To Think with Integrity (Putnam).pdf

LECTURE

“To Think with Integ rity”

Hilary Putnam’s Farewell Lecture

This is the last lecture Professor Hilary Putnam gave at Harvard before retiring. He

delivered it on May 4, 2000 in Emerson 305 as a conclusion to his legendary course,

Philosophy 154: Non-Scientific Knowledge.

lecture, and of course it doesn’t take much self-knowledge or psychoanalytic

penetration to understand that what that really means is that I don’t want my

career at Harvard to be over. But at this moment, no matter what I may ratio-

nally think (and I think I made the right decision), something in me is sad.

However, what’s done is done; so I

will give a last lecture. I heard somebody

give a very elegant acknowledgment lec-

ture just last week beginning with the

words, “I am literally speechless.” It

crossed my mind to say that too, but I

won’t do that.

The only thing that remains is to con-

tinue doing what I’ve been doing at

Harvard for thirty-five years, and at one

place or another ever since I taught my

first course in 1952 in Evanston: be a

pedagogue. So I will do some teaching.

One topic in my Dewey Lectures, Part

I of The Threefold Cord , that I didn’t say

much about (and there are many that I

didn’t get to in this course), is the topic

of truth. And I will just say a little about

that and then try to say something about

the more general themes that have domi-

nated my work since Reason, Truth, and History .

In the third Dewey Lecture, I distinguished between two versions of what

Hilary Putnam, widely considered one of the major philosophers of the last fifty years,

is Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard. Professor Putnam, whose tremen-

dously influential contributions to philosophy are too numerous to even list here, is the

author, most recently, of The Threefold Cord.

4 T HE H ARVARD R EVIEW OF P HILOSOPHY VIII 2000

The editors would like to thank Anthony Corsentino for his help in preparing this lec-

ture for publication. In order to preserve Professor Putnam’s lecturing style, the tran-

script of the lecture has been edited only slightly.

I REALIZED THIS MORNING THAT I DON’T WANT TO GIVE THIS

today is called ‘disquotationalism’ or ‘deflationism’. One of these I attribute to

Frege. The other is, I said, most clearly presented in a little-known article of Rudolf

Carnap’s, which I refer to in a footnote. It is an article that Carnap published in

what was perhaps the most influential anthology in analytic philosophy for many

years: the first edition of Feigl and Sellars’s Readings in Philosophical Analysis . It

seems to have been something that Feigl got Carnap to put together from, perhaps,

two different pieces that had appeared in Erkenntnis, or maybe something that had

appeared in Erkenntnis and something that Carnap hadn’t published. At any rate,

that particular version of it certainly appeared in English for the first time in

Readings in Philosophical Analysis . And it seems to me that, although it’s much

shorter than Paul Horwich’s book on truth, it is much more powerful. I say that

without any detriment to Paul. He would be the last to claim to be a philosopher of

Carnap’s stature.

I’ll use the term ‘disquotationalism’ for the Carnapian version of the theo-

ry and ‘deflationism’ for the Fregean version. On the Carnapian version, what’s true

and false are sentences, and sentences are marks and noises. (I take this language

from Richard Rorty, but I think that Carnap would have no objection.) So we are

supposed to say of a certain string of marks or noises that it’s true. And we’re told

that to say of a string of marks or noises that it’s true is just to assert that string of

marks and noises. Now

that version, of course,

raises the question, what

is it to assert marks and

noises?

When Horwich

(whom I use as a stalking

horse in the third lecture)

wrote his book on truth,

he subscribed to an

account of what it is to

assert marks and noises—

an account that was, in

fact, exactly the account

that Carnap would have

given, though Horwich gave it elsewhere and not in that article. On Horwich’s view

at that time, to understand marks and noises is to be able to assign them a ‘degree

of probability’ or perhaps a ‘degree of assertibility ’. Some of you, if you don’t have

tin ears, may already be beginning to wonder: how can marks and noises—say, the

sequence of marks, ‘There is a blackboard eraser on this table’, regarded as a discon-

tinuous range of patterns of ink on a page—be probable or assertible any more than

being true? But Horwich explains, not in his book but in articles he published at the

same time, that probability is something like a license to bet at certain odds. So we

are supposed to have dispositions to assent to sentences—that is, presumably to

mouth them—and, moreover, we have certain dispositions to bet at certain odds

that we won’t have to say, “I take it back,” or something like that.

