Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity 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 MARIO DE CARO 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 i ca First printing Acknowledgments on pages 227–228 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data Names: Putnam, Hilary, author. | De Caro, Mario, editor. Title: Naturalism, realism, and normativity / Hilary Putnam ; edited by Mario De Caro. Description: Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts : Harvard University Press, 2016. | Includes index. Identifi ers: LCCN 2015033370 | ISBN 9780674659698 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Realism. | Naturalism. | Perception (Philosophy) | Normativity (Ethics) Classifi cation: LCC B835 .P86 2016 | DDC 191— dc23 LC rec ord available at http:// lccn . loc. gov / 2015033370 Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/17/16 3:51 PM Contents Introduction: Putnam’s Philosophy and Metaphilosophy by Mario De Caro . .1 I. LIBERAL NATURALISM AND NORMATIVITY 1. Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity . .21 2. On Bernard Williams’s “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” . .44 3. What Evolutionary Theory Doesn’t Tell Us about Ethics . 56 II. REALISM AND ONTOLOGY 4. Sosa on Internal Realism and Conceptual Relativity . 67 5. Richard Boyd on Scientifi c Realism . .90 III. REALISM AND VERIFICATIONISM 6. Hans Reichenbach: Realist and Verifi cationist. .99 7. Between Scylla and Charybdis: Does Dummett Have a Way Through? . .114 8. When “Evidence Transcendence” Is Not Malign . 128 Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/17/16 3:51 PM vi Contents IV. NAIVE REALISM, SENSATION, AND APPERCEPTION 9. Sensation and Apperception . 139 10. Perception without Sense Data. 152 11. “Naive Realism” and Qualia . 169 V. LOOKING BACK 12. The Development of Externalist Semantics . 199 13. Sixty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Participant’s Thoughts and Experiences . .213 Acknowl edgments. 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 The title of this volume, which is taken from the fi rst essay collected here, is meant to direct the reader’s attention to three main philosophical questions with which Hilary Putnam has been dealing for very many years. The questions grow out of, on the one hand, the conclusions reached in Putnam’s early papers, collected in the fi rst two volumes of his Philosophical Papers,1 in which he criticized log- ical positivist accounts of the meaning of scientifi c terms and the na- ture of scientifi c theories, in part because they were “incompatible with a rather minimal scientifi c realism,”2 and, on the other hand, Putnam’s return to a more nuanced version of those early realist views after a fourteen- year (1976–1990) swerve in a direction that, notwithstanding his original intentions, substantially leaned toward antirealism (Put- nam’s “internal realist” years).3 The questions thus presuppose Put- nam’s realism (prescinding from the aforementioned “swerve”) as well 1. Mathematics, Matter and Method, vol. 1, and Mind, Language and Real ity, 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 scientifi c realism” occurs on p. 224. (This is the fi rst time Putnam recalls calling his posi- tion “scientifi c 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 as his more recent interest in what he calls the “entanglement” of fact and value.4 1. Assuming that one accepts the arguments that Putnam has given for many years, that antirealism, in its many forms, is an unacceptable view, what form of realism should one embrace? 2. Assuming that the philosophies that appeal to the supernatural are not acceptable, what form of naturalism should one endorse? 3. Assuming that normativity is an essential component of our rational and moral practices, should or could we assume that, at least in princi ple, it is reducible to the non-normative compo- nents of such practices? All these questions, besides being of primary philosophical interest, presuppose deep metaphilosophical refl ections regarding the nature, role, goals, and methods of philosophy. Let’s examine them in turn. 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 gradu ate 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 internal realist period) Putnam maintained that the theoretical terms of our best scientifi c practice do refer to real entities, even if such entities are in princi ple unobservable (i.e., electrons and black holes), and this means that he always rejected all forms of scientifi c antirealism, such as instrumentalism, conventionalism, operationalism, and relativ- ism.7 Second, when he moved away from his early physicalistically ori- ented realism toward internal realism, Putnam was motivated by his desire to shape a satisfying philosophical realism—that is, a realism able si mul taneously to (1) accept the approximate and revisable cor- rectness of the scientifi c worldview and (2) accept the approximate and revisable correctness of the commonsense worldview, which Putnam then thought (and still thinks) was threatened by the reductionist con- ceptions of real ity. In this light, at least since 1976 Putnam has rejected all positions that are unable (or worse, do not even try) to do full jus- tice, at the same time, to science and common sense. Arguably, Put- nam’s painstaking and uninterrupted efforts to shape a version of realism able to acknowledge the partial and revisable but very real verisimilitude of both the commonsense and the scientifi c images of the world, without privileging one over the other, is one of his most relevant bequests to the next generations of phi los o phers. Before entering in more detail into Putnam’s views on these issues, some remarks can be useful. First of all, it should be noted that the prob lem of realism does not have an “all or nothing” form. No serious phi los o pher has ever been a complete realist or a complete antirealist: even Alexius Meinong, perhaps the most realist of all phi los o phers, de- nied that a round square could be real; and even bishop Berkeley, a champion of antirealism in regard to the material world, was an arch- realist as to the mind (in partic u lar the divine mind). In a word, all rel- evant philosophical conceptions are a mix of realistic and antirealist components: one can be a realist in one sense, without being a realist in another sense.8 Moreover, as has frequently been noted, there is not one form of re- alism, but many, which can be grouped in three main families: 7. See Hilary Putnam, “On Not Writing Off Scientifi c 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 1. Ontological realism. The views that belong to this family claim the real ity of certain sorts of things: concrete (trees, galaxies, or atoms) or abstract (numbers, universals, or disembodied minds), properties (redness, goodness, electric charges, or freedom of the will) or events (the Big Bang, transubstantiation, the Moon landing). Moreover, the theories of the ontological- realist family can be general (such as when they claim the existence of the external world or of time) or par ticu lar (when they claim the existence of specifi c things or classes of things).9 2.