Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Hilary Putnam, Mario de Caro (Editor) - Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity-Harvard University Press (2016)
Hilary Putnam, Mario de Caro (Editor) - Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity-Harvard University Press (2016)
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:51 PM
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:51 PM
Naturalism,
Realism, and
Normativity
Hilary Putnam
EDITED BY M A RIO DE C A RO
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2016
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:51 PM
Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer ica
First printing
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:51 PM
Contents
I . L I B E R A L N AT U R A L I S M A N D N O R M AT I V I T Y
I I I . R E A L I S M A N D V E R I F I C AT I O N I S M
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:51 PM
vi Contents
I V. N A I V E R E A L I S M , S E N S AT I O N , A N D A P P E R C E P T I O N
V. L O O K I N G B A C K
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:51 PM
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:51 PM
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:51 PM
Introduction
PUTNAM’S PHILOSOPHY AND METAPHILOSOPHY
by Mario De Caro
1. Mathematics, Matter and Method, vol. 1, and Mind, Language and Reality, vol. 2 of Phil-
osophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
2. As Putnam says in “What Theories Are Not,” a lecture delivered to the 1960 Interna-
tional Conference on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science at Stanford Univer-
sity, and collected in Putnam’s Mathematics, Matter and Method, 215–227. “Rather minimal
scientific realism” occurs on p. 224. (This is the fi rst time Putnam recalls calling his posi-
tion “scientific realism.”)
3. The clearer exposition of Putnam’s internal realism is in his Reason, Truth, and History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
1
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
2 Introduction
1. Realism
In 1983 Michael Devitt wrote an article very unsympathetically titled
“Realism and the Renegade Putnam.”5 In that article, Devitt— a stu-
dent of Putnam’s during his graduate years at Harvard— complained
that, by opting for “internal realism,” Putnam became a “renegade”
from philosophical realism, which he had previously defended in the
papers collected in the Philosophical Papers volumes.
Indeed, in 1990 and subsequently, Putnam granted that internal
realism— a view based on an epistemic conception of truth—leaned
too much in an idealistic direction.6 But while acknowledging that in-
ternal realism was a mistake, one can easily see that Devitt’s harsh
judgment was quite unfair. As a matter of fact, Putnam never com-
pletely renounced realism. First of all, in his entire career (including his
4. Putnam used the term “entanglement” in The Collapse of the Fact / Value Dichotomy and
Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), but the idea, if not the
term, was already present in his Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1992) and in his subsequent essays on Dewey’s philosophy, such as those pub-
lished in Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1994).
5. Michael Devitt, “Realism and the Renegade Putnam: A Critical Study of Meaning
and the Moral Sciences, Noûs 17, no. 2 (1983): 291–301.
6. See Chapters 4, 7, and 8 in this work for some discussions on internal realism.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
Introduction 3
7. See Hilary Putnam, “On Not Writing Off Scientific Realism,” in Philosophy in an Age
of Science: Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 91–108.
8. The themes of this section of the introduction are analyzed more in depth in Mario
De Caro, “Realism, Common Sense, and Science,” The Monist 98 (2015): 197–214.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
4 Introduction
9. When discussing the independent existence of an entity, one should not pose the
question in genetic or causal terms. The table in front of me obviously exists because
someone built it; however, once it is built, the table exists independently of whoever built it.
10. The most complete discussion of metaphysical realism and antirealism by Dummett
is in his The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
11. Eddington spoke of “two tables,” the commonsense table and the physicist’s table, in
The Nature of Physical Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929). On this, see
Putnam, “On Not Writing Off Scientific Realism.”
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
Introduction 5
the entities and events (both observable and unobservable) to which our
best scientific theories are ontologically committed, and none of these
has the properties that our commonsense objects are supposed to have
(Eddington’s physicists’ table was not solid, not smooth, etc.). When
taken in their purest forms these two forms of realism are incompat-
ible because each of them is drastically antirealist in the field in which
the other assumes a firmly realist attitude.
It could be argued that the origin of this opposition can be tracked
back to Aristotle’s defense of the commonsense view of the world against
Plato’s peculiar idealism (which actually was a strong form of realism
regarding ideal forms!). More safely, however, one can claim that the
discussion opposing commonsense realism to hyperscientific realism
became explicit when the scientific revolution obtained a foothold. As
early as 1597, Jacopo Mazzoni— a phi losopher who was a colleague
and a good friend of Galileo in Pisa and influenced his intellectual
development—wrote an important book in which, among other things,
he opposed the Aristotelianism of his own time, which defended the
commonsensical, perception-based view of the world, in favor of a ver-
sion of Platonism according to which the natural world is mathemati-
cally structured.12 A few years later, expanding on that view, Galileo
offered the basics of the modern scientific worldview by claiming that
only the mathematizable properties of the bodies investigated by physics
are real, while the so-called secondary qualities—the qualitative prop-
erties that we get through perception and commonsensically attribute
to the external bodies—have no independent existence:
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
6 Introduction
But Galileo did not only defend a rigorous mathematical realism that
relegated secondary properties to the realm of the subjective and cred-
ited as real only primary properties; he also claimed that atoms, the un-
observable entities whose existence he postulated in order to explain
the changes of material states, were real.14 What we have here called
“hyperscientific realism” was born.
In the next centuries, hyperscientific realism was not unchallenged
(idealists and empiricists, for example, rejected it), but it remained an
important presence in Western culture. In his The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), Edmund Husserl of-
fered an influential genealogical account of the antirealist view of the
commonsense world produced by modern science. In his opinion, Gal-
ileo was responsible for
Galileo’s scientific realism (which in his case was a form of Platonism), see Mario De Caro,
“On Galileo’s Platonism, Again,” in Hypotheses and Perspectives within History and Philosophy
of Science. Hommage to Alexandre Koyré 1964–2014, ed. Raffaele Pisano, Joseph Agassi, and
Daria Drozdova (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, forthcoming).
14. In the last years of his life, Galileo might have abandoned atomism in favor of a con-
tinuous conception of space: see Michele Camerota, “Galileo, Lucrezio e l’atomismo,” in
Lucrezio, la natura e la scienza, ed. Marco Beretta and Francesco Citti (Firenze: Biblioteca di
Nuncius / Istituto e Museo di storia della scienza, Leo S. Olschki, 2008).
15. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale
Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, 1936; published in En-
glish as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 48 (emphasis added).
16. Husserl’s “life-world” is a refi nement of the everyday, subjective experience of indi-
viduals, obtained through the “phenomenological reduction.” See Dermot Moran, Hus-
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
Introduction 7
serl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
17. Husserl, Crisis, 48.
18. R. N. D Martin, Pierre Duhem: Philosophy and History in the Work of a Believing Physi-
cist (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1991).
19. Van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism is very dif ferent from the more traditional
empiricism of, say, Hume and the neopositivist philosophers, according to which our
knowledge of the external world coincides with the knowledge of our sense data.
20. Bas van Fraassen, “On McMullin’s Appreciation of Realism,” Philosophy of Science 70
(2003): 479–491, quotation from p. 480.
21. Bas van Fraassen, The Scientifi c Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
8 Introduction
22. Hilary Putnam, “Do True Assertions Correspond to Reality?” in Language and Re-
ality, vol. 2 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1975),
70–84.
23. The main charges against the miracle argument are that it is based on an inference
to the best explanation (which allegedly is either doubtful in itself or not applicable at
this meta- explanatory level); that dif ferent theories can account for the same sets empir-
ical data; and that the history of science shows that false theories (such as Ptolemaic as-
tronomy) can offer excellent predictions. Against these arguments, see Stathis Psillos,
“The Scope and Limits of the No Miracles Argument,” in Explanation, Prediction, and
Confi rmation, ed. Dennis Dieks et al. (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2011), 23–35;
Hilary Putnam, “On Not Writing Off Scientific Realism”; Mario De Caro, “Review of
J. Ritchie, Understanding Naturalism,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19 (2011):
527–531; Mario Alai, “Novel Predictions and the No Miracle Argument,” Erkenntnis 79
(2014): 297–326.
24. See Chapter 5 here.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
Introduction 9
2. Naturalism
The vast majority of scientific realists, including Putnam, defend phil-
osophical naturalism—the conception that stresses the indispensability
of the scientific worldview and rejects any appeal to the supernatural.25
Among these philosophers, however, many combine naturalism with
“hyperscientific realism,” the previously mentioned view according to
which every element of the commonsense worldview that cannot be re-
duced to the scientific worldview is to be rejected. The resulting concep-
tion has been called “scientific naturalism” or “strict naturalism,” and
Putnam has relentlessly criticized it for the last four decades.
In this battle, Putnam has not been alone: the list of philosophers
who have tried to shape more tolerant forms of naturalism—forms that
have been grouped under the label “liberal naturalism”26 —includes
Donald Davidson, John McDowell, Jennifer Hornsby, P. F. Strawson,
Barry Stroud, and Tim Scanlon and is growing fast. However, liberal
naturalism is still a minority view because most of the philosophical
scene in analytic metaphysics continues to be occupied by scientific
naturalism.
It is ironical that, at least in part, scientific naturalism stemmed from
Husserl’s Crisis. In fact, Wilfrid Sellars, one of the founders of scien-
tific naturalism, found inspiration in that book (with the mediation of
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
10 Introduction
27. Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in Frontiers of Science
and Philosophy, ed. R. Colodny (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), 37–78.
On the influx of Husserl on Sellars, see Moran, Husserl’s Crisis, 292–293.
28. Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956; Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1997), 83 (emphasis added).
29. W. V. Quine, Word and Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), and
“Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1969), 69–90.
30. This term is due to Stephen Stich, Deconstructing the Mind (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1996), 199.
31. Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),
1–5; Huw Price, “Naturalism without Representationalism,” in De Caro and Macarthur,
Naturalism in Question, 71–105.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
Introduction 11
gets believed by anyone except the proponent of the account and one
or two of his friends and / or students.”32
Putnamian liberal naturalism, instead, has a pluralistic attitude both
in ontology and epistemology. In his view, not all the real features of
the world can be reduced to the scientifically describable features, and
the natural sciences are not the only genuine source of knowledge to
which all the other apparent sources should hand over their epistemic
pretensions. Obviously, this approach gives rise to what could be called
a “reconciliation problem”—the problem of showing how the dif ferent
kinds of features of the world can all be real without conceptual ten-
sion or even contradiction.33 On this problem, Putnam has a number
of interest ing things to say.
In the last few years, he has started to make his reflections on liberal
naturalism explicit,34 but many impor tant, if scattered, reflections in
that direction can also be found in his previous works. Here is a list of
the most important features that, according to Putnam, a satisfying lib-
eral naturalism should encompass.
32. Hilary Putnam, “The Content and Appeal of ‘Naturalism’,” in De Caro and Macar-
thur, Naturalism in Question, 59–70, quotation from p. 62.
33. Mario De Caro, “Putnam’s Liberal Naturalism,” in Themes from Putnam, ed. Mi-
chael Frauchiger (Berlin: Ontos Verlag, forthcoming).
34. See Chapter 1 here.
35. Putnam, “On Not Writing Off Scientific Naturalism,” and Chapter 5 here.
36. Putnam, “The Diversity of the Sciences: Global versus Local Methodological Ap-
proaches,” in Metaphysics and Morality: Essays in Honor of J. J. C. Smart, ed. Philip Pettit,
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
12 Introduction
Richard Sylan, and Jean Norman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 137–153; repr. “The Di-
versity of the Sciences,” in Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1990), 463–480.
37. Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), passim.
38. Hilary Putnam, “Wittgenstein on Religious Belief,” in On Community, ed. Leroy
Rouner (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 56–75; repr. in Putnam,
Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 134–157.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
Introduction 13
39. Putnam, “Science and Philosophy,” in De Caro and Macarthur, eds., Naturalism and
Normativity, 89–99.
40. Putnam cites Tyler Burge’s Origins of Objectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010) in defense of the scientific legitimacy of realism about representation in the title essay
of this volume.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
14 Introduction
11. Finally, a notion that one should use with caution if one does
not want to end up with the reconciliation problem is that of
41. Hilary Putnam, “From Quantum Mechanics to Ethics and Back Again,” in Philos-
ophy in an Age of Science, 51–71.
42. Sometimes Putnam instead of talking of “cognitive equivalence” talks of “concep-
tual relativity,” but this term could be misleading since it can be interpreted as an opening
to ontological relativity (which Putnam does not want to offer at all).
43. Hilary Putnam, “Reply to Stephen White,” European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 4,
no. 2 (2008): 29–32, quotation from p. 29.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
Introduction 15
3. Normativity
Normativity and ethics are subjects discussed in Chapter 1, while
Chapter 3 concerns the bearing of evolutionary theory on ethics, but
neither normativity nor ethics are large topics in the other chapters of
the present volume. However, Putnam has written extensively on them,
and a word on those writings may help to clarify the discussion in those
two chapters.44 Recurrent themes in Putnam’s past writings are:
1. That values grow out of human needs, and are historic products,
but are not therefore arbitrary or merely culturally relative. (See
Chapter 3.)
2. That neither epistemic values nor ethical values can be reduced
to a single principle. (In particular, “seek successful prediction”
and “try to falsify your theories” are completely insufficient by
themselves.)45
44. Among those writings, in addition to two volumes, The Collapse of the Fact / Value
Dichotomy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002) and Ethics without Ontology
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), particularly useful for readers ap-
proaching this side of Putnam’s thought anew might be his essays on pragmatism and
ethics, particularly “Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity” and (with Ruth Anna Putnam)
“Dewey’s Logic: Epistemology as Hypothesis,” in Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 151–181 and 198–220, respectively.
45. Putnam argued this in “The Philosophers of Science’s Evasion of Values,” collected
in The Collapse of the Fact / Value Dichotomy.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
16 Introduction
46. Putnam argues this in The Collapse of the Fact / Value Dichotomy, 135–145.
47. Putnam, “Philosophers of Science’s Evasion,” 142.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
Introduction 17
48. Galileo Galilei, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, 1632; published in En-
glish as Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican, trans.
Stillman Drake (1953; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 341 (emphasis added).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
18 Introduction
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:58 PM
D1
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity
Naturalism
The terms “naturalism” and “realism” are useful (and even indispens-
able on occasion), but each of them has been applied to a wide range of
dif ferent and even incompatible positions. I very much like the term
“liberal naturalism,” which I first encountered in an important collection
of essays edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur entitled Nat-
uralism in Question. In my essay in that collection,1 I pointed out that
while Boyd, Casper, and Trout’s The Philosophy of Science admirably takes
the trouble to tell us what the editors mean by “naturalism” (and their
naturalism is certainly not “liberal”),2 their definition is disjunctive, and
thus offers us two possible meanings of “naturalism” rather than one.
According to Boyd and colleagues, naturalism is “[t]he view that all
phenomena are subject to natural laws, and / or [sic] that the methods
of the natural sciences are applicable in every area of inquiry,” and I
argued that both disjuncts are extremely vague. In what sense does a
“naturalist” have to believe that the “phenomenon” of Shakespeare’s
21
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
22 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
3. See W. V. Quine, Word and Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), and
“Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1969), 69–90.
4. Bernard Williams, Descartes: the Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1978).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity 23
I don’t know whether Tyler Burge would ever employ the term “lib-
eral naturalism,” but I do know that his Origins of Objectivity is a great
book.5 It takes indispensability for good scientific explanations (the sci-
ences in question being vision science and related parts of psychology,
in particular) to be sufficient reason for accepting an unreduced notion
of representation in psychology and philosophy of mind, and I agree;
at the same time, what Burge writes about “naturalization projects in
philosophy” is surely in the spirit of “liberal naturalism”:
The reason I say that this is in the spirit of liberal naturalism is not
just Burge’s rejection of reductionism; some hard naturalists are quite
proud of being “nonreductive materialists” or the like. But even when
hard naturalists eschew the demand that reference and representation
talk be reduced to physical vocabulary, they feel the need to explain ref-
erence and representation in terms of “causal relations.”7 Even if the
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
24 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
Metaphysically Realist
Readers who know of my philosophy from Wikipedia may be surprised
to find me saying that my position is “metaphysically realist.” Had I not
consistently attacked metaphysical realism from “Realism and Reason”
(1978) on?12 Well, not exactly. In that lecture and for a number of years
afterward, I used “metaphysical realism” (sometimes with capital let-
ters) as a term for a specific position whose main feature was the insis-
tence that the world can be divided into (mind-independent) objects and
properties in exactly one way. But the use of that term was a mistake
on my part. It was a mistake because, although I repeatedly explained
8. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, eds., Naturalism and Normativity (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010).
9. Huw Price, “Naturalism without Representationalism,” in De Caro and Macarthur,
Naturalism in Question, 71–105.
10. See David Macarthur, “Putnam, Pragmatism, and the Fate of Metaphysics,” Euro-
pean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 4, no. 2 (2008): 33–46.
11. Hilary Putnam, “Reply to David Macarthur,” European Journal of Analytic Philosophy
4, no. 2 (2008): 47–49.
12. Hilary Putnam, “Realism and Reason,” in Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 123–138.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity 25
Let me say for the record that I utterly and totally reject all ver-
sions of the “end of philosophy” story, whether they come from
Wittgensteinians, Rortians, Heideggerians, Derridians, or who-
ever. Philosophy was not a mistake; not in Parmenides’s time, not
in Plato’s time, not in Aristotle’s or Descartes’s or Hume’s or Kant’s
times, and not in our time. As Etienne Gilson put it, “philosophy
always buries its undertakers.”15
13. Hilary Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of
the Human Mind,” Journal of Philosophy 91 (1994): 445–517; reprinted in Hilary Putnam,
The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999),
3–70.
14. Hilary Putnam, “From Quantum Mechanics to Ethics and Back Again,” in Bagh-
ramian, Reading Putnam, 19–36.
15. Putnam, “From Quantum Mechanics to Ethics and Back Again,” 68.
16. Tim Maudlin, “Confessions of a Hardcore, Unsophisticated Metaphysical Realist,”
in The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. R. E. Auxier, D. R. Anderson, and L. A. Hahn (Chi-
cago: Open Court, 2015), 487–501.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
26 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
The thesis that a theory “ideal as far as we can tell” might actually be
false simply amounts to the claim that a statement that we are episte-
mically entitled to accept as part of our best theory of the world might
be false, and there might be no way of verifying that it is false. And I
agree with Maudlin that there are such statements.
Hence, if we understand metaphysical realism as he does, as simply
making that claim, metaphysical realism is true. For example, there
might be very strong reasons to believe that there are intelligent extra-
terrestrials, including radio signals or whatever, but the signals could
be the product of quantum mechanical fluctuations of immensely low
probability. And metaphysical realism in Maudlin’s sense is part of my
17. Putnam, “Realism and Reason,” 123–138. The passage quoted is at p. 125.
18. Maudlin, “Confessions,” 485.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity 27
19. The original publication was in Polish in 1933, and the German translation appeared
in 1935. The 1956 English translation was reprinted as Alfred Tarski, “The Concept of
Truth in Formalized Languages,” in Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923
to 1938, ed. John Corcoran, trans. J. H. Woodger (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983 [1956]),
152–278.
20. Kurt Gödel, The Consistency of the Continuum Hypothesis, Annals of Mathematics
Studies 3 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1940).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
28 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
21. Hartry Field, “Tarsky’s Theory of Truth,” Journal of Philosophy 69, no. 13 (1972):
347–375.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity 29
s ⇔ FORM(s*)
is a theorem of Meta-Bob.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
30 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity 31
Fregean language, FORM(x) has the right Bedeutung, but not the right
Sinn. But by giving two of his papers the titles “The Concept of Truth
in Formalized Languages” and “The Semantical Concept of Truth” [em-
phasis added], Tarski certainly gave the impression that his formal re-
sults somehow do capture the Sinn of “true in Bob” (that is, that they
capture the concept of truth) and not just the extension of that everyday
language semantical predicate.
A Technical Section
To explain all this, I need to say something about how one defi nes
FORM(x) following Tarski’s recipe. Simplifying outrageously by pre-
tending that all the predicates of Bob are monadic (the fact that this is
in general not the case is the reason that all the mathematical ingenuity
in Tarski’s paper was required), the easiest way to do this is to imagine
that we construct Meta-Bob in two stages. I shall also, less outrageously,
simplify by assuming Bob contains no names, only predicates, and (since
the universal quantifier can be defined in terms of the existential quan-
tifier [(x)F(x) ⇔ ¬(Ex) ¬F(x)]), I shall assume the primitive notation of
Bob has only the existential quantifier.
Stage 1. First, (if necessary) we add to the vocabulary of Bob enough
apparatus to do logical syntax (but not semantics!), that is, logical means
for quantifying over strings of symbols, such as the letter capital S fol-
lowed by the letter n followed by the letter o followed by the letter w,
and over finite sequences of such strings. We also ensure it is possible
to define such syntactic predicates as “x (a string of symbols) is a wff
(well-formed formula) of Bob” and “x (a string of wffs) is a proof in Bob,”
“x is a theorem of Bob,” and so on.
Stage 2. We temporarily add to Meta-Bob a primitive predicate Ref(x, y),
which we will read as “x (a wff of Bob with one free variable) refers to y.”
The interpretation of Ref should be clear from the following example:
if x is “F(v)” and a is an entity in the range of the quantifiers of Bob,
then [Ref(x, a) ⇔ F(a)].
Next, we start to create an inductive definition of “Ref” by adding to
the axioms (the axioms of Bob plus whatever axioms we need to do syntax
and set theory in Meta-Bob) as follows: for each atomic predicate—say,
“Glub(x)”—of Bob, we add as an axiom ( y)[Ref(“Glub” followed by
“(” followed by x followed by “),” y) ⇔ F( y)]. In words, “Glub(x)” refers
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
32 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
to y if and only if Glub( y), and similarly for all the other atomic predi-
cates of Bob. Note that there are only fi nitely many atomic predicates
in what Tarski calls “formalized languages,” and hence only fi nitely
many of these axioms. These axioms are the basis clauses of the induc-
tive definition.
Stage 3. We add further axioms recursively extending the definition
of “Ref” to molecular formulas, for example, an axiom saying that if x
is the result of writing the disjunction symbol “∨” between inscriptions
w and z, then Ref(x, y) ⇔ Ref(x, w) ∨ Ref(x, z), and an axiom saying that
if x is the result of writing the negation symbol “¬” before w, then
Ref(x, y) ⇔ ¬Ref(x, w).
And (important!) we add to the axioms the statement, duly formal-
ized, that for all w, if v is a variable, and w is z preceded by an existen-
tial quantifier (Ev), and z contains no free variables dif ferent from v,
then {Ref(w,1) ⇔ (Ex)Ref(z, x)} & {(Ref(w, 0) ⇔ ¬(Ex)(Ref(z, x)}. This
amounts to adopting the convention that a sentence (a wff with no free
variable) “refers to” 1 if it is true and to 0 if it isn’t.
Note that even if Bob’s primitive predicates were all monadic, Bob
would in general still contain polyadic defined predicates, for example,
“F(x) ∨ y = 0” and “F(x) & ¬F( y)”; therefore, we need a further clause in
our inductive definition for existential quantification of a polyadic for-
mula, but formulating such a clause requires more of Tarski’s technique
than we shall explain. Suffice it say that this technique involves con-
structing Ref as a relation between formulas and sequences (in fact, even-
tually constant infinite sequences) of objects.
Stage 4. Now comes the crucial stage. Given that “Ref” has been
inductively defined, it is a straightforward application of techniques
familiar to logicians from Frege on to turn the inductive defi nition
of “Ref(x, y)” into an explicit definition of a two-place predicate, say,
SAT( y, x) [read: “y satisfies x,” employing Tarski’s terminology]27 pro-
vided Meta-Bob has strong enough set theoretic axioms; if it doesn’t, we
just add them. And voilà, we have a predicate of Meta-Bob whose defi-
nition involves only the atomic predicates of Bob and (if necessary) the
27. Instead of speaking of a formula as referring to (a sequence of) objects, Tarski speaks
of (the sequence of) objects as satisfying the formula; I have imitated Tarski’s language here,
which is why “Ref(x, y)” has suddenly become “SAT( y, x).” Note that “Ref(x, y)” gets
dropped from the notation of Meta-Bob in the course of my “stages.”
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity 33
28. Note that inductive defi nition depends only on the logical and syntactical axioms we
added, but not on any “semantical” axioms!
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
34 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
29. In 1953, Carnap suggested to me a way of meeting this objection. I describe Carnap’s
objection (which depended on defining Bob by Bob’s “semantical rules”) and show why it fails
in Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 61–67.
