Abstract
All of us agree that some sentences are true and some are false. We further agree that the truth values of sentences are determined by two factors: language and reality. The truth of ‘Mount Everest is higher than Mont Blanc’ is due partly to the meanings of the expressions occurring in it, partly to the way things in fact are. If ‘Mount Everest’ meant Eiger, it would be false. It would also be false if Mount Everest were not actually higher than Mont Blanc. We also agree that the truth values of most sentences are in some sense independent of us. Of course, we may conspire to change the meanings of the words or transform the world and thereby change the truth values of the sentences, but if we keep the meanings fixed and the world unchanged, the truth values will be independent of our beliefs, desires, fears or hopes. We usually explain this independence by saying that reality, i. e. the way things are, is independent of us. The truth of the sentence ‘Mount Everest is higher than Mont Blanc’ is independent of us, because the fact that Mount Everest is higher than Mont Blanc does not depend on our beliefs, fears, desires, etc.
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Notes
This is a development of Putnam’s most explicit concise description of metaphysical realism: ’ ... the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of “the way the world is”. Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things.’ (Reason. Truth and History, 49) Let me indicate briefly why I did not stick to this formulation. The first statement speaks only about objects, while one can be metaphysical realist about any ontological category. The last sentence forgets about detlationists, who can be metaphysical realists as well. The ‘exactly one true and complete description’ is spelled out in such a way that only one member of a class empirically equivalent theories can be true, where empirically equivalent theories are taken to be such that no possible experiment can decide between them (ibid.,73; “Three Kinds of Scientific Realism”, 197-8). That is an extremely strong view to which few people would subscribe. As a result, metaphysical realism would turn into a view with very few advocates. Moreover, Putnam himself is not always willing to saddle metaphysical realism with this claim (Meaning and the Moral SCiences, 131-3; “Equivalence”, 42-45).
What about vagueness? I do not think it poses an insolvable problem for the metaphysical realist. He may take three lines. The first and least popular line is to say that in reality there are vague classes. The membership criteria do not sort all objects into members and non members. Classical logic does not fit the structure of reality. In this case, the right logic is a three-valued logic or, more likely, an infinitevalued logic. On the three-valued logic view objects are sorted into members, boundary cases, and nonmembers. In the infinite-valued logic solution criteria assign degrees of membership. The second, somewhat more popular line is epistemicism. Vague predicates stand for classes with sharp boundaries and with yes-or-no membership criteria. We just cannot identify the classes vague predicates stand for. The last and probably the most popular position is to say that vagueness is purely a I inguistic affair. Natural classes have sharp boundaries, but some linguistic classifications are not sufficiently fine-grained to capture them. In other words, vague predicates may be useful for practical purposes, but they are unsuitable for grasping the real structures.
In the coherence theory of truth ‘consistency’ has to be taken in the syntactic sense. If it is taken in the semantic sense, it presupposes the concept of ‘truth’, which would make the theory circular. The syntactic notion of ‘consistency’ may be called epistemic because it is linked to procedures. Davidson does not believe this any more (“Afterthoughts”, 135).
Davidson does not believe this any more (“Afterthoughts”, 135)
I will not distinguish between reference and satisfaction, for the distinction between the semantic properties of individual expressions and predicates does not matter for my purposes. So I will keep talking about reference.
‘Partially’ here is a different sort of qualification than the one I talked about four paragraphs earlier. In this case we have partial adequacy in the strict sense of adequacy. On the other hand, a conceptual scheme may be - at least in principle - completely adequate’ for all intents and purposes’, without being even partially adequate in the strict sense.
Or we may lind that a particular mental state is realized only in a very limited number of ways If we do not disallow all disjunctive reductions, this might also qualify as type- reduction.
