[MD] Reading Suggestion: Hilary Putnam

[Matt Kundert]

I went into one of the used bookstores around town recently and I found a 
book I've been dying to get: Hilary Putnam's The Collapse of the Fact/Value 
Dichotomy and Other Essays. It's one of those moments, where I find an 
author whose books I've been dying to get my hands on (stuff by Fish, 
Geertz, Putnam, Cavell, several others, who I'll just buy upon seeing), and 
I just lunge at it, clutch it to my chest, and look around as if someone's 
going to sneak up and steal it. And thankfully, the book was five bucks 
besides. When I went up to the counter, with my Putnam and a book by Quine 
and a couple others, the register jockey said as he rang them up, "Ooo, 
Quine. I see you've found some of the books I had to clear off my shelf. And 
Putnam! Everyone's favorite neopragmatist." I replied, "Nah, not 
everyone's." "Oh? Who do you like?" "Rorty, of course," I said with a 
knowing smile, knowing, of course, that if you like Putnam, you probably 
don't like Rorty. "Hmm." "I'm guessing you don't like Rorty." "No." As I 
left I thanked him for the book, being as it was just from his library.

Putnam is one of those that I'm dying to get inside. Everyone knows I've 
read Rorty inside and out. One of the things that is nice about Rorty is 
that he drops names a mile a minute, which gives you a good idea (at least 
from his perspective) of how the philosophical map shapes up. That also 
gives you, if you are a novice like me, a pretty sizable reading list. 
You've got people Rorty likes to read and you have his enemies to see where 
the attacks'll come from. I've found several that I really, really like 
(Fish, Bernstein, Stout, Geertz, Nehamas, Susan Neiman from a blurb Rorty 
left on the back of her book). And then there's cats like Dennett, Davidson, 
and Putnam (not to mention Continentals like Habermas, Derrida, and 
Foucault). These guys Rorty's been "profitably disagreeing with for years," 
as he might put it. All sides agree that they agree on a lot--there's just a 
few outstanding disagreements. Dennett's philosophy of the mind stuff I 
haven't gotten into much. I guess I'm just not that interested in philosophy 
of mind. He's a great writer, mind you. I've read pieces and he's just 
brilliant and very readable and funny. (On a readable scale, I gotta' go 
with a tight top four of Geertz, Fish, Dennett, Rorty, then slightly below 
with Putnam, and then much further down Davidson, who, god bless'im, is dry 
as a friggin' desert.) Davidson--well, Davidson's really technical and hard 
to understand. Every once in a while I give reading him a go. But 
Putnam--fairly readable with an interest in history, and he self-identifies 
as a pragmatist (unlike the other two).

This book is small and tight and centers around his Rosenthal Lectures, "The 
Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy". People who are in love with Pirsig 
and are interested in branching out into reading professional philosophy 
should read this book. It basically deals with the same place where Pirsig's 
philosophy begins--dissatisfaction with the current account of values. And 
this should provide a good place that Pirsigians are familiar with and 
thinking about to become familiar with attendant issues. What it adds to the 
Pirsigian picture is a more detailed account of what is wrong with that 
picture. I've been arguing for a while that Pirsig's claim that SOMists (in 
this case, specifically logical postivists) leave out values, cannot account 
for them, is just plain wrong, and is probably what bolsters the thought 
that Pirsig's creating a strawman. Logical positivists do account for 
values, they simply redescribe them into their schematic, a redescription 
that rubs some of our common intuitions about values the wrong way, but is 
no more wrong for it. After all, Pirsig says a bunch of things that 
challenge our common intuitions about subjects. That's the whole object of 
radical redescription (like calling reality Quality, value incarnate).

What Putnam does is offer a quick rundown of what is wrong with the logical 
positivist picture, what produces such weird slogans as "values are 
cognitively meaningless," while descrbing, with Pirsig, what some of the 
undesirable effects to our practice are. Putnam's picture is that the 
problems start with Hume, which leads rapidly to Kant and his 
analytic/synthetic dichotomy. From the Humean saying that "you can't derive 
an ought from an is," we get Kant's picture of language as broken up into 
analytic statements that are true by virtue of meaning and synthetic 
statements that are true by virtue of the world. From this, everything in 
logical postivism follows. Putnam is basically rehashing the destruction of 
logical positivism at the hands of Quine, but further arguing that we have 
yet to fully extract ourselves from that picture--specifically in ethics.

Putnam does a good job of getting from the analytic/synthetic dichotomy to 
the fact/value dichotomy. He shows us how the two go hand in hand and how to 
get out from underneath that picture (in particular, you'll notice that the 
picture Putnam's attacking is the "Empiricist Bachground," which should make 
us more wary about Pirsig hooking up his train to empiricism). His first two 
lectures are a good introduction to the material in this area of philosophy. 
His third lecture, however, goes a step further. In this chapter he tries to 
show how the fact/value dichotomy has effected the discipline of economics 
and, through the work of Amartya Sen, can get out from underneath it. This 
is a valuable chapter. It isn't definitive, but it is exploratory and shows 
the direction we should be moving (and its a good intro to Sen).

The rest of the book includes pendant pieces about (or dealing in part with) 
Sen, Habermas, Dewey, Bernard Williams (who I find to be an absolutely 
intriguing figure; he seems to me to be exceptionally eccentric in his 
philosophical views, being something of both a Cartesian and Nietzschean), 
and a good chapter on the philosophy of science, that perhaps should be the 
first read as prep for the Rosenthal Lectures. What's funny is that, after 
reading most of it, and seeing the usual potshots at Rorty that Putnam takes 
(which still seem to me to be misleading at best), I'm still not sure what 
seperates Putnam from Rorty. It revolves around a stonger notion of truth, 
and I can see Putnam making those moves against Rorty's supposed cultural 
relativism, but if I were to take them seriously, I'd have to count Putnam 
as abdicating his pragmatism. He's not, but I just can't see what space he 
thinks he's occupying between postivism and Rorty. I guess that will take 
much more reading. In the meantime, Putnam offers cogent criticisms of 
post-postivistic leftovers and gives a good picture of current philosophical 
space. He doesn't have the historical breadth or grand narratives of Rorty, 
but Putnam is very historically conscientious, and a little more of that 
would help philosophers.

Matt

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