Realism with a Human Face Paperback – March 31, 1992

This is my fav. Putnam book, among the few I've read.

The essays present a selection reflecting Putnam's interest in Kant, Wittgenstein and Cavell, with an eloquent introduction by Connant, who himself is a perspicuous voice on Wittgenstein. You may or may not agree with Putnam on certain grounds; if you have more of an analytic background, you may find him to be fetching it too far, particularly when he's attempting to reconcile his favored philosopher's approaches (esp. Kant) with everyday, 'human' realism (probably his most contentious project, hence the rumpus around Putnam's redefinitions of realism), or you may find him too technical and dry if you're more of a 'literary philosopher', like Cavell, but he's a voice worth hearing, and criticizing, as the late history of philosophical debates seem to have revealed.

Hilary Whitehall Putnam (born 1926) is an American analytic philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist who taught at Harvard for many years. He wrote many other books, such as Pragmatism: An Open Question,Reason, Truth and History, etc.

He wrote in the Preface to this 1950 book, “The essays … selected for this volume represent a central part of the thinking I have been doing since I drew my now well-known … distinction between two kinds of realism (‘metaphysical’ and ‘internal’) in …1976. Although they do not in any sense represent a giving up of the position I called ‘internal realism,’ I have chosen to emphasize a somewhat different aspect of that position… it might be said that the difference between the present volume and my work prior… is a shift in emphasis: a shift from emphasizing model-theoretic arguments against metaphysical realism ot emphasizing conceptual relativity.”

He admits, “In every philosopher there is a part that cries, ‘This enterprise is vain, frivolous, crazy---we must say “Stop!”’ and a part that cries, ‘This enterprise is simply reflection at the most general and most abstract level; to put a stop to it would be a crime against reason.’ Of COURSE philosophical problems are unsolvable; but as Stanley Cavell once remarked, ‘there are better and worse was of thinking about them.’” (Pg. 19)

He argues, “I don’t doubt that the universe of PHYSICS is, in some respects, a ‘machine,’ and that it is not ‘caring’… But… what the universe of physics leaves out is the very thing that makes that universe possible for us, of that makes it possible for us to construct that universe from our ‘sensory stimulations’---the intentional, valuational, referential work of ‘synthesis.’ I claim, in short, that without VALUES we would not have a WORLD. Instrumentalism, although it denies it, is itself a value system, albeit a sick one.” (Pg. 141)

He suggests, “the philosophical/subjective/objective distinction is today in total collapse. Philosophy has tried to draw this distinction in two quite different ways: ontologically, by making an inventory of of Furniture of the Universe, and banishing from the realm of the ‘objective’ whatever cannot be reduced to what the philosopher takes to be the basic building blocks of Reality… epistemologically, by making an inventory of the possible modes of verification, and banishing from the realm of the ‘objective’ whatever cannot be ‘verified’ by what the philosopher takes to be the ‘scientific’ means of verification. The ontological approach has ended up in a precritical materialism which has no account of such epistemological properties as confirmation… while the epistemological approach is immediately self-refuting: the criterion of ‘objectivity’ proposed by the epistemologists are self-violating.” (Pg. 184)

He points out, “If all sentences and texts lack determinate meaning, then how can [W.V.O.] Quine view his OWN utterances as anything more than mere noise? (Quine’s scientism does lead him to regard all discourse, including his own, as patterns of sound or inscription produced in accordance with Skinnerian schedules of conditioning.)… The difficulty is, in fact, the familiar self-application problem encountered by all relativisms which become total.” (Pg. 210)

He asserts, “It also seems to me that the empirical fact is that our ‘concepts’ are not ‘universal’ in the way that I am told syntactic categories are: the fact that French, English, and German have the very different concepts espirit, mind, and Geist… rather than some one ‘universal concept’ is evidence AGAINST the Innateness Hypothesis at the level of semantics.” (Pg. 295)

Putnam’s book will be of interest to all students of modern analytic philosophy.