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Hilary Putnam and the Promise of Pluralism

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Hilary Putnam and the Promise of Pluralism Contemporary Pragmatism Editions Rodopi Vol. 3, No. 2 (December 2006), 15–25 © 2006 Hilary Putnam and the Promise of Pluralism Joseph Margolis This symposium contribution discusses the conceptions of relativism and pluralism which are relevant to Hilary Putnam’s book Ethics without Ontology. 1. I begin with a friendly request in the form of a small complaint – for a clearer version of the opening remarks of Hilary Putnam’s Hermes Lectures (originally delivered at the University of Perugia, 2001), now collected as Part I of his recent book, Ethics without Ontology, which bears the same title.1 Putnam says there, in his orienting lecture, that he intends to replace both “inflationary” ontology (exemplified in the views of the conventional Plato of the doctrine of the Forms) and “deflationary” ontology (as in Democritus and Berkeley) by what he calls “pragmatic pluralism,” which, enlisting Wittgenstein, Putnam characterizes as combating the “illusion that there could be just one sort of language game which could be sufficient for the description of all of reality!”2 This sounds reasonable. Nevertheless, at the first mention of his central thesis, it’s not really clear to me what Putnam intends by what he says. Of course, it’s trivially true that there are many false and failed ways of describing anything. No one would deny that, not even the inflationists and deflationists Putnam means to displace. That can’t possibly be the nerve of what Putnam means to defend under the name of pluralism: it wouldn’t cut any philosophical ice; it would record no more than the first-order fact that people describe things “in many ways” – possibly, then, also, in many erroneous ways; it also would say nothing about the ways in which, epistemically, acceptable descriptions are rightly constrained. (Even the rejection of “platonism” invites – and may require – an account of the conditions thought to be binding on human knowledge. I would say what Putnam says here captures the “empiric” or “pragmatic” plurality of ordinary descriptions, but it says nothing as yet about pluralism in the philosophical sense suggested, and it says nothing regarding Putnam’s own view of pluralism’s “ontological” standing vis-à- vis inflationary and deflationary ontologies. Nothing really hangs on it at all. So there is a bit of a nagging complaint behind the intended courtesy. I think the issue has a much longer and busier inning than may at first appear. 16 JOSEPH MARGOLIS I’ve made my start from a very small piece of text. But I’ll risk an additional step or two before looking into the rest of “Ethics without Ontology.” The single most compelling clue (I’ve found) regarding what Putnam “must mean” by what I’ve just cited struck me very forcibly when I read the Lectures the first time around. There’s a somewhat lonely passage at the very close of Putnam’s Reason, Truth and History (just before a final Appendix is added that bears on the Theaetetus and that happens to be relevant to the issue first touched on), a passage very well known among professionals who have followed Putnam’s line of inquiry, that ends this way – drawing on the “hope” of “produc[ing] a more rational concep- tion of rationality or a better conception of morality if [only] we operate from within our own tradition”:3 Does this dialogue [“dialogue” is a term Putnam turns against Richard Rorty’s usage to signify the saving activity that starts from within our local tradition or practice and seeks to traverse all viable human traditions addressed to science and morality at least: does this dialogue, Putnam asks,] have an ideal terminus? Is there a true conception of rationality, a true morality, even if all we ever have are our conceptions of these? Here philosophers divide, like everyone else. Richard Rorty, in his Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, opted strongly for the view that there is only the dialogue; no ideal end can be posited or should be needed. But how does the assertion that “there is only the dialogue” differ from the self-refuting relativism we discussed in Chapter 5 [the book’s principal chapter, the one that rejects the extremes of both objectivism (“a God’s-eye view”) and relativism, two false views of objectivity, two arbitrary “scientisms” (or “solipsisms”) that fail to heed the regulative need to “operate from within our tradition”]? The very fact that we speak of our different conceptions as different conceptions of rationality posits a Grenzbegriff, a limit-concept of the ideal truth.4 Perhaps. But to “posit” a Grenzbegriff hardly entails that there is anything more than a purely formal, completely empty notion of “the ideal truth.” (“Is there a true conception...” Putnam asks: the seemingly Quinean phrasing anticipates the central discussion of the “Ethics without Ontology” lectures.) Putnam backs away from actually affirming the necessity of there being an ideal regulative principle of truth: he speaks of it in terms that seem to favor a rational “hope” (much as Peirce did and for related reasons). Yet, if that were conceded, there might well be endlessly many such “posits” – all originating “from within our tradition” in the benign sense intended, changing with every significant change in our society’s collective experience. And then it would not be clear what to understand by Putnam’s Grenzbegriff. If Putnam believed he could claim more – a changeless Grenzbegriff, say – wouldn’t he have endorsed the objectivism he himself repudiates among the classic forms of logical positivism? And if he admitted the insuperable objection against.
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