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Ethics Without Ontology
In this brief book one of the most distinguished living American philosophers takes up the question of whether ethical judgments can properly be considered objective―a question that has vexed philosophers over the past century. Looking at the efforts of philosophers from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century, Hilary Putnam traces the ways in which ethical problems arise in a historical context.
Putnam’s central concern is ontology―indeed, the very idea of ontology as the division of philosophy concerned with what (ultimately) exists. Reviewing what he deems the disastrous consequences of ontology’s influence on analytic philosophy―in particular, the contortions it imposes upon debates about the objective of ethical judgments―Putnam proposes abandoning the very idea of ontology. He argues persuasively that the attempt to provide an ontological explanation of the objectivity of either mathematics or ethics is, in fact, an attempt to provide justifications that are extraneous to mathematics and ethics―and is thus deeply misguided.
Putnam’s central concern is ontology―indeed, the very idea of ontology as the division of philosophy concerned with what (ultimately) exists. Reviewing what he deems the disastrous consequences of ontology’s influence on analytic philosophy―in particular, the contortions it imposes upon debates about the objective of ethical judgments―Putnam proposes abandoning the very idea of ontology. He argues persuasively that the attempt to provide an ontological explanation of the objectivity of either mathematics or ethics is, in fact, an attempt to provide justifications that are extraneous to mathematics and ethics―and is thus deeply misguided.
176 pages, Paperback
First published March 31, 2004
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About the author
Hilary Putnam
119 books134 followersHilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist who was a central figure in analytic philosophy from the 1960s until his death, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. He was known for his willingness to apply an equal degree of scrutiny to his own philosophical positions as to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposed its flaws. As a result, he acquired a reputation for frequently changing his own position. Putnam was Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University.
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June 28, 2022
Hilary Putnam's Obituary For Metaphysics
Hilary Putnam is a distinguished and prolific American philosopher whose views and philosophical interests have changed many times during a long career. His recent book "Ethics without Ontology" (2004) is a compiliation of two series of lectures he gave during 2001. The first part of the book consists of four lectures Putnam delivered at the University of Perugia while the second part consists of the two Spinoza lectures Putnam gave while serving as the Spinoza Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Both series of lectures have as their theme a reshifting of the concept of "objectivity" particularly as applied to ethics. In attempting to explain the nature of objectivity, Putnam tries to decouple ethics from ontology and metaphysics, a coupling which, he believes, has produced a distortion in the attempt to understand ethics. This distortion results on one hand from Platonism with its inflationary metaphysics and on the other hand from the converse of Platonism in an eliminative or reductionist metaphysics. Such eliminativism or reductionism, Putnam argues, leads to a broad skepticism, including a skepticism about the objectivity of ethical judgments. Putnam's major philosophical hero, in explaining how ethics can be objective without being metaphysical is the American pragmatist John Dewey. Putnam finds Dewey's ethics situational and particular in character, fallibilistic rather than dogmatic, and inclined to see ethical judgments as provisional -- cast in terms of better or worse -- rather than as absolutes.
The four initial lectures have largely a brush-clearing goal as Putnam tries to separate the concept of objectivity from Ontology. In the first lecture, Putnam sets forth his goal of divorcing ethical understanding from a theory of being -- of "what there is." In addition to Dewey, Putnam praises the thinking of Emanuel Levinas, Kant, and Aristotle. The second and third lectures are the heart of Putnam's approach as he argues that there are variant concepts of existence and of identity (using as an example a type of formal logic known as "mereology") and that different kinds of conceptual forms and of discourse can be regarded as objective without commiting one to the existence of the subject under discussion. In these lectures Putnam argues that we can speak reasonably in a variety of different conceptual schemes and that, for some questions in mathematics or logic, the question of "existence" does not arise in assessing the truth of the claims. Putnam's claim is that statements can be true and rational without being descriptive (about objects). In the final lecture of the set, Putnam applies his analysis to ethical statements and pronounces the death of Ontology in considering ethical questions.
