Reading Group: Hilary Putnam, 'The Content and Appeal of Naturalism'

Putnam has two criticisms of (scientific) naturalism:

(I) Naturalism cannot give stable accounts of semantic content so that central naturalistic claims about language imply views that are not consistent with an overall naturalistic perspective (anti-realism or even supernaturalism).

(II) Naturalism has anti-supernaturalistic appeal, but goes too far in its reductionist fervour -- Putnam attributes this to fear of the normative.

The essay starts with a survey of naturalistic attitudes towards semantic issues. As is well known, naturalism privileges the formalised languages of science, in particular physics, over language as we know and use it. Language, meaning and reference in the ordinary sense may or may not be part of the naturalistic picture of language. At any rate, there is a distinctive hierarchy between first-rate conceptual systems with contents that pertain to the absolute conception of the world sought by physics. Only statements of this (fairly rarefied) kind are bona fide statements. If less formal statements are considered at all, naturalism strives to reduce their contents to those of first-order statements. Putnam stresses, of course, that some areas of discourse resist this reduction to what pertains to an absolute conception of the world -- talk of desire, belief, meaning or reference. Naturalism may even accept this. But it is bound to take the irreducibility of certain areas of discourse as a symptom for their groundlessness. This should raise suspicions about this reductionist approach, or so Putnam argues.

This survey leads to Putnam’s summary critique of Quine’s view that reference is indeterminate and inscrutable. Quine is opposed to ordinary ideas about word-world correspondence on the grounds that there is no ostentative distinction between an object, undetached object parts or object stages. Therefore it cannot be determined whether ordinary sentences refer to the objects and relations between objects we take them to speak about literally or whether they refer to parts or stages of objects. On a different presentation of ontological relativity, it cannot be determined whether our ordinary statements refer to what we take them to speak about literally or to complement events. Maybe it should be added at this point that from a naturalistic point of view only highly formalised languages are equipped to deal with ontological relativity. This is in part because they cover a limited and very specific range of objects, in part because there are appropriate (scientific) tools for individuating what the statements of these languages refer to. In their case, reference is in fact reduced to an aspect of scientific method.

Putnam’s main point seems to be this: If word-world correspondence is abandoned along with a sui generis concept of reference, it is not clear what language does. But it would be highly counterintuitive to deny that language makes a determinate contribution to our accounts of the world. Naturalists may reply that language is still connected to objects on their view, albeit causally and not in terms of reference. But in Putnam’s view this amendment only conceals the problem that the naturalistic position on language is ant-realist. He believes that this endangers the overall realism of (scientific) naturalism. What is left of realism if utterances have no semantic relation to an appropriate part of reality, he suggests, is too thin to support naturalism. If propositions do not refer to reality in a determinate sense, preference for the (scientific) naturalistic view that they transmit or organise neural stimulation over, say, the notion that language helps creatures like us to cope with the world (Rorty) is a matter of predilection. Putnam seems to believe that this ambiguity seals the fate of scientific naturalism as an overall realist position.

Turning to (II), like Stroud and Dupré, Putnam wants to engage with the acclaim that naturalism appears to enjoy today. He does this from his own perspective: ‘”Naturalism”, I believe, is often driven by the fear that accepting conceptual pluralism will let in the “occult”, the “supernatural”.’ (66) To keep the occult at bay, naturalism adheres to two broad rules:

(1) All things are mereological sums of physical objects.
(2) The only admissible explanations are complete explanations in physical terms.

Failure to respect (1) means that outer-worldly entities can be included in one’s ontology. Failure to respect (2) means allowing events to be accounted for by miracles. However, according to Putnam, these rules create more problems than they solve.

In the case of (1), claiming that X is a mereological sum of its physical parts is unproblematic as long as I just mean that X is never disconnected from its parts. If I assume that this means the logical identity between X and the mereological sum of its physical parts, however, I could, for instance, create mereological sums of my parts which predate me by several centuries. Evidently, these sums wouldn’t be me.

Putnam argues against (2) that naturalism is in fact selective with regard to what it takes to be a pernicious and a benign incomplete explanation. The basic vocabulary of geology, for instance, does not map onto that of physics. Naturalists don’t believe this to be obscure. What they do not tolerate, however, are normative terms like true, justified, adequate, referring. According to Putnam, naturalism appears to imply that if these normative terms cannot be reduced to non-normative ones, it is unavoidable for us that we posit a supernatural realm of values. Contrary to the parsimonious understanding of language in naturalism, Putnam’s conceptual pluralism states that a wide variety of indicative sentences, including normative ones, are bona fide statements. These normative statements are not descriptions of reality. So there is no question of them relating to that occult realm. The naturalist fear is unfounded.

One of the things I don’t understand is how Putnam gets from instability of content (I) to horror of the normative (II). More specifically, I don’t see why Putnam’s conceptual pluralism is the most compelling solution to the semantic instability of naturalism. There seem to be other solutions to the semantic instability of naturalism. One of these is naturalistic in the sense attacked: to seek a different first-order conceptual system so that reference is not unstable (Millikan). Another solution is mentioned by Putnam: if we follow Rorty, language does not consist of bona fide statements to start with. So there is no particular issue with the inclusion of normative statements. But there is no special weight to them either that would suggest that those singling out specific bona fide statements commit another mistake (anti-normativism) in addition to the mistake of ascribing special status to certain statements.

Then, I wonder whether Putnam’s blanket accusation of normative horror might have profited from some reference to emotivism, expressivism or prescriptivism. Though his accusation is more concerned with normative terms like truth, justification rather than those of ethics, emotivism et al are broadly naturalistic attempts to say something about normativity without making it disappear. They talk about normative claims that are not descriptions of reality. The main difference to Putnam’s position is that emotivism et al do not treat normative claims as bona fide statements. In particular, Putnam might have explained vis-à-vis emotivism etc why his internal realism gives us a better idea than emotivism et al about claims that are not descriptions of reality. This might have prompted him to restate his blanket accusation of normative horror as a critique of non-cognitivism about norms. And this in turn might have incited him to reveal more about the systematic architecture in the background of his critique.