Putnam Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity
Putnam Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity
Putnam Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity
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C American Philosophical
Journal of the American Philosophical Association (2015) 312328
Association
doi: 10.1017/apa.2014.21
1. Naturalism
The terms naturalism and realism are useful (and even indispensable on
occasion), but each of them has been applied to a wide range of different 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 Naturalism in Question. In my essay in that collection,
Putnam (2004), I pointed out that while Boyd, Casper, and Trouts The Philosophy
of Science (1991) admirably takes the trouble to tell us what the editors mean
by naturalism (and their naturalism is certainly not liberal), 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
Shakespeares writing Julius Caesar was subject to natural laws? Is it enough to
believe that writing that play didnt violate any natural laws? Surely that makes
it too easy to be a naturalist! Or should one believe that in our first-grade
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2. 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? Well, not exactly.
In that lecture and for a number of years afterward, I used metaphysical realism
(sometimes with capital letters) as a term for a specific position whose main feature
was the insistence 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 what I meant by it,
based on the natural understanding of the phrase metaphysical realism, it refers
to a broad family of positions and not just to the one position I used it to refer to.
In effect I was saying that by refuting the one philosophical view I called by that
name I was ipso facto refuting anything that deserved to be called metaphysical
realism, and that was not the case.
In addition, in Putnam (1994), my Dewey Lectures, which were the best known
source for my postinternal realist views, I was still under the influence of
Wittgensteinian quietism; although this is an aspect of Wittgensteins thought I
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grew increasingly unsympathetic to, it was not until my closing address, Putnam
(2013), to my eightieth birthday conference in Dublin that I was willing to say, in
those words, that I am a metaphysical realist without capital letters, a realist in my
metaphysics, but not a metaphysical realist in the technical sense I gave to that
term in Realism and Reason and subsequent publications. At the same time I was
also willing to say, Let me say for the record that I utterly and totally reject all
versions of the end of philosophy story, whether they come from Wittgensteinians,
Rortians, Heideggerians, Derridians, or whoever. Philosophy was not a mistake;
not in Parmenidess time, not in Platos time, not in Aristotles or Descartess or
Humes or Kants times, and not in our time. As Etienne Gilson put it, philosophy
always buries its undertakers.
But what is it to be a metaphysical realist? In an elegant paper titled Confessions
of a Hard-Core, Unsophisticated Metaphysical Realist, Maudlin (2015) describes
his reaction to first reading the lecture in which I first used the term internal
realism. In that lecture I had written:
The most important consequence of metaphysical realism is that truth
is supposed to be radically nonepistemicwe might be brains in
a vat and so the theory that is ideal from the point of view of
operational utility, inner beauty and elegance, plausibility, simplicity,
conservatism, etc. might be false. Verified (in any operational sense)
does not imply true, on the metaphysical realist picture, even in the
ideal limit.
It is this feature that distinguishes metaphysical realism, as I am using
the term, from the mere belief that there is an ideal theory (Peircean
realism), or, more weakly, that an ideal theory is a regulative ideal
presupposed by the notions true and objective as they have classically
been understood. And it is this feature that I shall attack. (Putnam 1978:
125)
And Maudlins reaction:
We now have something quite concrete to discuss. The metaphysical
realist thinks that an operationally ideal theory, a theory ideal as far as
we can tell, might actually be false. This is a thesis that appears to be
clear and concise. It is also a thesis that I take to be true and took to
be true as a graduate student. So the most enduring impact Realism
and Reason had on me, despite its intent, was to make me a confirmed
metaphysical realist. (Maudlin 2015: 485)
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 epistemically 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.
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of constructible sets that he used to prove the consistency of the Axiom of Choice
and the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis). These tools have been employed in
many contexts ever since; the material for philosophers to assimilate and interpret
includes the T-schema or truth schema in section 1 of Tarski (1983) (not to be
confused with Convention T), Convention T, and the truth definitions, as they
have come to be called, that are required to meet that criterion of adequacy. (In
both the German and the original Polish of Tarski [1933], Convention T is called
a criterion and not a convention. Convention T comes from the 1956 English
translation, T being the first letter of the English word true and W being the
first letter of the German word wahr.) Although a minority of philosophers,
including Popper, saw Tarski (1983) as putting forward a correspondence theory
of truth, other philosophers have linked Tarski (1983) to deflationary theories
of truth, while the particular techniques Tarski employed led Hartry Field (1972)
(correctly in my opinion) to see Tarski as finding an intimate link between reference
(or, in Tarskisand Fieldsterminology, denotation) and truth; an insight that
Field unfortunately linked to an unworkable naturalization project (to use Burges
term), and later abandoned completely. The next two sections elaborate on these
remarks.
1 The original publication was in Polish, in 1933. The German translation appeared in 1935, and the 1956
English translation, titled The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages, can be found in Tarski (1983),
152278.
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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.