In the Spinoza lectures, Putnam has a more positive goal. He develops a concept of philosophy as "reflective transcendence" which he understands as a willingness to step back from received opinion, commonplaces, and religious dogma and to think critically. Again, Putnam's conclusion is that "reflective transcendence", which is rather a traditional way of understanding the goal of the philosophical enterprise, does not require ontology.
In his first lecture, Putnam traces three periods of philosophical entlightenment, the first Plato's, the second the seventeenth-century Enlightenment and the third an ongoing entlightenment project began by the pragmatism of Dewey. He says interesting, if hastily-developed things, about metaphysics, social philosophy, and ethics under each of these three enlightment projects. In the second lecture, Putnam attacks various post-modernist critics of the possibility of -- or even the concept of --- philosophical enlightenment, including Foucault, Derrida, and Richard Rorty.
Putnam's lectures are engagingly written and display an enviable breadth of erudition and thought. As a result of their format as lectures they move rather too quickly. They are suggestive, rather than full philosophical treatments. In particular, I thought that Dewey's pragmatism needed to be developed more fully to make it a convincing alternative to Ontology. Putnam praises Dewey's pragmatism a good deal, but does not give it a sufficient fleshing-out to permit even a warrantly assertible conclusion of Putnam's claims on its behalf.
For all his criticism of Ontology, Putnam practices philosophy in an ambitious manner. He decries overspecialization and mere technical skill and seeks in "reflective transcendence" to "regain the integrated vision which philosophy has always aspired to" (p. 1). This is a challenging, thoughtful work.
Robin Friedman
Hilary Putnam is a distinguished and prolific American philosopher whose views and philosophical interests have changed many times during a long career. His recent book "Ethics without Ontology" (2004) is a compiliation of two series of lectures he gave during 2001. The first part of the book consists of four lectures Putnam delivered at the University of Perugia while the second part consists of the two Spinoza lectures Putnam gave while serving as the Spinoza Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Both series of lectures have as their theme a reshifting of the concept of "objectivity" particularly as applied to ethics. In attempting to explain the nature of objectivity, Putnam tries to decouple ethics from ontology and metaphysics, a coupling which, he believes, has produced a distortion in the attempt to understand ethics. This distortion results on one hand from Platonism with its inflationary metaphysics and on the other hand from the converse of Platonism in an eliminative or reductionist metaphysics. Such eliminativism or reductionism, Putnam argues, leads to a broad skepticism, including a skepticism about the objectivity of ethical judgments. Putnam's major philosophical hero, in explaining how ethics can be objective without being metaphysical is the American pragmatist John Dewey. Putnam finds Dewey's ethics situational and particular in character, fallibilistic rather than dogmatic, and inclined to see ethical judgments as provisional -- cast in terms of better or worse -- rather than as absolutes.
The four initial lectures have largely a brush-clearing goal as Putnam tries to separate the concept of objectivity from Ontology. In the first lecture, Putnam sets forth his goal of divorcing ethical understanding from a theory of being -- of "what there is." In addition to Dewey, Putnam praises the thinking of Emanuel Levinas, Kant, and Aristotle. The second and third lectures are the heart of Putnam's approach as he argues that there are variant concepts of existence and of identity (using as an example a type of formal logic known as "mereology") and that different kinds of conceptual forms and of discourse can be regarded as objective without commiting one to the existence of the subject under discussion. In these lectures Putnam argues that we can speak reasonably in a variety of different conceptual schemes and that, for some questions in mathematics or logic, the question of "existence" does not arise in assessing the truth of the claims. Putnam's claim is that statements can be true and rational without being descriptive (about objects). In the final lecture of the set, Putnam applies his analysis to ethical statements and pronounces the death of Ontology in considering ethical questions.
In the Spinoza lectures, Putnam has a more positive goal. He develops a concept of philosophy as "reflective transcendence" which he understands as a willingness to step back from received opinion, commonplaces, and religious dogma and to think critically. Again, Putnam's conclusion is that "reflective transcendence", which is rather a traditional way of understanding the goal of the philosophical enterprise, does not require ontology.