30. I put it this way in “Comparison of Something with Something Else.”
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity 35
FORM(s*) ⇔ s
true(s*) ⇔ s,
it follows that
FORM(s*) ⇔ true(s*).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
36 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
32. See Hilary Putnam, “Comment on Michael Devitt,” in Baghramian, Reading Putnam,
121–126.
33. See Hilary Putnam, “Richard Rorty on Real ity and Justification,” in Rorty and His
Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 81–87.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity 37
34. If a modal primitive is added to the language, say the symbol ◊, then the appro-
priate clause will read: a satisfies ◊F just in case ◊(a satisfies F). Here is a word example:
take F(x) to be (Ey)(x loves y). Interpret ◊ as physical possibility (or, alternatively, so cio-
log ical possibility), and take a to be Alice. Then “a satisfies ◊F” says that Alice satisfies “it
is possible x loves somebody,” “◊(a satisfies F)” says that it is possible that Alice satisfies “x
loves somebody,” and these two formulas have the same truth condition, namely, that in some
possible world there is a person whom Alice loves. In mathematical jargon, “satisfies” com-
mutes with ◊. [In my view, “in some possible world there is” means that it is possible that
there is a world in which there is; modal logic does not presuppose the actual existence of
possible worlds.]
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
38 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
where the three dots are to be replaced by the translation of the sen-
tence s in English.
That the notion of translation is needed for disquotation and therefore
needed by deflationists (since their thesis is that grasp of disquotation is
all that is needed for an understanding of truth) is widely recognized. But
what I have not seen discussed by deflationists, let alone taken seriously,
is the thought that translating sentences presupposes knowing what their de-
scriptive constituents refer to. It is an illusion that disquotation does not
presuppose the relation of reference.
The idea that one can speak of translation as if it didn’t involve
reference can’t, of course, just stem from verificationism, as it did in
Carnap, although Horwich, a leading deflationist, once suggested
that sameness of meaning is just sameness of “use” and coupled this
with an explic itly verificationist account of “use.” He wrote, “The
communal disposition to use a word in a certain way should not be
regarded as simply the disposition to treat certain sentences as defi-
nitely and permanently acceptable and others not. In addition, there
are dispositions to sanction various levels of confidence [cashed out as
“betting behavior”] in the truth of certain sentences—where the ap-
propriate degrees of belief are a function of observable circumstances.”35
Degrees of confi rmation were also identified with betting behav ior
by Carnap.
35. Paul Horwich, “Wittgenstein and Kripke on the Nature of Meaning,” Mind and
Language 2 (Summer 1990): 105–121 (emphasis added).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity 39
36. W. V. Quine, “Speaking of Objects,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philo-
sophical Association 31 (1958): 5–22; reprinted in W. V. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other
Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 1–25.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
40 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
Normativity in Ethics
When philosophers teach ethics courses, they naturally emphasize the
places at which the major theories and thinkers disagree. Less often do
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity 41
they try to see how insights from dif ferent schools of thought can be
combined. Yet it is especially impor tant to do that in ethics because
when the subject matter is how to live, as John Dewey emphasized in his
sections of Dewey and Tufts’s monumental Ethics,38 no one school has
a monopoly on insight. Utilitarianism is inadequate as an account of
our ethical lives, but it does identify a question that all too often needs
be put to someone who proposes a significant rule of action, law, or
policy: “Would it contribute to the satisfaction of more people’s desires
or interests than the alternatives?” At the same time, pragmatists such
as Dewey point out that desires and interests may be partial and selfish
and that even when they are not, they may be based on bad reasoning
or bad information. Desires and interests are not simply givens whose
satisfaction needs to be maximized (as too many economists have as-
sumed); they need to be subjected to intelligent and informed criticism.39
And Kantians have long pointed out that what satisfies the desires and
interests of even a substantial majority may be wrong because it tramples
on the rights of a minority.
Although, I don’t agree with Scanlon’s claim that morality can be
founded on the single principle that “an act is wrong if its performance
under the circumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles
for the general regulation of behav ior that no one could reasonably
reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement,” 40 I do see
that principle as a laudable attempt to state what is right in Kant’s cat-
egorical imperative in a naturalistic spirit—that is, to state it in a way
that does not depend on Kant’s untenable belief that respect for the
moral law has a “supersensible” source (as contrasted to our “inclina-
tions” that have a natural source). Like Dewey,41 I see the categorical
38. John Dewey, Ethics, vol. 5: 1908, in The Middle Works, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boyd-
ston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 283–284.
39. See Hilary Putnam, “Dewey’s Central Insight,” in John Dewey’s Educational Philos-
ophy in International Perspective: A New Democracy for the Twenty- First Century, ed. L. A.
Hickman and Giuseppe Spadafora (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
2009), 7–21.
40. I criticize that idea in “Capabilities and Two Ethical Theories,” collected in Hilary
Putnam, Philosophy in an Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism, ed. by Mario De
Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 299–311.
The quotation from Scanlon is from What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1998).
41. Dewey, Ethics, 283–284.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
42 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
In Closing
Part of what I have been saying might be summarized thus: the fact
that something— perceptual representation or reference or truth or
intentionality or reasons— can’t be “naturalized” in the way that “physi-
calists” demand doesn’t make those things “non-natural” or “queer” or
suspiciously close to “supernatural.” It is true that the notion of a reason,
for example, is not the subject matter of a special science, but that notion
is presupposed by all science as well as by fields like history and politics
and criticism (including philosophical criticism) that are not sciences,
because in all of them one has to decide what there is reason to con-
sider, and “elegance” figures in the reasons scientists give for testing
certain theories at all. They are not scientific notions, but the activity
of science presupposes a reasonable command of them.43
42. Concerning the Categorical Imperative, Dewey wrote, “As a method (though not of
course the only one) of realizing the full meaning of a proposed course of action, nothing
could be better than asking ourselves how we should like to be committed forever to its
principle: how we should like to have others committed to it, and to treat us according to
it? . . . In short, by generalizing a purpose, we make its general character evident” (Ethics,
283–284).
43. See Hilary Putnam, “The Philosophers of Science’s Evasion of Values,” in The Col-
lapse of the Fact-Value Dichotomy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002),
135–145.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity 43
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 5:59 PM
D2
On Bernard Williams’s
“Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline”
44
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:00 PM
On Bernard Williams’s “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” 45
Since I did not mean by “the ultimate metaphysical truth” any more
than “a description of the world as it is anyway,” there is already a mis-
understanding at work here. The reason I spoke of physics in the pas-
sage Williams quotes, and not more vaguely of “science” as Williams
does here, is that Williams himself has elsewhere said explicitly that the
notion of an “absolute conception” does not “look too pale” because we
have a conception of “what an adequate physics might look like.”3 I did
make— and will go on making, until and unless Williams himself cor-
rects me— one further assumption: I take Williams’s position to be that
the description of the world in terms of its nonperspectival properties
is a complete description of all of the world. It isn’t, that is to say, that
an exhaustive description of the world in terms of all the “absolute”
properties would only describe a part of the world, and there is another
part, the “perspectival part,” that would still remain to be described.
This means that if a semantical statement, for example, “John referred
to object X,” describes a “perspectival fact”— say, the fact that in such-
and-such a perspective, John referred to object X—then that whole fact,
including the perspective and John and the object X and the relation
between them—must somehow appear in the “absolute conception.”
And the absolute description is envisaged as being given in terms of the
fundamental magnitudes of physics! Thus, it seemed to me that Wil-
liams does need to somehow reduce semantical facts to purely physical
facts if he is not to become an outright denier of the real ity of the
semantical (an “eliminationist,” in the jargon of contemporary ana-
lytic philosophy).4 And in his book Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:00 PM
46 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:00 PM
On Bernard Williams’s “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” 47
I never thought that this was Williams’s idea; I have far too much re-
spect for Williams’s intelligence to charge him with such an obvious
blunder. Nor did the assertion he quotes (“we cannot divide language
into two parts, a part that describes the world ‘as it is anyway’ and a part
that describes our conceptual contribution”) accuse him of making that
blunder. To think, as I said Williams thinks, that there is a part of
language that describes the world “as it is anyway” is to accuse him
of thinking that there are concepts that do this, and not to accuse
him of thinking that we can describe the world “as it is anyway” without
using concepts (whatever describing without using concepts might mean).
Our disagreement is over whether it makes sense to think that the concepts
of physics do this (assuming, as I said I will continue to assume until Wil-
liams corrects me, that the description of the world in terms of its “abso-
lute” properties is supposed to be a description of all of the world.)
8. See my “From Quantum Mechanics to Ethics and Back Again,” in Reading Putnam,
ed. Maria Baghramian (Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2013), 19–36, esp. 28–30.
9. Williams, “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline,” 482.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:00 PM
48 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:00 PM
On Bernard Williams’s “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” 49
tions are normative, and hence could not figure in any purely scientific
conception.”
I myself have never affirmed or denied that there could be a “scien-
tific conception” of semantic relations. As I have explained elsewhere,12
I think the terms “science” and “scientific” are much too vague for that
question to make sense. But I take it that what Williams means by the
phrase “purely scientific conception” here is “absolute conception,” or,
perhaps, conception that is at least a good sketch of what an absolute
conception might be. (He says, and I have already quoted this, that we
already have a notion of what an “adequate physics” might be, and that
this fleshes out our understanding of what an “absolute conception”
could be; he has also said that “the world itself has only primary quali-
ties.”)13 Thus it seems clear that Williams himself provides all the
premises I needed to argue that, on his own view, semantic relations
do not figure at all in the absolute conception. Indeed, in the lecture to
which I am replying he wrote, “I take it as obvious that any attempt
to reduce semantic relations to concepts of physics is doomed.” So I do
not see why references to my view that “semantic relations are norma-
tive,” and the expression “Let us grant for the sake of the argument the
principle, which is certainly disputable, that if semantic relations are
normative, an account of them cannot figure in the absolute concep-
tion,” come into Williams’s discussion at all. Given what Williams says
about the absolute conception (e.g., that it contains only primary
qualities— and, presumably, what is definable in terms of primary
qualities using the apparatus of mathematical physics), and what he
says about semantic relations, it follows from Williams’s premises—not
just from mine—that “an account of them cannot figure in the abso-
lute conception.” And given his characterization of the absolute con-
ception, it is not hard to see that he is right. What would an account of
a semantical relation in the language of mathematical physics (or in
terms of “primary qualities”) be?
It is, of course, true that I believe that semantic relations are norma-
tive, not in the sense of believing that semantical statements are value
judgments, which would be absurd, but in the sense (and this far I agree
12. Compare with my “The Idea of Science,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 15 (1990): 57–
64; collected in my Words and Life, 481–491.
13. Williams, Descartes, 247.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:00 PM
50 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
14. I have argued this in a number of places, most recently in the Threefold Cord: Mind,
Body and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 119–125, and in “Aristotle’s
Mind and the Contemporary Mind,” in Demetra Sfendoni-Mentzou, Jagdish Hattiangadi,
and D. M. Johnston, eds., Aristotle and Contemporary Science (New York: Peter Lang, 2000),
7–28.
15. Compare Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Routledge,
1985), 136.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:00 PM
On Bernard Williams’s “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” 51
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:00 PM
52 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
17. I discuss what Williams says about ethics in Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 122–129.
18. Having gone Davidsonian, Williams cannot avail himself of the solution that “the
earth” and “the sun” are rigid designators and not descriptions in these judgments!
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:00 PM
On Bernard Williams’s “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” 53
for his view that “psychological contents” (and hence meaning and
reference) are not “absolute,” let us see how this statement fares on
their respective philosophical views. In Quine’s view, to say that “the
earth” refers to a certain planet is “parochial” in the sense that (1) the
term “the earth” can be mapped on infi nitely many dif ferent things
via what Quine calls “proxy functions,” and (2) each of the resulting
mappings is as entitled to be regarded as “the” relation of reference as
any other. Of course, each of the infinitely many resulting models of
my language is such that (in the corresponding model of my metalan-
guage) the sentence “ ‘the earth’ refers to the earth” is true; but that
doesn’t mean that there is a fact of the matter as to which object the
term “the earth” in the above statement refers to (just as there is no
fact of the matter as to which object “Tabitha” refers to, even though
“ ‘Tabitha’ refers to Tabitha” remains true no matter what proxy
function we choose). It is only relative to a “translation scheme” that
I am talking about the earth at all. And in Davidson’s account of ref-
erence, the same thing happens, as I have already noted, notwith-
standing his claim that his greater willingness to appeal to charity “re-
duces” indeterminacy.19
There is an important difference between Quine and Davidson (but
I do not see how Williams will be able to take advantage of it). Davidson
does think that whole sentences have determinate truth conditions, and
truth, for Davidson, is not simply disquotational (as it is for Quine). It
is not that Davidson defines “true”; famously, he holds that it is a simple
and clear idea that needs no definition. But in his view there is a con-
nection between my sentence “The earth is 93 million miles from the
sun” and the world external to language, one that is captured precisely
by the truth condition for my sentence. And to be a thinker at all, ac-
cording to Davidson, I have to have such notions as “holds true” and
“is true”; other wise, I cannot even form concepts. So Davidson’s view
implies that all those extraterrestrial investigators that Williams hy-
pothesizes in his thought experiment must have the notion of truth;
that there is a difference between a false sentence and a true one is some-
thing they must recognize from the word “go.” So “true” would seem
to belong to the absolute conception—unless the reason they converge
19. Davidson, Essays on Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984),
221–240.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:00 PM
54 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
20. I argue this in detail in “A Comparison of Something with Something Else,” col-
lected in Realism with a Human Face, 330–350.
21. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1994), 129–161.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:00 PM
On Bernard Williams’s “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” 55
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:00 PM
D3
What Evolutionary Theory
Doesn’t Tell Us about Ethics
1. Hilary Putnam, Susan Neimann, and Jeffey Schloss, eds., Understanding Moral Senti-
ments from a Darwinian Perspective: An Exploration of the Roots and Complexity of Ethical Judg-
ment (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2014).
56
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:26 PM
What Evolutionary Theory Doesn’t Tell Us about Ethics 57
we have come to call ethics. (Of course, I do not deny that sympathy
and altruistic behaviors, even if they do not amount to ethics all by
themselves, are among the preconditions for the complex institution
that we call ethics. Indeed, they are probably among the preconditions
for the complex institution that we call science, and for the complex
institution that we call government—perhaps for all complex human
institutions.)
I speak of “what we have come to call ethics,”2 because my claim is
that ethics is something with a long cultural history. Ethics has devel-
oped and changed throughout recorded history (and doubtless had a
prehistory that is much longer than recorded history). I know, of course,
that stressing the role that culture plays in producing what we call
“ethics” is often considered tantamount to endorsing “moral relativism”
or even “nihilism”; that is, it is considered to entail that there is no
objective rightness or wrongness to ethical judgments, but that, I believe,
is a mistake. That ethics has a cultural and not only an evolutionary his-
tory, that it underwent a long process of development, and that it
wasn’t something that was “fixed in our genes” from the beginning does
not by itself imply anything about either the rationality or the objec-
tivity of ethical judgments.
To illustrate what I mean by the “cultural history” of ethics, I will offer
a much-too-brief account of a few moments in the development
of Western ethics; ideally, one would wish to consider also the history of
Chinese ethics over the same period of time, the history of Indian
ethics, and so on. (In The Idea of Justice,3 Amartya Sen draws on the
history of Indian ethics at a number of places.) At any rate, the term
“ethics” in the West assumes something like its present meaning with
Aristotle’s lectures, particularly the ones written up by his students and
preserved for us as the Nicomachean Ethics. Although Aristotelian ethics
is still relevant today and one of the leading approaches among Anglo-
phone ethicists, called “virtue ethics,” acknowledges Aristotle as its
forefather, there are many ways in which this concept of ethics is very
dif ferent from post-Enlightenment ethics.
2. I shall not distinguish, as some theorists do, between “ethics” and “morals”; indeed,
“moralis” functioned for Latin ethicists, such as Cicero who introduced it, as simply the
translation of the Greek “ethika.”
3. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:26 PM
58 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
4. Marc Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and
Wrong (New York: Ecco, 2006). I prescind from the problems that surfaced about Professor
Hauser’s research.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:26 PM
What Evolutionary Theory Doesn’t Tell Us about Ethics 59
after them, knowing what the good life consists in, particularly knowing
that the highest goods in life are definitely not the accumulation of
wealth, fame, or sensual pleasure, were the central topics.
Fast-forwarding more than two millennia and coming to the Enlight-
enment, we find that equality has become a central topic.5 The great
historical changes that culminated in the American and French Revo-
lutions were influenced by the idea of government as a “social contract”
into which all the citizens enter, and after those revolutions, it eventually
became the dominant model in the West (and powerfully influenced
such leaders as Sun Yat-sen and Mahatma Gandhi in the East as well).
It is true, of course, that as late as World War I, many of the leading
states of Eu rope were still monarchies, albeit “constitutional monar-
chies”; nonetheless, the idea that a just government rests on the con-
sent of the governed has become the dominant moral-political idea in
the West and, at least at the level of lip ser vice, in the world.
If we look more closely at the process by which democratic and egal-
itarian values acquired their present centrality, we can also see that
changes in epistemology, many of them connected with changes in our
understanding of how the natu ral sciences should proceed, played a
large role in changing our conceptions of ethics.
What I have in mind is this: according to Aristotle— and Aristotle
was the most influential philosopher of science for almost two
millennia— science reveals necessary truths about the world. Aristotle
indeed valued observation, and he even spoke of “induction.” But, in the
end, observation and induction are to lead us to necessary truths, and
necessary truths, once properly perceived, are supposed to be “apo-
dictic,” unrevisable. This idea was, of course, challenged by empiricists
from the seventeenth century on. In our own time, the overthrow of
the idea of apodictic truth was part of the overthrow of the analytic–
synthetic dichotomy, and more broadly of the a priori–a posteriori di-
chotomy, that Quine deserves so much credit for.
Why do I mention equality, democracy, and the a priori–a posteriori
dichotomy virtually in the same breath? The reason is this: as early as
Aristotle and Plato, the question of the equality or inequality of men
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:26 PM
60 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
and women, particularly the question whether women should be the po-
litical equals of men, was one about which there was disagreement. In
his Republic, Plato famously argued6 that women should be eligible to
be “Guardians,” that is, members of the ruling elite of his ideal state.
Aristotle, however, “justified” the prejudices of his time (and his “justi-
fication” was widely accepted—by men, of course—for more than two
thousand years) by arguing that women should not be eligible because
they lacked the higher form of intelligence, intellectual nous. Today,
such a claim would be regarded as an empirical claim and as a claim
that has been falsified. But in Aristotle’s time and after, it was accepted
(by men!) as something more or less self-evident. Originally, this
“justification” was accepted (by those men who saw the need for a jus-
tification) largely on Aristotle’s authority, and eventually it came to be
regarded as one of those self-evident truths that reason simply comes
to perceive after appropriate examination of the phenomena. And once
a supposed truth about nature had achieved that status in ancient and
medieval science, it was viewed as unnecessary and inappropriate to
look for “evidence” for or against.
If the whole history of ethics were simply a history of different “codes”
of conduct supported by claims of the “superiority” or “inferiority” of
dif ferent groups of people, or the “superiority or “inferiority” of dif-
ferent ways of life, that were not themselves subject to rational challenge, then
it could indeed be argued that the fact that ethical codes are cultural
products supports “ethical relativism,” or even what Alex Rosenberg has
called “nihilism,” but that argument goes too fast. For with the Enlight-
enment came not only the valorization of equality but also the valori-
zation of the new post-Galilean science. And with the valorization of
modern science came the idea that claims about nature, including claims
about human nature, are empirical claims that can be challenged and
investigated.
It is true that so-called “racial science” exerted a baneful influence
well into the last century, and in the eyes of the German Nazis pro-
vided a “justification” for the Holocaust; but today we do know that the
claims of “racial science” were both empirically false and profoundly
unscientific in their supposed methodology. Generalizing this case, we
see that the presuppositions upon which a supposedly ethical form of behavior
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:26 PM
What Evolutionary Theory Doesn’t Tell Us about Ethics 61
are based can themselves frequently be rationally criticized, and this is enough
to show that the “nihilistic” picture of ethics as just a matter of “condi-
tioning” by one’s culture, “conditioning” to value behaviors that are
rationally arbitrary, is a naive oversimplification. We are, of course,
brought up in cultures, and we acquire beliefs from our cultures, but
it is possible to ask whether those beliefs are reasonable or unreason-
able. For example, the idea that the highest type of human being is a
brave male warrior, and that society should therefore be led by brave
male warriors—the idea that the standard of human value should be
bravery in battle—was one that had already come to seem unreasonable
by the time of Plato and Aristotle (which is obviously not to say that they
didn’t value bravery in battle).
Of course, a “nihilist” may retort, “Sure, but what is ‘reasonable’
and ‘unreasonable’ is itself just a matter of conditioning.” But if judg-
ments of the reasonable and unreasonable are themselves outside of
the domain of rational criticism, then science itself must lie outside the
domain of rational criticism. For science is not just a matter of checking
“predictions,” as the positivists seemed to think; it is also a matter of
deciding which hypotheses are worth the time and expense of exper-
imental testing, as the great pragmatist C. S. Peirce already empha-
sized, and such decisions, as Walsh and I have argued in a number of
papers,7 presuppose epistemic values. Indeed, even when a theory is
tested experimentally, the decision as to which experiments to trust
and which to regard as dubious requires judgments of “coherence” and
“plausibility,” which resemble aesthetic judgments. (This is particu-
larly true of evolutionary theories, by the way, which are always open
to the suspicion of being just-so stories.) If all values are regarded as
matters of arbitrary conditioning, then science itself should be regarded
“nihilistically” as well.
I don’t mean to suggest that virtue ethics and social contract theory
exhaust all the dif ferent sorts of ethical concerns we have; obviously
they don’t. Rather, my picture is this: ethics, as we know it, rests on
a certain number of human interests. Some of those interests, for ex-
ample, the interest in a stable polis, large or small, are virtually universal
among human communities, and perhaps evolutionary psychology can
7. These papers are collected in Hilary Putnam and Vivian Walsh, The End of Value-Free
Economy (Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2014).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:26 PM
62 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
tell something about them. Others, however, came to the fore only
after the old claims of the innate superiority of one “race” over an-
other, or one gender over another, or warriors over nonwarriors crum-
bled in the face of reasonable criticism. In short, I believe that there are
learning processes in history, and that the rise of ethical systems that
value equality and not inequality and that see just governments as
resting upon the consent of the governed rather than on the divine
right of kings (or the innate superiority of philosophers) represents
progress. If there is evolution here, it is cultural evolution, and cultural
evolution, as has often been remarked, is “Lamarckian”; in cultural
history, there is an “inheritance,” that is to say a transmission, of ac-
quired characteristics, and those characteristics are not themselves
written into our genes.
As I pointed out above, certain of the interests that became central
to ethics in the West did so as the result of enormous political trans-
formations, transformations that are still continuing or striving to
continue in many parts of the world (for example, as I write these
words, in Iran), as the demand for the rule of law and the idea of the
“consent of the governed” become fundamental and acquire the aspi-
ration to universality.
The interest that my colleague and good friend Thomas Scanlon sees
as constitutive of ethics, the interest in being guided by a set of rules
that are accepted by all with an interest in a just society, and that no
one with that interest can reasonably object to, I see not as the founda-
tion of ethics but as something that has come to be one of the basic in-
terests of ethics. But there are others. I do believe that Scanlon has well
described how one sort of ethical claim can have motivating force in
any community that shares one of the basic interests of morality. But I
also believe that morality has a number of basic interests, including re-
spect for the humanity in the Other, equality of moral rights and re-
sponsibilities, compassion for suffering, and concern to promote human
well-being, and not only the desire to be governed by principles for
which one can give one another reasons, although that too is one of
them. Even though these interests sometimes conflict, I believe that,
on the whole and over time, promoting any one of them will require
promoting the others. Precisely for this reason, a philosopher who suc-
cumbs to the temptation to see ethics as standing on a single “founda-
tion” can always write a book “showing” that all of ethics “derives” from
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:26 PM
What Evolutionary Theory Doesn’t Tell Us about Ethics 63
that interest—indeed many such books have already been written.8 But
I believe this temptation should be resisted.
