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The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam THE LIBRARY OF LIVING PHILOSOPHERS VOLUME XXXIV THE PHILOSOPHY OF HILARY PUTNAM EDITED BY RANDALL E. AUXIER, DOUGLAS R. ANDERSON, AND LEWIS EDWIN HAHN SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY CARBONDALE CHICAGO, ILLINOIS • OPEN COURT • ESTABLISHED 1887 Putnam Frontmatter.indd 5 3/26/2015 8:51:55 PM To order books from Open Court, call 1-800-815-2280, or visit our website at www.opencourtbooks.com. Cover and frontispiece photos by Jan-Olav Wedin. THE PHILOSOPHY OF HILARY PUTNAM Open Court Publishing Company is a division of Carus Publishing Company, dba Cricket Media. Copyright © 2015 by The Library of Living Philosophers First printing 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Open Court Publishing Company, a division of Cricket Media, 70 East Lake Street, Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois 60601. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The philosophy of Hilary Putnam / edited by Randall E. Auxier, Douglas R. Anderson, and Lewis Edwin Hahn, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. pages cm. — (Library of living philosophers ; volume XXXIV) Summary: “This volume consists of an intellectual autobiography by world-renowned philosopher Hilary Putnam, 26 critical or descriptive essays, 26 replies by Hilary Putnam, and a bibliography listing all of Putnam’s published writings”— Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8126-9893-0 (hardback) 1. Putnam, Hilary. I. Auxier, Randall E., 1961– editor. II. Anderson, Douglas R., editor. III. Hahn, Lewis Edwin, 1908–2004, editor. B945.P874P49 2015 191—dc23 2015003628 The Library of Living Philosophers is published under the sponsorship of Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Putnam Frontmatter.indd 6 3/26/2015 8:51:55 PM knowing and being 16 Cora Diamond PUTNAM AND WITTGENSTEINIAN BABY-THROWING: VARIATIONS ON A THEME I. The Theme: WITTgensTeInIan BaBy-ThroWIng Putnam began his Dewey Lectures by saying, “The besetting sin of phi- losophers seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”1 He drew attention to the pattern of “recoil” in philosophy,2 in which philosophers who “recoil from the excesses of various versions of metaphysical real- ism” take up peculiar views instead—forms of antirealism, idealism, or relativism—while those who recoil from what they take to be a giving up on the whole idea of an objective world, come up with attempts to rescue objectivity by such mysterious notions as that of cross-world identity or an “absolute” conception of the world. In an earlier essay, “Does the Disquotational Theory of Truth Solve All Philosophical Problems?”3 Putnam examined two accounts of truth infuenced by readings of Wittgenstein, those of Michael Williams and Paul Horwich. Putnam criticiZed their appeal to assertibility conditions in their accounts of truth, and argued that their attempts to show that the philosophical problems concerned with truth are pseudoproblems serve as an illustration of how philosophical attempts to reject metaphysics may lead philosophers into a kind of disguised metaphysics, in this case a kind of empiricist metaphysics. In his critical account of these approaches to truth, Putnam also questioned whether they really do refect Wittgenstein’s ideas. Putnam has had a long-term interest in throwings out of the baby with the bathwater by philosophers who take themselves to be getting rid of Putnam Ch16.indd 603 3/28/2015 7:48:52 AM 604 Cora DiamonD objectionable forms of metaphysics, and to be making use of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in doing so. The three such baby-throwers most impor- tant for Putnam’s writings are (I should say) Norman Malcolm, Michael Dummett, and Richard Rorty. Putnam’s objections to the antirealism and verifcationism that have been drawn from Wittgenstein’s later writings go back to the earliest years of his career, when, as he says, much of his activity “was devoted to refuting Malcolm’s version of Wittgensteinianism,”4 and he adds that Stanley Cavell was at that time devoting much of his time to showing that the view that Putnam was criticiZing was not indeed Witt- genstein’s. In his 1992 lectures on pragmatism, Putnam notes that Rorty’s interpretation of Wittgenstein is in some ways close to Malcolm’s, and (as he takes it) equally misleading as a reading of Wittgenstein.5 Section II of this chapter is about the dispute between Putnam and Rorty. Sections III through V look at Putnam’s ideas in relation to those of lham Dilman, a Wittgensteinian philosopher who resembles Rorty in taking his own views to be far closer to Putnam’s than they are. The appendix to section V is about Peter