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Internal Realism: Transcendental Idealism? Trinity University Digital Commons @ Trinity Philosophy Faculty Research Philosophy Department 1988 Internal Realism: Transcendental Idealism? Curtis Brown Trinity University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/phil_faculty Part of the Philosophy Commons Repository Citation Brown, C. (1988). Internal realism: Transcendental idealism? Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 12(1), 145-55. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1988.tb00163.x This Pre-Print is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy Department at Digital Commons @ Trinity. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Faculty Research by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Trinity. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 12 (1988): 145-55. There may be small differences between this text and the published version. INTERNAL REALISM: TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM? Curtis Brown Idealism is an ontological view, a view about what sorts of things there are in the universe. Idealism holds that what there is depends on our own mental structure and activity. Berkeley of course held that everything was mental; Kant held the more complex view that there was an important distinction between the mental and the physical, but that the structure of the empirical world depended on the activities of minds. Despite radical differences, idealists like Berkeley and Kant share what Ralph Barton Perry called "the cardinal principle of idealism," namely, the principle that "being is dependent on the knowing of it."1 I believe that Hilary Putnam intends his "internal realism" to be a version of idealism in this broad sense; although many of his arguments concern semantic notions like truth and reference, he takes these semantic arguments to have ontological consequences. This is strongly suggested, for instance, by his claim that "'objects' themselves are as much made as discovered, as much products of our conceptual invention as of the 'objective' factor in experience."2 Or again there is this rather Kantian metaphor: "the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world."3 But just what is Putnam's ontology? Putnam has been defending a version of anti-realism in his writings of the last several years. He describes his view as "internal realism," where the term "internal" is intended to indicate his rejection of the view he calls "metaphysical realism." Putnam combines internal realism and metaphysical anti-realism in something like the way Kant combined empirical realism and transcendental idealism. I would like to investigate here one of the numerous lines of thought by means of which Putnam has defended internal realism. The argument I shall be focussing on is what might be called the "argument from reference." Putnam also has arguments from vagueness, from the nature of truth, and others; I will not discuss these. It would be interesting to undertake a full-scale investigation of the relations between Kant's transcendental idealism and Putnam's internal realism. Putnam himself invites this comparison by his frequent use of Kantian terminology and his allusions to Kant's work, and indeed the parallels are numerous. Both consider, somewhat uncomfortably, the view that there is an unknowable noumenal world behind the phenomena. Both are motivated in part by the threat of scepticism: Kant by scepticism about our ability to know the external world, Putnam by scepticism about our ability to refer to it. Both Kant and Putnam hold that the world we know and talk about is empirically real, but both hold also that it is mind-dependent. Putnam at least flirts with the Kantian idea that there are a priori truths about the world.4 Putnam, like Kant, stresses the pervasive importance of causation, and argues that causation is partly our own imposition on the world.5 Putnam argues that science presupposes values, in a way reminiscent of Kant's claim that science requires the regulative use of the Ideas of Reason. Like Kant, Putnam argues that the relation between morality and rationality is much closer than empiricists (from Hume to Bentham to the positivists) typically can allow.6 I shall not attempt such a full-scale investigation here. My purpose is to discuss one particular issue: Putnam's Kantian response to a kind of scepticism, namely scepticism about the possibility of reference. The paper divides into three parts. In section I, I discuss the view that in classifying or organizing the world into objects, we create objects. I explain what I take to be a plausible realist alternative to this view. The remainder of the paper discusses Putnam's reason for rejecting this realist account, namely, his argument that reference to mind-independent objects is impossible. I propose to accept the argument and see what follows from it. If determinate reference to mind-independent objects is impossible, this seems to leave open two possible responses. One might hold that we refer indeterminately to mind-independent objects, or that we refer determinately to mind-dependent objects. The first view retains a realist ontology at the expense of determinate reference; the second retains determinate reference by adopting an idealist ontology. In section II I discuss the former possibility, a response Putnam rejects. Putnam claims that this view introduces the problems of Kant's notion of the thing-in-itself; I question this. In section III I discuss the second response, that we refer determinately to mind-dependent objects. I suggest that this view is actually at least as Kantian in spirit as the one Putnam rejects. I also suggest that it is not clear that this response really succeeds in meeting Putnam's sceptical problem about reference. I Let us begin, then, with what we might call "the argument from organization." According to this argument, because our language organizes, selects, categorizes, and classifies things, the things we talk about are not part of the world as it is in itself, but rather are created by us. To be sure, we do not create the raw material out of which we produce objects, but the objects themselves, as opposed to neutral stuff of the world in itself, are our own creations. If this is correct, then the world we talk about is mind-dependent, and idealism in the broad sense I am concerned with is true. I do not mean to suggest that Putnam is committed to this argument, at least in the unsophisticated form in which I have just phrased it. But he does say things that suggest it. He writes, for instance, that: "'Objects' do not exist independently of conceptual schemes. We cut up the world into objects when we introduce one or another scheme of description. Since the objects and the signs alike are internal to the scheme of description, it is possible to say what matches what."7 This suggests that if we did not "cut up the world into objects" there would be no objects, so that we bring objects into being by organizing the world. Again, Putnam criticizes the view that there are "Self-Identifying Objects," explaining that "this is just what it means to say that the world , and not thinkers, sorts things into kinds," and he opposes to this idea the view that "'objects' are as much made as discovered,"8 suggesting again that the fact that we organize the world shows that we create objects. To take a final example, Putnam speaks approvingly of the idea "that objects and reference arise out of discourse rather than being prior to discourse."9 As Putnam is well aware, similar arguments are common in contemporary thought; one particularly explicit and unapologetic defense of the view may be found in Leszek Kolakowski's "Karl Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth."10 Kolakowski, as the title suggests, attributes the view to Marx. Just as Putnam criticizes the view that objects are "self- identifying," Kolakowski criticizes "Aristotelian realism, which posits that the species and genera into which the sciences divide reality are merely copies of the genera and species of this reality reflected more or less exactly, but ever more exactly, in the mirror of consciousness."11 As Putnam says that objects are "as much made as discovered," Kolakowski says things like this: "Nature as composed of parts and species is an 'artificial' creation;"12 or again: "In this world the sun and stars exist because man is able to make them his objects;"13 or again: "If, for Marx, man replaces God-the-Creator, still He is not the God of Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, a God who gives birth to the world out of nothingness; rather, He reminds us of the God of the Averroists, who organizes the world out of previously existing material."14 In Kolakowski especially, one gets the idea that there are only two possible views. On the one hand there is "Aristotelean realism," which holds that the universe divides itself up into a single set of kinds, and that the proper role of language is to copy the world's own single set of divisions, to classify the world in its own way. This seems to be the same view Putnam describes as the view that the world contains Self-Identifying Objects. On the other hand, there is Kolakowski's preferred view, which seems also to be Putnam's: that the world "in itself" is undifferentiated (he speaks of a "pre-existing 'chaos'"15), and that we create objects by inventing classifications. Kolakowski's argumentative strategy seems to be to argue that since Aristotelian realism is false, his own version of anti-realism must be correct. Now if this were the anti-realist's only argument that the world is mind- dependent (as in fact it seems to be Kolakowski's only argument), then the realist could quite plausibly assert that it simply is not good enough.
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