In his first lecture, Putnam traces three periods of philosophical entlightenment, the first Plato's, the second the seventeenth-century Enlightenment and the third an ongoing entlightenment project began by the pragmatism of Dewey. He says interesting, if hastily-developed things, about metaphysics, social philosophy, and ethics under each of these three enlightment projects. In the second lecture, Putnam attacks various post-modernist critics of the possibility of -- or even the concept of --- philosophical enlightenment, including Foucault, Derrida, and Richard Rorty.
Putnam's lectures are engagingly written and display an enviable breadth of erudition and thought. As a result of their format as lectures they move rather too quickly. They are suggestive, rather than full philosophical treatments. In particular, I thought that Dewey's pragmatism needed to be developed more fully to make it a convincing alternative to Ontology. Putnam praises Dewey's pragmatism a good deal, but does not give it a sufficient fleshing-out to permit even a warrantly assertible conclusion of Putnam's claims on its behalf.
For all his criticism of Ontology, Putnam practices philosophy in an ambitious manner. He decries overspecialization and mere technical skill and seeks in "reflective transcendence" to "regain the integrated vision which philosophy has always aspired to" (p. 1). This is a challenging, thoughtful work.
Robin Friedman
September 22, 2015
Alright, so, it is easy to chalk this book up as important and influential because of the status of its author. Hilary Putnam is certainly one of the most important 20th/21st century philosophers (and one of my favorites, as someone who I read both for mainstream metaphysics and because of his writing on Jewish philosophy) and his various contributions to philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics are noteworthy. But this book isn't among those contributions, and so I think it's important to evaluate the book somewhat separately, rather than as some more-or-less important part of that body of work.
As a work in metaethics, the book has been invaluable to me. Putnam sketches a moderate, thoughtful view of how we can have moral truth without something that seems really strongly metaphysically committal, setting off all sorts of alarms about weird beliefs around abstract objects. He criticizes Quine and others in American metaphysics for giving us the impression that we need a commitment to such abstract objects in order to believe in the truth of certain moral claims, and offers a valuable alternative perspective.
The book is not long; it is written in a way that is pretty accessible, and he often goes out of his way to get to the meat of these sorts of philosophical issues rather than explicating the jargon. It's written from his lecture notes, which comes across in the format and style. Overall, this is a really great piece of philosophical writing.
It also hit me where I live, personally, because of its discussion of figures from a lot of varied philosophical traditions. Putnam is a fantastically fluid mind, working on everything from Talmudic thought to analytic philosophy of mathematics, and he puts to work ideas from philosophers that are often treated as being well outside of analytic philosophy, like Levinas and Dewey. His use of their ideas is respectful, engaged, and thoughtful; the pluralist spirit that he takes it in and the ease with which he interconnects what are often regarded as disparate intellectual regions is really impressive. That was really moving to me, personally, and resulted in the high rating.
As a work in metaethics, the book has been invaluable to me. Putnam sketches a moderate, thoughtful view of how we can have moral truth without something that seems really strongly metaphysically committal, setting off all sorts of alarms about weird beliefs around abstract objects. He criticizes Quine and others in American metaphysics for giving us the impression that we need a commitment to such abstract objects in order to believe in the truth of certain moral claims, and offers a valuable alternative perspective.
The book is not long; it is written in a way that is pretty accessible, and he often goes out of his way to get to the meat of these sorts of philosophical issues rather than explicating the jargon. It's written from his lecture notes, which comes across in the format and style. Overall, this is a really great piece of philosophical writing.
It also hit me where I live, personally, because of its discussion of figures from a lot of varied philosophical traditions. Putnam is a fantastically fluid mind, working on everything from Talmudic thought to analytic philosophy of mathematics, and he puts to work ideas from philosophers that are often treated as being well outside of analytic philosophy, like Levinas and Dewey. His use of their ideas is respectful, engaged, and thoughtful; the pluralist spirit that he takes it in and the ease with which he interconnects what are often regarded as disparate intellectual regions is really impressive. That was really moving to me, personally, and resulted in the high rating.
June 22, 2020
A really good little book. Putnam sets out his pragmatist ethical project in which, rather than appealing to the existence of some ontological thing (some moral truth-maker), we instead base the truth of our moral claims on public discourse. He draws heavily on Dewey's idea of 'deliberative democracy' to do so. He also spends a bit of time in the second half talking about a 'pragmatist enlightenment' in which pragmatic ideals propel us towards progress similar to what happened with the rationalist and empiricist enlightenments.
