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This article discusses three recent philosophers who speak in different ways about the retroactive construction of reality by human knowledge. Bruno Latour unapologetically claims that the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II could not have died of tuberculosis, as determined by a team of French doctors in 1976, since this disease was not discovered until three thousand years after his death. Slavoj Žižek often makes comparable arguments, though his version of retroactivity draws on both psychoanalysis and dialectics in a way that is never the case for Latour. Yet in his 2012 book Less Than Nothing, Žižek takes the more prudent, realist-sounding line that changes in scientific theories do not change nature itself. The real novelty in retroactive theories is provided by Thomas Kuhn, who draws our attention to a grey temporal zone in scientific discovery in which it is impossible to pinpoint the exact date of any breakthrough. For Kuhn, this stems from a dualism found in reality itself: one between the fact “that” a thing exists and the determination of “what” its properties are. The tension between these two moments is responsible for much of the vagueness and drama surrounding any paradigm shift in the sciences and is closely related to at least one plausible theory of metaphor. In closing, three Hollywood films are cited as helpful examples for understanding the different ways in which a paradigm shift works its retroactive magic.

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In a 1911 research manuscript, Husserl puts forth an idea that resembles Putnam’s Twin Earth thought experiment presented in the 1970s. In this paper, I study Husserl’s “Twin Earth” passage and assess various readings of it to determine whether Husserl is better understood as an internalist or an externalist. I define internalism as the view that content depends solely on internal factors to the subject, whereas I distinguish between two versions of externalism: weak externalism, according to which content can also depend on other subjects’ conceptions, and strong externalism, which maintains that content can also depend on the real world. Only strong externalism maintains what McGinn calls “the philosophical significance of externalism” because it entails realism about the world. I argue that Husserl is better understood as an externalist when it comes to the “Twin Earth” passage, but the more precise question regarding weak and strong externalism requires further evidence. This additional evidence concerns Husserl’s concepts of the identity of sense (Sinnesidentität) and worldly meaning (weltlicher Sinn). In evaluating externalist Husserl interpretations, I classify Smith’s externalist interpretation as weak, whereas I take Crowell’s externalist interpretation to be ambivalent. Crowell’s excellent but somewhat embryonic interpretation leaves the dependence relation between content and the real world ambiguous. I clarify this relation by assessing McGinn’s argument for the philosophical significance of externalism from the Husserlian viewpoint. Although this study is historical, it also serves a systematic purpose because the externalist interpretation of Husserl calls into question central issues in phenomenology and externalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction. The problems of reference, truth, and realism are extremely important for contemporary philosophical discourse. Interesting interpretations of these problems have been given by such thinkers as Paul Ricoeur and Hilary Putnam. Instead of being originally representatives of different philosophical traditions, Ricoeur and Putnam came to similar conclusions on a number of the above issues, which allows us to speak of the possible prospect of a fruitful philosophical synthesis of the two authors' positions. The aim of this paper is to justify the theoretical possibility of such a synthesis, namely to show how the different elements of Putnam's theory can be improved by using Ricoeur's approach, which is outlined in his concept of metaphorical truth. Despite the obvious proximity of the two authors, there are currently no works where Ricoeur's conception of metaphorical truth was compared with Putnam's philosophy.Methodology and sources. To meet this challenge, we have resorted to an examination of the author's primary sources, which reveal the methodology of both philosophers. Special relevance of the article is connected with the unusual perspective of considering the problems that are important for the philosophy of late 20th-early 21st century. These are problems that related to the comprehension of our thinking, the role of language in creating a picture of the world and the resulting possibility of building a special kind of ontology.Results and discussion. The study revealed many overlaps in the authors' consideration of the concept of truth, the problem of realism, and the theory of reference, as well as in the way that both philosophers define the relationship between language and reality. The most similarities were found in the relationship between Ricoeur's concept of metaphorical truth and Putnam's philosophy of inner realism.Conclusion. Thus, we can conclude that the philosophical approaches of both thinkers share a great deal of intuition about the direction in which research of truth and referential theory and the problem of realism that is one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy throughout its history can be developed.

This article responds to the arguments put forth by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen in Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (1994). It argues that the said work is representative of the widespread tendency in literary theory today to discard the possibility of literary truth, and it provides counterarguments to the work’s main theses. Consequently, it criticizes the philosophy of pragmatism and its implications, and it offers a theory that defines fictional objects as existing and solves contradictions that commonly affect our debates on the ontology of fiction. The article does not provide a positive theory of literary truth, but it undermines its denials, which have become popular in recent decades.