To sum up, then: I am suggesting that the history of ethics is what
I just called “Lamarckian” and not “Darwinian.” It is the history of
the evolution of a set of distinctive interests that themselves presup-
pose certain historical developments; in par ticular, they more and
more presuppose the development of democratic societies. I do not
agree that these interests are arbitrary; I don’t believe that the interest
in democracy is an “arbitrary” interest; on the contrary, I agree with
de Tocqueville that even if “the great democratic revolution” that oc-
curred in his time was “a new thing” it also represented “the most
continuous, ancient and permanent tendency known in history.” 9 But
if Tocqueville is right, and the aspiration to democracy is a very old
one, the realization of that aspiration, even to the imperfect extent
that it has been realized today, is a very recent phenomenon as histor-
ical time goes. Certainly, there were those who aspired to see the
equality of men and women and the equality of all races and an end to
theocracy, nonconstitutional monarchy, and all forms of dictatorship
in the very distant past, but it required new means of criticism, scien-
tific and philosophical criticism, to overthrow the arguments for in-
equality that dominated for so long. In short, we have in ethics a vast
complex of institutions and a vast complex of concerns, and one doesn’t
even begin to scratch the surface of that complex if one confi nes one-
self to talking about “altruism.”
Before closing, however, I need to say something about the
“Chomskian” view proposed by Marc Hauser in Moral Minds. According
to that view, our species has an “innate moral grammar,” and all the
historical developments that I have described would be just so many
dif ferent realizations of that universal moral grammar. According to
Hauser, the grammar itself can be accounted for by evolutionary
psychology. There are at least two major difficulties with this theory,
in my view.
8. In Ethics without Ontology, I said of the ethicists who succumb to this temptation that
“it is as if they wanted to see ethics as a noble statue standing at the top of a single pillar”
[Nelson’s Column, perhaps], and I added that “I see ethics as a table with many legs, which
wobbles a lot [ because the floor is not even] but is very hard to turn over” (28).
9. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in Amer ica, trans. George Lawrence (Chicago: En-
cyclopedia Britannica, 1990), 1.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:26 PM
64 LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY
10. Noam Chomsky, Language and the Problems of Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1988), 62–63.
11. However, if, as Chomsky claims in Language and the Problems of Knowledge, all pos-
sible “par tic u lar meanings” are defi nable in terms of the positions of a fi nite number of
“switches” in the “language organ” (62–63), then it would seem as if something like the
explicit defi nability of all concepts from some fairly limited basic vocabulary is still presup-
posed by Chomsky’s picture.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:26 PM
D4
Sosa on Internal Realism
and Conceptual Relativity
1
E r n e s t S os a’s 1993 paper, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Real-
ism,” is one of the most important of the many papers that were pub-
lished analyzing and criticizing the “internal realism” that I defended
in books and papers published between 1976 and 1989.2 Not only is
the argumentation outstanding, as is the case in all of Ernest Sosa’s
work, but the scope of the discussion is extraordinarily comprehensive.
67
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
68 REALISM AND ONTOLOGY
If I did not reply to the paper at the time, the reason is that I had only
relatively recently given up some of the views that Sosa criticized, and
was still in the process of working out my present position. But I wel-
come the opportunity that I very much value to explain just which of
Sosa’s criticisms I accept and which I believe that I can meet. I look for-
ward very much to learning his response!
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
Sosa on Internal Realism and Conceptual Relativity 69
I stated the view Davidson was attacking (the view I called “conceptual
relativity”) was my first Carus Lecture,7 and nothing like the assertion
that “a sentence of yours and a sentence of mine may contradict each
other, and yet each be true ‘for the speaker’ ” occurs in that lecture. (In
fact, neither the notion of contradiction nor the notion true for the speaker
occurs.) What does occur is an example: the example of a world in which
the number of objects will be said to be three if one disallows mereolog-
ical sums as objects and seven if one allows them, and a discussion in
which I claimed that it is absurd to suppose that there is some kind of
metaphysical fact of the matter as to whether “mereological sums really
exist.” We can extend our language so that we speak of such things, and
in the sense of “exist” and “object” we thereby create, it will be true that
“there are such objects as mereological sums,” or we can refuse to extend
our language in that way; and both procedures are legitimate. I thereby
drew the conclusion that the logical primitives themselves, and in particular
the notions of object and existence, have a multitude of dif ferent uses rather
than one absolute “meaning.” What this implies is that the sentence “There
are seven objects (in the relevant world)” (spoken by a “Polish logician”
who has introduced mereological sums into his language) and the sen-
tence “There are three objects (in the relevant world)” (spoken by my
fictitious “Carnap”) do not “contradict” each other. Moreover, as I ex-
plained in the follow-up paper “Truth and Convention,” it does not help
to say that the difference in the use of “object” in the two languages is a
“difference in meaning” either—especially if the criterion for sameness /
difference of meaning is supposed to be “translation practice.” But I
shall return to this issue below.
In contrast, the model-theoretic argument was not an argument for
conceptual relativity, but rather an argument for the identification of
truth with “idealized rational acceptability.”8 In his essay, Sosa decided
to “set the controversy [provoked by that argument] aside, as one with
little prospect of any new progress or insight beyond what is already
contained in the literature about it,” and “to discuss instead, and in turn,
7. These were published as The Many Faces of Realism. “Conceptual relativity” is ex-
plained on pp. 16–21.
8. My internal realist notion of truth coincided with the notion that Crispin Wright
calls “superassertibility” in his Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1992) (although that is not how he interprets me!), if we prescind from possible
differences over the notion of “assertibility.”
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
70 REALISM AND ONTOLOGY
9. Note that Sosa here uses “pragmatic realism” as synonymous with “internal realism.”
I would today describe myself happily as a pragmatic realist, but not as an “internal
realist.”
10. My reasons for giving up “internal realism” are given in detail in “Sense, Nonsense
and the Senses.”
11. Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense and the Senses,” 606.
12. In Putnam, Realism and Reason, 205–228.
13. Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense and the Senses,” 607.
14. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 607–608.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
Sosa on Internal Realism and Conceptual Relativity 71
I have helped myself to the notion of . . . one event being the cause
of another. I have therefore to claim that whatever the right
15. It might be thought, after all, that all the interest-relativity is already allowed for in
the fact that reference is relative to a context, and that there will be no possibility of dif-
ferent answers to “What does word W refer to?” once the context in which W was used has
been specified. Actually, I do not think this is the case: I think that the answer to this
question may depend on who is asking and for what reason and not only on the context of
the user of the word W in question. But this is something I did not argue in the paper
Sosa refers to.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
72 REALISM AND ONTOLOGY
That was precisely what my argument was designed to show: that “the
cause” does “smuggle in intentional / semantic notions,” and hence the only
way that materialist metaphysical realists have suggested for avoiding
the model-theoretic argument doesn’t work.
Given his reading of my argument, however, I find it natural that Sosa
writes:
16. Jerry Fodor, Psychosemantics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 126.
17. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 608.
18. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 609. In Realism with a Human Face— a work
Sosa cites in his essay— I write, “It is a part of [our image of the world] itself that the world
is not the product of our will—or our dispositions to talk in certain ways either” (29). Com-
pare Sosa’s own distinction between existing relative to a conceptual scheme and existing in
virtue of that conceptual scheme (“Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 621).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
Sosa on Internal Realism and Conceptual Relativity 73
19. I do not myself see why the fact that something is interest-relative need mean that it
is nonobjective. As Richard Boyd (surely no “antirealist”!) once remarked, reference can be
interest-relative, but that fact that a word refers to X given certain interests is perfectly
objective.
20. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 608–614.
21. Sosa cites my “Objectivity and the Science / Ethics Distinction” (Putnam, Realism
with a Human Face, 174) as the locus of the alleged fallacy. Note that this was published in
1990, and written after I had given up “internal realism.” Its purpose was to defend the ob-
jectivity of ethics, not to argue that “real ity is perspectival,” however that might be
understood.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
74 REALISM AND ONTOLOGY
Sosa himself does not feel the appeal of the idea of reducing the inten-
tional to the nonintentional (nor the appeal of denying its existence al-
together) that my physicalist opponents are so attracted to that he
(charitably) misdescribes Williams’s views.
One sees such a charitable misdescription when Sosa writes,
Sosa immediately adds “It is not at all clear that Williams himself would
accept objectivism.” In fact, not only is it clear that Williams accepts
objectivism, but he wrote a whole book the gravamen of which is that
objectivism is the lasting element of truth in Descartes philosophy!23
“Finished Science”
As Sosa points out, in my criticism of Bernard Williams’s views I
argued that
22. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 610. Here Sosa is quoting from The Many Faces
of Realism, p. 4 (emphasis added).
23. Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth, United
Kingdom: Penguin, 1978). See Chapter 2 in this collection for a description of Williams’s
agreements with it.
24. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 613.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
Sosa on Internal Realism and Conceptual Relativity 75
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
76 REALISM AND ONTOLOGY
opponent (who might not be a realist at all) understood it. What I reject
is not the idea of mind-independent things (in the sense of things caus-
ally independent of the mind), but (1) the idea that there is one single
metaphysically privileged use of “thing” (or “object,” or “entity”), and
(2) the idea that there is a fact of the matter as to such questions as “Is
a table identical with the mereological sum of its time-slices?” But I
would not express this by saying “There are no things in themselves,”
because I don’t think any of the metaphysical uses of the notion I have
seen to date are intelligible.
The situation is similar with respect to “intrinsic properties.” I would
not define them in terms of Williams’s concept of finished science (or
rather, asymptotically approachable finished science). Actually, I would
say that when people talk about “intrinsic properties” they generally
suppose them to be essential properties in the Aristotelian sense
(properties without which something would not be the thing that it is),
and also supposes them to be interest-independent. And I don’t think
that there is a definite set of properties possessed by, say, dogs that are the
“intrinsic properties” of dogs interest-independently. What is “essential”
to being a dog from the point of view of a molecular biologist is not
what is “essential” from the point of view of an evolutionary biolo-
gist, nor what is “essential” from the point of view of someone who is
interested in dogs as pets. (I argue this in detail in “Aristotle after
Wittgenstein”).27
So I throw the ball back to Sosa in the following sense: I say,
“Ernie, you want to read me as defi ning these metaphysical notions
(‘thing-in-itself,’ ‘intrinsic property’), in fact defi ning them the way
Bernard Williams did, and then asserting ‘there are no things-in-
themselves with intrinsic properties.’ But I don’t think these notions
are intelligible (as used by metaphysicians), nor do I think that all the
dif ferent (unfortunate) ways they have been used are captured by Wil-
liams’s definition. I don’t want to either assert or deny the thesis that
‘there are things-in-themselves with intrinsic properties.’ So do we have
any remaining disagreement about this issue?” If the answer is “yes,” I
suspect the remaining disagreement(s) will come up in what I shall say
now about conceptual relativity.
27. Collected in Hilary Putnam, Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1994), 62–81.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
Sosa on Internal Realism and Conceptual Relativity 77
Conceptual Relativity
As Sosa describes, in The Many Faces of Realism, I used the following
example (I quote Sosa’s presentation of the example, which is quite
accurate):28
Suppose a world with just three individuals x1, x2, x3. Such a world
is held by some “mereologists” to have in it a total of seven things
or entities or objects, namely, x1, x2, x3, x1 + x2, x1 + x3, x2 + x3,
x1 + x2 + x3. Antimereologists by contrast prefer the more austere
ontology that recognizes only the three individuals as objects that
really exist in that world. Talk of the existence of x1 + x2 and its ilk
is just convenient abbreviation of a more complex discourse that
refers to nothing but individuals. Thus, suppose x1 is wholly red
and x2 is wholly black. And consider
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
78 REALISM AND ONTOLOGY
Sosa begins the first of his criticisms with the following words: “There
is a valuable insight here, I believe, but I am puzzled by the linguistic
wrapping in which it is offered.”31
After saying “I am puzzled by the linguistic wrapping,” Sosa
continues,
After all, none of 1–4 mentions any language, or any piece of lan-
guage, nor does any of them say we shall or shall not or should or
should not use any language or bit of language. So I do not see how
our decision actually to use or not to use any or all of the sentences
1–4 can settle the question of whether what these sentences say is
true or false.
31. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 615. However, there is one (possibly quite con-
sequential) change I would make in the above explanation of “the Carnap-Putnam line”: in
the last sentence, I would change the last clause to read “and may even claim that by its
criteria there are no such objects as the ‘sums’ x1 + x2, x1 + x3, x2 + x3, x1 + x2 + x3.”
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
Sosa on Internal Realism and Conceptual Relativity 79
32. See Hilary Putnam, “Convention, a Theme in Philosophy,” in Realism and Reason,
vol. 3 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 170–183.
33. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 615.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
80 REALISM AND ONTOLOGY
1. The speaker of, say, PL does not do anything that would ordi-
narily be called giving (or “adopting”) a meaning to the word
“object” (if this is not clear, substitute “entity”). When he says
that there are such objects (or such entities) as mereological
sums, he counts, at least for linguistic purposes, as simply using
“object” (“entity”) in the normal (Anglo-American) way. So the
trivial linguistic truth that the truth-value of our utterances
depends on the meanings we give to their words (or that our
linguistic community has already given them) is not the same as
the thesis of conceptual relativity that I affirmed above, unless
“meaning” is already being given a special philosophical
interpretation.
2. To see that it is not trivially true that if we adopt CL we thereby
make “There are seven objects in the box Sosa described [the
one with 3 marbles in a vacuum]” true, consider the question
from the standpoint of a metaphysical realist who does not believe
in the existence of mereological sums. (I called him “Professor
Antipode” in The Many Faces of Realism.) Obviously Professor
Antipode will say something like this: “I don’t mind your saying
that when you use the word ‘object’ you mean to include mereo-
logical sums as objects. But that doesn’t make ‘Mereological
sums exist’ true, any more than saying ‘When I use the word
“object” I mean to include leprechauns’ makes ‘Leprechauns
exist’ true.”
3. On the other hand, according to my own unmetaphysical sort of
realism, adopting the conventions of PL does make it true to say
(in PL) “Mereological sums exist,” and adopting the conventions
of (CL) makes it true to say “Only three objects exist” [in the
relevant world], and a fortiori that mereological sums do not
exist. Whether I am right in this claim or not is not an instance
of trivial linguistic conventionality, as Professor Antipode’s
argument shows.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
Sosa on Internal Realism and Conceptual Relativity 81
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
82 REALISM AND ONTOLOGY
That would block the explosion of real ity, but the price is con-
ceptual relativity. Supervenient, constituted entities do not just
exist or not in themselves, free of any dependence on or rela-
tivity to conceptual scheme. What thus exists relative to one
conceptual scheme may not do so relative to another. In order for
such a sort of entity to exist relative to a conceptual scheme, that
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
Sosa on Internal Realism and Conceptual Relativity 83
Comment: Both Ernest Sosa and Jennifer Case have noted that all
the examples I gave (and, I might add, that Sosa now gives) of “concep-
tual relativity” involve what Sosa called “recondite entities” (he added
“of controversial status,” but I have explained above why I don’t think
that is always the case). And Case went on to make an impor tant
suggestion:
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
84 REALISM AND ONTOLOGY
If one looks at the matter this way, as I think we should, then one
will not say that “we” (or “our culture”) do not countenance snowdiscalls
or mereological sums. Our culture allows us to do dif ferent things in
dif ferent contexts, including introducing, if we want, an optional lan-
guage in which we quantify over snowdiscalls—and “snowdiscalls” are,
after all, no more unusual than, say, “the mereological sum of my nose
and the Eiffel Tower.”
Second, I don’t think it is happy to say that “mereological sums exist
relative to the Polish Logician’s language” (or “snowdiscalls exist
relative to the SD scheme”). If we use PL, in some context and for some
appropriate reason, then we should simply say, “There is an object that
is the mereological sum of my nose and the Eiffel Tower,” or “The
mereological sum of my nose and the Eiffel Tower exists.” We do not
have to relativize existence to PL in PL. What we have to do is make
clear which optional language we are speaking.
“But then what you count as the same sentence in English may have
dif ferent truth-conditions in dif ferent contexts!” That is the case
anyway! (“Tomatoes are vegetables” has dif ferent truth-conditions in
the mouth of a grocer and the mouth of a botanist, for example, and
none is disturbed by this.)
Third, I do not see why Sosa thinks he has “put the insight without
appeal to language or to any linguistic relativity.” Talk of criteria of ex-
istence and perdurance is metalinguistic talk on the face of it. (Perhaps
Sosa read me as advocating that we must always restate existence
claims in the formal mode, as Carnap did. But this was not the aspect
41. Jennifer Case, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Southern Journal of Phi-
losophy 35, no. 1 (1997): 1–18; quotation from p. 11.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
Sosa on Internal Realism and Conceptual Relativity 85
of Carnap’s view that I endorsed. What I endorsed was his tolerant atti-
tude to a plurality of—to use Jennifer Case’s term— optional languages,
with dif ferent so-called ontologies.)
Fourth, as already mentioned, I think that—very importantly—
conceptual relativity should be our approach not only to questions of
existence and perdurance, but to many questions having to do with
cross-category identification (such as “Are points mere limits?,” or “Are
functions sets of ordered pairs?”).42
42. A possible fifth point: as I say in a passage that Sosa quotes, I think yet another ap-
proach to the kind of problem he raises with the snowdiscalls example is sortal identity. I
know that both Kripke and Quine shudder, but isn’t just this sort of example a good reason
to reconsider the shudders?
43. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 621
44. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 622.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
86 REALISM AND ONTOLOGY
cross- category identity that I mentioned a moment ago. Consider the fact
that I have mentioned a couple of times in this essay that in recursion
theory and hierarchy theory (one of the branches of mathematics I
wrote quite a few articles in) we regularly take numbers as individuals,
and functions of numbers, functions of functions, functions of func-
tions of functions . . . (as in type theory, but extended through the
transfinite) as primitive. We do not take sets to be still additional enti-
ties, but “identify them” with characteristic functions. In another
branch of mathematics (set theory), we regularly take sets as primi-
tive, and identify functions with sets of ordered pairs. I have never
met a philosopher or a mathematician who thinks there is a “fact of the
matter” as to which is right! Yet they can’t both be right.45 According to
“conceptual relativity,” there is only the question of a choice of an “op-
tional language” here. But if we go for the “exploding reality” approach,
what do we do? Do we say there is a (possibly unknowable) “fact of the
matter” as to whether sets are characteristic functions or functions are
sets of ordered pairs? That, I must admit, seems crazy to me!46
Nor does the problem arise only in pure mathematics. Typically,
when we find a way of “interpreting” one version of a physical (or geo-
metrical) theory in another, the dif ferent alternative “translations” are
incompatible if taken at face value. For example, even if we decide that
points are limits, there are just as many ways of formalizing the notion
of a “limit” as there are of formalizing the notion of a “set.” Yet surely
the adoption of one or another way is a choice of a linguistic option,
and not a metaphysical claim.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
Sosa on Internal Realism and Conceptual Relativity 87
most if not all ordinary reality will be lost. Perhaps we shall allow
ourselves to continue to use its forms of speech “. . . but only as a
convenient abbreviation.” But in using those forms of speech, in
speaking of snowballs, chains, boxes, trees, hills, or even people,
we shall not believe ourselves to be seriously representing reality
and its contents. “As a convenience”: to whom and for what ends?
“As an abbreviation”: of what?47
Part (but only a part!) of the answer to this worry is that we should
not think of ourselves has having one conceptual scheme. We have a
language within which we can already introduce an indefinite number
of conceptual schemes or optional languages (and as that language de-
velops, there will be the possibility of still more). But we must not think
of all the optional ontologies as if they might be simply pooled: that leads
right back to “the explosion of real ity” (with the consequences noted a
moment ago). Yet reality does force us to recognize that we need, for
example, at least one optional language in which we can describe (for
example) quantum real ity. That there are a number of such optional
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
88 REALISM AND ONTOLOGY
Conclusion
I cannot resist quoting Sosa’s closing paragraph, which I very much ap-
preciate, in full:
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
Sosa on Internal Realism and Conceptual Relativity 89
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:27 PM
D5
Richard Boyd on Scientific Realism
1. This paper is a reply to Richard Boyd, “What of Pragmatism with the World Here?,”
in Reading Putnam, ed. Maria Baghramian (Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2013),
39–94.
2. This is chapter 2 of my Philosophy in an Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics, and Skepti-
cism, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2012), 51–71.
3. I described and supported Boyd’s version of scientific realism in Meaning and the
Moral Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 20–22.
4. I identified “internal realism” with the thesis that truth is “idealized rational accept-
ability” in Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). I used
the term “verificationist semantics” in “Computational Psychology and Interpretation
Theory,” in my Realism and Reason, vol. 3 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), 139–154.
90
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:28 PM
Richard Boyd on Scientific Realism 91
cally approximately true, and terms in the mature sciences typically refer, and
I am unrepentant in that respect.5 However, I also think that those
principles are not enough to refute the idea that the “right” semantics
is verificationist semantics (whether of Dummett’s kind, or of the kind
I advocated in Reason, Truth and History), because antirealists may claim
that it is possible to reinterpret the whole language, including all scien-
tific hypotheses expressible in it, and if these two principles represent
a scientific hypothesis, in a very liberal sense of “scientific” (as we both
claimed), then antirealists should claim that they can reinterpret them
too. And that was what I tried to do in my lecture titled “Realism and
Reason”6 and subsequently: accept scientific realism, but reinterpret it
to make it compatible with verifi cationist semantics. I have always been a
scientific realist, in Boyd’s sense, in spite of the misunderstanding, which
is very widespread, that I renounced scientific realism—that’s just
wrong. And I’ve never accepted Nelson Goodman’s idea that we “make”
the world.
Moreover, I even repented, in my Dewey Lectures,7 of saying that
“the mind and the world together make up the mind and the world.”8
And I’ve written a lot about Pragmatism, and in every single paper I
say that I don’t think that the pragmatist theories of truth— any of the
pragmatist theories of truth—Peirce’s, James’s or Dewey’s—were right.
(Fortunately, Dewey never really depended on the pragmatist theory of
truth. He mentions it in one footnote in the Logic,9 but what he is other-
wise concerned with is warranted assertibility, and that means that, for-
tunately, his belief that Peirce got the definition of truth right actually
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:28 PM
92 REALISM AND ONTOLOGY
plays no real role in anything Dewey does. But in any case one can learn
from a philosopher without believing every thing he says, or even be-
lieving every thing he regards as tremendously impor tant. John Mc-
Dowell and I both believe we can learn a great deal from Kant, but
that doesn’t mean we don’t reject certain ideas from the first Critique
that Kant would have regarded as absolutely essential to his whole vi-
sion. It had better be the case that we can learn from dead philosophers,
’cause we’re all gonna be dead!)
Now, with respect to Ethics without Ontology: I did not mean to reject
the idea of metaphysics with a small “m.” Sometimes I describe what I
do as metaphysics, but I know that very often, because of who my
teachers were,10 and perhaps because of the bad influence of a certain
side of Wittgenstein, I do use the word “metaphysics” as a pejorative.
But I am very well aware that I have metaphysical views. And the point
of Ethics without Ontology was not that one shouldn’t have a metaphys-
ical view—a naturalist metaphysical view—of the nature of ethical judg-
ment and ethical practices. In fact, in Ethics without Ontology I tried to
present one, namely, I suggested that ethics rests on a certain set of
human interests. I compared ethics to a table on many legs, and I said
such a table wobbles a lot because the ground isn’t even, but it is very
hard to overturn. And I had something to say about what those inter-
ests are. Like Stanley Cavell,11 I think that ethics isn’t the only way,
but it is far preferable to other ways of settling conflicts. It’s not the only
way of settling conflicts, Cavell says, but the other ways are often inac-
cessible or brutal. And I don’t think that it should be a constraint on
the semantics of ethical terms that anyone who repudiates ethics or re-
jects ethics is irrational. A lot of bad arguments for noncognitivism
assume that cognitivists think that something like that is a constraint
on the semantics of ethical terms. They think that a cognitivist must
make a certain traditional philosophical Platonist view come out
right. But that isn’t what I think.