The problems with the book are, mainly, that he is too brief. In response to Donald Davidson's 'On The Very Idea of a Conceptual Schema', he is far too brief, firstly, in showing that Davidson relied on faulty presuppositions, and secondly, in showing how the falsity of Davidson's thesis opens the way towards the rejection of ontological questions. The other issue I found is that he leaves vague what his notion of truth/warranted assertability with respect to moral claims is. Perhaps this is because he assumes the reader to have a familiarity with Dewey, in which it is developed, but based on the given text alone it is a bit unclear what it is that makes things true in a deliberative democracy, aside from, for example, Rorty's sociological thesis (what people would accept).
In spite of its flaws, this book is excellent. It is very much worth reading, both for its philosophical insights and for its beautiful style. Putnam writes incredibly well and is, obviously, a supremely humble and honest thinker. While a bit underdeveloped, I think this book lays a promising groundwork for a pragmatist ethics moving forward.
The problems with the book are, mainly, that he is too brief. In response to Donald Davidson's 'On The Very Idea of a Conceptual Schema', he is far too brief, firstly, in showing that Davidson relied on faulty presuppositions, and secondly, in showing how the falsity of Davidson's thesis opens the way towards the rejection of ontological questions. The other issue I found is that he leaves vague what his notion of truth/warranted assertability with respect to moral claims is. Perhaps this is because he assumes the reader to have a familiarity with Dewey, in which it is developed, but based on the given text alone it is a bit unclear what it is that makes things true in a deliberative democracy, aside from, for example, Rorty's sociological thesis (what people would accept).
In spite of its flaws, this book is excellent. It is very much worth reading, both for its philosophical insights and for its beautiful style. Putnam writes incredibly well and is, obviously, a supremely humble and honest thinker. While a bit underdeveloped, I think this book lays a promising groundwork for a pragmatist ethics moving forward.
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February 22, 2022He aquí otra genialidad de Putnam para leer y releer con mucha atención e interés. Al ser dos ciclos de conferencias el estilo es relativamente claro y asequible de entender y sus ideas son lo suficientemente valiosas como para hacer el esfuerzo de rellenar los huecos de lo que no se entiende.
La propuesta de una ética no fundamentada, sino basada en el principio de resolución de problemas prácticos y la crítica a la Ontología (importante la mayúscula) como inventario de "lo que es" animan el primer ciclo, el más sesudo y rico en detalles. Las dos siguientes conferencias versan sobre la necesidad de una nueva ilustración de influencia pragmatista, una propuesta estimulante que completa los planteamientos de las charlas previas. Todo junto constituye una obra notable e importante.
La propuesta de una ética no fundamentada, sino basada en el principio de resolución de problemas prácticos y la crítica a la Ontología (importante la mayúscula) como inventario de "lo que es" animan el primer ciclo, el más sesudo y rico en detalles. Las dos siguientes conferencias versan sobre la necesidad de una nueva ilustración de influencia pragmatista, una propuesta estimulante que completa los planteamientos de las charlas previas. Todo junto constituye una obra notable e importante.
June 11, 2021
This is a series of lectures by one of the most recognizable contemporary philosophers, Hillary Putnam, from 2004. In one sense, it is an introduction to the study of ontology - but it's also Putnam's asnwer to the question whether ethical judgements can be objective. It's a very provoking and captivating text, meant to be read by a general philosophical audience.
In a nutshell, Putnam distinguishes two types of ontology: one posits the existence of things that are unknown to perception and common sense, such as Platonic forms or the Good, which Putnam calls inflationary ontology - because it inflates the set of existing things. The other type is called deflationary ontology, and Putnam distinguishes two variants, one is reductionism ("A" is nothing but "B") the other eliminationism ("A" is an illusion).
Examples of reductionism would include nominalism (properties are nothing but names), utilitarianism (goodness is nothing but pleasure), atomism (the world is nothing but void and atoms). Examples of eliminationism would be Berkeley's idealism (the material world is an illusion), another sort of nominalism (properties don't exist), etc.