6. A Technical Section
To explain all this, I need to say something about how one defines FORM(x)
following Tarskis recipe. Simplifying outrageously by pretending 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 Tarskis 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 quantifier [(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 followed 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, etc.
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 to y if and only if Glub(y), and similarly for all the other atomic
predicates of Bob. Note that there are only finitely many atomic predicates in what
Tarski calls formalized languages, and hence only finitely many of these axioms.
These axioms are the basis clauses of the inductive 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 formalized, that
for all w, if v is a variable and w is z preceded by an existential quantifier (Ev)
and z contains no free variables different 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 isnt.
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Note that even if Bobs 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 formula, but formulating such a clause
requires more of Tarskis technique than we shall explain. Suffice it say that this
technique involves constructing Ref as a relation between formulas and sequences
(in fact, eventually 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 definition of Ref(x,y) into an explicit definition
of a two-place predicate, say, SAT(y,x) [Read: y satisfies x, employing Tarskis
terminology] provided Meta-Bob has strong enough set theoretic axioms; if it
` we have a predicate of Meta-Bob whose
doesnt, we just add them. And voila,
definition involves only the atomic predicates of Bob and (if necessary) the primitive
predicates of our favorite set theory but no nonlogical predicates that werent
already in Boba predicate that provably satisfies all the clauses in the inductive
definition of Ref! N.B. that inductive definition depends only on the logical and
syntactical axioms we added, but not on any semantical axioms!
Therefore, we can drop Ref from our list of primitive predicates, drop the axioms
that contained it, and use SAT(y,x) instead of Ref(x,y), since we know that all the
old axioms for Ref are theorems of Meta-Bob, once we simply replace Ref(x,y)
`
with SAT(y,x). And againvoila!it
can be verified that if we take FORM(x) to
be x is a wff with no free variables & SAT(1,x), then for each sentence of Bob, the
result of substituting it for s and its structural-descriptive name for s in FORM(s )
s will be a theorem of Meta-BobConvention T is satisfied!
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OR SOMETIMES,
(D) The statement S is true 2 is equivalent to the statement S.
Since Convention T does not mention truth, as I have been emphasizing, it obviously
does not state either (D) or (D). But it is plausible that it presupposes (D) for the
following reason: Tarskis reader is supposed to see that if all of the conditionals
that are required to be theorems of Meta-Bob by Convention T are theoremsand
if we assume that the theorems of Meta-Bob are true, which cannot be taken for
granted because a mathematical theory may contain false statements without being
inconsistentthen each sentence of the form
FORM(s ) s
is trueand, using the T-schema
true(s ) s,
it follows that
FORM(s ) true(s ).
Thus, it is plausible that the disquotation principle is presupposed by Tarskis claim
that Convention T is a correct (accurate, in the original Polish version) condition
for the material adequacy of a formula like FORM(x) as a truth predicate for
Bob. In any case, the idea of disquotation easily arises from a study of Tarski great
paper. But there is all the difference in the world between accepting a disquotation
principle and accepting the claim that such a principle captures completely what
one has to know about truth. The latter is the thesis of deflationism. I conclude
that Tarski is not committed to that thesis any more than he is committed to the
correspondence theory of truth.
(4) Just as it is plausible to see a disquotation principle as presupposed by
Convention T, even if Tarski did not state one, it is plausible to see the fact that
the extension of true in Bob is determined by the extension of denotes in Bob
as driving the entire strategy of defining the desired truth predicate (FORM(x))
inductively in terms of a predicate (in our simplified version of Tarski, above,
SAT(y,x)) that is constructed to have precisely the extension of the everyday
language predicate x refers to y in Bob.
In sum, and this is something I regard as of great importance, Tarskis formal
methods intuitively draw on and presuppose not just one property of truth, the
T-schema, or disquotation, but on that property and the further property that the
extension of true depends on the extension of refers. The concepts of truth and
of reference are intimately related, and his entire procedure exploits the relation,
as Field saw in 1972.
2 A technical problem: in (D) is S a variable over statements? Or is (D) to be understood with some sort
of systematic ambiguity? The literature discusses this problem extensively, and there are different proposals.
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12. 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 reasonscant
be naturalized in the way that physicalists demand doesnt 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 as I
argued in Putnam (2002) 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 consider
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and even what there is reason to test. (Notions like plausibility, simplicity, and
elegance figure 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.) Science depends on what is not fully scientific at every point.
And both pragmatists and Wittgensteinians have rightly criticized the bad habit of
turning what are sometimes useful distinctions into untenable dualisms, and that
includes the dichotomy between normative and descriptive language (a dichotomy
that our thick ethical conceptsincluding such ancient concepts as brave and
wiseleap over without the slightest sign of embarrassment) and also includes the
dichotomy between science and nonscience itself. One can learn from pragmatists
and Wittgensteinians and philosophers of so many other kinds without becoming
a card-carrying member of any philosophical sect. And that is something I have
always tried to do in my philosophical life.
hilary putnam
harvard university
hilary.putnam@gmail.com
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