This article responds to the arguments put forth by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen in Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (1994). It argues that the said work is representative of the widespread tendency in literary theory today to discard the possibility of literary truth, and it provides counterarguments to the work's main theses. Consequently, it criticizes the philosophy of pragmatism and its implications, and it offers a theory that defines fictional objects as existing and solves contradictions that commonly affect our debates on the ontology of fiction. The article does not provide a positive theory of literary truth, but it undermines its denials, which have become popular in recent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artigo pretende analisar, a partir da obra de Hilary Putnam (1926-2016), algumas das muitas faces de seu realismo interno. Embora seu pensamento seja marcado pelo funcionalismo (posição parcialmente abandonada), são no externalismo e holismo semânticos que repousam suas afirmaçõeschave. Desse modo, inicialmente, reconstruímos como Putnam salvaguarda o realismo interno e sua posição pragmatista a respeito de Wittgenstein. Em seguida, mostramos como o autor sugere que o debate psicofísico entra em colapso, com base na aceitação do valor das propriedades semânticas para a instanciação do conteúdo mental.

During the 80s, Hilary Putnam developed a metaphysical viewpoint called 'internal realism'. Its slogan said, "the mind and the world together make up the mind and the world." According to Putnam, internal realism has two elements: 1) conceptual relativity and 2) seeing truth as idealized rational assertability. Here it will be argued that there is an internal incompatibility in the second element; i.e. truth as idealized rational assertability. To explain this incompatibility, firstly it will be shown that the idealization of rational assertability is duo to Putnam's emphasis on realistic intuitions of truth. Secondly, it will be shown that Putnam prefers to use 'sufficiently good conditions' instead of 'ideal conditions' to make a distinction between his idea and pierce's. Finally, it will be argued that some implication of 'sufficiently good conditions' is incompatible with those realistic intuitions of truth. Hence, one can conclude that there is an incompatibility in Putnam's attitude toward truth.

Nick Bostrom considered a number of simulations and contended that the probability that we are living in one of them is high or at least nonzero. I present arguments to refute the claim that we are or might be in any one of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Saul Kripke's and Hilary Putnam's groundbreaking work in the Seventies, the idea has emerged that natural kind terms are semantically special among common nouns. Stephen P. Schwartz, for example, has argued that an artifactual kind term like "pencil" functions very differently from a natural kind term like "tiger." This, however, blatantly violates a principle that I call Semantic Uniformity. In this paper, I defend the principle. In particular, I outline a picture of how natural kind terms function based on Kripke's and Putnam's considerations, and I use it to rebut Schwartz's arguments, showing that if it works for natural kind terms, it can work for artifactual kind terms too (and, arguably, for common nouns in general), or at least that Schwartz did not provide good enough reasons to the contrary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the challenges of religious language is how to reconcile these two theses: the transcendence of the divine realm and conventional reference to that realm. This challenge raised since it seems, at first glance, that ‘if the divine realm is transcendent, i.e., completely separated from the human realm, then one, a human, cannot make a fixed reference to that realm.’ In this paper, extending Putnam’s model-theoretic argument in metaphysics, I argue that this conditional statement could be true, and thereby the transcendence of the divine realm and conventional reference to that realm would be irreconcilable unless we adjust at least one of our presuppositions. I will show just three ways for this adjustment: Internal pluralism that says that the divine realm is mind-dependent; Some versions of apophatic theology according to which one cannot assert a true utterance about the divine realm; Claiming that language is a non-human phenomenon.

