From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 03 1999 - 02:00:35 MST
'What is your name?' 'Damien Broderick.' 'IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOUR
NAME IS!!!':
> but both risk losing their grip on/need for access to a genuine referent
> out there (whatever that means in a QT/relativistic universe).
Putnam's approach is not relativism, though many people who consider
themselves anti-realists are relativists. For Putnam, "coherence" is the
criterion for evaluating sentences, as is the case for many relativists,
but many of them go on to assume that there is no meaningful notion of
"objective truth," there is only true-for-me, true-for-you,
true-for-Putnam, etc. ie relativized truth.
Putnam, however, argues that there must be some OBJECTIVE notion of
rationality, and on this account, not any old conceptual scheme is
rationally acceptable. He argues that to reject the idea of objective
rationality would require one to embrace total relativism, a position
which he argues (correctly, I think) is totally incoherent. "If there is
no conception of rationality one objectively *ought* to have, then the
notion of a 'fact' is empty. Without the cognitive values of coherence,
simplicity [Ockham's Razor] and instrumental efficacy, we have no world
and no 'facts,' not even facts about what is so *relative* to what, for
those are in the same boat with all other facts." Under internalism,
truth is the ultimate goodness of fit.
In rejecting total relativism, he provides a rather puzzling argument,
however. Maybe one of you can sort it out for me. He bases it on
Wittgenstein's "Private Language" argument, as follows:
"The argument is that the relativist cannot, in the end, make any sense of
the distinction between *being right* and *thinking he is right*; and
that means that there is, in the end, no difference between *asserting* or
*thinking*, on the one hand, and *making noises* (or *producing mental
images*) on the other. But this means that (on this conception) I am not
a *thinker* at all but a *mere* animal. To hold such a view is to commit
a sort of mental suicide."
I have no idea how he thinks he can make the leap from ("I think that P"
<-> P) to meaninglessness, and he appears to leave it undefended. He
explicitly rejects the argument that the equivalence of "I think that P"
and P requires one to perform it an infinite number of times: "I think
that I think that I think that ... P", but rather only shows that it CAN
be repeated any number of times.
I've guessed that maybe Putnam's argument has something to do with the
fact that in this situation one is speaking in a language in which one
can't ever be wrong, (and thus all sentences have the same cognitive
value,) or perhaps his argument hinges on the fact that sentences no
longer HAVE to be about anything in order to be right. If anyone can shed
some light on this argument, I'd appreciate it.
Thankfully, he also provides the more conventional arguments against
relativism, which, I think, are pretty palatable to all of us: "If anyone
really believed that [every conceptual system is just as good as every
other], and if they were foolish enough to pick a conceptual system that
told them they could fly and to act upon it by jumping out of a window,
they would, if they were lucky enough to survive, see the weakness of the
latter view at once." :)
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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