Against all that, Putnam forward his own view, called pragmatic pluralism, stating that in philosophising we employ many different kinds of discourses - "language games" in the Wittgensteinian sense - and it's an illusion to think that just one language game would be sufficient for describing all of reality! That leads him to argue that the ontology we choose to describe the world is just a matter of convention, rather than superiority of one way over another (conceptual relativity). Moreover, we can use many ways of describing the world without being able to reduce one way to another (conceptual pluralism). An example would be describing a room with an ontology of furniture vs. an ontology of fields and subatomic particles. The first description loses something of the second and vice versa. There's no ultimate ontology in which to describe the room.
That leads us to the question of whether objectivity is possible without reference to objects. Traditionally it is held that if a claim is objectivitely true, then there have to be some objects to which the claim corresponds. And if there's no obvious natural objects, there have to be some non-natural objects to which the claim corresponds (forms, numbers, goodness, etc.). What Putnam argues, however, is that logical, mathematical and ethical truths don't describe the world, but are more closely related to the notion of conceptual truth. Let's take the claim that the sum of the inner angles of a triangle is 180°. Well, the claim is taken to be true only in euclidean geometry. What makes it "true" is not some reference to geometric objects, but rather, inner conceptual relations. So, accepting the claim is a matter of accepting the procedures by which we do geometry.
In the same way logical and mathematical truths are accounted for, not as descriptions of anything, but rather acquired agreements as to how to go about doing logics and mathematics. In the same sense ethical truths, Putnam contends, aren't a description of the world, but rather something that is related to the conventions about how to go about the study of ethics. All of those truths are corrigible.
The only truths that do describe something, are according to Putnam scientific truths, which consequently present us with a certain ontological commitment. According to the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument, for example, accepting the truth of scientific theories also commits us, along physical entities that it describes, to the existence of mathematical entities, which play a central role in the way our sci. theories are formulated. This is so, because it's the only kind of truth that does indeed describe the world.
Everyday language, for example, makes reference to certain entities and predicates that are indispensable, but according to Quine, have no ontological significance. That's because everyday language does not operate within a theory that aims to accurately describe the world. Since logics, mathematics and ethics don't describe the world aswell, but merely establish conceptual relations, the entities they posit have no real ontological significance either.
REFLECTION: Putnam, at this point in his career, seems to be accepting of some "wholesale" kind of scientific realism, meaning that it seems to be commiting intself to the truth of most claims a (successful & mature) theory is making. He clearly states that he's reluctant to "become an instrumentalist" (which is a kind of scientific anti-realism), but doesn't foresee that many kinds of scientific realism would completely reject the notion of ontological commitment (such as structure realism or even entity realism, which only commits to "manipulatable" things). Philosophers that would follow Putnam in his idea of scientific ontological commitment, would be rather in a minority. However, I think he makes a very insightful point with the notion of "conceptual truth", and while I'm not quite persuaded, I must admit there's something very powerfully intuitive behind it.
In a nutshell, Putnam distinguishes two types of ontology: one posits the existence of things that are unknown to perception and common sense, such as Platonic forms or the Good, which Putnam calls inflationary ontology - because it inflates the set of existing things. The other type is called deflationary ontology, and Putnam distinguishes two variants, one is reductionism ("A" is nothing but "B") the other eliminationism ("A" is an illusion).
Examples of reductionism would include nominalism (properties are nothing but names), utilitarianism (goodness is nothing but pleasure), atomism (the world is nothing but void and atoms). Examples of eliminationism would be Berkeley's idealism (the material world is an illusion), another sort of nominalism (properties don't exist), etc.
Against all that, Putnam forward his own view, called pragmatic pluralism, stating that in philosophising we employ many different kinds of discourses - "language games" in the Wittgensteinian sense - and it's an illusion to think that just one language game would be sufficient for describing all of reality! That leads him to argue that the ontology we choose to describe the world is just a matter of convention, rather than superiority of one way over another (conceptual relativity). Moreover, we can use many ways of describing the world without being able to reduce one way to another (conceptual pluralism). An example would be describing a room with an ontology of furniture vs. an ontology of fields and subatomic particles. The first description loses something of the second and vice versa. There's no ultimate ontology in which to describe the room.
