Conceptual Relativity Meets Realism in Metaphysics
Tom Marvan
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Abstract
The paper addresses the relationship between ontological realism and Putnam's thesis of conceptual relativity. The paper divides into three parts. The first part aims to reconstruct the notion of conceptual relativity, focusing on Putnam's example involving mereological principles of individuation of objects. The second part points to some major shortcomings of the mereological example of conceptual relativity and then moves to a different version of conceptual relativity, which targets objects posited by mature scientific theories. I claim that the mereological and the scientific version of conceptual relativity are different in important respects and that two main types of conceptual relativity therefore need to be distinguished. In the third part, I show that conceptual relativity is not in tension with realism. More specifically, conceptual relativity is not in tension with " realism in metaphysics " that Putnam adopted in the last decade before his death.
Related papers
Conceptual Relativity and Metaphysical Realism
Nous, 2002
Is conceptual relativity a genuine phenomenon? If so, how is it properly understood? And if it does occur, does it undermine metaphysical realism? These are the questions we propose to address. We will argue that conceptual relativity is indeed a genuine phenomenon, albeit an extremely puzzling one. We will offer an account of it. And we will argue that it is entirely compatible with metaphysical realism.
Realism and Conceptual Relativity—PhD Dissertation
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.
Conceptual Relativity and the Intelligibility of Metaphysical Realism
The purpose of this paper is three-fold. I will endeavor to show: 1) The exact nature of Putnam's views on conceptual relativity and how they are related to a number of other ontological positions in the recent literature. 2) The way in which conceptual relativity is supposed to show not that metaphysical realism is false, but that it lacks full intelligibility. 3) Why Putnam's position on conceptual relativity shows neither the (partial) unintelligibility nor the falsity of metaphysical realism.
Conceptual Relativity: Putnam on the Excess of Scientism and Relativism
The Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam criticizes philosophers who advocate scientism: the view that science offers the only true and correct description of the world. Scientism, for Putnam, undermines the finite and contextual nature of human perception. Putnam is also critical with the plurality of worlds espoused by Nelson Goodman in which different and incompatible ways of seeing things are equally valid. The problem with this idea for Putnam is that it undermines the fact that we interact with the same piece of reality and so there can be an interface despite diversity and incompatibility of description. Drawing from the Polish logician Lezniewski’s mereological frame, Putnam points out that conceptual relativity or the different ways of seeing the same state of affairs internal to a conceptual scheme steers a middle course between the excess of scientism and relativism. The paper argues that conceptual relativity rejects scientism and relativism while still affirming science and plurality of views.
Putnam's realism and relativity: An uneasy balance
Erkenntnis, 1991
The principle of relativity and the indeterminacy of special relativity
European Journal of Physics, 2008
This work ends a trilogy devoted to a journey into the foundations of special relativity. The first paper debated the meaning of the constancy of the twoway speed of light and its close relation to the conceptualization of time. The second one addressed the question of the possible constancy of the oneway speed of light and the trivial-but, unfortunately, even now somewhat controversial-question of the compatibility between the assumption of a special system of reference and Einstein's special relativity. The present study deals with the principle of relativity. Its historical evolution is reviewed and a 'weak' formulation is defended. It is emphasized that many assertions usually associated with special relativity, such as the 'relativity of time dilation' and 'relativity of space contraction' are indeed philosophical statements, as it has been established already by several authors in the past. Nonetheless, most teachers and scientists still believe nowadays they are implied by the theory and by the group property of the Lorentz transformation. This is by no means so, as it is reviewed and elucidated with the simple example on space contraction. It is argued that the lack of knowledge of the true value of the one-way speed of light in empty space leaves the theory undetermined. Einstein's special relativity corresponds to a simple and very elegant solution to this problem, allowing the study of relative motion without any concern with the study of absolute motion, which is considered to be superfluous. However, its standard interpretation is minimalist and even misleading. A large number of researchers have discussed this question, mostly within the conventionality of simultaneity thesis. The typical formulation of this thesis provides some new physical insight and points out the problem, but does not solve it. In contrast, it often leads to a labyrinth of difficult language which is herein clarified.