But let me return to the subject of ontology, and to my dissatisfac-
tion with Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment, and the implicit
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:28 PM
Richard Boyd on Scientific Realism 93
assumption that goes with it, the assumption that “exist” is univocal.12
I wish to draw a distinction here that is foreign to Quine’s way of
thinking: the distinction between saying that an expression has dif-
ferent truth conditions in two or more dif ferent circumstances, and the
difference between saying it has “dif ferent meanings” in the sense that
is connected with translation practice (call it, “the usual linguistic
sense”).13 In the latter sense, it is (roughly) true that “exist” has a con-
stant meaning. I say that because, with Charles Travis, I think that a
word may have the same meaning in dif ferent contexts even though the
truth-evaluable content of what you say by using that word may vary
with the context. (“There is a lot of coffee on the table” may used to
say either that there is coffee to drink, or that coffee has been spilled
on the table; these uses go with dif ferent truth conditions, but it is not
the case that the words have meanings other than those given in a good
dictionary, and those meanings are the same in the two cases). The
truth-evaluable content of what we say using the word “exist” varies a
great deal, and in some contexts it is perfectly right to say that mereo-
logical sums exist, and in other contexts it is right to say there aren’t
really such things as mereological sums, that’s “just one way of talking,”
and we can say what we want to say without it, for example, by talking
about sets. I’m sure Carnap would have said it’s a matter of convention
whether or not we say that there are such things as mereological sums,
and my gut feeling is that that’s got to be right. The view that somehow
there is a deep problem as to whether mereological sums “really exist”
seems absurd. I know that Gideon Rosen thinks that the problem is so
hard that we’ll never know whether there are really mereological sums
or not. That seems to me crazy! And I would assume that Dick Boyd
12. There are deep tensions in Quine’s thinking: for example, between thinking of
“exist” as univocal, and admitting that it admits of both “objectual” and “nonobjectual”
interpretations. Moreover, even when Quine clearly thinks of “exist” as univocal, he equiv-
ocates (or, perhaps, he is torn) between thinking of the univocality of “exist” as something
trivial (what better standard of univocality do we have, he asks in effect, than how some-
thing looks when properly “regimented”?) and thinking of it as involving a substantive
claim, the claim that being committed to the existence of abstract entities (when quantifi-
cation over them cannot be explained away as “nonobjectual”) is doing something he calls
“positing” intangible objects, objects whose existence has to be inferred from the contribu-
tion that positing their existence makes to the success of prediction, particularly in physics.
13. For more on these two senses, see my Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2004).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:28 PM
94 REALISM AND ONTOLOGY
probably shares my intuition here. But it’s this idea that there’s just one
correct way of using “exist” and that way determines a unique answer
to the question “are mereological sums included in the furniture of the
universe or not?” that I reject. That’s the sort of “ontology” that I wrote
an obituary for.14
Thus, I am not the internal realist that Boyd thinks I still am, al-
though there are certainly deep issues about which we disagree. Some
of them go beyond the scope of this comment,15 but I will say some-
thing about whether truth is “correspondence.” I agree with Boyd that
true empirical statements correspond to states of affairs that actually
obtain. But I would not say that I have a “correspondence theory of
truth.” In The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World, I defended what I
described as Fregean disquotation (not, please note, Fregean defl ation). I
believe that the disquotational property of “true” is an extremely impor-
tant one, as Frege and Tarski both realized, whatever the differences
between their theories, but neither thought that the disquotation prop-
erty is all there is to say about truth, which is the characteristic thesis
of what is called “deflation.”16 I think one problem with speaking of
truth as defined in terms of a correspondence theory of truth is, first,
that it is misleading. I believe that, in addition to the disquotation prop-
erty, it is a property of the notion of truth that to call a statement of
any kind—not only an empirical statement, but also a mathematical
statement, a statement of logic (e.g., such-and-such a schema is valid), an
ethical statement, and so on—true is to say that it has the sort of cor-
rectness appropriate to the kind of statement it is. When we speak of
“states of affairs” what we normally think of are empirical states of af-
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:28 PM
Richard Boyd on Scientific Realism 95
fairs, ways the universe can be.17 And correspondence to such a state
of affairs— one that actually obtains—is the standard of correctness for
empirical statements. Here Boyd and I agree, I believe. When we con-
fine attention to empirical statements, both correspondence and disquo-
tation are features of truth. But even this statement is misleading.
It is misleading because said just like that it could be read as implying
that there is one and the same kind of correspondence at stake no matter
what the empirical statement is, and no matter what the occasion of its
utterance may be. But that is not the case. “This piece of beef weighs
one pound” may “correspond to reality” by the standard of correspon-
dence appropriate to a butcher shop, but be extremely wrong by the
standard of laboratory science. And the kind and degree of correspon-
dence changes again when the statement is “John is very neurotic,”
or . . . The difficulty in giving a picture of our notion of truth (I doubt
we can give anything that deserves the title of a “theory”) is to do jus-
tice simultaneously both to the unity of the notion and to the plurality
of the correctness-conditions that go with it and give it content.
Moreover, when it comes to mathematical statements and logical
statements I am not sure I want to speak of their correctness conditions
as “correspondence,” but I don’t have time to unpack this remark here.18
Suffice it to say that if one must speak of correspondence, then let us
recognize that what sort of thing (in what Sellars once called “the widest
possible sense of thing”) a statement has to correspond to in order to
count as “true” varies from language game to language game. Never-
theless, the concept of truth does exhibit certain constant features; the
disquotation schema describes one.
I would also say that “true” is a logical word like “and,” “or,” or “not.”
That is why it can apply to every kind of sentence, without being in-
compatible with the fact that dif ferent sorts of sentences have dif ferent
sorts of truth-conditions. I can say a tautology is true without being
forced to regard the tautology as “describing” something or “corre-
sponding to a state of affairs,” or inventing a “vacuous state of affairs”
for tautologies to correspond to. Just as one can conjoin a descriptive
sentence and an evaluation with an “and” or an “if-then,” one can say
17. On the indispensability of such talk, see my “From Quantum Mechanics to Ethics
and Back Again,” in Baghramian, Reading Putnam, 19–36.
18. See chapter 3 of Ethics without Ontology for an explanation of why I say this.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:28 PM
96 REALISM AND ONTOLOGY
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 6:28 PM
D6
Hans Reichenbach
REALIST AND VERIFICATIONIST
1. Hilary Putnam, “Reference and Understanding,” in Meaning and the Moral Sciences
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 97–119. The remark I quote occurs on p. 112.
2. The grounds in question were that Reichenbach’s “probability theory of meaning,” as
he explained it, ignores two central principles of the “externalist” semantics I advocated in
“The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” and subsequently, namely, the linguistic division of labor and
the fact that paradigms external to the speaker often serve to fi x reference. In the case of
the word gold, for example, speakers rely on experts (whose criteria the average speaker
doesn’t know), and the experts rely on ongoing scientific investigation of the metal. I wrote
that “there is nothing in the meaning to enable us individually to assign a ‘weight’ to ‘such
and such is gold’ in many circumstances— contrary to the “probability theory of meaning”
(Putnam, “Reference and Understanding,” 113).
3. In “Testability and Meaning,” Part I, Philosophy of Science 3 (1936): 422, Carnap wrote
that this identification was “exhibited in the earliest publications of our Vienna Circle; it is
still held by the more conservative wing of this Circle.”
99
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
100 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
What I want to argue here (and did not argue at that time) is that
this observation is essential to understanding the structure and
content of Reichenbach’s only work in pure epistemology, Experience
and Prediction.5 That is, not only is it the case that one might suppose
that realism and Reichenbach’s form of verificationism are compatible,
but that was, so to speak, the point of Experience and Prediction. What
Reichenbach was trying to do in the whole book was simultaneously to
be a particular sort of realist (a materialist, in particular) and preserve
a weak form of the verifiability theory of meaning—weak, but not too
weak to exclude metaphysics. This is not to say that Reichenbach did
not feel some discomfort; after all, his friend (with whom he co-founded
Erkenntnis) Rudolf Carnap (and the other members of the Vienna Circle
as well)6 had characterized the realism / idealism issue as a pseudo-
issue, and Reichenbach defers to this view to the extent of claiming
that the issue is just a question of a choice of a linguistic framework.
But I wish to claim that the arguments Reichenbach gave only make
sense if we realize that his realism was much more robust than these
disclaimers suggest.
To argue this properly would require a much longer paper than this
one. What I shall do here is point to places in Reichenbach’s argumen-
tation at which his realism is most evident, and also briefly discuss the
claim just alluded to, that the issue is one of choosing a “language.”
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
Hans Reichenbach 101
7. Rudolf Carnap, “Testability and Meaning,” Philosophy of Science 3 (1936): 420–471, and
4 (1937): 2–38.
8. Reichenbach’s term for a sentence. “The words ‘sentence’ and ‘statement’ are also in use.
But this distinction being of little importance and rather vague, we shall make no distinction
between ‘propositions’ and ‘sentences’ and ‘statements’ ” (Experience and Prediction, 21n).
9. Reichenbach neglects to say “on the basis of some possible observation,” but the for-
mulation of the second principle makes it clear that this is what he means.
10. Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction, 54.
11. At least we know that as late as “Testability and Meaning” (1936–1937) Carnap could
write (speaking of Reichenbach’s probability theory of meaning), “It presupposes the thesis
that the degree of confi rmation of a hypothesis can be interpreted as the degree of proba-
bility in the strict sense which this concept has in the calculus of probability, i.e., as the limit of rela-
tive frequency. Reichenbach holds this thesis” (427). Of course, Carnap was later to develop
his theory that “degree of confi rmation” is itself a quantitative notion and a possible inter-
pretation of “probability” dif ferent from “the limit of the relative frequency.” But in “Test-
ability and Meaning” he wrote (also on p. 427), “It seems to me that at present it is not yet
clear whether the concept of degree of confi rmation can be defi ned satisfactorily as a quan-
titative concept, i.e. a magnitude having numerical values” (emphasis added).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
102 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
And again,
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
Hans Reichenbach 103
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
104 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
16. One of those “weak points,” in Reichenbach’s view, is the assumption that no propo-
sition could be known with probability unless some basic propositions were known with
certainty. In a remarkable paper titled “Are Phenomenal Reports Absolutely Certain?”
Philosophical Review 61 (1952): 147–159, delivered at a symposium with C. I. Lewis and
Nelson Goodman, Reichenbach returns to this question late in his life and argues devastat-
ingly against Lewis’s defense of this assumption. Compare my “Reichenbach and the Myth
of the Given,” in my Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1994), 115–130.
17. Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction, 163. The only one of the “exceptional” phi-
losophers who have been able to resist the idea that impressions are observable facts cited
by Reichenbach is Richard Avenarius. This is interest ing because we know that it was
reading Avenarius that fi rst inspired James to turn to his own version of direct realism.
D. C. Lamberth, Metaphysics, Experience and Religion in William James’ Thought (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) provides a detailed account of the development
of James’s metaphysics.
18. Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction, 164.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
Hans Reichenbach 105
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
106 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
spots have the shape of animals, and what is more important still,
that there are corresponding pairs of black dots, consisting of one
dot on the ceiling and one dot on the side wall, which show a very
similar shape.21
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
Hans Reichenbach 107
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
108 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
Both Lewis and Schlick assert that this sentence is not verifiable.
This is true if “verifiable” is interpreted as “completely confirm-
able.” But the sentence is confi rmable and even testable, though
incompletely . . . The sentence in question is meaningful from the
point of view of empiricism, i.e., it has to be admitted in an empir-
icist language, provided generalized sentences are admitted at all
and complete confirmability is not required.26
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
Hans Reichenbach 109
But Reichenbach does not only speak of the inference from observed
objects (birds, trees) to unobserved objects. As already remarked, he re-
gards the inference to unobservable objects (e.g., “electricity, radio
waves, atoms”) as of exactly the same nature.29 Such theoretical enti-
ties, he claims, are illata (inferred entities),30 not abstracta (logical con-
structions). With respect to this claim I want to make two remarks, one
historical and one purely philosophical.
The historical claim is that the agreement between Carnap and
Reichenbach regarding the status of sentences about unobserved objects
decidedly did not extend to agreement about the status of unobservable
objects, such as the “electricity and radio waves” Reichenbach mentions.
The predicates we need to even speak about such objects are only
“partially interpreted,” Carnap insisted to the end of his life; talk about
them is highly derived talk about observables (and, strange to say, sets
of observables, sets of sets of observables, etc.). Although these “theo-
retical constructs,” as Carnap’s followers continued to call them,31 were
no longer claimed to be individually definable in “observational vocab-
ulary,” the theory of contemporary science as a whole was held to be
expressible in a language with no primitive vocabulary except “observa-
tion terms.”32 This is precisely the attitude that Reichenbach rejected.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
110 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
Hans Reichenbach 111
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
112 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
I contend that this argument makes a deep point, and one quite un-
like anything to be found in Carnap’s writing. What Reichenbach is
telling us is that if I view my whole language as just a device for pre-
dicting what experiences I myself will have—if even statements about
my family, and about what will happen to them after I die, are no more
than gears in a prediction machine, a machine whose whole purpose is
to predict what I will experience here and now—then that view will vi-
olate the deepest intuitions we have about what we are doing when we
utter sentences about others and about events after (and before) our own
lives. One might add (although Reichenbach unfortunately did not) that
even if I deny that such statements are translatable into an “egocentric
language,” if the only account I have of what it is to understand a “re-
alist” language is that it consists in being able to use it to predict one’s
own sensory stimulations, the view remains just as unsatisfactory. As I
have myself put this further moral:
37. Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction, 150. In “Logical Positivism and Intention-
ality,” in Words and Life, 90–93, I argue that Reichenbach fails to realize that this defense of
realist language is, in fact, incompatible with the defense he offers of the claim that all that
is at stake is a choice of a language. It assumes, in par tic u lar, that my understanding of the
language doesn’t consist merely in my ability to assign weights to sentences on the basis of
my own experiences, but recognizes this involves recognizing that some account of refer-
ence is needed.
38. Hilary Putnam, “Richard Rorty on Real ity and Justification,” in Rorty and His
Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 81–87 (emphasis in original).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
Hans Reichenbach 113
Conclusion
In closing, it is appropriate to ask, when all is said and done, just what did
Reichenbach understand by his contrast of “the positivistic and realistic
conceptions of the world”? I take it, that at least this much is safe to say:
(1) A realistic conception of the world did not, in Reichenbach’s eyes,
presuppose a theory of truth. His realism was, in the main, a rejection of a
picture that he saw as inadequate to our scientific lives and, in the re-
markable paragraph I just quoted, to our humanity as well, not a proposal
for a metaphysical foundation of some kind. (2) Reichenbach did not,
however, think through the question of whether what he retained from
positivism was fully adequate to his “realistic conception of the world.”
39. Putnam, “Richard Rorty on Real ity and Justification.”
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:02 PM
D7
Between Scylla and Charybdis
DOES DUMMETT HAVE A WAY THROUGH?
1. Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, The William James Lectures 1976
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
114
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
Between Scylla and Charybdis 115
2. Michael Dummett, “What Is a Theory of Meaning, I,” collected in his Seas of Lan-
guage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 97–138.
3. Michael Dummett, Truth and the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
4. However, I don’t wish to give the impression that it was the manifestation argument
that was responsible for what I described as a close approach of our philosophical orbits
around the time of Dummett’s William James Lectures (and for a number of years subse-
quently). If anything it was because of a dif ferent argument, my model theoretic argument
against metaphysical realism, that I was prepared to accept the claim that “we have no
means” for acquiring the realist notion of truth. The model theoretic argument is set out in
a lecture titled “Realism and Reason” to the American Philosophical Association reprinted
as the last chapter of my Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1978), and at more length in my Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981). I explain what I think is wrong with it in The Threefold Cord: Mind,
Body and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
116 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
Redefining “Realism”
What I hope to do in this essay is to make clear how it was that I came
to see what I regard as insuperable difficulties with antirealism. In this
way, I hope to open yet another page in the dialogue that Michael Dum-
mett and I have been having for forty years.
The term “realism” occurs quite often in my essays prior to 1975.6
In those essays, it means one thing and one thing only: the rejection
of logical positivism, operationalism, and related positions. As I ex-
plained in one of those essays, “A Philosopher Looks at Quantum
Mechanics”:
5. Michael Dummett, “Truth: Deniers and Defenders,” in Truth and the Past, 97–116;
quotation from p. 114.
6. I am thinking in par tic u lar of the essays I collected in the fi rst two volumes of my
Philosophical Papers, which were published in 1975 by Cambridge University Press. (A third
volume, Realism and Reason, published in 1983, represents my subsequent “internal realist”
position— a position I now regard as a false start to dealing with the very real problem of
the normativity of language use.)
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
Between Scylla and Charybdis 117
Although I pointed out in that essay that Carnap had given up the
attempt to reduce statements about unobservables to “observation lan-
guage,” I criticized him in “Explanation and Reference,” for an “ide-
alist” tendency manifested in the fact that according to the theory of
the meaning (or “partial interpretation”) of theoretical terms in science
he defended in his late writings, every change in the total scientific
theory amounted to a change in the reference of every one of those
terms, so that theoretical terms were not treated as names of, say, unob-
servable things and forces concerning which scientists change their
minds, but as merely parts of a machine for predicting “observations,”
parts which have no meaning in themselves apart from their role in the
particular theory.8
The term “idealism” in those essays was virtually synonymous with
“phenomenalism.” Prior to my reading Dummett’s William James Lec-
tures, the only “idealism” I knew was Berkeley’s, and the only “antire-
alism” I knew was antirealism about unobservables (and, in the case of
phenomenalism, about “middle sized dry goods,” which were treated as
unobservables by phenomenalists). Thus it was an eye-opener that “re-
alism” and “antirealism” could be understood as positions about the
nature of truth itself, and not simply as positions about the reducibility
or nonreducibility of “theoretical terms” to “observation terms” or of
“thing-language” to “sense-datum language.”
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
118 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
9. The views I am referring to were those in the William James Lectures (see note 1,
above). They were set out more briefly in “What Is a Theory of Meaning? (I),” and “What Is
a Theory of Meaning? (II),” respectively published in Mind and Language, ed. S. Guttenplan
(Oxford: University Press, 1975), 97–138, and in Truth and Meanings: Essays in Semantics, ed.
Gareth Evans and John McDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 67–137.
10. See note 4 for details.
11. Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); see Drew Khlentzos,
Naturalistic Realism and the Antirealist Challenge (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004) for a
convincing criticism of Devitt’s response to Dummett.
12. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio- Criticism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub-
lishing House, 1952).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
Between Scylla and Charybdis 119
accept the statement that the solar system existed before there were
human beings.13 This argument simply assumes—what positivists of
course deny14 —that the positivists cannot interpret “the solar system
existed before there were human beings” in their rationally recon-
structed “language of science.”
But what of the word “independent” in “the behav ior of the stars is
independent of human sensations and thoughts and beliefs”? (This is
what Devitt portrayed antirealists as denying.)
Well, there are many kinds of independence. Presumably causal in-
dependence is what Devitt was talking about, since logical independence
is a property of statements (or, perhaps, of events under a description), and
whether statements are or are not logically independent is certainly a
question about their semantics, which Devitt claimed to be irrelevant
to the realism issue. But then Devitt’s argument once again simply as-
sumes—what antirealists of course deny—that the antirealist cannot
interpret the sentence “the behavior of the stars is independent of human
sensations and thoughts and beliefs” in a “justificationist” way, inter-
pret it so that it is “true” (in the antirealist sense). Devitt cannot, after
all, say, “But that’s not what the sentence means!” without engaging in
a discussion of—guess what?— semantics.
I remain convinced that Dummett has made a truly lasting contri-
bution to our appreciation of the depth of the realism/antirealism issue,
just as Berkeley did at an earlier time. Devitt’s dismissive attitude is as
unphilosophical as Samuel Johnson’s stone-kicking.
13. Indeed, Devitt seems to have read Lenin closely—at least his fi rst published attack
on my “internal realism” was titled “Realism and the Renegade Putnam,” a clear play on the
title of Lenin’s famous article “Marxism and the Renegade Kautsky.”
14. For example, Carnap discusses this sort of statement (his example is “If all minds (or
all living beings) should disappear from the universe, the stars would still go on in their
courses”), without mentioning Lenin, however, in “Testability and Meaning,” Part II, Phi-
losophy of Science 4 (1937): 37–38, and concludes that it is both cognitively meaningful and
well confi rmed.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
120 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
15. Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1938).
16. Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction, 150.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
Between Scylla and Charybdis 121
17. Dummett uses the term “justificationism” in Truth and the Past; I spoke of “verifica-
tionist semantics” in my fi rst internal realist writing, “Realism and Reason,” my American
Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) Presidential Address of 1976, collected in my
Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 123–138.
18. Dummett, Truth and the Past, 41.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
122 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
Between Scylla and Charybdis 123
23. Although Dummett is not unaware that the verification of an empirical statement is
typically corrigible, as a rule, he tends to prescind from this fact. This tendency may spring
from his expressed desire to carry Brouwer’s intuitionist logic, a logic designed by Brouwer
in connection with an antirealist philosophy of mathematics, over to empirical language.
The simplest possible way to make such a carryover is to extend the notion of “proof,”
which is the basic notion in the intuitionist semantics for mathematical language, to a bivalent
predicate ‘verified’ ” applicable to mathematical and non-mathematical language alike, and
this is what Dummett does. In this quotation, only the fi rst italic (“unalterably”) was in the
original text.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
124 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
Between Scylla and Charybdis 125
Dummett’s Way
As was already said, the first step in avoiding the Scylla of solipsism was
simply to insist that the justificationism that we both advocated was
social and not individualistic in nature, or as Dummett put it, that the
word “our” in “our being justified in asserting a statement” must be
taken “in a collective, not a distributive, sense.” Whether this is some-
thing that Dummett can say without doing violence to his own justifica-
tionist principles, and what it means when understood in a justificationist
way, is what we must now ask.
The question is impor tant because of its connection with another
question, the question to which, indeed, Truth and the Past is devoted:
how to avoid antirealism about the past. I referred earlier to Dummett’s
“flirtation with antirealism about the past”; he himself says that this is
a topic that troubled him for years, and that this new book is an attempt
to see if a justificationist can repudiate “the view that statements about
the past, if true at all, must be true in virtue of the traces past events
have left in the present.” He still not does find that view incoherent,
but he does say it is “repugnant.”25 The way in which Dummett pro-
poses to reject antirealism about the past involves simply counting past
observers as fully on a par with present observers. The details of this
proposal are complex, and it would take a much longer essay than this
to examine them in detail. But the essential ideas are (1) that the se-
mantically crucial verification of a statement about the past is not the
present “indirect” verification, via a memory, or, in the case of the dis-
tant past, via a historical trace, that the statement is true, but the veri-
fication by a witness at the time (“Dying does not deprive anyone of
the status either of an observer or of an informant”);26 and (2) that while
that “direct” verification may be transmitted to us via a trace, it counts
as a verification whether it is transmitted or not (“For all the messages
25. Dummett, Truth and the Past, ix. I believe that Yuval Dolev has successfully argued
that, contrary to Dummett, antirealism about the past is incoherent. See Dolev’s “Dum-
mett’s Antirealism and Time,” European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000): 253–276.
26. Dummett, Truth and the Past, 68.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
126 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
that have been lost, it remains that statements about the past must count
as having been directly established, and therefore as true, if someone
observed them to be true at the, or an, appropriate time”).27
The problem, however, is that while language is indeed social, com-
petence is individual. Earlier I quoted Dummett as asking (rhetorically)
“How could we learn what it is for assertions to be true independently
of any means we have for establishing their truth?” but one can also
ask “How could” an individual language learner learn to understand
Dummett’s “we.” Dummett, indeed, tells us that:
A child who had learned only when he was right to come out with
simple assertoric utterances, such as “Doggie” when a dog was in
sight, would serve as an extension of adults’ range of observation,
but could not yet be credited with saying that anything was so; he
can be credited with that only when he has learned to treat the
utterances of others as extending his range of observations. It is
intrinsic to the use of language that we accept the testimony of
others: to believe what we are told is the default response. Language
binds us into society.28
I agree that it does, of course. But Dummett moves too rapidly from
the child’s acquisition of the practice of accepting the testimony of
others—an idea the justificationist seems clearly entitled to—to the
child’s “treating the utterances of others as extending his range of ob-
servations,” where this “treating” must amount to something quite dif-
ferent from a mere disposition to accept sentences that the child hears
if it is to account for the child’s grasp of the thought that a statement
about the past may be true even though no testimony is available (to the
child). (Dummett also speaks of the child’s forming a mental “grid” that
shows the relations of other places and times to one another and to the
child’s present location.)
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
Between Scylla and Charybdis 127
I believe that Michael Dummett would agree with this. But I think
that he would still say that we cannot rest with the commonsense thought
that being able to think about past events that we cannot verify (being
able to locate them in our mental “grid”) is an ability that we acquire as
we acquire language and all the skills that language brings with it. He
believes that we need to show that that ability can be accounted for in a
“justificationist” way. (Perhaps he thinks this because he thinks that anti-
realism about the past is only “repugnant” and not actually “incoherent”).
