Reason, Truth and History (9781139927956) by Putnam Hilary

Author:Putnam, Hilary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr
Published: 2004-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

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1 ‘Literature, Science, and Reflection’, New Literary History, vol. VII, 1975–6, reprinted in my Meaning and the Moral Sciences, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

2 Concerning evolution what Wittgenstein said was ‘People were certain on grounds which were extremely thin. Couldn’t there have been an attitude which said: “I don’t know. It is an interesting hypothesis which may eventually be well confirmed” ‘, Lectures on Aesthetics, p. 26, in Cyril Burret (ed.) L. W. Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967. What it would be like for evolution to be ‘well confirmed’ Wittgenstein does not say, but the paragraph suggests that actually seeing speciation occur is what he has in mind (‘Did anyone see this process happening? No. Has anyone seen it happening now? No. The evidence of breeding is just a drop in the bucket.’)

It is instructive to contrast Wittgenstein’s attitude with Monod’s:

the selective theory of evolution, as Darwin himself had stated it, required the discovery of Mendelian genetics, which of course was made. This is an example, and a most important one, of what is meant by the content of a theory, the content of an idea . . . [A] good theory or a good idea will be much wider and much richer than even the inventor of the idea may know at his time. The theory may be judged precisely on this type of development, when more and more falls into its lap, even though it was not predictable that so much would come of it (J. Monod, ‘On the Molecular Theory of Evolution’, in Harre, R. (ed.), Problems of Scientific Revolution: Progress and Obstacles to Progress in the Sciences, Oxford, 1975).

3 One might develop an ‘ordinary language’ philosophy which was not committed to the public and ‘criterial’ verification of philosophical theses if one could develop and support a conception in which the norms which govern linguistic practices are not themselves discoverable by ordinary empirical investigation. In Must We Mean What We Say, Stanley Cavell took a significant step in this direction, arguing that such norms can be known by a species of ‘self knowledge’ which he compared to the insight achieved through therapy and also to the transcendental knowledge sought by phenomenology. While I agree with Cavell that my knowledge as a native speaker that certain uses are deviant or non-deviant is not ‘external’ inductive knowledge – I can know without evidence that in my dialect of English one says ‘mice’ and not ‘mouses’ – I am inclined to think this fact of speaker’s privileged access does not extend to generalizations about correctness and incorrectness. If I say (as Cavell does) that it is part of the rule for the correct use of locutions of the form X is voluntary that there should be something ‘fishy’ about X, then I am advancing a theory to explain my intuitions about specific cases, not just reporting those intuitions. It is true that something of this sort also goes on in psychotherapy; but I

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