Roberto Frega's Pragmatism and the Wide View of Democracy reformulates the question of democracy posed by our current historic conjuncture using the resources of a variety of pragmatic thinkers. He brings into the contemporary conversation regarding democracy's fortunes both classical and somewhat neglected figures in the pragmatic tradition to deal with questions of power, ontology, and politics. In particular, Frega takes a social philosophical starting point and draws out the consequences of this fundamental shift in approach to questions of democratic and political theory. This turn to social philosophy as a theoretically more sufficient conceptual vocabulary, extended in detail by Frega, raises questions regarding the work that a social ontology does in clarifying the role of economic and political approaches to democracy that are worth further exploration. Likewise, the practical proposals for moving beyond methodological nationalism with respect to forming publics for the sake of problem-solving, while providing a clarifying and fresh starting point, are still too beholden to models of agency and expressions of coordinated action that themselves are the very fruit of those systems which undermine democratic power in the first instance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this work is to survey Putnam’s defense of objectivity and normativity in the ethic’s realm. I pretend to show an alternative conception of objectivity which involves a broader aproach to racionality than the scientific. Moreover, this approach acknowledges pluralities of points of view and it´s committed to reflective thinking about our assertions. Then, I will examine the question of objectivity in Putnam’s papers, according to different outlooks: firstly, Putnam’s rejection to the traditional fact-value dichotomy, secondly, the Logical Postivism’ claim and his attitude about values judgments, finally, from the survey of the term objectivity and his relationship with linguistic practices.

In his 1975 paper "The Meaning of 'Meaning'", Hilary Putnam famously argued for semantic externalism. Little attention has been paid, however, to the fact that already in 1973, Putnam had presented the idea of the linguistic division of labour and the Twin Earth thought experiment in his comment on Wilfrid Sellars' "Meaning as Functional Classification" at a conference, and Sellars had replied to Putnam from a broadly inferentialist perspective. The first half of this paper aims to trace the development of Putnam's semantic externalism, situate his debate with Sellars in it, and reconstruct the two arguments he presented against Sellars. The second half of this paper aims to reconstruct how Sellars replied to Putnam. I argue that Sellars not only accepts the social character of language but also suggests how inferentialists can accommodate the contribution of the world. Sellars' key idea is that substance terms have a 'promissory note aspect' which is to be cashed out in a successor conceptual framework. I reconstruct Sellars' position as ideal successor externalism, and compare it with temporal externalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Definitions of digital abound at the present time, but there is a thread amongst the most vital of these that questions the relevance of human agency and evaluative choice. If we follow where technological advances take us we come to the unsettling conclusion that 'machine reading' has usurped more analogue procedures and that algorithmic formulae have supplanted human judgement; the opportunities that new software provide can outstrip our imagination in framing research questions. Literary history, however, addresses how we might make sense of the One as well as the Many, and, when confronted by a string of word- or phrase-patterns, it is not that our findings speak for themselves; we have to conjure their value. This is exemplified by analysing where some digital searches might take us in relation to Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, basing the reading on all the repetitions of gentile/gentle, kind, and credit. The sensitive interrogation of the play's electronic text does point us to salient 'returns' and patterning signalled by following where the significant iterations of these words might take us, but what we make of these lines of enquiry eventually calls on human evaluation and volition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neopragmatist epistemology rejects any significant distinction between ethics and the sciences. The idea is that in ethics, we acquire knowledge in similar ways as in the natural sciences. Quine/Duhem holism applies to both fields, which explains why the aim of reaching reflective equilibrium is prominent in many meta-ethical accounts: As in the sciences, our ethical system of belief is constrained by logic, observation, coherence, simplicity and parsimony. Whereas considerations of beauty (an important ingredient of scientific methodology) are irrelevant in ethical epistemology, emotions play an essential role; these, in turn, do not matter in the sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rejecting metaphysical realism (MR) is a basic element in Putnam's Philosophy. He introduces two arguments against MR: Model-theoretic (MT) and brain-in-vat (BIV). However, according to some scholars and commentators who work on Putnam's Philosophy, the phenomenon of conceptual relativity, as introduced by Putnam in some of his books, is another argument by which MR is rejected. This Phenomenon is a state in which two sentences that are at face value incompatible could be consistently true. However, there is not any explicit and complete formulation of this argument in the writings of Putnam and his commentators. In this paper, first we will formulate a version of conceptual relativity against MR. According to our version, Putnam ask the metaphysical realist to explain this phenomenon. Then we will show that this argument is not independent of MT and BIV. Therefore, the phenomenon of conceptual relativity could be an argument against MR only of we accept either MT or BIV. Furthermore, any objection to MT and BIV will weaken the argument from conceptual relativity against MR.