But, first, I don’t see that he has accounted for that ability in a justifica-
tionist way, for the reasons I have just briefly laid out, and, second, I do
think that antirealism about the past is incoherent.30
29. Putnam, Threefold Cord, xxx.
30. See Yuval Dolev’s “Dummett’s Antirealism,” cited previously. Dummett himself
pointed out that if one holds the antirealist view that statements about the past, if true at all,
“must be true in virtue of the traces past events have left in the present,” then it must be that
the meaning of every empirical statement about the past changes every time the reference of
“the present” changes—that is to say, must change at every moment. But, as Dolev points
out, any attempt to say what a statement about the past meant a moment ago must then like-
wise be semantically unstable—indeed, the change in question will be indescribable.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
D8
When “Evidence Transcendence”
Is Not Malign
To explain why I don’t agree with this, let me go back a few paragraphs
in Wright’s paper to some remarks in which Wright lays out in a clear
128
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
When “Evidence Transcendence” Is Not Malign 129
and very general way the position for which he is arguing. Wright makes
the point that there are benign forms of evidence-transcendence:
In the paragraphs that follow, Wright contrasts this benign form with
the “malign” kind of evidence-transcendence posited by interface con-
ceptions, writing:
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
130 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
aims to do justice to the natural realism of the common man (as Dum-
mett’s antirealism about the past evidently did not).5 But unlike
Wright, I believe that “There are no intelligent extraterrestrials” might
conceivably be true; that this too should be admitted by any philosophy
that aims to do justice to commonsense realism; and that the evidence-
transcendence of the truth of this proposition should be classed as “be-
nign” and not as “malignant.”
To see why, let us compare it with a “Fitch-example” (Wright calls it
F) whose truth is also evidence-transcendent, but in a way Wright con-
siders “benign”:
But there is a catch! As Wright notes, there are only two sorts of
circumstances in which it is possible to “appraise” the truth-value of
F: these are (1) circumstances in which it is possible to know that Q is
false, and (2) circumstances in which it is possible to know that someone
rationally believes that Q is true, and in both sorts of circumstances F
is false (because either its first or its second conjunct is false). In sum,
what (1) captures is the fact that F is falsifiable. But it isn’t verifiable. If we
say that F might be true, we must presuppose our hearer’s possession
of an idea of what constitutes F’s being true which (1) does not cap-
ture. This would become crystal clear if the “sufficiently good circum-
stances” in (1) were spelled out “constructively,” in Wright’s sense, for
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
When “Evidence Transcendence” Is Not Malign 131
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
132 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
It is the idea that thinkers would not take the correct view of the ques-
tion under such circumstances that Wright analogizes to belief in a
metaphysical “interface.” But this is obviously a confusion.
To see the confusion, let us assume, as is reasonable on present
knowledge, that the “very best possible empirical theory” that Wright
speaks of tells us that the cosmos, or at least the part of space-time
that might contain intelligent life, is fi nite, and that there is no one
place within that fi nite region from which one can survey (or even
receive causal signals from) the entire region. Let us suppose, with
Wright, that the theory, call it P, provides “enough understanding of
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
When “Evidence Transcendence” Is Not Malign 133
12. My qualms about “a priori” stem from the long-standing association of the notion
with the idea of unrevisability, not with any rejection of the idea of conceptual analysis.
Compare with Hilary Putnam, “Pragmatism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95,
part 3 (1995): 291–306, especially pp. 299–302.
13. See Putnam, “Pragmatism,” 291–306.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
134 REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM
14. More precisely, the conjunction P&N&S, where S is the statement that an observer
cannot verify whether there is intelligent life in a region of space-time that that observer is
unable to receive causal signals from, P is the “possible empirical theory” that tells us that
(1) causal signals do not travel faster than light, (2) it is physically possible (and highly prob-
able) that there are intelligent extraterrestrials, but (3) it is also physically possible that
there aren’t, and (4) there are large regions of space-time that any par tic u lar physically
possible observer is unable to receive causal signals from, is a statement that it is logically
impossible to verify if true, and yet it is a statement that P tells us could be true (and even
assigns a probability to).
15. These are collected in Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 3–70.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
When “Evidence Transcendence” Is Not Malign 135
(2) I did not and do not, however, think that one can survey in
advance what one might reasonably come to understand by
“sufficiently good epistemic conditions,” even for a particular
topic. Certainly there is no fi xed set of “standards” associated
with language that could enable one to do this. (This is the
possible difference over the notion of “assertibility” to which I
just referred.)
(3) Wright is quite correct in supposing that I did not consider
the problems posed by the Conditional Fallacy in any of my
formulations. I agree that they are serious—indeed, I do not
think that Provisional Biconditionals can meet them either
(precisely because, like all reduction sentences, they leave the
extension of the predicate that they “elucidate”— Carnap’s
term was “reduce”—undetermined with respect to cases in
which the test condition is not fulfilled, and this is precisely
what we don’t want in the case of recognition-transcendent
truths). I at least want to say that, for example, N can be true in
such cases, not that it is indeterminate. Even in the case of
truths that are not recognition transcendent but simply such
that (contingently) the test condition is unfulfilled, it is not
enough to specify via a provisional biconditional what the truth
value would have been if the recognition condition had been
fulfilled, for this leads right back to the problems of the Condi-
tional Fallacy. My conclusion is that the problem Wright poses
for my former view is also an (unsolved) problem for Wright’s
own “moderate internalism.”
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:04 PM
D9
Sensation and Apperception
139
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
140 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
1. “McDowell’s Mind and McDowell’s World,” in Reading McDowell on Mind and World,
ed. N. H. Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 174–190; quotation from pp. 176–177.
2. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1994), 30 (emphasis added).
3. In “Avoiding the Myth of the Given,” in his Having the World in View (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 256–272, McDowell gives up the claim that the
experiences of language-using human beings (which he refers to by the Kantian term “in-
tuitions” in this chapter) presuppose that the subject already possesses the concepts (including
demonstrative concepts, like “this shade”) needed to describe their content, but he takes
the ability to form such concepts to be “in play” when one has those experiences, and he
explicitly describes such abilities as “discursive” abilities. Thus, McDowell still takes the
learning of a language to be a prerequisite for having experiences in the sense in which
rational beings— beings that can understand and respond to requests for justifications for
their judgments— have experiences. Hilla Jacobson and I discuss this revised version of
the thesis that experiences are “conceptualized” in “Against Perceptual Conceptualism,”
International Journal of Philosophical Studies (forthcoming).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
Sensation and Apperception 141
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
142 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
they are true or false, and only worries about whether we can ever
really know that any of them are true. Kantian skepticism threatens
to undercut even Cartesian skepticism. This poses a problem for em-
piricism, in that it is not clear how merely saying that our judgments
come from experience explains how any of them have content, as op-
posed to being merely what Rorty called “marks and noises.” “Come
from” needs to mean something more than “are caused by,” McDowell
tells us, if experience is to be a “tribunal” before which our judgments
are to stand.6 The second thing we need to know to understand Mc-
Dowell is that he is concerned with Kantian, not Humean, skepticism
in Mind and World.
6. “We can coherently credit experiences with rational relations to judgment and belief,
but only if we take it that spontaneity is already implicated in receptivity; that is, only if we
take it that experiences have conceptual content.” McDowell, Mind and World, 162.
7. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1912), 47.
8. How we can possibly acquire concepts that apply to anything besides sense data was a
puzzle for classical empiricism.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
Sensation and Apperception 143
Davidson
Davidson—who evidently despaired of fi nding a rational linkage be-
tween concepts and experiences (or impressions—we need to keep an
eye on McDowell’s identification of experiences with impressions!) held
(reviving an idea of Neurath’s) that justification begins with beliefs
(which, for Neurath, were just sentences) and not with experiences. But
how sentences about experiences can be justified by other sentences is
just as problematic! (The coherence of the whole system does the work?
How do we know it isn’t “spinning in the void?”) And if observation
sentences (Neurath called them “protocols”) aren’t justified by any-
thing, how can they in turn justify anything? Davidson responds to
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
144 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
10. “Experiences in general are states or occurrences in which conceptual capacities are
passively drawn into operation” (McDowell, Mind and World, 30). “Conceptual capacities
must be in play in experience if we are to avoid the Myth” (McDowell, Having the World in
View, 262).
11. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy refers to this as the problem of “the richness of
experience.” Susanna Siegel, “The Contents of Perception,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philos-
ophy, March 18, 2005, www.illc.uva.nl /~seop/archives/spr2009/entries/perception-contents/.
12. McDowell, Mind and World, 58.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
Sensation and Apperception 145
Mind and World) was clearly wedded to the idea that one could not have
a par tic u lar sensation (“impression”) if one did not have the concepts
under which that sensation falls. But how could one’s conceptual abili-
ties be “in play” when one has a sensation (say, a par tic u lar color-
sensation) if one didn’t previously have that concept?
McDowell’s view is clearly in flux here. In Mind and World, the an-
swer to this question was that one forms the demonstrative concept and
one has the sensation at the same time. In Having the World in View, how-
ever, the view McDowell defends is that to have a sensation it suffices
that one could have formed the appropriate demonstrative concept; it is
conceded that in many cases one does not, in fact, form it. Yet the claim
that “conceptual capacities are in play” in all experiences is not given
up, and that includes the claim that one could not have any par ticular sen-
sation if one did not have the ability to form a concept under which it falls.
But why not? Let us grant that it is a conceptual truth that one could
not have the experience of recognizing that one is having a sensation that
falls under a particular concept if one did not have that concept (or form
it on that occasion, in the case of a demonstrative concept). But it does
not seem to be a conceptual truth that one cannot have the sensation of
seeing a particular color (or of seeing red flashes because one has been
hit on the head—a McDowell example),13 or feel a particular sort of
pain unless one has, or has the ability to form, a demonstrative con-
cept of precisely that color (or precisely that sort of “red flash”), or pre-
cisely that sort of pain.
Why should our human conceptual abilities (which McDowell iden-
tifies with “discursive abilities”—that is, the abilities that enable us to
use language and speak about “reasons”) be required to feel pains or
see red flashes when one is struck on the head? And why are brain sci-
ence and cognitive psychology supposed to be irrelevant to these ques-
tions? McDowell’s supposed “exorcism” of the questions only leaves this
reader more puzzled.
A natural place to look for an account of the extent to which human
discursive abilities affect sensation would be a sophisticated and nonre-
ductionist cognitive science. But for McDowell, there is one thing that
is the natural-scientifi c kind of intelligibility, and that he identifies with
“bald naturalism,” that is, the sort of naturalism that seeks a reductionist
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
146 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
account of normative epistemic notions, and there is a dif ferent thing that
is philosophical understanding, and never the twain shall meet.14 But
what I have elsewhere called a “liberal functionalism,”15 a nonreductive
investigation of the functional roles of biological and psychological
processes, has no reason to eschew normative notions (e.g., the notion
of the “normal function” of an organ or a capacity itself involves nor-
mative judgment) or intentional notions. Moreover, the whole idea of a
sharp line between philosophical speculation and empirical hypothesis
is one I find extremely uncongenial.
In any case, I propose that if we are willing to think about the phil-
osophical problem of how experience can have rational bearing on
belief and the cognitive psychological question as to what a reasonable
picture of the extent to which our conceptual powers are be “in play”
in experience together, we are more likely to make progress than if we
assume from the beginning that philosophy is philosophy and natural
scientific intelligibility is natural scientific intelligibility, and the two
have nothing to do with each other.
14. The possibility stressed by Tyler Burge (discussed in Chapter 1 of this book) that
cognitive science might use and be entitled to use a concept like representation goes
missing in McDowell’s picture, of course. [Note added July 7, 2015.]
15. See “Corresponding with Real ity,” chapter 3 of Philosophy in the Age of Science: Physics,
Mathematics, and Skepticism, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012) and “How to Be a Sophisticated ‘Naïve Realist’,”
chapter 37 in the same volume.
16. “The I think must be capable of accompanying all my presentations; other wise some-
thing would be presented to me which could not be thought at all, which means no less
than: the presentation would be either impossible, or at least nothing to me . . . Conse-
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
Sensation and Apperception 147
be such a thing. James did not deny this, but he recognized that the
line between sensation and apperception is sometimes fuzzy; in fact, he
asserted that in the case of a
quently every manifold of perception has a necessary relation to the I think, in the same
subject in which the manifold is found.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, §15 and
§16, B 131.
17. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. R. B. Perry (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1976), 16.
18. Putnam, Threefold Cord, 158.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
148 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
On “Fusion”
The phenomenon that interested James is that on some occasions the
phenomenal character of a sensation is actually changed by conceptual-
ization. For example, the phenomenal character of the sensation of
seeing a word in an alphabet one doesn’t know certainly changes when
one learns to read texts in the relevant language. When literate English
speakers see the word STOP on a traffic sign, our awareness of the letters
and our awareness that they “say” stop are, as James said, “fused.” But
there are some concepts that need to be distinguished here.
First, there is a difference between attending to something and con-
ceptualizing it. If a child feels pain she certainly attends to the pain,
whether she applies concepts to it or not. The psychological literature
strongly indicates that all experiences are altered to some degree by the
particular way in which attention is focused, and Hilla Jacobson and I
have argued, on the basis of those findings,21 that counterfactuals to
the effect that a subject would have been able to apply the appropriate
demonstrative concept to a sensory experience if she had attended to it
presuppose an untenable “snapshot model” of sensory experience, that
19. According to Ned Block, “Seeing-As in the Light of Vision Science,” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 89 (2014): 560–572, cases of what I am calling (visual) “appercep-
tion” are cases of “secondary seeing,” combinations of both primary visual repre sentation
(in Burge’s sense of representation) and ensuing conceptualization. I fi nd this plausible.
[Note added July 7, 2015.]
20. Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).
21. We argue this in “Against Perceptual Conceptualism,” cited in note 3 above.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
Sensation and Apperception 149
is, a model in which a given sensory experience would have been just
the same if one had attended to it, just as a tree would have been the
same if one had photographed it. (McDowell employs such counterfac-
tuals to explain the sense in which our experiences are allegedly “con-
ceptualized” in “Avoiding the Myth of the Given.”) The phenomenal
character of a red patch or a pain are different when one attends to them,
but I don’t believe that they are necessarily dif ferent when one recognizes
the color as red or the pain as a pain (although sometimes they may be)
and hence I don’t need to deny that an animal or a child who has not
learned to talk and I ever have “qualitatively” the same or similar feel-
ings of pain or sensations of red (even when we both attend to those
feelings or visual sensations). But I do maintain that I have conceptu-
alized awareness that the red I experience is the color of a surface (or the
result of a blow on the head, as the case may be), and that the pain is an
unpleasant sensation, that the prelinguistic child and the animal lack.22
Using Kantian terminology, we may say that the prelinguistic child
and the animal see red and feel pain, but they do not apperceive pain,
that is, they do not recognize pain as pain. The kind of awareness that
constitutes a mature human being’s apperceptive awareness of a sensa-
tion is like a belief, in that it can be accepted or rejected (whereas it makes
no sense to accept or reject the mere sensation!), and it presupposes we
have the requisite background of concepts, but it is not an explicit judg-
ment, although it can justify a judgment.
To repeat, apperceptions are conceptually shaped, and they can justify
judgments. But they are not the same as perceptual beliefs. I may have an
apperception or, better, a seeming apperception that one “shaft” is longer
than the other in the Müller-Lyer illusion, but I do not believe what I
seem to be apperceiving. One can seem to oneself to apperceive when
one knows that one does not (successfully) apperceive, but one cannot
seem to oneself to believe when one does not believe. The distinction
between sensations and apperceptions is not the same as the distinction
between sensations and perceptual beliefs.
I say this because I fear that other wise this will sound to McDowell
like Gareth Evans’s story, according to which “the informational
22. Although if Burge is right, the prelinguistic child and even the animal may enjoy
representations of the fact that the color is on a surface and the pain is unpleasant that are
more primitive than conceptualizations. [Note added July 7, 2015.]
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
150 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
system” supplies inputs, which causally trigger (but do not justify) the
relevant beliefs.23 This, McDowell might say, is Davidson and Neurath
all over again. But while this is right as a criticism of Evans’s account,
it is not right as a criticism of the account I just proposed (and not only
because apperceptions can be rejected; they do not automatically “trigger”
beliefs, although that is an important point about them). What Evans
was doing was speculating about the brain’s hardware; thus his account
was a reductionist account. In my view, talk about what the organism
does in intentional terms is not reducible to “hardware” talk.24 To be
sure, any intentional state, such as knowing the meaning of the word
“ephebe,” has to be realized in “hardware” somehow. But intentional
states are realizable in a practically infi nite number of dif ferent ways,
and the fact that a particular piece of hardware is a realization of a par-
ticular intentional state is only visible from the intentional level, not
from either the neurological or the computational level by themselves.
Amodal Apperception
When my apperception is not of something that produces a sensation
but of something “amodal,”25 it is even clearer that an apperception is
dif ferent from a sensation. Amodal apperception includes awareness of
aspects that are “present in absence” such as my awareness of a tomato
that I am looking at as having another side. Alva Noë accounts for such
apperception in terms of sensorimotor expectations,26 but he does also
mention shaping by thought as a possibility. And it is more than a mere
possibility, in fact; my awareness of the computer in front of me as a
computer does not consist just of “sensorimotor” expectations.
23. For McDowell’s description of Gareth Evans’s view, see Mind and World, 47–63.
24. This is something I argue in many papers; among them are Hilary Putnam,
“Meaning Holism,” in The Philosophy of W. V. Quine, ed. L. E. Hahn and P. A. Schilpp (La
Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986), 405–431; reprinted in Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 278–302; and Hilary Putnam, “Functionalism:
Cognitive Science or Science Fiction?,” in The Future of the Cognitive Revolution, ed. D. M.
Johnson and C. E. Erneling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 32–44; reprinted in
my Philosophy in the Age of Science, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 608–623.
25. On “amodal” awareness, see Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2004), 77–79.
26. Alva Noë, Action in Perception, 7–9, and throughout the volume.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
Sensation and Apperception 151
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
D 10
Perception without Sense Data
1. Hilary Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the
Human Mind,” Journal of Philosophy 91 (1994): 445–517; reprinted in The Threefold Cord:
Mind, Body and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 3–70.
2. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981).
3. Most of those papers are collected in Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason, vol. 3 of
Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Realism with a
Human Face (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
152
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
Perception without Sense Data 153
ticed, or, when noticed, those reasons were often misunderstood. Obvi-
ously I was not as clear in the Dewey Lectures as I should have been.
Let me begin by saying something about these points, before I turn to
philosophy of mind.
To take the second point fi rst, it appears that a reason that many
people continued to describe me as an “internal realist” is that they con-
fused two dif ferent doctrines: conceptual relativity, a doctrine I con-
tinue to defend, and internal realism, a doctrine that now I regard as
mistaken. Conceptual relativity is the claim that sometimes two scien-
tific theories have dif ferent “ontologies” in the familiar Quinian sense,
that is, “taken at face value” their quantifiers range over dif ferent sorts
of objects, and yet there is a systematic way of interpreting each theory
in the language of the other that renders them (not just empirically
equivalent, but) explanatorily equivalent—that is, the translation of
any explanation of a physical phenomenon provided by one theory is
a perfectly good explanation of the same phenomenon in the language
of the other theory (but one that is very different, at least at “face value”).
Internal realism, however, was the claim that what truth amounts to is
justification under epistemically ideal conditions. At one time I thought
that the existence of cases of conceptual relativity was an argument
against metaphysical realism and hence for “internal realism” (which I
took to be the only reasonable alternative to metaphysical realism). But
that was a mistake.
It was a mistake because one can perfectly well be a metaphysical re-
alist (as, perhaps to your surprise, I now admit to being) in the simple
sense of believing that there is a real world that is largely independent
of our mental workings, beliefs, or concepts, and many truths about that
world that outrun what we can possibly verify, without denying the ex-
istence of the phenomenon I call “conceptual relativity.” If, for ex-
ample, it turns out, as according to some quantum physicists it already
has,4 that a theory in which certain particles are fermions and a theory
in which the same particles are bosons are simply two “representations”
of the same facts, then the moral will be that what is fundamental, at
least in the ontology of physics, is not particles but states of affairs. If
what are dif ferent ontologies in the familiar (Quinian) sense I referred
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
154 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
to above are just dif ferent representations of the same states of affairs,
then that may be a problem for the Quinian ontologist, but I no
longer think it is fatal for metaphysical realism. I repeat, one can accept
the possibility of conceptual relativity and simultaneously reject internal
realism. A fortiori, they are not the same thing.
On the other hand, the charge that my Dewey Lectures represented
a “capitulation” to Wittgenstein and / or Austin is partly but not wholly
right.
In my “Wittgenstein: A Reappraisal,”5 I criticized a view that Witt-
genstein undoubtedly held, the view that metaphysics is, in some very
literal sense of the term, nonsense—that is, completely devoid of lin-
guistic meaning, as claimed by the “New Wittgensteinians,” or in vio-
lation of the “grammatical conditions for making sense” as claimed by
more traditional Wittgensteinians. But I do not find, when I read Plato,
or Aristotle, or Maimonides, or Kant, or even Hegel, that I am liter-
ally reading nonsense, although there is much about their thought that
I cannot imagine believing. Some of my talk about “unintelligibility”
in the Royce Lectures now seems wrong to me. Although those lec-
tures were published together with the Dewey Lectures, Wittgenstein
figures in the Dewey Lectures themselves in a much more modest role,
although I do engage in some metaphysics bashing.
Austin, however, was clearly front and center in the Dewey Lectures.
But so was William James. They both figured, not as metaphysics
bashers, but because the main point of the Dewey Lectures was that
philosophy of perception needs to return to the view of the man and
woman on the street, that is, to a view in which we actually perceive
shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings and many of
the other items in the passing show—the view that Russell dismissed
as “naive realism.” And I saw Austin and James as allies because (albeit
in dif ferent ways) they both criticized the traditional epistemological
paradigm, under which what we “directly perceive” are just our own
sense data, and external objects are known by “inference,” if they in-
deed exist as something more than logical constructs out of sense data
or “permanent possibilities of sensation.” [Note: In this essay, I shall use
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
Perception without Sense Data 155
6. This is argued in the fi rst three chapters of Bertrand Russell’s Problems of Philos-
ophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912). In chapter 1, Russell proposes that “we
give the name ‘sense data’ to the things that are immediately known in sensation: such
things as colors, sounds, smells, hardness, roughness, and so on” (12) [I have American-
ized the spelling]. By chapter 2, we have learned that “the sense data are private to each
separate person” (20), and in chapter 3 we are told, “Now our sense- data are situated in
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
156 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
our private spaces” (30) and not in “one all- embracing physical space in which physical
objects are” (31).
7. In The Threefold Cord, I wrote, “My own ‘Girondist’ position is that while it may be
that some experiential content is nonconceptual in the sense of not being conceptualized,
such epistemologically impor tant content as recognizing something as an object of a cer-
tain kind is irreducibly conceptual” (156–157). In the note to that sentence I added that, “I
fi nd McDowell’s talk of our conceptual powers being in play uncomfortably reminiscent of
faculty psychology” (218n24).
8. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).
9. I fi rst saw it in the writings of C. I. Lewis.
10. I shall use Russell’s term at times to bring out the traditional roots of the current
debates about perception, but I will not distinguish between “qualia” and “sense data.”
11. Note that following David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), but not Block, I do not take talk of qualia to rule out “adverbial” views of phe-
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
Perception without Sense Data 157
nomenal qualities, that is, views under which they are modifications of experiences rather
than “mental paint,” and ditto for “sense data.” A variant— one I prefer, in fact—of adver-
bialism, due to Wilfred Sellars, “The Adverbial Theory of Objects of Sensations,”
Metaphilosophy 6 (1975): 144–160, treats “I have a red sense datum” as better analyzed as “I
sense redly.” In this view, it is the case, as urged by Reichenbach in Experience and Predic-
tion, that what correspond to sense data / qualia are states of the subject, not properties of
mental particulars (see p. 100n5).
12. G. E. Moore, “A Reply to My Critics,” in The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. P. A.
Schlipp (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1952), 546. The words in square brackets are my
interpretations of Moore’s expressions.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
158 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
Perception without Sense Data 159
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
160 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
Moreover, the inputs to the brain are not qualia, but not because
qualia aren’t features of brain events (I believe that they are, and, in any
case, they certainly supervene on brain events). The idea of qualia as
inputs might have been at least partially vindicated had it turned out
that Fodor’s “modularity” view, on which phenomenal appearances are
simply outputs of perception-modules, turned out to be right. In that
case qualia might be identified with those outputs, and those outputs
in turn identified with the first stage of cognitive processing. But the
consensus in neural science today favors a much more complicated
story. On the modularity hypothesis, perception was supposed to be
an entirely “bottom up” affair, but today it is becoming clear that that
perception is both “bottom up” and “top down.” When I see a tomato,
for example, many parts of the brain are involved, and interactions
(reverberating circuits) take place between cortical and precortical
functions. If there are “inputs” to the brain, they begin with the eyes—
much earlier than the formation of “qualia.”