Again, this is a development of Putnam’s description of internal realism, which goes as follows: ’it is characteristic of this view (internal realism) to hold that what object does the world consist of? is a question that it only makes sense to ask within a theory or description. Many “internalist” philosophers, though not all, hold further that there is more than one “true” theory or description of the world. “Truth”, in an internalist view, is some sort of (idealized) rational acceptability - some sort of ideal coherence of our beliefs with each other and with our experiences as those experiences are themselves represented in our belief system - and not correspondence with mind-independent or discourse-independent “states of affairs”’. (Reason. Truth and History, 49-50) I have already indicated why I diverge from Putnam’s formulation in connection with the metaphysical realist theses.
This is one of the ideas Davidson (“On the Very Idea”) attacks. Davidson’s argument will be taken up later, but let me indicate briefly why his criticism does not apply His point is conceptual scheme cannot disagree about organization without agreeing on individuation. But if dillerent conceptual schemes individuate similarly, they cannot be completely untranslatable. So one cannot use the idea of untranslatability to distinguish between conceptual schemes. However, I did not use the idea of untranslatability in the explanation of the notion of conceptual scheme. Moreover, by ‘organization’ I mean not only classification, but individuation as well. I shall also explain shortly how conceptual schemes which organize differently can be said to organize the same domain of reality.
I suspect that this dilemma did cause a problem for Putnam. In the beginning he often relied on the organization picture to explain the counterpart of my (IR I) (Reason, Truth and History, 52-3). But he also recognized the need for external constraints (ibid., 54). This is what sets up the dilemma. Then he criticized and abandoned the organization picture for its alleged metaphysical realist implications (Many Faces, 19, 35-6), and stopped to rely on the counterpart of (lRI) in the exposition of internal realism. He came to emphasize (IR3) instead (Many Faces, x-xi; “Truth, Activation Vectors”, 433).
There is a traditional worry that the notion of the thing in itself cannot fulfill this role. The explanation of facti city relies on the category of causation. The thing in itself ‘causes’ us to experience things as we do. Kant thus tacitly applies the category of causation to the thing in itself However, he explicitly forbids the application of categories to anything but phenomena. There is a usual reply to this worry. Kant uses ‘category’ in two different senses as pure and as schematized. The schematized category includes a temporal element, and it is through the schematization that the category can be applied to phenomena. Since the thing in itself - by definition - is not subject to time, a form of our sensibility, schematized categories cannot be applied to it. On the other hand, nothing precludes the application of pure - unschematized - categories. Hence, Kant’s prohibition can be understood as holding only for schematized categories. So he can be acquitted of the charge of incoherence. Moreover, the application of unschematized categories is inescapable if we are to think of the thing in itself at all, since human thought, by its very nature, is subject to the categories. However, these sorts of thoughts do not amount to knowledge. Knowledge cannot outstrip the bounds of possible experience, but thoughts of the thing in itself do - by the very definition of the thing in itself So the explanation of facticity itself is not a piece of knowledge.
Putnam does not try this route. Even though he occasionally toys with the thought that the idea of the noumenal contains a grain of truth (Reason, Truth and History, 61-2; Why there isn’t a Ready-Made World, 225-6), his official line is that the notion should be rejected (Meaning and the Moral Sciences, 5-6; Many Faces, 45-6; Sacks, The World, 8).
‘ ... “objects” and reference arise out of discourse rather than being prior to discourse .. ’ (Putnam, “Introduction”, xvi)
This is somewhat similar to Wittgenstein’s view in on Certainly. Wittgenstein emphasizes there are some empirical propositions we cannot doubt, because doubting them would call into doubt the meaning of our words, e.g. ’I am no more certain of the meaning of my words than I am certain of certain judgments. Can I doubt that this color is called blue? (126 See also 80, 81,114, 124, 140). Of course, he would reject the philosophical speculations about the structure of reality, criteria of identity and the Iike.
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Forrai, G. (2001). Metaphysical Realism and Internal Realism. In: Reference, Truth and Conceptual Schemes. Synthese Library, vol 296. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2868-3_2
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