That leads us to the question of whether objectivity is possible without reference to objects. Traditionally it is held that if a claim is objectivitely true, then there have to be some objects to which the claim corresponds. And if there's no obvious natural objects, there have to be some non-natural objects to which the claim corresponds (forms, numbers, goodness, etc.). What Putnam argues, however, is that logical, mathematical and ethical truths don't describe the world, but are more closely related to the notion of conceptual truth. Let's take the claim that the sum of the inner angles of a triangle is 180°. Well, the claim is taken to be true only in euclidean geometry. What makes it "true" is not some reference to geometric objects, but rather, inner conceptual relations. So, accepting the claim is a matter of accepting the procedures by which we do geometry.
In the same way logical and mathematical truths are accounted for, not as descriptions of anything, but rather acquired agreements as to how to go about doing logics and mathematics. In the same sense ethical truths, Putnam contends, aren't a description of the world, but rather something that is related to the conventions about how to go about the study of ethics. All of those truths are corrigible.
The only truths that do describe something, are according to Putnam scientific truths, which consequently present us with a certain ontological commitment. According to the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument, for example, accepting the truth of scientific theories also commits us, along physical entities that it describes, to the existence of mathematical entities, which play a central role in the way our sci. theories are formulated. This is so, because it's the only kind of truth that does indeed describe the world.
Everyday language, for example, makes reference to certain entities and predicates that are indispensable, but according to Quine, have no ontological significance. That's because everyday language does not operate within a theory that aims to accurately describe the world. Since logics, mathematics and ethics don't describe the world aswell, but merely establish conceptual relations, the entities they posit have no real ontological significance either.
REFLECTION: Putnam, at this point in his career, seems to be accepting of some "wholesale" kind of scientific realism, meaning that it seems to be commiting intself to the truth of most claims a (successful & mature) theory is making. He clearly states that he's reluctant to "become an instrumentalist" (which is a kind of scientific anti-realism), but doesn't foresee that many kinds of scientific realism would completely reject the notion of ontological commitment (such as structure realism or even entity realism, which only commits to "manipulatable" things). Philosophers that would follow Putnam in his idea of scientific ontological commitment, would be rather in a minority. However, I think he makes a very insightful point with the notion of "conceptual truth", and while I'm not quite persuaded, I must admit there's something very powerfully intuitive behind it.
to-keep-reference
September 19, 2018...discute «juicios de valor internos de la investigación científica misma: juicios de coherencia, simplicidad verosimilitud y otros similares».
Religión sin dios Pág.41
Religión sin dios Pág.41
September 6, 2021
Challenging
Lectures two and three get a bit technical, but it would seem by necessity. There are some hard questions here. I don’t much like many of the conclusions but the discussion is thorough and well worth considering.
Put a bunch of philosophers in a room and soon enough - like the proverbial hordes of monkeys on typewriters - they will come up with all possible combinations of points of view.
In this book the author argues that ethical judgments can be objective after all. But not because of any underlying ontology - which is apparently a silly idea without any sound basis. So we are told.
This novel and unusual permutation takes some time to wrap your head around.
Lectures two and three get a bit technical, but it would seem by necessity. There are some hard questions here. I don’t much like many of the conclusions but the discussion is thorough and well worth considering.
Put a bunch of philosophers in a room and soon enough - like the proverbial hordes of monkeys on typewriters - they will come up with all possible combinations of points of view.
In this book the author argues that ethical judgments can be objective after all. But not because of any underlying ontology - which is apparently a silly idea without any sound basis. So we are told.
This novel and unusual permutation takes some time to wrap your head around.
May 29, 2013
Only thing that left me wanting was the end -- so much good detail and critical reflection to end on such a flat note. But read anyway to find the flat note yourself.
June 20, 2025
【Hilary Putnam / Ethics Without Ontology (Harvard University Press, 2004)】
If one can expect Putnam to write this book in an academic style, you'd be baffled. He tinged his "popular" discourse with sensationalism (quoting Jerusalem-based religions, Confucius and Stoicism in a row on P25, for example). One would undergo this vulgarity if one was reading a prodigy thinker with too much to say like Richard Rorty.