One might try to bypass this objection by adopting a dualistic view
of the unconscious mind, and posit that while the inputs to the brain
are neural stimulations, beginning in the eyes, the inputs to the uncon-
scious mind are “mental” qualia, but at this point all contact with both
science and phenomenology would have been lost. The “unconscious
inference” story was cutting edge psychology at one time,13 but it is not
tenable as either personal level or subpersonal level psychology today.
What about the version according to which the story about inferences
from qualia to material objects is supposed to be a “rational reconstruc-
tion”? When we make explicit the steps in a proof that are left implicit
in a mathematics journal, for example, we are engaged in rational
reconstruction, but in such a case the steps could have been made explic-
itly to begin with (the article would simply have been boring to read).
But to say why I believe that there is a computer in front of me as I type
these words by (1) describing all the relevant “sense data” and (2) pro-
viding an inference from all that information (assuming it exists, and
assuming it could all be stated) to “there is a computer in front of me”
is not something I could really do. At best (and assuming we ignore all
13. H. L. Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, vol. 3 (Leipzig: L. Voss, 1866);
repr. 3rd ed., with extensive commentary by Allvar Gullstrand, Johannes von Kries, and
Wilibald Nagel (Hamburg and Leipzig: L. Voss, 1896), 28–29.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
Perception without Sense Data 161
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
162 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
do not belong in science. But that even he was not willing to consis-
tently go that far reveals how unappealing the position is, as McDowell
and others have pointed out.
18. I also have problems with McDowell’s “minimal empiricism.” I quote from Mind and
World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994): “Empirical judgments in
general—whether or not they are justified at all, perhaps less substantially than knowledge
requires—had better have content of a sort that admits of empirical justification, even if
there is none in the present case (say in a quite unsupported guess)” (6). As it stands, this
reads like a “verifiability” requirement, and if that is not how McDowell understands it, it
is noteworthy that he does not feel it necessary to explain why it does not mean that every
“empirical judgment” must be confi rmable or disconfi rmable by experience.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
Perception without Sense Data 163
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
164 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
19. See Alva Noë, Action in Awareness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004). While Noë
perhaps overemphasizes the role of sensorimotor expectations in such “amodal” awareness,
they are without doubt a significant part of the story.
20. In John McDowell, “Avoiding the Myth of the Given,” in Having the World in View:
Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), he
gives up the requirement that experiences must be “articulated” or at least “articulable” like
propositions, and sums up some key elements of his current view as follows:
Even though the unity-providing function is a faculty for discursive activity, it is not
in discursive activity that these capacities are operative in intuitions. With much of
the content of an ordinary visual intuition, the capacities that are in play in one’s
having it as part of the content of one’s intuition are not even susceptible of discur-
sive exercise. One can make use of content’s being given in an intuition to acquire a
new discursive capacity, but with much of the content of an ordinary intuition, one
never does that. (Think of the fi nely discriminable shapes and shades of color that
visual experience presents to one.) Nevertheless an intuition’s content is all concep-
tual, in this sense: it is in the intuition in a form in which one could make it, that very
content, figure in discursive activity. That would be to exploit a potential for discur-
sive activity that is already there in the capacities actualized in having an intuition
with that content. (265)
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
Perception without Sense Data 165
Liberal Functionalism
In closing, what I want to do isn’t to present a fourth model of per-
ception, but to describe a way of thinking about the topic that can
help us see how studies of perception at many levels and with many
tools— perceptual psychology (including, importantly, the kind of
psychology pioneered by Gibson), evolutionary biology, neural sci-
ence, behavioral science, and conceptual analy sis— can fit together,
and how personal-level psychology, subpersonal neural science, and
studies of organism– environment transactions at more than one level
can all fit together. The aim is metaphysical in the best sense of the
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
166 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
21. This connection is explicit in Hilary Putnam, “Computational Psychology and In-
terpretation Theory,” in Artifi cial Intelligence: The Case Against, ed. Rainer Born (London:
Routledge, 1987), 1–17; reprinted in my Realism and Reason, vol. 3 of Philosophical Papers
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 139–154.
22. Compare with Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1987).
23. My Prometheus Prize Lecture, “Corresponding with Real ity,” is collected in De
Caro and Macarthur, Philosophy in an Age of Science, 72–91.
24. The term “liberal functionalism” was suggested by Mario De Caro and David
Macarthur’s use of “liberal naturalism” in the introduction to their Naturalism and Norma-
tivity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
Perception without Sense Data 167
receptors” and the “signals from the brain to the motor organs”25 is all
that psychology is concerned with, as my computational functionalism
assumed.
Instead, liberal functionalism holds that we have naturally evolved
functions for dealing with specific environmental contingencies, 26
as well as functions that develop in the maturational history of each
individual—in the case of humans, functions that depend on and in
turn condition the sort of language we understand and use. Rather than
view what happens between the object we see and eye as simply a
matter for physics, for example, a liberal functionalist will follow Gib-
son’s pioneering lead in seeking for a description of the complex relations
between the properties of the object in question, the organism’s reper-
toire of actual and possible sensory-motor transactions with the object,
and the ways in which the object is perceived. And the vocabulary to
be used in describing those functions will not be circumscribed in ad-
vance. As I wrote in my Prometheus Prize Lecture,
25. This is approximately the language I used in “The Mental Life of Some Machines,”
in Intentionality, Minds and Perception, ed. Hector-Neri Castañeda (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1967), 177–200; reprinted in Hilary Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality,
vol. 2 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 1975), 408–428.
26. These are what Ruth Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), has called “normal functions” or “proper functions.”
I agree with Millikan on the importance of the notion, but not on the claim that we can
reduce intentional notions such as reference with its aid.
27. Noam Chomsky is an exception. He thinks talk of reference has no place in serious
study of language, and he adds that we can have no intuitions about reference because “the
terms extension, reference, true of, denote, and others related to them are technical inno-
vations which mean exactly what their inventors tell us they mean.” See his New Horizons in
the Study of Language and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 148.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
168 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:38 PM
D 11
“Naive Realism” and Qualia
1. “12 Philosophers— and Their Influence on Me,” Dewey Lecture to the Eastern Divi-
sion of the American Philosophical Association, December 2007, Proceedings and Addresses
of the American Philosophical Association 82, no. 2 (2008): 102–115.
2. Lest the reader worry that “13 is an unlucky number,” let me point out that this is a
specifically Christian superstition (arising from the fact that there were 13 at the table at
the Last Supper, according to the New Testament), and neither Block nor I are Christians.
In the Jewish tradition, 13 is the number of the attributes of the deity!
169
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
170 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
3. The papers read at this conference, including “Wittgenstein and Qualia,” are col-
lected in Reading Putnam, ed. Maria Baghramian (Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge,
2011).
4. Ned Block, “Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh between Psychology and
Neuroscience,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (2007): 481–548.
5. Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1999), 221n50.
6. In fact, I already argued that “externalism” was untenable in The Threefold Cord: “The
fact that even if color properties . . . are conceived of as properties of ‘external’ objects they
must be admitted to be perspectival, to have dif ferent looks, including looks that depend on
the condition of the perceiving subject, should not be denied (as it has been, unfortunately,
by certain ‘externalist’ phi losophers of mind” (169).
7. Block mentions my remarks in that discussion in the ( later) version of “Wittgenstein
and Qualia” that appears in Baghramian, Reading Putnam, 275–318.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
“Naive Realism” and Qualia 171
one side of my face was lying on the sand) that the beach looked a slightly
less intense shade of yellow if the left eye was the open eye and if the
right eye was the open eye. But I wouldn’t have said that it seemed to
be yellow when viewed through my left eye alone, and gray when viewed
through my right eye alone. The difference was not that extreme. And
it wouldn’t have affected my “matching” performance on a color chart.
No matter which eye is shut, if the beach matches “yellow32” with the
left eye shut, it will match “yellow32” with the right eye shut. The dif-
ference is “ineffable” in Block’s sense.8 But it is not inexplicable; as
Block mentions, it is easily accounted for by differences in the maculae
of the two eyes. This is not even an “abnormality,” for most people re-
port the same phenomenon if they are asked to make the test.9 And
to ask, “Is the sand really the shade it looks to your left eye or the shade
it looks to your right eye?” is meaningless.
However, at the Dublin conference, I also rejected the idea (which is
central to Block’s defense of “qualia” talk against Wittgensteinians) that
the relation of “sameness of qualitative character” could be fi xed by
finding out which brain-states qualia are (i.e., by showing that a “mind–
brain identity theory” is correct for “qualia”). I said in the discussion,
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
172 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
that I defended in Reason, Truth and History, it also rejected “qualia” talk,
on the grounds that sameness and difference of subjective experiences
is something for which there are only ordinary language criteria (for
example, if a fully competent speaker of the language says her experi-
ence was the same on two occasions, then, other things being equal,
that counts as its being the same). The question as to whether the
experiences of dif ferent people, or even one person at dif ferent times,
are “really” the same, when there is no basis for doubt in the ordinary
use of “same experience” talk, could not, I claimed, be scientifically
investigated. There is no “well-defined” relation of phenomenological
sameness there for science to investigate.
This claim of mine, that qualitative sameness, supposing there is such
a thing, is epistemologically inaccessible was directly rebutted by Block
in the second of the two papers to which I referred earlier.13 It is worth
our while to review the issues at stake. Here is part of what I said in
Dublin after Block delivered “Wittgenstein and Qualia.” (I have already
quoted the first sentence.)
But if there were such an identification [of qualia with brain-states],
knowing which one it is is a probably unsolvable epistemological problem.
I think we should give up the assumption that sameness of qualitative
character is well-defined even for one person at dif ferent times or dif-
ferent people at the same time, let alone for nonconspecifics. I don’t
think that there is a fact of the matter, albeit an ineffable one, about
whether the qualitative character is the same or dif ferent in such cases.
I think that we should give that assumption up. I think that there are
no good candidates in present day neurology for a relation of “identity
of qualitative character.”
If it seems strange that one can be wrong about there being a well-
defined relation of identity here, an example from the history of science
may help. It naturally seems to us that there is a fact of the matter about
what is happening somewhere ten light years from here right now. But
after Special Relativity we’ve had to abandon that natural belief. We have
learned that “right now” is not well defined when astronomical distances
or high relative velocities are involved. Similarly, it may be that “identical
phenomenal quality” is not well defined. Nagel’s famous question, “Is the
13. Namely, Block, “Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh Between Psychology
and Neuroscience.”
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
“Naive Realism” and Qualia 173
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
174 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
15. Of course, “shifts” due to insertion of color-changing lenses, or changes in the pig-
mentation of the maculae, or changes in the optic nerves exterior to the brain itself could
still be detectable if changes due to changes in the relevant “modules” themselves were not.
But while the possibility of shifts whose causes are (literally) “in the head” but not in the
brain itself is enough to show that pure “externalism” with respect to color-qualia is unten-
able, it does not seem to me that they are fatal for Wittgenstein’s skepticism about “the
private object,” or my more empirically grounded attempt to defend it.
16. J. M. Hinton, “Visual Experiences,” Mind 76 (1967): 217–227.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
“Naive Realism” and Qualia 175
junctivism”) that I had long found fishy. Hinton scoffs at the idea that
someone has “experiences” that are the same when she has a hallucina-
tion and when she has a corresponding (indistinguishable by her)
veridical experience. Call such a common factor her “psi-ing” on both
occasions. We could not find out what “psi-ing” is by empirical inves-
tigation, Hinton argues, because we would fi rst have to be clear on
what psi-ing is; his picture is clearly that an empirical identity, say, “As
are really Bs” can only be confirmed if one is totally clear in advance on
what one means by “As.” Here is the passage:
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
176 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
“Naive” Realism
The idea that the mass of mankind is quite mistaken in thinking
that the colors, textures, and other “secondary properties” of the ob-
jects they claim to perceive are “out there,” in the things themselves,
when they are really just our own “sense data” is an old one.18
For Russell it was quite clear when he wrote The Problems of Philos-
ophy in 1912 (and still clear in 1940, even after a flirtation with direct
realism in The Analysis of Mind),19 that we do not observe physical ob-
jects at all. He wrote,
About ten pages later, Russell has shown to his satisfaction that the table
we see lies in our own private visual space, and the table we feel lies in
our own private touch space, and so on.21 And furthermore, we do not
perceive the external, physical, table at all:
18. See book I, section II, part IV of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, for example.
19. Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1921).
20. See Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1912), 10.
21. Russell, Problems of Philosophy, 29.
22. Russell, Problems of Philosophy, 47.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
“Naive Realism” and Qualia 177
Nor is the Russell view wholly dated. Although philosophers who will
say that what we perceive are our own sense data are no longer thick
on the ground, there are respected contemporary philosophers who
deny that colors are “real” (Larry Hardin, for example),24 and if colors
are not real, then much of what we take ourselves to see is not there to
be seen!
Moreover, a search of the Internet under “naive realism” will reveal
that quick “refutations” of naive realism, many of them two or three
centuries old, are all over the place. For example,
This refutation assumes that the naive realist cannot maintain that
dispositions to have certain appearances to human beings cannot be “out
there in the world.” In fact, even naive realists would include disposi-
tions to have certain a certain look depending on the lighting conditions
and the position of the viewer among the objective properties of the
objects viewed.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
178 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
Yet today there are philosophers who are proud to call themselves
naive realists.26 Obviously, this new use represents a reaction against
views like Russell’s. And clearly the “externalism” that I argued against
earlier represents a sort of return to naive realism, as does my own call
in The Threefold Cord for a “second naiveté” in the philosophy of per-
ception. But rather than try to survey all the contemporary views that
represent (more or less) a defense of naive realism, what I shall do for a
moment is look at Russell’s position and see at what points a defender
of any degree of return to naive realism might reject it.
(1) We perceive our sense data. (But the man and woman on the
street mistakenly think that what they are perceiving are
physical things.)
26. For instance, “disjunctivists” in the philosophy of perception. See, for example,
M. G. F. Martin, “On Being Alienated,” in Perceptual Experience, ed. Tamar Szabo Gendler
and John Hawthorne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 354–410.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
“Naive Realism” and Qualia 179
27. H. L. Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, vol. 3 (Leipzig: L. Voss, 1866);
3rd ed., repr. with extensive commentary by Allvar Gullstrand, Johannes von Kries, and
Wilibald Nagel (Hamburg and Leipzig: L. Voss, 1896), 28–29.
28. However, Block rejects the idea that we are unable to ever attend to our own qualia.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
180 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
experience. Harman puts the point by saying that the more one
tries to attend to one’s experience of the tree, the more one attends
to the real tree instead.29 Although Moore is sometimes cited as the
originator of this point, he did not actually accept it. I have
heard him quoted saying “the moment we try to fi x our attention
upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to
vanish: it seems as if we had before us a mere emptiness. When
we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue;
the other element is as if it were diaphanous.” But these words are
followed by what I regard as a more significant truth: “Yet it can
be distinguished if we look attentively enough, and know that there
is something to look for.30
Any inference from it seems to us that we attend to “the real tree” to “we
actually perceive the real tree” would, of course, be questioned by Rus-
sell, and with reason. The “diaphanousness” of (much of)31 perceptual
experience is simply a fact about the phenomenology of perceptual ex-
perience, but accepting it as such is not sufficient to overthrow or even
present a clear alternative to Russell’s picture.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
“Naive Realism” and Qualia 181
cognitive access to the world, at any rate to the world outside the brain.
But there is no good reason for a present-day naturalist philosophy of
mind to be internalist.
In a way, this is something I already argued in “The Meaning of
‘Meaning’.”33 A central thesis of that essay was that we need an exter-
nalist and anti-individualist account of what it is to understand the
words of a natu ral language.34 To think about gold, or water, or grass,
or most of the things we think and talk about, is to engage in an activity
that presupposes complex interactions with our environment and with
other people. In “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” I expressed this by saying
that “Meanings aren’t in the head,” but as a number of people later
pointed out, I should have said “The mind isn’t in the head.” It is not, I
hasten to add, that “the mind” is somewhere else; the mind isn’t a thing
with a location at all (so it is not simply the brain under another name),
but a system of world-involving abilities and exercises of those activities.
This view is, I believe, now accepted by a majority of philosophers of
mind and cognitive scientists.
This is the view of the mind I have had for a long time, but in the
last few years I have realized that it also captures what was right in
“functionalism.” It is true that I originally gave the name functionalism
to an internalist view; in “The Nature of Mental States,”35 the mind
was identified with brain, which was described as a computer, and our
mental states were identified with computational states of that computer.
That was wrong,36 but the idea that mental capacities and activities are
ways of functioning was right, provided we allow that those ways of func-
tioning may involve the environment and other people, and provided
33. Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” in Language, Mind and Knowledge, ed.
Keith Gunderson, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 7 (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1975), 131–193; collected in Hilary Putnam, Mind, Language and Re-
ality, vol. 2 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 215–271.
34. By an “externalist” account of understanding, I mean here one that makes essential
reference to things in the environment, as the account of meaning in “The Meaning of
‘Meaning’ ” did, not one that insists that the phenomenological character of a “veridical”
perceptual experience can be exhaustively described by describing the relevant observable
properties of the presented scene.
35. Hilary Putnam, “The Nature of Mental States,” in Mind, Language and Reality,
429–440.
36. I explain why I say it was wrong in Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
182 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
we do not limit the language used for the description of those ways to
the language of computer science. For that reason, in a lecture I gave
not long ago,37 I referred to my present position as “liberal function-
alism,” and to functional “states” in this liberal sense as having “long
arms” (arms that reach out to the environment). In this terminology,
“The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” is a liberal functionalist view of cogni-
tion, or an “externalist” view if we do not give “externalist” the meaning
I gave it in The Threefold Cord—the meaning according to which an “ex-
ternalist” view of perception requires us to hold that the phenomeno-
logical character of a veridical perceptual experience can be exhaustively
described by describing the relevant observable properties of the pre-
sented scene in the usual public language—but simply take an “exter-
nalist” view to be one that allows at least some of our mental states to
be at least partly externalistically identified.
I said earlier that an externalist conception of thinking (in this sense
of “externalist”) is now widely accepted in cognitive science and phi-
losophy of mind. But once this has become the case, as it obviously had
not in Russell’s day, nothing stands in the way of extending externalism
to perceptual states as well.38 But now a problem arises.
The Problem
From here on, I shall discuss McDowell’s views in Mind and World as
an example of a position diametrically opposed to Block’s and to the
whole idea of qualia, that is, of nonconceptual phenomenal characters
common to both veridical and nonveridical experiences.39 To see the
problem to which I just alluded, let us recall that McDowell motivates
37. Hilary Putnam, “Corresponding with Real ity,” in Philosophy in an Age of Science:
Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 72–90.
38. A great deal in this direction has been done by Tyler Burge in Origins of Objectivity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
39. Block himself usually takes “representationalists,” particularly “intentionalists” like
Tye, as his chosen targets; however, these philosophers are not in total disagreement with
Block because they do believe veridical and hallucinatory experiences (to take the extreme
case of the nonveridical) have a common phenomenal character, although they identify that
phenomenal character with information; disjunctivists such as McDowell are in total dis-
agreement with Block’s views because they deny both that sensory impressions are noncon-
ceptual and that there is such a “highest common factor.”
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
“Naive Realism” and Qualia 183
his complex chain of arguments in Mind and World by laying down two
requirements for a satisfactory philosophy of perception. The fi rst,
which he calls “minimal empiricism,” is that sensory impressions must
be a “tribunal” before which our beliefs about the world can stand,40
and much of the controversy connected with that book has to do with
McDowell’s claim that this requirement can only be fulfilled if those
impressions are themselves conceptualized.41 The second (which is sup-
posed to follow from the fi rst) is that “reliabilism” must be rejected,
because in the reliabilist view, McDowell charges, experience only
“exculpates” the subject from criticism for having the beliefs her im-
pressions cause her to have, but fails to justify those beliefs. This is the
central argument of Mind and World: sense impressions (the “tribunal”
before which all our beliefs have to stand) can justify beliefs only if those
sense impressions are themselves justified.
In opposition to McDowell’s views, Hilla Jacobson and I have argued,
on both empirical and conceptual grounds, that the phenomenal char-
acters of perceptual experiences are not (in any case, not always)
conceptualized in any of the senses McDowell has proposed;42 hence,
if McDowell is right, they cannot be a “tribunal,” whether or not those
phenomenal characters are identical with qualia. So, if McDowell is
right, skepticism threatens us. Moreover, qualia, Block taught us, are
brain states, and hence internalistically identified. We might, of course,
say that having (appropriate) qualia only counts as perceiving something
when they are caused in the right way; but didn’t I criticize that idea
previously when I wrote that to say, “When we have the appropriate
40. Minimal empiricism, which McDowell endorses, “makes out that the very idea of
thought’s directedness at the empirical world is intelligible only in terms of answerability
to the tribunal of experience, conceived of in terms of the worlds impressing itself on per-
ceiving subjects.” Quote from John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1996), xvi. Note the (nonaccidental) similarity of “impressing itself”
and “impressions.”
41. McDowell generally uses “impressions” and “experiences” interchangeably (he also
sometimes uses the Kantian term “intuitions,” particularly in the essays collected as Having
the World in View; Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2009). In Mind and World, he identifies “intuitions” with “bits of experiential intake”
(pp. 4 and 6) and “impressions” with “impacts of the world on our senses” (139).
42. Hilla Jacobson and Hilary Putnam, “Against Perceptual Conceptualism,” paper read
(by Hilla Jacobson) at the conference “Philosophy in an Age of Science: Conference in
Honor of Hilary Putnam’s 85th Birthday,” Harvard and Brandeis Universities, June 30–
July 4, 2011; forthcoming in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
184 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
“Naive Realism” and Qualia 185
45. My identification here of the “psychological level” with the level of “rational agency”
is something I now [ July 2015] regard as a mistake. Representation, in Burge’s sense dis-
cussed in Chapter 1, is a psychological activity (not a subpersonal one)—representing some-
thing involves the thing represented, and is thus an externalistically identifi ed psychological
process— but much more primitive than “rational agency,” which requires conceptualiza-
tion. [Note added on July 5, 2015.]
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
186 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
But what of McDowell’s claim that any form of reliabilism only “ex-
culpates” the subject from criticism for having the beliefs her sense im-
pressions cause her to have, but fails to justify those beliefs? What do
we do about skepticism?
46. James Conant, “Varieties of Skepticism,” in Wittgenstein and Skepticism, ed. Denis
Mc Manus (Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge Press, 2004), 97–136.
47. See John McDowell, “Responses,” in Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, ed.
Nicholas Smith (London: Routledge, 1994), 267–305.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
“Naive Realism” and Qualia 187
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
188 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
“Kantian” skeptics in the way there are Cartesian (or Humean, or Pyr-
rhonian) skeptics. It would be obviously self-refuting to claim that “no
thought has any content at all, including this one.” What Kant is asking
of us is not to refute this claim, since it refutes itself, but to answer a “how
is it possible?” question: How is it possible that thoughts possess content?
And that is a task for all philosophers as well as for psychologists—
indeed, for all who theorize about the mind.
That there is a real task here is not an objection to reliabilism, how-
ever, because the reliabilism I have endorsed (call it minimal reliabilism)
does not purport to address it. If it seems to McDowell to be an objec-
tion to reliabilism that it offers “exculpations” where “justifications” are
called for, that is because it does not do what his own answer to the “how
can thoughts possess content?” question allegedly does.51 But I fi nd
that answer unacceptable if understood, as I think it is intended to be
understood. Strangely, because it is a vital part of McDowell’s call for
“minimal empiricism,” I have been unable to find any real discussion
of what he says about content in the literature. The connection to
Block’s concerns (lest the reader think I have forgotten that this is an
essay about Ned Block!) is that McDowell seems to be offering a “tran-
scendental argument” that qualia, if there are such things, must be
conceptualized if our thoughts are to have content at all, a thesis that goes
against much of what Block claims.
I just said that “I have been unable to fi nd any real discussion of
[McDowell’s account of content] in the literature”; in part, this no
doubt due to the fact that McDowell presents that account in very few
pages,52 and neither in Mind and World nor in Having the World in View
does he expand on that presentation in any great detail. Indeed, it may
be that I misunderstood what McDowell intends, but what follows is
how I understand him.
(1) McDowell is a realist (as am I, and as is Ned Block). He criticizes
Sellars for denying the reality of the objects of our commonsense world-
picture,53 and, although I could only fi nd one remark to this effect in
Having the World in View (and none that I recall in Mind and World ), he
51. See McDowell, Mind and World, 11–12. McDowell does not use the term “reliabi-
lism,” but the position he ascribes to Davidson is a version of the reliabilism with respect to
perceptual judgments I describe.