But this is precisely what Carnap would call assigning a degree of confirma-

tion to a sentence. And indeed, in a review of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and

VIII 2000 T HE H ARVARD R EVIEW OF P HILOSOPHY 5

The only thing that remains is to

continue doing what I’ve been

doing at Harvard for thirty-five

years, and at one place or another

ever since I taught my first course

in 1952 in Evanston: be a peda-

gogue. So I will do some teaching.

Private Language , Horwich attributed this view to Wittgenstein. Now Horwich

today will insist that this isn’t his view anymore, and he once mildly criticized me

for criticizing a view of his that he no longer holds—although he has published nei-

ther a retraction nor a sketch of what the replacement is going to be. In any case,

Carnap’s picture was quite clear.

Now, I would say that I’m not in the business, as a philosopher, of pro-

hibiting you from talking in certain ways. I don’t read Wittgenstein, either, as doing

that. If you want to say of a sentence, in certain circumstances, that it’s true, then

OK: go ahead—provided that you recognize, at least, that sentences are only true or

false under particular understandings. But presumably neither Horwich nor Carnap

would object to that. Although Carnap might say, “I’m idealizing by assuming a

language in which every sentence has one and only one fixed understanding.”

But the model of an understanding of a sentence is functionalist: it’s a dis-

position of a speaker, conceived of as if the speaker were a computer, to behave in

certain ways or to lay certain wagers in response to certain stimulations. It’s a

methodologically solipsist picture. And ultimately, any methodologically solipsist

picture will fail to do justice to the fact—which seems to be doubted only by French

philosophers and people in English and French departments—that there is such a

thing as representing the world and not just producing bets in response to inputs at

the surface of your body.

In Frege’s version, what are true and false primarily are judgments. And he

denies that truth is a property—some universal that is wholly present in each true

sentence or each true judgment. One way of making the judgment that there is a

blackboard eraser on this table is to write this English sentence, another being to

utter the corresponding noise; if I could recall the German phrase for “blackboard

eraser,” I could make that same judgment in German. And sometimes I think in

German when I’ve been in Germany for a while. Or I think in Hebrew rather than

in English. So I could make that judgment without either using or thinking the

English sentence. Some people use, instead of ‘judgment’, the word ‘statement’,

others ‘proposition’; Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations uses the word

‘ Satz’ in deliberate defiance, I think, of the doctrine that it must be either a sen-

tence or something abstract and wholly distinct from the sentence. If I say of the

judgment that there is a blackboard eraser on this table that it is true, I am not say-

ing of one object, ‘the judgment’, that it has a property. On that view, then, when-

ever I think of a judgment that it is true I am making a meta-judgment about the

original judgment. Whereas Frege wants to say that the relation between truth and

judging is more intimate than that. (There’s a good paper on this by Thomas

Ricketts, by the way.) It is, rather, that when I say that it’s true that there is a black-

board eraser on this table I’m judging that there is a blackboard eraser on this table.

The subject is not the judgment; the subject is the blackboard eraser just as much as

if I had only said, “There’s a blackboard eraser on this table.” That, at a certain

superficial level, agrees with the other theory; that is, deflation and disquotation

have a similar story to this extent.

Now the difference, I would say, is this. In the Fregean picture, judgments

are not conceived of as corresponding to the world—it’s rather a big thing to corre-

spond to, especially if by ‘the world’ you mean ‘the universe’—or even some piece

of the world, or some peculiar entity in the world called, ‘the fact that there’s a

6 T HE H ARVARD R EVIEW OF P HILOSOPHY VIII 2000

blackboard eraser on this table’. Rather, the judgment is intrinsically about the

blackboard eraser, and the table, and the geometrical relation of ‘being on.’

But what does that “intrinsic” talk come to? That sounds like mystery talk.

Really, all it comes to is this: to be able to judge, to do what we call “judging,” that

there is a blackboard eraser on this table, you must have certain world-involving

abilities. I would also speak here of language-involving abilities. I would defer to

Warren Goldfarb’s knowledge of Frege’s texts here, but I think that this is some-

thing that Frege neither affirms nor denies. I don’t think that he discusses the issue.

