[6.3.2.] Description Pluralism.

 

Putnam’s defense of conceptual relativity suggests a way of thinking about the threat posed by Scientific Relativism (the view that only the objects of scientific study are ultimately real and describable in the mathematical language of physics, so chairs, ice cubes, etc., and commonsense properties like red, solidity, etc., are not ultimately real):

 

... it may be possible to see how it can be that what is in one sense the “same” world (the two versions are deeply related) can be described as consisting of “tables and chairs” (and these described as colored, possessing dispositional properties, etc.) in one version and as consisting of space-time regions, particles and fields, etc., in other versions. To require that all of these must be reducible to a single version is to make the mistake of supposing that “Which are the real objects?” is a question that makes sense independently of our choice of concepts. (631)

 

This is Putnam’s description pluralism, the view that:

·         there are multiple true descriptions (“versions”) of the world;

·         scientists describe the world in terms of space-time regions, sub-atomic particles, etc., and non-scientists describe it in terms of red books, grey desk tops, solid tables and chairs, etc.;

·         these different descriptions are not “reducible” to a single description—there is no single, unique, true description of the (one real) world.

 

Elsewhere, Putnam indicates that James was aware of description pluralism. In Renewing Philosophy (1992, p.110 and pp.215-6 n.4), Putnam quotes James’s description of the view of scientific theories according to which

 

...no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but … any one of them may from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand, as some one calls them, in which we write our reports of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects. (“What Pragmatism Means,” 1907; in your textbook at 296)[1]

 

 

[6.4.] Further Echoes of James.

 

Putnam uses James’s statement that “the trail of the human serpent is over everything” as a section heading in this reading. (p.628; Putnam says “over all”).

 

James made this statement while explaining “the problem of maxima and minima”:

 

Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no rôle whatever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for ‘to be true’ means only to perform this marriage-function.

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. (James, “What Pragmatism Means” (1907); p.300)

 

Putnam gives no explicit indication in this reading that he accepts this aspect of James’s pragmatism. However, later in the same book from which this reading is taken, he quotes the “human serpent” line again, and in context it is easier to tell why:

 

                Once we have given up the picture of a totality of Noumenal Objects and Properties from which our different conceptual schemes merely make one or another selection, the picture of a Noumenal Dough which our conceptual schemes merely ‘slice up’ differently, we are forced to recognize with William James that the question as to how much of our web of belief reflects the world ‘in itself’ and how much is our ‘conceptual contribution’ makes no more sense than the question:[2] ‘Does a man walk more essentially with his left leg or his right?’ The trail of the human serpent is over all.[3]

 

 

[6.5.] Echoes of James and Dewey.

 

Putnam also refers back to Dewey’s rejection of “the spectator view” in epistemology. You should remember that Dewey rejected what he called spectator theories of knowledge, according to which

·         knowing is analogous to seeing; it is similar to looking at something rather than as being similar to doing something;

·         inquiry (which can result in knowledge) is passive, in that it involves no practical activity; knowers are like spectators in the stands of a sporting event, not participating in the event by simply watching;

·         this activity is not constitutive of the object of knowledge.

 

Dewey acknowledged the obvious psychological fact that human beings have moral experiences and aesthetic experiences, i.e., that we experience some actions as being morally better or worse than others, and that we experience some natural objects and artifacts as being beautiful. Dewey maintained that such moral and aesthetic experiences are just as valuable, and reveal reality just as much as, “scientific” experience (reflection / thinking / cognition).

 

Putnam endorses one of the consequences of this Deweyan view:

 

Many thinkers have argued that the traditional dichotomy between the world “in itself” and the concepts we use to think and talk about it must be given up. ... Like the great pragmatists, these thinkers have urged us to reject the spectator point of view in metaphysics and epistemology. ... These thinkers have been somewhat hesitant to forthrightly extend the same approach to our moral images of ourselves and the world. Yet what can giving up the spectator view in philosophy mean if we don’t extend the pragmatic approach to the most indispensible “versions” of ourselves and our world that we possess? Like William James ... I propose to do exactly that. (632)

 

 

[6.6.] Echoes of James and Dewey... and Peirce?

 

In a passage later in The Many Faces of Realism (not in your reading), Putnam reveals another idea he takes himself to have inherited from Dewey and James:

 

                What is wrong with relativist views (apart from their horrifying irresponsibility) is that they do not at all correspond to how we think and to how we shall continue to think. … The heart of pragmatism, it seems to me—of James’s and Dewey’s pragmatism, if not of Peirce’s—was the insistence on the supremacy of the agent point of view. If we find that we must take a certain point of view, use a certain ‘conceptual system,’ when we are engaged in practical activity, in the widest sense of ‘practical activity,’ then we must not simultaneously advance the claim that it is not really ‘the way things are in themselves.’ Although philosophers have traditionally allowed themselves to keep a double set of books in this way, the effect is to perpetuate at least two intellectualist errors: it leads one to debase the notion of belief (remember, Pragmatism was inspired by Bain’s definition of belief—‘of that upon which a man is prepared to act’); and it leads one to indulge in the fiction that there is a God’s Eye point of view that we can usefully imagine.[4]

 

Although Putnam downplays any connection with Peirce on this point, this passage does recall Peirce’s claim that

 

A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of that Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts. (“Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” 1868; in your textbook at 71; emphasis added)

 

But in noting this, we have not settled the question of how close Putnam has come to Peirce’s own view of truth. Specifically, there remains the question whether Peirce’s pragmatic clarification of the concept of truth (according to which a true belief is one that will be held at the end of hypothetical, ideal inquiry) would count, for Putnam, as not taking seriously enough “the supremacy of the agent point of view.”

 

 

Stopping point for Friday November 5. For next time:

·         a printed copy of your term paper draft is due at the beginning of class;

·         begin reading Rorty’s “Pragmatism, Relativism, Irrationalism,” pp.635-40.