52. See especially McDowell, Mind and World, 3–13.
53. McDowell, “The Logical Form of an Intuition,” in Having the World in View, 41–42.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
“Naive Realism” and Qualia 189
54. In his Second Woodbridge Lecture, McDowell writes, “Not, of course, that we
cannot direct thought at objects that we are unable to bring into view, perhaps because they
are too small or too far away.” And he adds, “But thought so directed is carried to its object,
so to speak, by theory” (Having the World in View, 37). He does not discuss reference to
such objects as fi elds or quantum mechanical particles or wave functions, which are not the
sort of thing that could be “viewed” if they were larger or closer to us.
55. I recall that somewhere— I cannot now fi nd the place— McDowell writes that in-
stead of saying “percepts without concepts are blind” he should have written that “percepts
without concepts are mute.”
56. I criticize this view in Putnam, “Comments on Travis and McDowell,” 347–358.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
190 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
57. After 1939, the logical positivists (or “logical empiricists” as they by then preferred
to style themselves) abandoned sense-datum epistemology in favor of “thing language,”
and they also recognized that theoretical terms could not be “reduced” to observation
terms. I give a brief account of this history in Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact / Value Di-
chotomy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 7–27.
58. McDowell, Mind and World, 6 (emphasis added).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
“Naive Realism” and Qualia 191
ence, described earlier in the essay, also shows). The strong form of
transparency that McDowell’s account needs is just not there; if this is
“naive realism,” it is too naive.
Point 4 is wrong because it is incompatible with what I take to be a
proper scientific realism.59 If we can refer to things outside our light
cone at all, as I take it we obviously can, it is not only “guesses” that
“admit of empirical justification” that have content, but so do conjec-
tures that it is impossible to justify that have content—for example, the
conjecture that “there are no intelligent extraterrestrials anywhere in
space-time.”60
With respect to how our thought can reach to the unobservable, I
could find only the single remark (in the Second Woodbridge Lecture)
that “thought so directed is carried to its object, so to speak, by theory.”
In sum, to the extent that we can understand “how is it possible that
thoughts possess content?” as an intelligible question, McDowell has
not given an answer we should accept. And, in any case, it is not an ob-
jection to what I called “minimal reliabilism” that it does not answer
that question.
59. See Hilary Putnam, “Pragmatism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95, no. 3
(1995): 291–306; “When ‘Evidence Transcendence’ Is Not Malign” [a reply to Crispin
Wright], Chapter 8 in this volume; and “On Not Writing Off Scientific Realism,” in Philos-
ophy in an Age of Science, 91–108.
60. See Chapter 8 for a defense of this claim.
61. Hilary Putnam, “Computational Psychology and Interpretation Theory,” in Realism
and Reason, vol. 3 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
130–155. The sentences quoted in the present essay are on p. 142.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
192 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
62. See Bertrand Russell, “On Denoting,” Mind 14, no. 56 (1905): 479–493.
63. Of course, any theory has to recognize the possibility of reference “by description.”
But not all reference can be by description.
64. McDowell, Mind and World, 45.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
“Naive Realism” and Qualia 193
ness that I raised it (it didn’t simply “go up”) is a genuine awareness, a
genuine act of apperception, but there is no quale of voluntariness. (I
think I remember that Elizabeth Anscombe somewhere describes this
kind of awareness as “knowledge without observation,” but this seems
to me to be a misdescription. I would say that I did observe that I raised
my hand, but this is observation without any particular qualia, or, to
use a term employed by Alva Noë, an instance of “amodal awareness.”)
Similarly, my awareness when I see a tomato that I am seeing some-
thing that has a round other side and a soft seedy inside involves amodal
awareness and not only qualia. McDowell thinks he has to say that im-
pressions warrant beliefs, and that is the reason that he needs them to
be conceptually articulated; my view is that it is apperceptions that war-
rant beliefs. Of course, certain sorts of apperceptions are internally
related to impressions. But it is the apperceptions and not the impressions
that do the warranting.65 Babies and languageless animals do not have
apperceptive awareness in the demanding Kantian or McDowellian
sense, but I see no reason to deny them qualia.
Of course,66 there is as little hope of a reductive account of appercep-
tion as there is of a reductive account of intentionality; indeed, apper-
ception involves intentionality because it involves recognizing things
and goings-on for what they are, and recognizing involves applying
concepts. Apperceiving some thing or event in my environment is what
I have called a “functional state with long arms,” a world-involving
functional state, in a very liberal sense of “functional state.” Under
normal conditions neither our perceptual experiences nor sentences we
accept are the beginning of the process of forming a perceptual belief.
The beginning is outside our heads; the process of forming a percep-
tual judgment to the effect that there is a notepad on this table is an
exercise of a “function”—in fact, a whole system of functions, some
shaped by evolution, and some shaped by cultural processes that con-
nect me to objects and goings-on in my environment (in this case, to
the notepad and to the table). Forming beliefs in accordance with our
normal biological functions and our linguistic upbringing is not just
uttering noises that are mere responses to qualia, although those qualia
are a part of the causal chain that constitutes the normal formation of
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
194 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
67. Or at least that is a reasonable hypothesis on the basis of present knowledge. But it
isn’t a priori, as many phi losophers seem to think, that the relevant qualia (partially) cause
or even temporally precede the cognitive awareness that I am seeing a tomato or a rabbit; it
is logically possible that the cognitive awareness and the quale are effects of a common
cause, or that the qualia are the effect and the cognitive awareness is the cause. But these
questions relate to the subpersonal mechanisms behind awareness; the idea that they are a
question for personal-level psychology is the central mistake of classical empiricism.
68. This question was put to me by Hilla Jacobson.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
“Naive Realism” and Qualia 195
I agree with Block that we can attend to our own qualia. Moreover,
this is not just something that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
introspective psychologists or twentieth-century phenomenologists
or the subjects of twenty-first century experimental studies of percep-
tual experience did and do; there are many moments in life when we
are interested in “what it is like” to experience such and such, in a
sense that involves attending to our qualia rather than (or, as the occa-
sion demands, along with) attending to the worldly properties that we
perceive when we “see through” the qualia as through a transparent
window. Qualia themselves are as much capable of being the objects of
perceptual experience as, say, trees or rabbits. If it seems shocking to
“downgrade” the epistemological role of qualia to the level of the epis-
temological role of the trees and the rabbits, it is no doubt because the
view that knowledge is “based on” qualia has become so deeply
entrenched.
In his Second Woodbridge Lecture,70 McDowell takes Sellars to task
for positing “non-concept-involving episodes or states in sensory and
specifically visual consciousness.”71 As McDowell reads Sellars, Sellars
thinks we need to see the flow of “conceptual representations” in per-
ception as “guided by manifolds of sensations,” where the latter are the
non-concept-involving episodes or states in question.72 And, in line
with his “naive realist” view of experience, McDowell replies that it is
not “non-concept-involving episodes or states” that do the guiding, but
the “objects themselves” (the rabbit and the trees, to stick to our exam-
ples).73 I agree with McDowell that the guiding that is epistemologically
relevant is done by the objects themselves, but I agree with Sellars
that part of the guiding that is causally relevant— assuming our current
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
196 NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:39 PM
D 12
The Development of
Externalist Semantics
1. This chapter consists of the lecture I gave on November 1, 2011, on the occasion of
being awarded the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy by the Royal Swedish
Academy of Science for my contribution “to the understanding of semantics for theoretical
and ‘natu ral kind’ terms, and of the implications of this semantics for philosophy of lan-
guage, theory of knowledge, philosophy of science and metaphysics.” In it I describe the
path that led to the work for which I was awarded that prize, including at least one wrong
idea that I had to overcome on the way.
199
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
200 LOOKING BACK
2. The only graduate course in mathematics I had, in fact, was a course in Ideal Theory
at Harvard in 1948–1949. I learned mathematical logic by solving problems posed for me by
Georg Kreisel, when I became an assistant professor at Princeton University, starting in
1953, and, after publishing a number of papers in logical and mathematical journals, I re-
ceived tenure in both the philosophy department and the mathematics department at
Princeton in 1959.
3. Hilary Putnam, “Synonymity, and the Analysis of Belief Sentences,” Analysis 14
(1954): 114–122; repr. in Propositions and Attitudes, ed. N. Salmon and S. Soames (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 149–158.
4. Paul Ziff, Semantic Analysis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
The Development of Externalist Semantics 201
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
202 LOOKING BACK
1905; rather, I said, we were talking about the same magnitude in those
two years, but we came to have a more accurate idea of the nature of that
magnitude. And similarly, I argued, when physicists gave up the idea
that atoms are little solar systems (the Bohr model), they did not change
the reference of the term “atom”; rather, they arrived at a better idea of
what atoms are.
Two points are essential here, if one wants to understand the con-
nection with semantic “externalism”: First, the idea that terms must have
precise and unchanging definitions, and that it is those definitions that
fix their reference, has to be given up. Second, it is a combination of the-
ories and experiments that tell us what our terms refer to, and not un-
changing “definitions.” Because the results of experiments depend on
the external environment, as does the fate of the theories we use those
experiments to test, one way of expressing this is that the terms I dis-
cussed in “The Analytic and the Synthetic” (e.g., “energy,” “atom”) have
their reference fixed by the environment itself, and not simply by what is
in our heads. But that is not the way I thought about it at the time, which
is why ten years had to pass before I arrived at “semantic externalism.”
As I mentioned, the first draft of “The Analytic and the Synthetic”
was written in 1957–1958; my fi rst explicitly “semantic externalist”
paper, “Is Semantics Possible?,” was written ten years later.8 One
reason for this substantial time gap is that I thought of “The Analytic
and the Synthetic” as a paper only about one limited issue in seman-
tics, namely, what was right and what was wrong in Quine’s famous at-
tacks on the analytic-synthetic distinction. The moral I drew was that
while Quine was wrong to deny that there are any analytically defin-
able terms in the language at all—I defended, and still defend, the idea
that there is a point to saying that “all bachelors are unmarried” is an
analytic statement— the notion of analytic truth could not bear the
weight put on it by Russell, Frege, and the logical positivists, all of whom
claimed that the truths of mathematics were analytic, and some of
whom also who thought that “E = ½ mv2” was analytic in classical
physics and that Einstein—for good reason, to be sure—“changed the
8. Hilary Putnam, “Is Semantics Possible?” Metaphilosophy 1 (1970): 187–201; revised ver-
sion in Language, Belief and Metaphysics: Contemporary Philosophic Thought: The International
Philosophy Year Conferences at Brockport, vol. 1, ed. H. E. Kiefer and M. K. Munitz (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1970), 50–63; repr. in Mind, Language and Reality,
139–152.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
The Development of Externalist Semantics 203
9. One of those insights is that a property may be linguistically associated with a natu ral
kind term although the property is only contingently, not analytically, associated with the
relevant kind. For example, the properties striped and quadrupedal are associated with the
noun tiger, but it is not analytic that all tigers are striped, and possibly not even true that
there are no three-legged tigers. “Tigers are striped” and “Tigers are quadrupeds” are
“state regularities” in Ziff’s terminology. I did not preserve the terminology, but Ziff’s
observation led me to the notion of a stereotype in the “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” in Mind,
Language and Reality, 215–271.
10. W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960).
11. Donald Davidson, “Truth and Meaning,” Synthese 17 (1967): 304–323.
12. I mean “ideal” from a strictly linguistic point of view, with no philosophical or be-
havioristic axe to grind, of course.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
204 LOOKING BACK
13. Jerrold Katz, “Review of Semantic Analysis,” Language 38, no. 1 (1962): 52–69.
14. I left MIT for Harvard in 1965.
15. “How Not to Talk about Meaning: Comments on J. J. C. Smart,” in Boston Studies in
the Philosophy of Science, vol. 2, ed. R. S. Cohen and M. R. Wartofsky (New York: Human-
ities Press, 1965), 205–222; repr. in Mind, Language and Reality, 117–131. I talk about “seman-
tical rules” in the Boston Studies publication (216–222), and in Mind, Language and Reality
(126–131). This is the text of a talk to the Boston Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science
that I gave December 12, 1963.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
The Development of Externalist Semantics 205
16. Although I had already published “Minds and Machines,” in Dimensions of Mind, ed.
Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1960), 148–180, while I was at MIT, I
wrote “Robots: Machines or Artificially Created Life?” Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 668–
691; repr. in Mind, Language and Reality, 386–407.
17. Locke says dif ferent things about “our idea of gold” in dif ferent places. In one place
he writes, “He that will examine his complex idea of gold, will fi nd several of its ideas that
make it up to be only powers; as the power of being melted, but of not spending itself in the
fi re; of being dissolved in aqua regia [emphasis added— HP], are ideas as necessary to make up
our complex idea of gold, as its colour and weight: which, if duly considered, are also
nothing but dif ferent powers” (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), II, 23, §10). But in another
place he has it that the nominal essence of the name “gold” “is that complex Idea the word
Gold stands for, let it be, for instance, a Body yellow, of a certain weight, malleable, fusible,
and fi xed” (III, 6, §2). But the same objection applies: I have no idea what the “certain
weight” of gold is, and so, according to Locke, I do not know the “nominal essence,” that is,
the meaning of the word.
18. Putnam, “How Not to Talk about Meaning,” 217–218.
19. Putnam, “How Not to Talk about Meaning,” 217–218.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
206 LOOKING BACK
I found myself driven to an idea that was wholly new to me, and ap-
parently to other philosophers as well: nothing that is in the head of the
average speaker suffices to determine what her word gold refers to.
Meanings aren’t in the head.
Well, if they aren’t in the head, where are they? Of course, the brain
is in the head, and the brain has to undergo appropriate changes (mat-
uration, and all the various effects of acculturation) before one can speak
a natu ral language. “Meanings aren’t in the head” doesn’t mean that
the brain has nothing to do with semantic competence. But what fi xes
the meanings of a speaker’s words is not just the state of her brain; the
reference of our terms is generally fixed by two things that classical phi-
losophy of language either ignores or mentions only as an afterthought:
other people and the world.
You may have noticed that I just shifted from “meaning” to “refer-
ence”; they are not the same, but they are closely connected. Consider:
typical modern English speakers have only a vague idea of what an
elm tree looks like. They depend on other people, especially experts, to
determine for them which trees are “elms,” and if there is an island
somewhere in which a dialect of English is spoken in which the word
“elm” is the name of a dif ferent species of tree— say, of beeches—
then we would say that on that island “elm” means beech. For natural
kind words, for instance, names of biological species and names of sub-
stances, difference in reference counts as difference in meaning.20
One problem with viewing the reference of my words as something
fi xed by the way my brain is “programmed” is that such an individual-
istic account ignores the linguistic division of labor. Not only am I unable
to reliably distinguish elms from other species of tree; the fact is that I
do not have to be able to do this on my own. If I need to know whether a
particular tree is an elm, I can ask someone who is more knowledge-
able than I.
In the case of names of substances—metals, for example—the lin-
guistic division of labor is even more obvious; or it is obvious once
pointed out— evidently it wasn’t obvious to Locke, with his various at-
tempts to say what the “idea” of gold is that we English speakers sup-
20. The extension of a natu ral kind term—that is, the set of things it is true of—is one
of the components of its “meaning vector,” in the theory I proposed in “The Meaning of
‘Meaning’.”
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
The Development of Externalist Semantics 207
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
208 LOOKING BACK
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
The Development of Externalist Semantics 209
22. Hilary Putnam, “Meaning Holism,” in The Philosophy of W. V. Quine, ed. L. E. Hahn
and P. A. Schilpp (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986), 405–431; repr. in Realism with a Human
Face (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 278–302.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
210 LOOKING BACK
23. I should mention that some implications of externalism for theory of knowledge are
explored in my well-known “Brains in a Vat” thought experiment. See Hilary Putnam,
“Brains in a Vat,” in Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 1–21.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
The Development of Externalist Semantics 211
24. N. Block, “Mental Paint,” in Refl ections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler
Burge, ed. M. Hahn and B. Ramberg (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003), 165–200.
25. For example, see Michael Martin, “On Being Alienated,” in Perceptual Experience,
ed. Tamar Szabo Gendler and John Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006),
354–410.
26. For example, see Michael Tye, “Phenomenal Externalism, Lolita and the Planet
Xenon,” in Qualia and Mental Causation in a Physical World: Themes from the Philosophy of
Jaegwon Kim, ed. Terence Horgan, Marcelo Sabatés, and David Sosa (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2015), 190–208; and Michael Tye and Alex Byrne, “Qualia Ain’t in the Head,”
Nous 40, no. 2 (2006): 241–255.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
212 LOOKING BACK
have already resulted from these discussions. No one can be sure what
the philosophy and psychology of perception will look like in another
fifty years, but that is an indication of the vitality of the field. That my
contributions to something as dry sounding as “the understanding of
semantics for theoretical and ‘natural kind’ terms” has helped to revive
interest in the metaphysics of perception gives me great pleasure.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
D 13
Sixty-Five Years of Philosophy
A PARTICIPANT’S THOUGHTS AND EXPERIENCES
1. This chapter was a lecture delivered via Skype at the University of East Anglia on
December 5, 2013, from my home in Massachusetts. The sixty-five years counts from my
graduation from the University of Pennsylvania.
2. Hilary Putnam, “A Half Century of Philosophy, Viewed from Within,” Daedalus:
Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 126, no. 1 (1997): 175–208.
213
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
214 LOOKING BACK
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
Sixty-Five Years of Philosophy 215
4. Hilary Putnam, Philosophy in an Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism, ed.
Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012),
chap. 6, “A Philosopher Looks at Quantum Mechanics (Again),” and chap. 7, “Quantum
Mechanics and Ontology.”
5. See particularly chapter 4, “On Not Writing Off Scientific Realism.”
6. Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method, vol. 1 of Philosophical Papers (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 73.
7. See Hilary Putnam, “Wittgenstein: A Reappraisal,” in De Caro and Macarthur, Phi-
losophy in an Age of Science, chap. 28.
8. Putnam, “Science and Philosophy,” in De Caro and Macarthur, Philosophy in an Age of
Science, 44.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
216 LOOKING BACK
9. Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in Frontiers of Science
and Philosophy, ed. Robert Colodny (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), 35–
78; repr. in Science, Perception and Reality (1963; Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview, 1991), quota-
tion from p. 37 of the 1991 edition.
10. Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” in Language, Mind and Knowledge, ed.
Keith Gunderson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), 131–193. Collected
in Hilary Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality, vol. 2 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press: 1975), 215–271.
11. Hilary Putnam, “Brains in a Vat,” in Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1981), chap. 1.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
Sixty-Five Years of Philosophy 217
topics, and I shall not talk about these other interests of mine. So let
me describe those two well-known thought experiments of mine.
Twin Earth
Although many of you know about Twin Earth, I need to review the
argument in which that thought experiment figured. Imagine a planet
like earth— call it “Twin Earth”—on which the liquid that fills the lakes
and rivers, that people drink, is not H2O but a different compound,
XYZ, with similar superficial characteristics. The Twin Earthers were
supposed to be our doppelgängers; some of them even spoke English.
Also, I imagined the year to be 1750, before the chemical composition of
either water or twater (Twin Earth “water”) was known. The English-
speaking Twin Earthers naturally called twater “water” (and the French-
speaking ones called it “eau,” and the German-speaking ones called it
“Wasser”). The reaction of the majority of people who have considered
this thought experiment is that upon learning that Twin Earth “water”
doesn’t consist of H2O at all, we Earthers would and should say “it isn’t
really water.” The word “water” has a different meaning on Earth and
on Twin Earth. Twin Earthian Oscar’s word “water” and Earthian Os-
car’s word “water” are homonyms, but not synonyms. They do not have
the same meaning—not even if Earthian Oscar and Twin Earthian
Oscar happen to be microphysical duplicates!
It is irrelevant that there is no such physically possible compound
XYZ, because we can imagine that neither Oscar nor Twin Oscar know
this esoteric fact. (Indeed, I am not sure I myself know such a thing,
unless having been told that this is so by one former chemist counts as
“knowing.”) The question is what we would say under perfectly imag-
inable circumstances, not what is chemically or physically possible.
Moreover, the example can easily be modified to avoid this (irrelevant)
objection, and that is what I did in a later paper:12 just imagine that
Twin Earth water consists of 50 percent water and 50 percent a taste-
less and nonpoisonous liquid that does not quench thirst (D2O, “heavy
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
218 LOOKING BACK
Brain in a Vat
The similarity of my Brain in a Vat thought experiment and the movies
The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded has often been remarked. In The
New Yorker, Adam Gopnik wrote,
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
Sixty-Five Years of Philosophy 219
13. Adam Gopnik, “The Unreal Thing: What’s Wrong with The Matrix,” The New
Yorker, May 19, 2003, www.newyorker.com /magazine/2003/05/19/the-unreal-thing.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
220 LOOKING BACK
real world, that is, they experience just what non-envatted people would
be experiencing. Because it is part of the scenario that the Brains were
always envatted, so there was never a time when they had information
carry ing causal interaction with things in the “real world” and their
properties, it belongs to the Brain in a Vat hypothesis that people in the
vat have no information carrying causal interaction with real cabbages or
real rabbits or real mountains, or even real vats (they are causally depen-
dent on one vat, of course, as they would die if it broke, but they do not
receive information from it as long as the system functions as it is de-
signed to). Nor do they have information carry ing causal interactions
with such properties as one thing’s being inside another, or being to the
south of another, or having a certain color or weight or whatever. Thus,
if “semantic externalism” is right, then the Brains in a Vat aren’t able
to refer to cabbages or kings, or ships or shoes or sealing wax.
This means that although the Brains in a Vat use the same words we
do, or at least the same vocables go through their heads, and their
Joycean “stream of consciousness” may be the same as that of a non-
envatted person, their words do not have the same meanings as those of a
non-envatted doppelgänger. That was, remember, the conclusion of the
Twin Earth argument. Thus, they are not speaking the same language
as a non-envatted doppelgänger. Let us call the language of the Brains
in a Vat (or of the ones who call their language “English”) Vat English.
The question as to whether I am a Brain in a Vat is the question as
to whether the language I speak (I call it “English, of course) is Vat
English.
But in my language, the word “cabbage” refers to cabbages. How do
I know that?
There is a fundamental logical principle, basically stated by Tarski,
according to which in one’s own language any term T refers to, pre-
cisely, Ts.14 For example, in my language, the word “cabbage” refers to
cabbages. For me to say in my language, the one I am speaking (or
writing or thinking in) now, that the word “cabbage” does not refer
to cabbages in that very language would be simply self-contradictory.
14. Tarski’s disquotation principle (the famous convention T) was stated for truth rather
than reference, but the above disquotation principle for reference follows from Tarski’s
analysis as well; formally, for all x, x satisfi es the open sentence “Tx” if and only if Tx (“satisfac-
tion” is the reference relation, in Tarskian semantics).
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
Sixty-Five Years of Philosophy 221
But we just saw (and again, I am saying all this in my own language)
that in Vat English the word “cabbage” does not refer to cabbages. From
these two facts together, it follows at once that my language is not Vat
English. Hence, I am not a Brain in a Vat.
Instead of discussing the lecture I am going to finish giving, we could
of course spend the rest of our time discussing the pros and cons of this
argument, why it seems so counterintuitive, and why nonetheless so
many people now accept semantic externalism, including this conse-
quence. I will just say one thing: the argument is not meant to convince
a skeptic. Skeptics can always reject the premise; they can reject se-
mantic externalism. On the other hand, if the skeptic assumes that
semantic externalism is false, the skeptic assumes something I do not
believe and do not have to believe. Thus, even if the argument does
not show that Cartesian skepticism is wrong, it does show that Des-
cartes, or his imagined contemporary successor who talks about Brains
in a Vat rather than disembodied minds, does not have a proof I must
accept that skepticism is right; or at least not a proof based on the pos-
sibility that we are all Brains in a Vat, because I don’t have to accept
the possibility that I am a Brain in a Vat.
15. “Aristotle’s Mind and the Contemporary Mind,” in Aristotle and Contemporary Sci-
ence, ed. Demetra Sfendoni-Mentzou, Jagdish Hattiangadi, and D. M. Johnson (New York:
Peter Lang, 2000), 1:7–28.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
222 LOOKING BACK
16. See Putnam, “Corresponding with Real ity,” in De Caro and Macarthur, Philosophy in
an Age of Science, 72–90.
17. Donald Davidson, “Knowing One’s Own Mind,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objec-
tive (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 2001), 15–38; originally published in Proceedings and Ad-
dresses of the American Philosophical Association 60 (1987): 441–458. Davidson later expressed
embarrassment at his own thought experiment in his article “Interpretation: Hard in
Theory, Easy in Practice,” in Interpretations and Causes: New Perspectives on Donald David-
son’s Philosophy, ed. Mario De Caro (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer, 1999), 31–44. I
see need for the embarrassment.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
Sixty-Five Years of Philosophy 223
somewhere full of warm water and vegetation and thus with atoms, or
at least atomic particles, of which in principle a human being could be
formed. Suppose that by one of those almost infi nitely improbable but
not impossible quantum-mechanical scenarios,18 the particles in the
swamp jump together and form a human being with a completely false
but reasonably consistent set of memories, as of a human life, including
some memories that make sense of the fact that he is now in this swamp.