Winch’s treatment of magic, and his attempt to rule out certain kinds of criticism of forms of thought distant from our own. In section VI, I look at what makes baby-throwing attractive, and I draw some conclusions about Putnam and commonsense realism. II. The relaTIvIsT menace? A striking feature of the dispute between Putnam and Rorty is their dis- agreement about how far apart their views are from each other. This has been an issue in the dispute since its beginnings in the early 198s. The most important statement by Rorty of how he sees the dispute, his essay “Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace,”6 takes its title from the disagreement about what the disagreement is about. By speaking of Putnam’s view of him as a “Relativist Menace,” Rorty distances himself from relativism (or at any rate intends to do so), and suggests that Putnam has been attacking a straw man. Rorty was responding to Putnam’s remark, in lectures which Putnam gave in 1981, that “cultural relativists usually deny that they are cultural relativists”7—a remark that Putnam had explained by pointing to Rorty’s views, which combine an attack on relativism with a view of truth that is, so Putnam suggests, plainly committed to relativism. Rorty’s frst response to the accusation was in “Solidarity or Objectivity?,” his Howison lecture, in early 1983. “Relativism,” he said, “is the traditional epithet ap- plied to pragmatism by realists.”8 He distinguished three views which may get labeled “relativism,” the frst of which is self-refuting and the second eccentric, neither of which he holds. The third view is Rorty’s version of Putnam Ch16.indd 604 3/28/2015 7:48:52 AM BABY-THROWING: VARIATIONS ON A THEME 605 pragmatism, which he describes as a kind of ethnocentrism about truth and rationality. He adds that there is really no good reason for calling it “relativist,” since it does not involve holding of anything that it is relative to something else. The view might appear to be self-refuting if one took it to involve a theory of truth, identifying truth with the opinions of some group. But that, Rorty says, is a misinterpretation, which underlies the way realists respond to this sort of pragmatism. He adds that his view is in fact quite close to Putnam’s 1981 “internalism,” since Putnam rejects a God’s-eye view of things. The criticisms that Putnam had directed against “relativists,” Rorty says, do not apply to him. In particular, he does not hold the kind of “incommensurability” view for which Putnam had criticiZed Kuhn and Feyerabend; and there does not appear to be any other matter on which Putnam could take himself to be in disagreement with Rorty, or so Rorty says.9 Putnam was not convinced. In his ant lectures, in 1987, he took Rorty’s formulations of his own views about truth and rationality to be deeply differ- ent from his own, and he argued that Rorty, though not a typical Relativist, is indeed a Relativist. Putnam expressed his own commitment to what, in Rorty’s terms, is a form of ethnocentrism: our norms and standards are our norms and standards and refect our interests, but Putnam insisted on not drawing the kinds of conclusions that Rorty had taken to follow. According to Putnam’s principles, there usually is, in ordinary circumstances, a fact of the matter whether the statements people make are warranted or not; further, the possibility that our norms and standards may improve is not the same as saying that they will come to seem better to us, or come to be accepted by our cultural peers. “From within our picture of the world . we say that better’ isn’t the same as we think it’s better’.”10 “Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace” was Rorty’s considered response. He objected strongly to being confused with his evil twin, “the Relativist,”11 while reiterating the sorts of view that had made Putnam call him a relativist in the frst place. For example, he committed himself to the view that all that can be meant by talk of “a fact of the matter about whether p is a warranted assertion” is “a fact of the matter about our abil- ity to feel solidarity with a community that views p as warranted.”12 From Rorty’s point of view, the situation was extremely puzzling, since Putnam appeared to him to accept the same pragmatist principles which Rorty himself did. To bring out the extensive agreement between his own views and Putnam’s, Rorty listed fve passages from Putnam’s writings, express- ing principles that he himself wholeheartedly shared. In these passages, Putnam repudiates metaphysical realism and insists on the importance of our situatedness as thinkers, and on the inseparability of our interests and our values from any view we may have of the world.
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