--...our empirical knowledge, or any piece of it, is conventional relative to certain alternatives and factual relative to certain others. (P45)
If it is really a validation of conceptual relativity as Putnam says, it seems that he was in the place of God who sorts out "relativity" - or "antimony" (P47). His argument about tautology is even less reliable unless we bend the use of "natural language," which is insisted to have no tautology as all instances being true (P57)- if so, what do you think about "All the people on Northern Sentinel Island are those who don't know electricity"? So far as people there have never met anyone outside, that'd be true...and is it just about "mathematical possibility" (P67), or calling it exercise in reasoning (P70)...? That's why we need to change the use of "natural language" instead.
If one applied it to any social science / humanities as one apply JL Austin to read literary works, they'd soon find many things without history or future. That would be disastrous so far as one worked in these field.
However, this book is a great example in which how "genre-crossing breakthrough" is just an extremely difficult thing to do. How one errs in being asked to do that (for example, at the faculty of liberal arts / MFA, see P111 to see his most radical criticism: he doesn't think "continental philosophy" is a good word).
If one can expect Putnam to write this book in an academic style, you'd be baffled. He tinged his "popular" discourse with sensationalism (quoting Jerusalem-based religions, Confucius and Stoicism in a row on P25, for example). One would undergo this vulgarity if one was reading a prodigy thinker with too much to say like Richard Rorty.
--...our empirical knowledge, or any piece of it, is conventional relative to certain alternatives and factual relative to certain others. (P45)
If it is really a validation of conceptual relativity as Putnam says, it seems that he was in the place of God who sorts out "relativity" - or "antimony" (P47). His argument about tautology is even less reliable unless we bend the use of "natural language," which is insisted to have no tautology as all instances being true (P57)- if so, what do you think about "All the people on Northern Sentinel Island are those who don't know electricity"? So far as people there have never met anyone outside, that'd be true...and is it just about "mathematical possibility" (P67), or calling it exercise in reasoning (P70)...? That's why we need to change the use of "natural language" instead.
If one applied it to any social science / humanities as one apply JL Austin to read literary works, they'd soon find many things without history or future. That would be disastrous so far as one worked in these field.
However, this book is a great example in which how "genre-crossing breakthrough" is just an extremely difficult thing to do. How one errs in being asked to do that (for example, at the faculty of liberal arts / MFA, see P111 to see his most radical criticism: he doesn't think "continental philosophy" is a good word).
December 14, 2020
Somewhat casual and repetitive, as are most works of Putnam post-90s. Although I agree with most of his conclusions, the arguments themselves are lacking. He does not say much that Wittgenstein didn't say already, and he seems insistent on misunderstanding Rorty. That being said, his discussion of conceptual truths could be considered an important addition to Wittgensteinian scholarship even though he does not introduce the matter in this way.
December 22, 2023
Muy bien escrito.
Pensaba que iba a profundizar un poco más en algunas cosas, sobre todo en la primera parte parte (acerca de la no-ontología y sus implicaciones en la filosofía de la lógica y las matemáticas). La segunda parte se centra en temas puramente éticos e históricos (a través de la filosofía de Dewey) pero, de nuevo, me ha faltado más detalle en algunos puntos.
De todos modos, totalmente recomendable.
Pensaba que iba a profundizar un poco más en algunas cosas, sobre todo en la primera parte parte (acerca de la no-ontología y sus implicaciones en la filosofía de la lógica y las matemáticas). La segunda parte se centra en temas puramente éticos e históricos (a través de la filosofía de Dewey) pero, de nuevo, me ha faltado más detalle en algunos puntos.
De todos modos, totalmente recomendable.
November 1, 2016
While I'm sympathetic to Putnam's attempt to situate a possible ethics that doesn't rely on an ontological foundation - in the sense of ontotheology, as he notes - I don't know if he's actually able to follow through in this ambition.