Swampman, of course, might be on Earth, he might be on Twin Earth,
or any other planet that has the right sort of atmosphere. No matter
what the “water” on that planet actually is, Swampman, if he is a dupli-
cate of an Earthean human being, will say that water is H2O. But the
question is, “What do Swampman’s words refer to?”
If semantic externalism is correct, the answer is that Swampman’s
words do not refer to anything. And if his words do not (yet) have any ref-
erence, Swampman has no concepts; and, a fortiori, anything he says is
meaningless. Of course, after he has been in existence for a while, and
has had causal connection with the liquid in the swamp and calls it
“water,” with the grass in the swamp and calls it “grass,” perhaps his
words acquire meaning, but initially, Swampman has no concepts, and hence
no thoughts. Some philosophers of mind would go further and say he
has no consciousness; I don’t see that conclusion as following, but in
any case, it follows from our externalist (or “causalist”) premise that
Swampman has no concepts. To have concepts it is necessary to have
appropriate causal connection with an environment. Semantic exter-
nalism implies externalism about the mind; if to have a mind is to have
thoughts, then to have a mind it isn’t sufficient to have the right go-
ings-on in the brain and the rest of the body; to have a mind you have
to be hooked up to an environment in the proper way, or at least to have
a mind that can think about an external world, you have to have causal
interactions that extend into the environment. One might call this an
anti-solipsist conclusion: If externalism is right, pace Descartes, an isolated
disembodied mind would have no thoughts about the world at all, not
even false thoughts. In Kantian language, the pseudo-thoughts of Des-
cartes’s isolated mind are an empty play of representations and not
thoughts at all.
18. Davidson, “Knowing One’s Own Mind,” has this all happening as a result of light-
ning bolts, which is, physically speaking, impossible.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
224 LOOKING BACK
To put it another way, one suggested many years ago by John Mc-
Dowell, if meanings aren’t in the head (which is what I said in “The
Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ”), then the mind isn’t in the head either;19 that
is to say, the mind isn’t a thing, it’s a set of abilities— abilities that in-
volve the external world from the beginning.
Especially at the University of East Anglia, it is appropriate to say
at once that such a view was arrived at by Wittgenstein long before
I thought about this question, but Wittgenstein’s arguments, while
fascinating, are problematic for me. The Twin Earth argument
was my own way of arriving at the conclusion that to think of the
mind in the traditional epistemological way, as something that is
isolated from the world initially and that has to get past a kind of
“veil” of its own sensations to get to the world, is wrongheaded from
the start.
19. John McDowell, “Putnam on Mind and Meaning,” in Philosophical Topics 20 (1992):
35–48. McDowell wrote, “The moral of Putnam’s thought for the nature of the mental
might be, to put it in his terms, that the mind . . . is not in the head either” (36).
20. William James, “Does Consciousness Exist,” in The Works of William James: Essays in
Radical Empiricism, ed. Frederick Burckhardt and Frederick Bowers (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1976), 3–19, quotation from p. 16.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
Sixty-Five Years of Philosophy 225
it not only in the minimal sense of “see,”21 in which a cat might be said
to see a television set, without having a concept or a protoconcept of a
television set,22 but sees it in the sense in which to see a television set is
to see it and know that what one is seeing is a television set, the case of a
full-blown apperception. In such a case, my perceptual experience has
a sensational component—it includes what some philosophers call
“qualia” that could also be part of the experience of a child who does
not yet have the concept of a television set—but it also includes in a way
that is real but hard to describe the fact that it looks like a television set,
the fact that the concept “television set” is in play.
But now we can apply externalism: if to see a television set, in the sense
in which a master of the relevant part of a language can see a television
set, requires concept-possession, and concept-possession requires causal
connection to external things, then seeing requires causal connection
to external things—not just in the trivial sense, that we don’t call it
“seeing” if no light rays from external objects are striking the eye, but
in a much more complicated sense: seeing, in the sense of perceiving by
means of sight, requires a history of language acquisition and language use.
(In fact, according to another part of the argument of “The Meaning
of ‘Meaning’,” it also requires a history of interaction with other
speakers, but I do not have time to go into that part of the argument
today.) In the demanding sense, Swampman doesn’t “see” anything
when he appears on the scene; he doesn’t perceive anything.
How this “externalist” picture contrasts with the traditional episte-
mological account was already indicated earlier, when I said that on that
account the mind has to get past a “veil” of its own sensations to get to
the world. I could also have said that in the traditional epistemological
picture, knowledge is entirely based on experiential qualia, in the sense
that every thing we know about the world has to be inferred by the sub-
ject from those qualia, from the phenomenal character of his or her
sensations. Perhaps the best statement of that view in the twentieth
century is Russell’s classic The Problems of Philosophy. In The Problems of
Philosophy, everything we know about the external world is inferred from
21. On the senses of “see,” see Ruth Anna Putnam, “Seeing and Observing,” Mind 78
(1969): 493–500.
22. On the difference between the concepts of humans who have mastered a language
and the protoconcepts, as I termed them, of animals, see Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philos-
ophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 28–31.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
226 LOOKING BACK
our “sense data,” and those sense data are all in our own “private spaces.”23
If the externalist picture I have been defending is right, this traditional
picture of us as starting from data available in our individual “private
spaces” and inferring that there is an external world at all is hopelessly
wrong. If all we have is our own private data, then we are Swampmen.
Swampman has sensations, but he cannot infer the existence of an
external world—he cannot so much as conceive of an external world.
Swampman has no concepts, and having no concepts—if we accept what
James said about “fusion”—lacking “apperceptive ideas” to fuse with his
sensations, means having no perceptions (or, in a dif ferent terminology,
no “apperceptions”). Knowledge is not the product of interactions with
mental objects in a private space, but of transactions between a human
organism and an environment, including a history of transactions with
a linguistic environment.
23. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 29.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:58 PM
Acknowledgments
Many of the papers reprinted here have been lightly edited to correct
minor mistakes, avoid needless repetition, and, in cases where the papers
were originally given as talks, remove indications of occasional address.
Minor additions or deletions to several papers for purposes of clarifica-
tion have been made. However, in cases where we have added a whole
paragraph indicating a significant change in view, this has been indicated
in the text by putting it in brackets and giving the date of the remark,
when pertinent. We thank the publishers and journals that have granted
us the permission to republish some of the papers contained in this book.
227
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:59 PM
228 Acknowledgments
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:59 PM
Acknowledgments 229
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:59 PM
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/3/16 7:59 PM
Index
Absolute conception of the world, 44, 45, Austin, John, 152, 154, 155
47, 48–49, 50–52 “Avoiding the Myth of the Given”
Absolutism, 88, 89 (McDowell), 147, 149
Action, perception and, 165 Ayer, A. J., 155
Adequacy, Tarski’s criterion of, 28–30
Aesthetic judgments, science and, 61 Being Realistic about Reasons (Scanlon), 42
Aesthetic values, 16–17 Beliefs, perceptual experience and,
Affordances, 211 141–142, 143, 183–184; apperceptions
Altruistic behav ior, 56–57, 58 and, 149, 193–194
Amodal apperception, 150–151, 193 Berkeley, George, 3, 117, 159, 180
The Analysis of Mind (Russell), 176 Blackburn, Simon, 214
“The Analytic and the Synthetic” Block, Ned, qualia and, 156, 157–158, 163,
(Putnam), 201, 202, 210 169–170, 171, 172, 174, 179–180, 188,
Analyticity, 79 194–195, 211
Analytic metaphysics, 214 Boyd, Richard, 21, 90–96
Anscombe, Elizabeth, 193 Brain in a Vat thought experiment,
Antirealism, 1–2, 3, 115, 117, 119–121, 216–217, 218–221, 222
125–126; alternative to, 126–127 Bronowski, Jacob, 16
Apperception, 184, 225–226; amodal, Burge, Tyler, 23, 28, 39, 40
150–151, 193; beliefs and, 193–194;
conceptual shaping of, 149; Kantian Carnap, Rudolf, 38, 77, 93; conceptual
model of perception and, 162–163; scheme, 81–84; reduction sentence and,
linguistic ability and, 185, 189; qualia 131; Reichenbach and, 100, 101–102, 103,
and, 192–194; sensations vs., 146–148 111; status of unobserved objects and,
A priori– a posteriori dichotomy, 59–60 107–108, 109, 117
Aristotle, 5, 57–60, 59, 61, 154, 221–222 Cartesian skepticism, 141–142, 186–187, 221
“Aristotle after Wittgenstein” (Putnam), Carus Lecture, 69
76 Case, Jennifer, 83–84, 85
Artifacts, 88 Casper, Philip, 21
Assertibility, 134–135 Categorical imperative, 41–42
231
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:54 PM
232 Index
Causal connection principle, 218, 219, Davidson, Donald, 9, 46, 50, 114, 203;
222–224, 225–226 conceptual relativism, 68–69; justifica-
Causation, 15; reference and, 70–74, 218, 219 tion and experience, 143–144, 150;
Cavell, Stanley, 92, 216 reference and, 52, 53; thought experi-
Charity, principle of, 46, 53 ment, 222–223; truth and, 53–54
Chomsky, Noam, 63–64, 143, 199 De Caro, Mario, 21, 22, 24
Churchland, Paul and Patricia, 214 Defi nitions, 202, 207, 210
Churchman, C. West, 200 Deflationary theory of truth, 35–36, 37–38,
Cognitive equivalence, 14 40, 94
Color, perception of, 140–141, 159, Deflationism about reference, 40
170–171, 177, 211 Democracy, 59, 63
Commonsense realism, 4–5, 7–9 Dennett, Daniel, 214
Commonsense worldview, 3, 12 Descartes, René, 221, 223
Computational functionalism, 166 Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry
Conant, James, 141, 186 (Williams), 45–46, 70
Conception: causal connection with Descriptive statements, 96
environment and, 218, 219, 223, 224, Devitt, Michael, 2, 71, 118, 119
225–226; change in sensation and, Dewey, John, 22, 41, 91–92
148–150; innate, 143; perceptual Dewey Lectures, 25, 91, 122, 134, 152, 153,
experience and, 139–141, 143, 144–146, 154, 156, 166
183, 192–193 Dialogue on the Two Main Systems of the
“The Concept of Truth in Formalized World (Galileo), 16–17
Languages” (Tarski), 27–28, 30, 31, 34 Disjunctivism, 155–157, 169, 174–175
Concept-possession, perception and, 225 Disquotation, 35, 37–38; truth and,
Conceptualization: of impressions, 94–95
189–191; perception and, 224–226 Dreben, Burton, 79
Conceptual pluralism, 14 Dretske, Fred, 157, 179, 211
Conceptual relativity, 68–69, 77–80, Duhem, Pierre, 7
82–83, 88, 89, 153–154 Dummett, Michael: idealism and, 123–124;
Conceptual schemes, 81–88 justificationism and, 115, 116, 121–122,
Conditional Fallacy, 135 125–126, 127; realistic semantics and, 4,
“Confessions of a Hard- Core, Unsophisti- 91, 116, 121; redefi ning “realism” and,
cated Metaphysical Realist” (Maudlin), 116–119
25, 26
“Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Eddington, Arthur, 4, 5
Mesh between Psychology and Edelman, Gerald, 173, 174
Neuroscience” (Block), 170, 174 Einstein, Albert, 202–203
Constructive empiricism, 7 Eliminationism, 45–46
Content, thoughts and, 191–194 Eliminativism, 86–88, 89
Conventionalism, 200–201 Empiricism, 7, 141, 142, 144, 156–157;
Conventions, 79 minimal, 141, 144, 183; model of
Convention T, 27–28, 29–30, 35–36 perception, 158, 159–161, 165
“Cornell Moral Realists,” 22 Enlightenment, 59, 60
Correspondence theory of truth, 34–35, Epistemic situation, 123–124, 129, 135
94–96 Epistemic values, 16–17, 61
Counterfactuals, 122, 124, 148–149 Epistomological realism, 4
The Crisis of European Sciences and Equality, ethics and, 59–60
Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl), Ethical judgments, 52
6–7, 9–10 Ethical relativism, 60
Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 92, 146 Ethics: cultural history of, 57–62;
Cross-category identity, 85, 86 evolutionary theory and, 56–64;
Cubical world argument, 103–107 normativity and, 15, 40–42; Putnam on,
Cultural evolution, ethics and, 62–63 92; Williams and, 54–55
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:54 PM
Index 233
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Williams), Having the World in View (McDowell),
70 188–189
Ethics (Dewey & Tufts), 41 Hegel, G. W. F., 154
Ethics without Ontology (Putnam), 92 Helmholtz, H. L., 179, 185
Evans, Gareth, 149–150 Hempel, Carl, 131
Evidence-transcendence, 128–135 Hierarchy theory, 86
Evolutionary theory, ethics and, 56–64 Hilbert, David, 204
“Exist,” as univocal, 93–94 Hinton, J. M., 155, 156, 174–175
Experience. See Perceptual experience Hornsby, Jennifer, 9
Experience and Prediction (Reichenbach), Horwich, Paul, 38
100, 102–103, 107, 111, 120 “How Not to Talk about Meaning”
“Explanation and Reference” (Putnam), (Putnam), 205
117 Hume, David, 159, 180
Externalism, 170, 178, 180–182, Husserl, Edmund, 6–7, 9–10, 147–148
192, 201–202, 205; history of, 221–222; Hyperscientific realism, 4–6, 7, 9
perception and, 210–212, 222–224, Hypothetico-deductive method, 110
225–226. See also Semantic externalism
Idealism, 117–118, 123–124
Fallibilism, 12 Idealization theory of truth, 122, 124
Farber, Marvin, 10 Ideal theory, 26
Feigl, Herbert, 200 The Idea of Justice (Sen), 57
Feyerabend, Paul, 201 Identity of phenomenal character, 172–173
Field, Hartry, 28, 30–31, 33, 39 Immaterialism, 180–181
Fitch propositions, 130–134 Impressions: beliefs and, 183–185, 193;
Fodor, Jerry, 64, 71–72, 160, 200, 203, 204, conceptualization of, 189–191; Reichen-
214 bach on, 103–105
Fraassen, Bas van, 7 Indeterminancy thesis, 39
Frege, Gottlob, 202 Inductive logic, 108–111
“From Quantum Mechanics to Ethics and Inference: empiricist model on, 159–160;
Back Again” (Putnam), 90 of existence of things, 105–107; sense
Functionalism, 181–182, 194, 216; data and, 178
computational, 166; liberal, 146, Information, qualia and, 211
165–168, 182, 185–186, 194 Innate language, 63–64
Intention: apperception and, 193; reference
Galileo, 5–6, 16–17 and truth and, 71–72
Gandhi, Mahatma, 59 Intentionalists, 189
Gibson, Etienne, 165, 167, 211 Interface conceptions, 128–133
Gilson, Etienne, 25 Interface-realism, 129
Glymour, Clark, 71, 102 Internalism, 180–181
Gödel, Kurt, 27 Internal realism, 1, 2–3, 25–26, 70, 71, 124,
Gold, meaning of, 205–207 152–153
Goodman, Nelson, 91 Intrinsic properties, 75–76
Gopnik, Adam, 218–219 “Is Semantics Possible?” (Putnam), 202,
Government, as social contract, 59, 203, 208
61–62
Grünbaum, Adolf, 200–201 Jacobson, Hilla, 148, 158, 183
James, William, 91, 146–147, 148, 154, 169,
“A Half Century of Philosophy Viewed 178, 224–226
from Within” (Putnam), 213 Judgments, 16, 50, 52, 61
Hardin, Larry, 177 Justification: Davidson and, 143–144, 150;
Harman, Gilbert, 157, 179, 180 reliabilism and, 187–188
Harris, Zelig, 199 Justificationism, 115, 116, 121–122, 124,
Hauser, Marc, 58, 63–64 125–126, 127
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:54 PM
234 Index
Kant, Immanuel, 41, 92, 146, 147, 154, 194 and, 159, 162–164, 165; on meaning, 224;
Kantian model of perception, 159, 162–165 ostensive defi nition and, 142–143;
Kantian skepticism, 141–142, 186, 187–191 perceptual experience and beliefs and,
Kaplan, David, 208 141–142, 143; philosophy of perception
Katz, Jerrold, 200, 203–204 requirements and, 182–184; Sellars and,
Kinetic energy, reference and, 201–202 195–196; thoughts possessing content
Knowledge: qualia and, 192–193, 225–226; and, 191–194
reliabilism and, 187 Meaning: as correspondence, 103;
Kripke, Saul, 114, 208, 209–210 deflationism and, 37–38; of expression,
93; linguistics and, 199–200; probability
Land, Edwin, 158 theory of, 100, 101–103, 107; truth
Language: concept of truth in, 27–30; theory of, 103; of words, 204–209,
conceptual relativity and, 77–80; 217–221. See also Reference; Semantic
conceptual schemes and, 81–88; externalism; Semantics
difference between “egocentric” and Meaning and Necessity (Carnap), 200
“usual,” 111–113; liberal functionalism Meaning and the Moral Sciences (Putnam),
and, 167; natu ral vs. optional, 83–86; 99, 108–109
normative vs. descriptive, 43; Reichen- “Meaning and Truth” (Davidson), 114
bach and choice of, 100; social nature of, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” (Putnam),
121, 125–126 181, 182, 203, 207, 208. 210, 216, 218,
Language organ, 64 221, 224, 225
Lauener Prize, 152 Meinong, Alexius, 3
Lenin, V. I., 118–119 “The Mental Life of Some Machines”
Lewis, C. I., 108 (Putnam), 168
Lewis, David, 141 Mereological sums, 74–75, 77–78, 80, 84,
Liberal functionalism, 146, 165–168, 182, 93–94
185–186, 194 Metaphysical realism, 24–27, 71, 73–74, 80,
Liberal naturalism, 9–15, 21–24, 40, 41, 42 124, 154, 222
Life-world, 6–7 Metaphysical truth, physics and, 44–45, 47
Linguistic ability, apperception and, 185, Mill, John Stuart, 110
189 Mind: internalist vs. externalist theories of,
Local perspectives, 214 180–181; philosophy of, 180–182, 210,
Location/placement problem, 10, 13 221–224
Locke, John, 205, 206–207 Mind and World (McDowell), 139, 140,
Logical positivism, 190, 201 145, 156, 182–183, 184–185, 186, 188,
Logic (Dewey), 91 190
Minimal empiricism, 141, 144, 183
Macarthur, David, 21, 22, 24 Minimal reliabilism, 188, 191
Maimonides, 154 Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of
Manifestation argument against realism, Science, 200–201
114–116 Model-theoretic argument, 68–70, 71–72
The Many Faces of Realism (Sosa), 77, 80 Modularity hypothesis, 159–160
Materialism, 180–181 Moore, G. E., 157, 158, 179, 180
Mates, Benson, 200 Moral grammar, innate, 63–64
The Matrix/The Matrix Reloaded (films), 218 Moral Minds (Hauser), 58, 63–64
Maudlin, Tim, 25, 26 Moral relativism, 57
Mazzoni, Jacopo, 5 Myth of the Given, 143–144, 147, 190
McDowell, John, 9, 92, 168; Cartesian
skepticism and, 186–187; conceptual Nagel, Thomas, 172–173
capacities and experience, 139–141, Naive realism, 158, 165, 176–180, 191, 196,
144–146, 147, 149; conceptualization of 211
impressions, 189–191; disjunctivism and, Naming and Necessity (Kripke), 114,
156, 169; Kantian model of perception 209–210
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:54 PM
Index 235
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:54 PM
236 Index
Quine, W. V., 10, 22, 59, 64, 114, 168, 170, 101–103, 107; verificationism and,
187, 202; indeterminancy and, 46; 99–100, 120
ontological commitment and, 92–93; Reliabilism, 179, 183, 184; sound objection
radical translation and, 39–40; reference to, 184–186; unsound objections to,
and, 52–53, 54; surface-irritation model 186–191
and, 159, 161–162, 165, 166 Representationalism, 40
Republic (Plato), 60
Radically perspectival, causation, Rorty, Richard, 47, 48, 54, 142, 169
reference, and truth as, 70, 71–72 Rosen, Gideon, 93
Radical translation, 39–40 Rosenberg, Alex, 60
Read, Rupert, 213 Royce Lectures, 154
Realism, 2–9; internal, 1, 2–3, 25–26, 71, Russell, Bertrand, 75, 142, 155, 159,
124, 152–153; language and, 111–113; 176–177, 178–180, 185, 202, 225–226
manifestation argument against,
114–116; metaphysical, 24–27, 71, 73–74, “Sameness,” qualitative, 171–173
80, 124, 154, 222; naive, 158, 165, Scanlon, Thomas, 41, 42, 62
176–180, 191, 196, 211; quasi-, 214, 215, Scanlon, Tim, 9
216; redefi ning, 116–119; Reichenbach Schlick, Moritz, 108
and, 102, 111–113; scientific, 1, 11, Science: experimental testing and, 61;
90–96, 191, 214, 215; types of, 4–5; investigation of claims about nature, 60;
verificationism and, 99–100. See also role of aesthetic factors in, 16–17;
Antirealism single-theory convergence and, 74–75
“Realism and Reason” (Putnam), 24–25, Scientific hypotheses, 102
27, 91 Scientific naturalism, 9
“Realism and the Renegade Putnam” Scientific realism, 1, 11, 90–96, 191, 214,
(Devitt), 2 215
Realistic semantics, 114–116, 121 Scientific theories, 8
Real ity: explosion of, 82–83, 85–86, 88. Scientific worldview, 3, 12
See also Internal realism Scientism, 70–71
Reason, 16, 42 Sellars, Wilfrid, 9–10, 40, 95, 143, 188,
Reason, Truth and History (Putnam), 91, 189, 195–196, 216
119–120, 121, 134, 152, 171–172, 216 “The Semantical Concept of Truth”
Reconciliation problem, 11, 13 (Tarski), 31
Recursion theory, 86 Semantical judgments, 52
Reducible complex, 106–107 Semantical rules, 205–207
Reductionism, 118 Semantic Analysis (Ziff), 200, 203–204
Reduction sentence, 130–131, 134, 135 Semantic externalism: development of,
Reference: causation and, 70–74, 218, 219; 202–212; perception and, 222–224,
Davidson and, 53; defi ned, 96; liberal 225–226; thought experiments and, 218,
functionalism and, 167; liberal natu- 219–221
ralism and, 24; McDowell and, 189; Semantic realism, 4
meaning and, 205, 207–209; perceptual Semantic relations, normativity of, 48–50
representation and, 40; Reichenbach on, Semantics: antirealist account of, 119–121;
102–103; scientific revolutions and, foundations of, 204–205; Putnam’s early
201–202; truth and, 28, 30–31, 33–34, interest in, 199–203; realistic, 114–116,
37, 38 121; verificationist, 90–91. See also
Reference by description, 219 Meaning
Reichenbach, Hans, 168, 201; cubical Sen, Amartya, 57
world argument, 103–107; “illata” vs. Sensations: apperceptions vs., 146–148;
“abstracta,” 107–111; language and conceptual capacities and, 144–146;
difference between positivism and conceptualization and change in,
realism, 111–113; on the mind, 180; 148–150
probability theory of meaning, 100, Sense and Sensibilia (Austin), 155
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:54 PM
Index 237
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:54 PM
238 Index
What We Owe to Each Other (Scanlon), 42 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 92, 152, 154, 156,
White, Morton, 200 161, 173, 215, 224; Private Language
Whitehead, Alfred North, 75 Argument, 142–143
“Why There Isn’t a Ready-Made World” “Wittgenstein and Qualia” (Block),
(Putnam), 70, 71 169–170, 172, 179–180, 194–195
William James Lectures, 114, 117 Word and Object (Quine), 39–40, 168,
Williams, Bernard, 22, 214; absolute 203
conception of the world and, 44, 45, 47, Words: meaning of, 204–209, 217–221;
48–49, 50–52; intrinsic properties and, ostensive defi nition and, 142–143
76; metaphysical realism and, 73–74; World, absolute conception of, 44, 45, 47,
Putnam on “Philosophy as a Humanistic 48–49, 50–52
Discipline,” 44–55; scientism and, 70–71 Wright, Crispin, 128–135
“Wittgenstein: A Reappraisal” (Putnam),
154 Ziff, Paul, 200, 203
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 6/17/16 3:54 PM