about the “same” state of affairs without “object” having a different meaning in each description. If the descriptions simply differed in meaning, then they would be about different things; and if they were contraries or contradictory, then they could not both be true. And if they differed in meaning or couldn’t both be true, then the purported examples of conceptual relativity would not pose a problem for alethic realism. Much of Putnam’s effort is spent defending the idea that there can be incompatible but equally true descriptions. As we began to see above, he faces a dilemma. Two descriptions, A and B, are either consistent or not. If they are not consistent, then the proponent of conceptual relativity is committed to the truth of contradictions. If they are consistent, then they are simply about different things and are thus conjoinable. So, Putnam’s views on conceptual relativity are either irrational or they are consistent with alethic realism. In order to try to steer his way through this dilemma, Putnam distinguishes between the meaning and sense of a word. The idea is that the meaning of “object” is in some sense the same when counting mereological sums or leaving them out; however, “object” differs in regard to its use or sense. So, when one person says, “There are three objects,” and another says, “There are seven objects,” they are using “object” with its ordinary meaning but in different senses. Thus, according to Putnam, they do not contradict one another, nor do they talk past one another. I criticize Putnam’s views on conceptual relativity along three lines. First, I argue that despite his meaning/sense distinction, Putnam’s views on conceptual relativity still fall prey to the second horn of the above mentioned dilemma. Thus his attempt to hold that there are (in some sense) incompatible descriptions of the “same” state of affairs is untenable. The problem is that it is not clear why the supposed incompatible descriptions cannot be conjoined once it is clear that “object” is used in different senses. For example, “There are three non-mereological objects and there are seven mereological objects” is as unproblematic as, “There are three square objects and there are seven triangular objects.” However, the question still remains as to whether any two concrete objects are themselves an object. Therefore, second, I call into question Putnam’s views on mereological sums, specifically the claim that any two concrete objects are themselves an object. While it is less problematic to think that some objects are mereological sums of their parts, e.g., a fleet of ships or an archipelago, it is not clear that just any two concrete objects are themselves an object. It is not my intention to argue that Putnam’s views on mereology are false, but rather to emphasize that they are not as unproblematic as Putnam seems to believe. Third, I argue that since “object,” is not a true sortal term, i.e., it does not provide for individuation of objects on its own, Putnam’s mereological sums example fails to undermine alethic realism. That is, Putnam asks the alethic realist to count the number of objects, and then argues that there is no determinate, representation-independent answer. However, we should not be surprised if there is not some fixed totality of objects qua “object.” Rather, the totality of objects to which our language corresponds, and which we can count, are objects qua trees, rivers, tables, rocks, houses, etc. Lastly, I close the dissertation by arguing that from the remains of Putnam’s views on conceptual relativity, the alethic realist can salvage the idea that knowledge is objective even though it may be relative to different perspectives. Different languages or conceptual schemes can provide for different ways of conceptualizing the world without that entailing any form of radical subjectivism or relativism. Recognizing this objective but perspectival nature of knowledge is only a problem for the alethic realist if she also endorses a kind of scientism according to which it is finished science alone that tells us what really exists.

2003

This study intends to settle a context-sensitive and realistic account of Kuhn’s notion of incommensurability. Originally, Kuhn employed this notion to question positivist understandings of science as a cumulative enterprise guided by a universal method – that mobilizes the allegedly neutral ground of empirical observation – and teleologically geared toward the elucidation of reality’s fundamental ontology. Kuhn opposed to this view a contextualized picture of science as irreducibly relying on socially, culturally and historically situated paradigms (providing notably taxonomies and standards for theory assessment). According to Kuhn, the evolution of science is punctuated by crisis and revolutions during which new paradigms override ancient ones. More recently, renewed attention has been granted to incommensurability with the growth of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research attempts gathering many different systems of categories and methodologies. Nonetheless, the notion of incommensurability has been intensively debated and its epistemological and philosophical consequences remain problematic. Therefore, refined insights about topics such as realism, truth or meaning and reference are required to establish a context-sensitive and realistic account. In this respect, Putnam’s philosophical work is mobilized. His intellectual trajectory from metaphysical realism to commonsense or pragmatic realism (through the intermediate internalist period) is carefully analyzed. Important continuities and ruptures are evidenced with, in particular, the crucial step constituted by the criticism of interfacial understandings of conception and perception as leading to a kind of antinomy of realism. A synthesis of Putnam’s late positions about realism, truth and reference is then provided under the label ‘Putnam’s pragmatist theory of knowledge’. It includes two important features. First, mind-independent reality is reconsidered according to a second naiveté leading to recognize it is many different ways along differently situated points of view. Second, semantic processes involved in the establishment of knowledge claims, theories or conceptual schemes and mechanisms at stake in their rational acceptance are pictured as context-sensitive. On the ground of Putnam’s pragmatist theory of knowledge, a global pragmatist approach of rational inquiry doing justice to indispensable and irreducible influence of contexts is developed. In this framework, contextual influences have two types of consequences. Differently contextualized rational inquiries can tune to different domains of investigation (that is to say, they can focus on different pools of real entities being particular ways along specific sets of points of view). In addition, differently contextualized rational inquiry can possess different systems of rational acceptability and establish differently featured conceptual schemes. According to this global picture of rational inquiries as context-sensitive processes of knowledge production, phenomena of incommensurability are reconstructed as standing between differently contextualized investigations that, under the guidance of incompatible systems of rational acceptability, settle differently featured (possibly incompatible and even taxonomically incommensurable) conceptual schemes hosting same terms. A context-sensitive and realistic account is then developed in which such phenomena are interpretable either in competing perspectives as cognitive imperfections (when standing between inquiries tuned to same or overlapping domains of investigation) or in non-competing perspectives as legitimate and significant (when standing between inquiries tuned to different domains of investigation). This account is eventually mobilized to reconcile incommensurability and scientific realism.

This chapter is concerned with a semantic (as opposed to ontological) approach to metaphysics, developed by Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright, that takes the concept of truth as fundamental, and explicates debates about realisms in terms of truth. On this approach realism is fundamentally concerned with the objectivity of truth conditions of classes of statements, where objectivity is not a matter of the existence of entities. I show that Dummett worked with three separable criteria for the objectivity of truth, which support a subtle and flexible framework for characterizing various degrees of realism. I argue that

Dialectica, 2002

Philosophy in the Age of Science: Essays of Hilary Putnam. De Caro & Macarthur (eds.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts." C. S. Pierce "Even the hugest telescope has to have an eye-piece no larger than the human eye." Ludwig Wittgenstein

Analele ştiinţifice ale universităţii „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din Iaşi (serie noua), Filosofie, 2008

When conceiving or dealing with a philosophical theory there are a few things that should be investigated. First, one has to know what the theory is about. This means, of course, knowing what its basic concepts and premises are, and also what they are supposed to lead to. Secondly, it is important to understand how 1 the concepts direct the theory in the respective directionwhich includes proving whether the basic elements of the theory were precise and strong enough to let the theory do its purported job. If the system is alright (to the extent to which a philosophical system can be alright), it should be important to see what effect it had over the general realm of philosophyif and how the other main philosophical concepts fit into its schema, or what is left of them, if they don't.

TeAM YYePG, 2005