Putnam, Hilary - Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity

2015/07/17

Journal of American Philosophical Association, 2015

This article is a review of three positions that author holds, that of "liberal naturalism", metaphysical realism, and normative realism. Author first starts with an elucidation of the term "liberal naturalism"; it emerged first from reading Naturalism in Question, edited by De Caro and Macarthur. In that collection, author wrote an essay that attacked Boyd, Casper and Trout's The Philosophy of Science, which had a disjunctive definition of the natural that was too vague to work. The example author used is how to understand Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (the play). Was it "subject to natural laws", and if so, did that capture the "phenomenon"? (pg312-3) The method of resolving this that author prefers is to rely on the naturalism of John Dewey, which does not allow supernatural entities, but also does not reduce ethics and aesthetics to the natural sciences or as meaningless-- a kind of liberal naturalism (pg313). Author also relies on Burge to argue that psychological terms like "representation" do not need reduction to the physical to be empirically valuable or explanatory, and so reduction is dispensable even as a hope. Yet author believes that liberal naturalism covers a broad range of positions, which he does not share, so further refinement is necessary: author is also a metaphysical and normative realist, which he discusses in the next sections.

Author first takes time to distinguish between his criticisms of a particular kind of metaphysical realism from the more broad view, which he has finally come to understand that he holds (on his 80th birthday) (pg213-5). Author quotes his previous lecture and Maudlin's reaction to it: author attacked the idea that there is a mind-independent reality and that an ideal theory of it could be technically false, and Maudlin agreed that this is indeed a feature, not a fault, of 'Metaphysical Realism'. Author has now come to accept that there could be an assertible, warranted, theory that is technically false (pg315-6), and that his attack of it in Realism and Reason was wrong. But "a responsible metaphysical realist needs to say something about what truth is and not simply what it isn't", so author continues to the next section. (pg316)

Author turns to Tarski's contribution to the concept of "True" in a formal language, as applied to a sentence within that language (pg316). In particular, author thinks that Field, in his Tarski's Theory of Truth, correctly interpreted Tarski's work as connecting the concepts of reference (or denotation) to truth. Author goes into specific elaboration with a formal language "Bob" and a "meta-Bob", which is "set-theoretically more powerful than Bob" in the way Tarski would need it (pg317), using "Snow is white" as an example sentence. Author takes a good amount of time dealing with the proposed Tarskian link between reference and truth (pg318-320). What comes out of this technical re-creation of the meta-Bob language is author's claim that neither the correspondence nor the deflationary theory of truth are supported by Tarski (pg321-2), though one can easily interpret Tarski as presupposing the deflationary theory. The bottom line is that the concept of true depends on successful reference (pg322).

The discussion now moves to the oddity of possibly understanding a claim about the world to be true but not be about the entities (asteroids or daises or marsupials) referred to (pg323). It does no good to understand a sentence to refer in a causal way-- for instance that I learned about asteroids from a textbook-- since the truth of the matter is dependent on my reference, not the causal connection that put me in the position to assert the truth. In this attack, deflationists need to revise their approach, particularly when it comes to translating sentences between languages (pg323-4), and verificationists are also targeted. The ultimate nemesis is Quine with his theory of radical translation, which author takes on next (pg324-5). The response basically is that Quine misses "a liberal naturalist understanding of what natural-scientific explanations are", and doesn't take seriously "relations between the basic needs and activities of animals and the ecological facts about their environments" (pg325). In other words, we refer to what we perceive, and we happen to perceive in a rather regular physio-psychological manner across languages.

The third position of normative realism is now discussed, but is ultimately given short shrift. Author claims that morality evolves according to human needs and interests, and that Kantian categorical-imperative-like claims (Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other as a stand-in) aren't good foundations for ethics. Instead, they are good tools to use, similar to using utilitarianism as a tool, in recognizing the implications of action (pg326). The final conclusion is liberating: "One can learn from pragmatists and Wittgensteinians and philosophers of so many other kinds without becoming a card-carrying member of any philosophical sect." (pg327)