The most striking tension I found in the book was Putnam's reliance on what he calls "optional languages" (which are just specialist languages that expand on the set of meaningful words/phrases in a 'base' language - for example, things like philosophy, mathematics, or history are optional languages in the base language of English when written in English) with his attempt to say that philosophers unnecessarily rely on transcendent entities that appear to make metaphysical claims necessary. It's striking because Putnam claims that these transcendent 'platonic' entities don't exist in any meaningful way within the subject under discussion (mathematics and ethics are the two areas Putnam focuses on). What Putnam misses is that although these may not be entities in the optional languages being analyzed, they are entities in the philosophical language used to discuss these issues and thus have an ontological import.
This is a minor point in some respects, but since Putnam bases his "obituary to ontology" on his rejection of this form of Platonism, this tension is important for the argument as a whole, and is left unaddressed from what I could tell.
Considering this, along with some other questionable moments (Putnam seems to ignore that Derrida viewed deconstruction as a method to be used in certain situations - and thus is closer to the pragmatism he advocates than Putnam is willing to accept - and also makes some both unnecessary and baseless remarks about the existence of multiple enlightenments (what qualifies Ancient Greek and ~18th century European thought as "enlightenments" that makes important work elsewhere in the world not worth mentioning?), among other issues), makes this work less than spectacular to say the least, though it is full of memorable and useful moments all the same.
If one has an interest in finding a base for ethics that follows in the anti-ontotheological strain of thinking characterized by Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida - or in the pragmatist tradition that Putnam loves, for that matter - then this book is useful despite reservations. Otherwise, it may be worth avoiding.
The most striking tension I found in the book was Putnam's reliance on what he calls "optional languages" (which are just specialist languages that expand on the set of meaningful words/phrases in a 'base' language - for example, things like philosophy, mathematics, or history are optional languages in the base language of English when written in English) with his attempt to say that philosophers unnecessarily rely on transcendent entities that appear to make metaphysical claims necessary. It's striking because Putnam claims that these transcendent 'platonic' entities don't exist in any meaningful way within the subject under discussion (mathematics and ethics are the two areas Putnam focuses on). What Putnam misses is that although these may not be entities in the optional languages being analyzed, they are entities in the philosophical language used to discuss these issues and thus have an ontological import.
This is a minor point in some respects, but since Putnam bases his "obituary to ontology" on his rejection of this form of Platonism, this tension is important for the argument as a whole, and is left unaddressed from what I could tell.
Considering this, along with some other questionable moments (Putnam seems to ignore that Derrida viewed deconstruction as a method to be used in certain situations - and thus is closer to the pragmatism he advocates than Putnam is willing to accept - and also makes some both unnecessary and baseless remarks about the existence of multiple enlightenments (what qualifies Ancient Greek and ~18th century European thought as "enlightenments" that makes important work elsewhere in the world not worth mentioning?), among other issues), makes this work less than spectacular to say the least, though it is full of memorable and useful moments all the same.
If one has an interest in finding a base for ethics that follows in the anti-ontotheological strain of thinking characterized by Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida - or in the pragmatist tradition that Putnam loves, for that matter - then this book is useful despite reservations. Otherwise, it may be worth avoiding.
July 14, 2016
Pretty disappointing. Putnam sketches out the beginnings of an idea that looks like it might have merit, then wanders around the topic for a while and quits. A very poor analogy, for the deep-diving review reader:
A: "We decided that the fire department was unnecessary, so we disbanded it."
B: "What will you do if there's a fire?"
A: "Oh, I don't know... I guess we'll just have to muddle through. We'll figure something out, and if we're wrong, we'll try something else next time."
The initial idea is intriguing, and it's even possible that his solution is ultimately the correct one, but I defy someone to walk away impressed.
A: "We decided that the fire department was unnecessary, so we disbanded it."
B: "What will you do if there's a fire?"
A: "Oh, I don't know... I guess we'll just have to muddle through. We'll figure something out, and if we're wrong, we'll try something else next time."
The initial idea is intriguing, and it's even possible that his solution is ultimately the correct one, but I defy someone to walk away impressed.
March 21, 2007
What few arguments this book contains are unsound, and the rest is just second-hand Resolute Wittgensteinianism.
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