Relativism-Relativity: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on a Modern Concept
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013
The concept of relativity is born of the confrontation between Cartesians and Helmontians on the early modern battlefield of the philosophy of science. It was one of the favourite issues of essayistic speculation in the later nineteenth century when it came to be perceived as a more appropriate epistemic position than Kantian transcendentalism in a post-Nietzschean world, which had experienced the transvaluation of all values. Walter Horatio Pater saw in relativity the very spirit of modernity. In its twentieth-century hypostasis, radicalized by existentialism and aggravated by the agno sticism of the Copenhagen School of Quantum Physics, relativism was both lauded, especially by vanguard artists and subversive social groups, and exposed as an amoral and dangerous attitude. Our essay is a revisionary and historicist approach to the issue, which cuts across the disciplinary borders of science, philosophy, ethics and art. Earlier versions of current theories in the New Physics, such as relative time and space, the two (implicate and explicate) orders, the superposition of states, fractal geometry, or space-time, are traced back to the work of Kepler, Leibniz or D’Alembert. Such ground-breaking ideas, first launched in the tentative form of the essay, which acquired a quasi- canonical status in the French Encyclopaedia, referenced other disciplinary fields (psychology, ethics, social science), and entered into fertile negotiations with discursive and formal innovations in literature.
Physics and Ontology - or The 'ontology-ladenness' of epistemology and the 'scientific realism'-debate
Physics and Ontology - or The 'ontology-ladenness' of epistemology and the 'scientific realism'-debate, 2020
The question of what ontological insights can be gained from the knowledge of physics (keyword: ontic structural realism) cannot obviously be separated from the view of physics as a science from an epistemological perspective. This is also visible in the debate about 'scientific realism'. This debate makes it evident, in the form of the importance of perception as a criterion for the assertion of existence in relation to the 'theoretical entities' of physics, that epistemology itself is 'ontologically laden'. This is in the form of the assumption that things (or entities) in themselves exist as such and such determined ones (independent of cognition, autonomously). This ontological assumption is not only the basis of our naïve understanding of cognition, but also its indispensable premise, insofar as this understanding is a fundamentally passive, 'receptive' one. Accordingly, just as 'perception' is the foundation, ('objective') description is the aim of cognition, that which cognition is about. In this sense, our idea of cognition and our idea of the things are inseparably linked. Without the ontological premise mentioned we just would not know what cognition is, but it is basically just a kind of image that we have in our minds (an assumption that helps us understand 'cognition'). Epistemology not only shares this basic assumption (which it also shares with metaphysics), but it revolves (unlike metaphysics) entirely around it by making the idea and demand of 'certainty' a condition of 'real' knowledge. As 'certainty' is a subjective criterion this entails the 'remodelling' of the real, holistic cognitive situation (to which metaphysics adheres) into a linear subject-object-relation (which results in the strict 'transcendence' of the objects). And it also establishes, due to its 'expertise' in matters of cognition, the 'primacy of epistemology' over all other sciences. Now, on closer inspection, however, the expertise of epistemology seems not all that dependable, because it basically consists only of paradigms which, from the point of view of the holism of the real cognitive situation itself, are nothing more than relatively simplistic interpretations of this situation. However, we do not yet know what another conception of cognition might look like (which is not surprising given the high rank of the phenomenon of cognition in the hierarchy of phenomena according to their complexity). 'Certainty' as a criterion of cognition is thus excluded from the outset, and thus the linear relational model of cognition appears as what it is, a gross distortion of the real, holistic cognitive situation. The significance of this argumentation with regard to physics is that the linear epistemological model of cognition itself is a major obstacle to an adequate epistemological understanding of physics. This is because it is fixed 'a priori' to an object-related concept of cognition, and to 'description' as the only mode of ('real') cognition. But physics (without questioning our naïve notion of cognition on the level of epistemology) simply works past it and its basic assumptions. Its cognitive concept (alias heuristic) is fundamentally different from that of metaphysics. The acceptance of the real, holistic cognitive situation is, in my opinion, the condition for an adequate understanding of physics' heuristic access to objects, its transcendental, generalizing cognitive concept, as well as its ontological relevance and dimension of its own.
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