BOOK REVIEW
Christopher
Norris. Hilary Putnam: Realism, Reason, and the Uses of Uncertainty.
Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002. 280pp.
by
John R. Shook
Norris (Cardiff) distinguishes three Putnams in this highly valuable study, each deserving careful scrutiny because they have deeply influenced recent philosophy. The first Putnam defended scientific realism and the existence of natural kinds, earning Norris’s approval. The second Putnam, emerging after his 1975 repudiation of metaphysical realism in favor of internal realism, permitted anti-realist arguments, quantum mechanics, and verificationism to overthrow scientific realism. The third post-1994 Putnam has been gradually returning to realism, by in turn leaving behind internal realism for an anti-representationalist understanding of perception and mind that may yet avoid skepticism.
Although
Putnam’s longstanding interests in philosophy of mind were a major component
in his development, Norris does not portray these concerns as a central
motivating factor. Instead, Putnam’s struggles with scientific realism are
center-stage, possibly distorting Norris’s otherwise sound exposition. What
makes Norris’s account the most useful full-length study of Putnam is the
text’s continual struggle with Putnam’s arguments for his positions.
Norris’s own commitment to scientific realism is a partner in dialogue with
Putnam throughout the book, and usually this produces a fairly reliable aid to
understanding the complex questions at issue.
Unfortunately,
Norris is sometimes overzealous in his defense of scientific realism, which
occasionally detracts the book’s value by unnecessarily distracting and
misleading the reader. For example, after several chapters of this tactic,
Norris’s steady complaints against the effectiveness of anti-realists
arguments make Putnam appear foolish and vulnerable; yet Norris himself does not
provide any argument himself for scientific realism beyond stating over and over
that anti-realist views cannot disprove the existence of unobservable entities.
Of course, anti-realism has always been an empiricist position questioning the
extent of rational justification for accepting the existence of unobservables
— to merely repeat the phrase “and yet we can believe” ignores the
epistemological stakes. Thus Norris defends Bohm’s stance that we can conceive
of subatomic particles as always having objective properties despite the
accepted fact that measuring them introduces uncertainties. Well sure, but the
Copenhagen interpretation which Putnam 3 now adopts does take seriously the
empiricist’s epistemological problem of justifying such a realist conception.
Norris’s protest that epistemological issues should be kept strictly separate
from ontological issues (pp. 56-57) surely leaves readers pondering how this
“meta-physics” move of strict separation could be itself justified,
particularly from any standpoint that still respects empirical science itself as
the best arbiter of reality. Only in the last chapters does Norris develop
anything like a defense of scientific realism in the course of discussing the
third Putnam’s danger of collapse into thorough relativism and skepticism.
Norris
is likewise dubious about the influence of Wittgenstein and Dummett on
Putnam’s move towards commonsense realism. Putnam is impressed by arguments
that purport to show why appeals to truth, objectivity, and reality have no
validity outside of some social practice or another. Norris does not pause to
examine in detail these arguments, but simply contrasts recent Putnam (and
Goodman) with the older-and-wiser Putnam who would have known (with Norris) that
truth is independent of conceptual schemes since it is determined solely by a
correspondence with the objective features of the world (pp. 92-94). Further
chapters are marked by this appeal to correspondence (qua ontological stance!),
modal realism, and the matching notion of meaning as fixed by actually existing
natural kinds, not convention (e.g. 114-15, 173-74, 235-37). Here, an
exploration of Putnam’s difficulties with such a “magical” theory of
meaning-fixation (by noetic rays?) that surface in his later writings in
philosophy of mind would have balanced Norris’s easy appeal to a causal theory
of reference that Putnam has since rejected. Paradoxically, the first Putnam’s
externalism (“meanings just ain’t in the head”) was grounded on an
acceptance of natural kinds, putting the later Putnams closer to mental
internalism (as Norris points out on pp. 150-51). But perhaps Putnam has been
looking for a third mediating option, that meanings are the product of
human-environment transaction (explaining his interest in McDowell), placing
full responsibility for neither internal mental workings nor external physical
objects. Norris’s decision to largely avoid Putnam’s progression in
philosophy of mind puts him at a disadvantage here, notwithstanding a brief
mention of Putnam’s struggle over the nature of reference on pp. 205-6.
The sixth chapter, “The ‘Many Face’ of Realism,” offers a more useful treatment because it minimizes Norris’s own views in favor of directly comparing the positions and arguments of early and recent Putnam. Norris helpfully establishes important points of contrast and disagreement, dissecting Putnam’s arguments and exposing issues where the early Putnam appear to have the advantage over the later Putnam. The seventh chapter on the revisability of logic is likewise quite useful as Norris discusses Putnam’s various attempts to grapple with the question of a priori principles and necessary knowledge. His difficulties with Quine receive a good airing, but regretfully Putnam’s reliance on the Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem for his later anti-realism is but briefly mentioned despite the fact that the eighth and ninth chapters are devoted to philosophy of mathematics. This chapter argues that rejecting Platonic realism in favor of internal realism leaves the later Putnams uncomfortably close to nominalism and mathematical intuitionism even while he rebuffs naturalistic approaches. Norris is quite confident that verificationism cannot handle all types of mathematical truths and thus favors realism. Norris cannot understand why Putnam’s empiricism doesn’t simply lead him towards a Quinean/Platonic resolution. Instead, the later Putnam argues that “nothing works” in philosophy of mathematics, despite his tendency (regrettable, for Norris) to blur the distinction between logical necessity and empirical warrant. Norris argues that Putnam is caught in a dilemma over whether an axiomatic system like Peano arithmetic might be susceptible to revision like Euclidean geometry. Putnan does not want logical or arithmetical truths to be so close to empirical knowledge, yet requires them to be revisable under extremely difficult to conceive epistemic conditions.
Despite Norris’s somewhat one-sided and partisan stance, this book is
the best available full-length discussion of Putnam’s career.
John
R. Shook
Oklahoma State University
November
2002