TO THINK WITH INTEGRITY by Hilary Putman.
Extracts.

On the Carnapian version, what's true and false are sentences, and sentences are marks and noises... So we are supposed to say of a certain string of marks or noises that it's true. And we're told that to say of a string of marks or noises that it's true is just to assert that string of marks and noises. Now that version, of course, raises the question, what is it to assert marks and noises?

When Horwich... wrote his book on truth, he subscribed to an account of what it is to assert marks and noises - an account that was, in fact, exactly the account that Carnap would have given... On Horwich's view at that time, to understand marks and noises is to be able to assign them a 'degree of probability' or perhaps a 'degree of assertibility '.

How can marks and noises - say, the sequence of marks, 'There is a blackboard eraser on this table', regarded as a discontinuous range of patterns of ink on a page - be probable or assertible any more than being true? But Horwich explains, not in his book but in articles he published at the same time, that probability is something like a license to bet at certain odds. So we are supposed to have dispositions to assent to sentences - that is, presumably to mouth them - and, moreover, we have certain dispositions to bet at certain odds that we won't have to say, "I take it back," or something like that. But this is precisely what Carnap would call assigning a degree of confirmation to a sentence.

If you want to say of a sentence, in certain circumstances, that it's true, then OK: go ahead - provided that you recognize, at least, that sentences are only true or false under particular understandings. But presumably neither Horwich nor Carnap would object to that. Although Carnap might say, "I'm idealizing by assuming a language in which every sentence has one and only one fixed understanding." But the model of an understanding of a sentence is functionalist: it's a disposition of a speaker, conceived of as if the speaker were a computer, to behave in certain ways or to lay certain wagers in response to certain stimulations.

In Frege's version, what are true and false primarily are judgments. And he denies that truth is a property - some universal that is wholly present in each true sentence or each true judgment. One way of making the judgment that there is a blackboard eraser on this table is to write this English sentence, another being to utter the corresponding noise; if I could recall the German phrase for "blackboard eraser," I could make that same judgment in German... So I could make that judgment without either using or thinking the English sentence.

If I say of the judgment that there is a blackboard eraser on this table that it is true, I am not saying of one object, 'the judgment', that it has a property. On that view, then, whenever I think of a judgment that it is true I am making a meta-judgment about the original judgment. Whereas Frege wants to say that the relation between truth and judging is more intimate than that... It is, rather, that when I say that it's true that there is a blackboard eraser on this table I'm judging that there is a blackboard eraser on this table. The subject is not the judgment; the subject is the blackboard eraser just as much as if I had only said, "There's a blackboard eraser on this table."

In the Fregean picture, judgments are not conceived of as corresponding to the world... or even some piece of the world, or some peculiar entity in the world called, 'the fact that there's a blackboard eraser on this table'. Rather, the judgment is intrinsically about the blackboard eraser, and the table, and the geometrical relation of 'being on.'

Really, all it comes to is this: to be able to judge... that there is a blackboard eraser on this table, you must have certain world-involving abilities. I would also speak here of language-involving abilities.

The capacity to make such judgments at all presupposes the sorts of skills that a speaker of the language comes to possess as he gains mastery of that language. And those skills involve such things as blackboard erasers, tables, and geometrical relations, and not only hypothetical events in the brain conceived of as a computer.

How we manage to have stable memories is something that we still don't know. And yet we are happily babbling away about whether the brain is a computer.

Wittgenstein in one place uses the example of the phrase "blue sofa," and he says that you could of course say that the words "blue sofa" correspond in a particular context to a particular blue sofa.

In a discussion in which someone says, "I believe in correspondence truth; so-and-so rejects correspondence truth," there is always this unquestioned assumption that either it's all correspondence or no correspondence; and, moreover, that it is one and the same correspondence always, or no correspondence.

I have been looking at John Searle's Minds, Brains, and Science, an old book. He says in the first chapter that "the smell of the rose is a rate of neural firings." There you have the whole 'Cartesian-cum-materialist' picture in one sentence: the smell of the rose is a rate of neural firings.

Is Searle saying that the whiteness of this paper, or the sense-datum or quale of the whiteness of this paper, is a rate of neural firings? (Searle has to mean)... that the property - the way something can be, or in this case the way a person can be - of its appearing to a person in that way, of having that experience of white, is a property of the form "having such-and-such neurons firing in such-and-such location at such-and-such rate"? ... For he compares the situation with the discovery that liquidity is explainable in terms of the properties of the water molecules, and that solidity is explainable in terms of the properties of a crystal; he even says with respect to intentionality that it is a consequence of his view that just as we can define - empirically and not analytically - liquidity or solidity, we may someday be able to define intentionality or the smell of the rose or the white of the chalk in terms of the properties of neuron firings. So his is clearly the view that one psychological attribute will be discovered to be a certain physical attribute.

No matter where you draw the boundaries for the rate of neuron firings... the consequence will be that if the rate is just a little bit higher than the highest rate you allow, or just a little bit lower than that highest rate (even by one per second), you will have to say that you don't have that appearance: you have another one.

Pluralism has been... a consistent theme in my work for almost twenty-five years: the language-games that we call "scientific language," or at least the ones that we paradigmatically think of, are insufficient to describe all of reality. There is no one language-game, no one group of language-games, of which you can say "All of reality is describable in terms of these...

