Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry: Channeling Wittgenstein by John G. Gunnell

Author:John G. Gunnell [Gunnell, John G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, History & Theory, Language, Political Science, Political
ISBN: 9780226661278
Google: M6TGDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 44179345
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-01-15T07:46:12+00:00

Pinning Down Putnam

By the end of the twentieth century, Putnam had rejected dominant forms of scientific and metaphysical realism, including several to which he had once subscribed. He adopted a formulation that he explicitly equated with Wittgenstein and Austin (but which he claimed was foreshadowed in Aristotle as well as in the work of pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey). As in the case of Davidson, an interpretation of Putnam depends to a large extent on the stage in his work that a reader happens to engage his arguments. All his work had, however, involved a search for an answer to what he called “the great question of realism” or the problem of how language attaches to the world. As in the case of Davidson, however, there was a problem with what it means to speak about attaching to the world if the “world” is not defined.

Putnam had begun in the 1950s as a logical empiricist but by the 1960s had embraced semantic externalism and a causal theory of reference similar to that of Kripke as well as a functionalist theory of mind, that is, the claim that the mind and mental states are analogous to the software of a computer. By the end of the 1970s, however, he had rejected the assumption that knowledge is based on the existence of a mind/language independent world. He instead subscribed to what he referred to as “internal realism,” which was an idealized image of epistemic justification that rejected the idea of a correspondence theory of truth. By the 1990s, however, he renounced this position as simply an alternative to or negation of metaphysical realism and as yet another fruitless attempt to specify some trans-contextual account of truth.

His final position was actually a challenge to the whole debate about such things as realism and anti-realism and to any claim about an absolute conception of the world. He recognized that it was a mistake to interpret Wittgenstein as an anti-realist, because Wittgenstein had rejected the assumptions that supported claims about both realism and anti-realism. Like Austin, Putnam argued that realism and anti-realism simply “mirror” one another. He claimed that it was the very failure of empiricism that had long ago driven philosophers toward idealism as a solution, but he nevertheless maintained that “there is a way to do justice to our sense that knowledge claims are responsible to reality without recoiling into metaphysical fantasy” (1999, 4). The phrase “responsible to reality” still seemed, however, to imply a lingering representationalist problematic, but, at the same time, he rejected the assumption “that there must be an interface between our cognitive powers and the external world” (10). As an alternative, he advanced what he referred to as “direct,” “natural,” or “pragmatic” realism. Somewhat like Davidson, he presented this new form of realism as a disposal of the issue how we access the “world” and the recognition, as a philosophical claim, of its needlessness and unintelligibility. But speaking about this disposal as direct realism might still seem to imply that there is a universal that stands behind all reality claims.

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