In this paper, I introduce the idea of ‘radical relativity’ to elucidate an undervalued justificatory context for Wittgenstein’s affirmation of radical pluralism. I accept D.Z. Phillips’s definition of radical pluralism as the view that certain radical differences between people’s ordinary practices prevent the latter from being reduced to a necessary set of common interests, meanings, or truths. I argue that radical relativity provides this form of pluralism with the logical justification it requires in that it accounts for how pluralism became radical. More specifically, I argue that the contingent, non-causal, and yet non-arbitrary relation between ordinary concepts and the pluralistic world through which they emerge explains the reality of radical pluralism. Radical relativity is suggested in Wittgenstein’s three notions of ‘concept formation’, ‘agreement in reaction’, and ‘world pictures’, I argue, without endorsing traditional forms of relativism. Finally, I show that although D.Z. Phillips and Hilary Putnam promote notions of pluralism indebted to Wittgenstein, neither philosopher utilizes the radical relativity suggested in his work to justify his respective version of pluralism or Wittgenstein’s version of radical pluralism.

Copyright of Tabayyun is the property of Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of this paper is to examine the development of philosophical presuppositions of Albert Einstein's views on reality, to find out what interpretation framework is suitable to express his understanding of reality, and to compare his views with that of Hilary Putnam. I have decided to make the comparison with Putnam due to the fact that their conceptions seem to be similar. I will attempt to defend the possibility to interpret Einstein's views using a different conceptual framework than his own. Putnam always held some form of realism, but when he was accepting metaphysical realism, he was rejecting semantic antirealism, and vice versa. When accepting naturalistic realism, he simultaneously held conceptual relativism. Einstein espoused the reality of atoms and fields, which means he held some form of metaphysical realism. Since 1908, under the influence of Duhem, he held the belief about the underdetermination of scientific theories, that enabled him to accept several incompatible theories that were, however, in accordance with the facts. Similarly to Putnam in his stage of naturalistic realism, Einstein is an example of maintaining realism while using conceptual relativism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Putnam's vat argument is intended to show that I am not a permanently envatted brain. The argument holds promise as a response to vat scepticism, which depends on the claim that I do not know that I am not a permanently envatted brain. However, there is a widespread idea that the vat argument cannot fulfil this promise, because to employ the argument as a response to vat scepticism I would have to make assumptions about the content of the premises and/or conclusion of the argument that beg the question against the sceptic. In this paper, I show that this idea is mistaken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Putnam and others have argued that semantic externalism extends to artifactual kind words such as "pencil" or "doorstop". I first show that, even with natural kinds, externalism applies (at best) to words for ground level kinds. The issue then arises of which categories of artifacts should be identified as kinds in the relevant, restricted sense. I argue that, though there are natural taxonomies of artifactual categories at least some of which have well-defined ground levels, even words for such kinds do not appear to have externalist semantics, as they do not support ignorance or error arguments. Some think that membership to any kind is determined by objective features. Against this, I argue that the makers' productive intentions are often crucial in selecting which pattern of features counts as constitutive of a kind. Though externalists may insist that membership to a kind is ultimately determined by sharing objective features, the resulting version of externalism can hardly be distinguished from internalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pacifists and their opponents disagree not only about moral questions, but most often about factual questions as well (as is illustrated by the controversy surrounding the crisis in Kosovo in 1999). According to my reconstruction of pacifism, this is not surprising, since the pacifist, legitimately, looks at the facts in the light of her system of values. Her opponent, in turn, looks at the facts in the light of an alternative value system. And the quarrel between the two parties about supposedly descriptive matters never ceases, as there is no objective reality that could settle the issue. The pacifist’s value-laden perspective on reality is informed by Christian charity and humility: a specific mixture of optimism (about human nature) and pessimism (about human powers). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pacifists and their opponents disagree not only about moral questions, but most often about factual questions as well (as is illustrated by the controversy surrounding the crisis in Kosovo in 1999). According to my reconstruction of pacifism, this is not surprising, since the pacifist, legitimately, looks at the facts in the light of her system of values. Her opponent, in turn, looks at the facts in the light of an alternative value system. And the quarrel between the two parties about supposedly descriptive matters never ceases, as there is no objective reality that could settle the issue. The pacifist’s value-laden perspective on reality is informed by Christian charity and humility: a specific mixture of optimism (about human nature) and pessimism (about human powers). