MD'er
Is anyone familiar with the work of Hilary Putnam? I have recently been
reading a collection of his essays "Realism with a Human Face" published in
1990 from which I've included a few snips which might be of interest. He talks
about value with reference to the "fact/value dichotomy" in both metaphysical
and ethical essays.
Metaphysical
"If I dared to be a metaphysician, I think I would create a system in which
there were nothing but obligations. What would be metaphysically ultimate, in
the picture I would create, would be ought to do (ought to say, ought to
think) In my fantasy of myself as a metaphysical super-hero, all facts would
dissolve into "values"....I am not, alas! so daring as this."
Someone has already been so daring, Hilary, all you have to do is get on
board. He goes on to say:
" What I do think, even outside my fantasies, is that fact and obligations are
thoroughly interdependent; there are no facts without obligations, just as the
are no obligations without facts."
"Of course, a metaphysical realist might be a realist about reasonableness as
well as a realist about truth. But that is, in a way, my point; neither a
positivist nor a metaphysical realist can avoid absurdities if he attempts to
deny any objectivity whatever to the question of what constitutes
reasonableness. An that question, metaphysically speaking, is a typical value
question."
"Put more simply, the point is that no conclusion should be drawn from the
fact that we cannot give a "scientific" explanation of the possibility of
values until we have been shown that a "scientific" explanation of the
possibility of reference, truth, warrant, and so on, is possible. And the
difficulties with the correspondence theory suggest that to ask for the latter
is to ask for a we-know-not-what."
HIS CHALLENGE FOR THE MoQ?
"I think that, if someone [Pirsig?] could show that Ramsey's view is wrong,
that objective values are not mythology, that the "uncaring machine" may be
all there is to the world of physics and chemistry and biology, but that the
worlds of physics and chemistry and biology are not the only worlds we
inhabit, we would welcome this...provided the new view gave us the same
intellectual confidence, the same idea that we have a superior method, the
same sense of being on top of the facts, that the scientistic view gives us."
Ethics
"As I put it in "Reason, Truth, and History", without the cognitive values of
coherence, simplicity, and instrumental efficacy we have no world and no
facts, not even facts about what is so relative to what. An these cognitive
values, I claim, are simply a part of our holistic conception of human flourishing."
So far, what I have said could be summarized by saying that if "values" seem a
bit suspect from a narrowly scientific point of view, the have, at the very
least, a lot of "companions in the guilt"; justification, coherence,
simplicity, reference, truth, and so on, all exhibit the same problems that
goodness and kindness do... None of them is reducible to physical notions;
none of them is governed by syntactically precise rules. Rather than give up
all of them,... and rather than do what we are doing, which is to reject some
-the ones which do not fit in with a narrow instrumentalist conception of
rationality which itself lacks all intellectual justification- we should
recognize that ALL VALUES, including the cognitive ones, derive their
authority from our idea of human flourishing and our idea of reason. These two
ideas are interconnected: our image of an ideal theoretical intelligence is
simply a part of our ideal of the total human flourishing, and makes no sense
wrenched out of the total ideal, as Plato and Aristotle saw."
" I claim, in short, that without VALUES we would not have a world.
Instrumentalism, although it denies it, is itself a value system, albeit a
sick one."
He then goes on to the next essay "The Place of Facts in a World of Values"
which I have not read yet.
SOUNDS LIKE HE MIGHT BE COMING AROUND. Surely not, not a mainstream academic
philosopher like him?
Struan your opinion on Putnam from an academic (is that too strong),though
nonprofessorial,-) position would be welcome.
DLT
MOQ Online Homepage - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Unsubscribe - http://www.moq.org/md/index.html
MD Queries - horse@wasted.demon.nl
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:03:13 BST