We are committed to an open plurality of ways of describing, ways of conceiving, ways of talking, ways of thinking: that, if you like, is pluralism. It's also connected with anti-scientism. But I don't like to put it that way, for that sounds like anti-science. And I have always respected science enormously.

Take the experience case. If you say that we need appearance talk, we need brain talk, we need many other kinds of talk, then you must see that there is no reduction here.

"Where do appearances emerge? Where does consciousness emerge?" I have argued (and this is perhaps the most Wittgensteinian strain in my recent work...) that that question itself only makes sense because we think, or we fall into the enormously seductive error of thinking, that we can imagine a world in which it had not emerged. We think that there could be a world like this one where all the people were physically just the same, but they were "automatic sweethearts" (in James's wonderful metaphor, which also occurs, by the way, in a story of E.T.A. Hoffmann's), or "empty hulls," as David Albert might put it.

But pluralism is not the only issue here. The other issue, I think, is connection. It is in general an error to try to reduce one of our language-games to anything that looks on the surface like a very different one. Generally, if they look different on the surface, then they really are different. It is the rare case when that is only an appearance. And in a way, it is an error to think, "If these language-games - that of talk about appearances and sensations, and that of neurology, and that of behavior - are all different, then there are no connections." What I am suggesting is that analytic philosophy, starting with logical positivism and perhaps earlier, valorized one kind of connection too much. It valorized strict equivalence... But "softer" connections - "When we conceptualize in this way, we rely on the availability of this other form of conceptualization" - are all over the place.

Quietism, or saying nothing, is the failure to see any interest in the enormous range of connections, connections among all our different language-games, which are still largely unexplored.

The form of pluralism that I have most strongly advocated involves the recognition of what I call "the collapse of the fact-value dichotomy."

The view that "values are subjective, and that's the end of the story" ... is indeed a view that I have questioned and have argued to be incoherent. One of the ways that I have argued - and I'm building here on the work of John Dewey - is by insisting on the ubiquity of value.

I urge that we have cognitive values, for example, coherence... Last week, at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia at which I lectured about this, the scientists in the audience... included a number of people who were enthusiastic about this claim; they said, "Of course we judge theories on the basis of things like beauty."

Gerald Holton has produced a series of examples, all connected with the Special Theory of Relativity, starting with Planck's answer to the criticism, "Why did you accept Einstein's theory? We have Lorentz transformations, and we have Poincaré. Why Einstein?" And Planck replied, "Es ist mir einfach sympathischer." It's just more simpatico. And when I reminded Holton of this story, he produced two other scientists who were originally opponents of the Special Theory until after it was formulated by Minkowski in a way that really brought out its elegance, and were won over. One of them said that the theory is so beautiful that it has to be true. But I am not saying that it is good pragmatist, or any other, methodology to say that you should accept a theory on beauty alone. Although we often refuse to test a theory just because it is ugly. For you cannot test every possible theory.

But there are also judgments of coherence on a much more mundane level. Such judgments are involved when I decide which of my memories to trust, for example.

Now here again, if you are fixed with the view, which I think dominates a lot of analytic metaphysics, that the only predicates we can take seriously have to do either with what causes what or with composition (or with both composition and causation), then what can you say about the role of a predicate like 'is an incoherent theory', 'is a Rube Goldberg job', 'is ad hoc'? These phrases can be descriptive: certainly, when I say of a theory that it has "artificial assumptions," I am making a description. If I use words from logic - if I say "This is a valid proof," or "This is an invalid proof; there's a fallacy at line five" - I am describing something. But I am not speaking the language of efficient causation and composition.

"How can you responsibly discuss ethical values? How can you responsibly discuss a question like whether a society should conceive itself, in Rawlsian terms, as a cooperative venture among free and equal citizens?" Part of the answer, of course, is: look at the reasons that people give for denying that people should be treated as equals. What reasons have people given for saying that women should not be treated as equals, that blacks should not be treated as equals, and so on? It is not as if these things occurred in a vacuum. Perhaps the worst thing about subjectivism is that it is a reasoning-stopper.

There are two other points about this whole question of subjectivism versus objectivism. First, subjectivist views have enormous impact in our culture... For example, think of how much influence on economic theory has been exerted by the idea that there is nothing rational about valuation except in the sense in which subjective preferences can be rational... Think of how the role, especially in the so-called Chicago School, of that kind of subjectivism is now beginning to spread through the law. But if any philosophical issue deserves to be called a perennial issue in philosophy, that one surely does.

Of course, one doesn't do philosophy only because one hopes that it will make some difference in the world. One also does it for the pure joy of it. And those are not incompatible.

At the close of (Wilfred Cantwell Smith's) lecture he said, "I'm not saying that religion is a good thing. I'm saying that it's a great thing. It can make you better or it can make you much worse. But it means that you take the question of how to live seriously." And if I were to mimic that, I would say that philosophy isn't a good thing. It's a great thing. It can lead to wonderful things, and it can lead to terrible things. But it means - to modify Smith's sentence - that you take the responsibility of trying to think deeply and with integrity seriously.