But I see nothing intrinsically incompatible, in the Fregean view, with the claim

that, at least for most judgments that human beings make—certainly judgments like

the judgment that there is a blackboard eraser on this table—the capacity to make

such judgments at all presupposes the sorts of skills that a speaker of the language

comes to possess as he gains mastery of that language. And those skills involve such

things as blackboard erasers, tables, and geometrical relations, and not only hypo-

thetical events in the brain conceived of as a computer. Although today we don’t

even know, as I heard David Hubel say last week, how memory is laid down in the

brain, or how memory is laid down in individual cells. It’s rather a mystery, for the

proteins in those cells are recycled, various things happen to them, and so on: how

we manage to have stable memories is something that we still don’t know. And yet

we are happily babbling away about whether the brain is a computer.

Thus, in the Fregean story, supplemented in this somewhat

Wittgensteinian way, there is the idea that using words is a world-involving thing.

Wittgenstein speaks at times of ‘methods of projection’, which is, in a sense, repre-

sentation—which is just

what postmodernism

denies ever exists. Now

I think that Wittg-

enstein in one place

uses the example of the

phrase “blue sofa,” and

he says that you could

of course say that the

words “blue sofa” cor-

respond in a particular

context to a particular

blue sofa. But

Wittgenstein would not

say that if I say, “There

are no books in this room,” then that sentence ‘corresponds to’ something called

‘the absence of books in the room’. But there is nothing in talk of methods of pro-

jection, or of world-involving abilities, or of the idea that words do sometimes cor-

respond to things, to force one to think that if some words, in some situations, can

be meaningfully said to correspond to some particular things, then there must be

one correspondence, one and the same correspondence, in every case where we can

think of words as corresponding to particular things. Let alone that all words that

can be meaningfully used, including whole sentences, correspond to particular

things, even if we have to invent abstract things like ‘the nonexistence of books in

VIII 2000 T HE H ARVARD R EVIEW OF P HILOSOPHY 7

In a discussion in which someone

says, “I believe in correspondence

truth; so-and-so rejects correspon-

dence truth,” there is always this

unquestioned assumption that either

it’s all correspondence or no corre-

spondence.

this room’.

That is, in a discussion in which someone says, “I believe in correspon-

dence truth; so-and-so rejects correspondence truth,” there is always this unques-

tioned assumption that either it’s all correspondence or no correspondence; and,

moreover, that it is one and the same correspondence always, or no correspon-

dence.

So now I’ve completed my little task of saying something about the third

Dewey Lecture.

Now another little bit of pedagogy. I have been talking a good deal about

the unhelpfulness, to put it mildly—the nonsensicality—of sense datum talk, partic-

ularly when ‘sense data’ are said to be identical with neural processes. I have been

looking at John Searle’s Minds, Brains, and Science, an old book. He says in the first

chapter that “the smell of the rose is a rate of neural firings.” There you have the

whole ‘Cartesian-cum-materialist’ picture in one sentence: the smell of the rose is a

rate of neural firings. Now one thing that I have stressed is that (even if you aren’t

bothered by ‘appearance’ talk) there are no scientific objects that have the same

identity conditions as appearances.

Consider that statement of Searle’s: the smell of the rose is a rate of neural

firings. First of all, it’s ambiguous. Let’s assume that the notion of token-identity of

events is all right (I say in the second Dewey Lecture that all the existing definitions

of token-identity for events have such utterly counterintuitive consequences that

we’re just better off not talking that way). But for the moment allowing talk of

token-identity of events: is Searle saying that the whiteness of this paper, or the

sense-datum or quale of the

whiteness of this paper, is a rate

of neural firings? Does he mean

that this token event of its

appearing white to me at this

very instant is identical with the

token event of particular neurons

firing at a certain rate at that

time? Let’s grant that that might

be true, if we knew what we

meant by ‘token-identity’, and

apart from other objections. Or

does he mean that the proper-

ty—the way something can be, or in this case the way a person can be—of its

appearing to a person in that way, of having that experience of white, is a property

of the form “having such-and-such neurons firing in such-and-such location at

such-and-such rate”?

Now, Searle has to mean the latter. For he compares the situation with the

discovery that liquidity is explainable in terms of the properties of the water mole-

cules, and that solidity is explainable in terms of the properties of a crystal; he even

says with respect to intentionality that it is a consequence of his view that just as we

can define—empirically and not analytically—liquidity or solidity, we may someday

be able to define intentionality or the smell of the rose or the white of the chalk in

terms of the properties of neuron firings. So his is clearly the view that one psycho-

8 T HE H ARVARD R EVIEW OF P HILOSOPHY VIII 2000

We are committed to an open

plurality of ways of describ-

ing, ways of conceiving, ways

of talking, ways of thinking:

that, if you like, is pluralism.

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