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nominalism seems natural for defending a decent economy of research. However such a program may and has been achieved by such a strongly realistic pragmatism as the one endorsed by Peirce: he shows that there is no risk of "blocking inquiry", no tension between adopting a cost-benefit program and aiming at truth and knowledge, provided, on the negative side , our economy of research is able to stress the impossible reduction of theoretical matters to vital ones, the impossible assimilation of epistemic virtues to mere ethical virtues; and on the positive side , it is able to embrace a strong conception of normative rationality and epistemic virtues, make room as much to "uberty" degrees of belief, propensities as to validity, full-fledged justifications, absolute certainties and mere practical concerns, and develop a conception of knowledge as a virtuous process of inquiry within a genuine intellectual ethics firmly based on a Critical Commonsensist approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two convictions underlie the following article. The first is that Hilary Putnam has been one of the greatest thinkers of our time, a philosopher who was able to propose groundbreaking ideas in virtually every area of philosophy. As the reader will see, the topics he tackled in his writings included questions of philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics and logic, philosophy of mind, metaethics, the fact-value dichotomy, the interpretation of Wittgenstein's later thought, the question of relativism, the analysis of rationality, the analysis of religious experience, the character of Jewish philosophy, the interpretation of pragmatism, the elucidation of the concept of truth, the question of realism, the relationship between mind and the world. The second is that the changes some of his positions underwent, far from being a point of weakness-as some critics have sometimes felt compelled to claim-reveal the freshness and genuineness of Putnam's way of philosophising and at the same time the essence of philosophical discussion itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The overlapping of pragmatic philosophy and the Aristotelian concept of praxis is explored with application to music and music education. John Dewey's philosophy of Art as Experience is contrasted with tacit aesthetic assumptions about music that music teachers often hold as a result of the aesthetic meme inherited from their university music studies. Praxis is then accounted for in terms of the conditions of consummatory experience shared with Dewey's pragmatism. The "ends-in-view" importance of consummatory experience to both pragmatism and praxis are examined in terms of the intentionality (individual and collective) analyzed by John Searle and further qualified by the pragmatic realism of Hilary Putnam. These philosophical implications are explored with conclusions for music education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The relationships between Hilary Putnam and the pragmatists (especially William James and John Dewey) are obvious but subtle. To shed some light on this issue, the author will explore a key issue that not only stands as Putnam's main inheritance from the pragmatists, but that also illuminates the relationships between them more clearly than any other issues. This key issue is the understanding of perception and the philosophical position that arises from this understanding. The author argues that in adopting Dewey's transactionalism (or interactionalism), Putnam advances from James' insight to Dewey's, a shift that is particularly manifest in Putnam's attempt to add another layer of meaning to what he refers to as the second naïveté that he detects and appreciates in James' natural realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hilary Putnam, one of the most famous analytical philosophers of the 20th century, died in 2016. His intellectual legacy extends to many areas of analytic philosophy and, beyond philosophy, to mathematics and computer science. The present article is focused on his particular contribution to the philosophy of mind - the thesis of the multiple realizability of mental states. Multiple realizability is among the most influential arguments in the debate on the mind-body problem and on the relationship between psychology and “the more fundamental” natural sciences (neuroscience, physiology, biology, physics, etc.). The article presents a brief overview of multiple realizability. In the first part, the author introduces the concept, and in the second part presents a reconstruction of the main argument of multiple realizability, as well as the most frequent applications of the concept in the philosophy of mind. In the third part, some of the most influential critiques of multiple realizability are reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the issue of how moral philosophy and social sciences can play a role in defining visions of a better future for humanity. The author analyzes Hilary Putnam's relevant ideas in this respect, including the possible impact of knowledge obtained through literature in this process. The article emphasizes two aspects of Putnam's discussion. First, the author focuses on what underlies the current inability of social sciences and practical reasoning to perform their proper visionary functions. Second, the author presents certain potentially interesting consequences of Putnam's ideas on errors in practical reasoning, which are applicable to a classical debate in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper juxtaposes two stripes of realism, both present in the writings of the late Hilary Putnam. As is well known, forty years ago Hilary Putnam, who was until then a staunch supporter of metaphysical realism, switched to a different doctrine, which he called “internal realism”; many adherents of realism saw this as an unjustifiable retreat from their camp. The question remains: is internal realism a true variety of realism? In order to answer it, §1 compares the postulates of metaphysical and internal realism, while §2 shows how internal realism deals with certain key distinctions observed by metaphysical realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]