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Reason, Truth and History, by Hilary Putnam
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Hilary Putnam deals in this book with some of the most fundamental persistent problems in philosophy: the nature of truth, knowledge and rationality. His aim is to break down the fixed categories of thought which have always appeared to define and constrain the permissible solutions to these problems.
- Sales Rank: #4148564 in Books
- Published on: 1981-12-31
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .87" w x 5.43" l, .93 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Review
'Hilary Putnam's Reason, Truth, and History is an interesting, ambitious well-written book, which deals with a broad set of issues (in epistemology, metaphysics, value theory, and the philosophy of language) and diverse thinkers (ranging from Plato, Berkeley and Kant to Carnap, Quine, Kuhn, Wittgenstein, and Foucault). In spite of its broad scope, the book is both relatively short and possesses a remarkable degree of unity and coherence ... the book is important because it reflects a serious effort to break the grip that the natural sciences have had on philosophical thought in this century. Although Putnam is not hostile to science, he rejects the equation of rational thinking with scientific thinking and rejects the idea that science provides the only true descriptions of reality.' International Philosophical Quarterly
'This is a timely book, with penetrating discussion of issues very much in the forefront of the contemporary philosophy. Despite the prominence of negative arguments it contains much to contribute positively to our understanding of what is needed for a conception of rationality and objectivity that covers ethics and value theory generally as well as physics.' Ethics
'It is refreshingly wide-ranging and ambitious, covering the philosophies of logic, language and knowledge, philosophy of mind, philosophy of history, and ethics. It manages to derive fresh insights even from such familiar topics as Wittgenstein's so-called Private Language argument. Without pretentiousness or name-dropping, it combines strands from recent Anglo-American and Continental philosophy. And it is written in a style which is usually lively and witty.' Philosophical Books
From the Back Cover
'This is a timely book, with penetrating discussion of issues very much in the forefront of the contemporary philosophy. Despite the prominence of negative arguments it contains much to contribute positively to our understanding of what is needed for a conception of rationality and objectivity that covers ethics and value theory generally as well as physics.'
About the Author
Hilary Putnam is Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Mathematical Logic at Harvard University.
Most helpful customer reviews
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Important work in the Western analytic philosophical style
By DocCaligari
This is a review of Reason, Truth and History by Hilary Putnam.
Hilary Putnam (born 1926) is one of the leading philosophers in the English-speaking world in the 20th (and early 21st) century. He is in the "analytic" philosophical tradition, which emphasizes rigorous argumentation and incorporating into philosophy the insights of science and mathematics, so his work is sometimes technical. This book is a combination of ingenious but difficult arguments (there is an appendix that contains a formal mathematical proof of one of his claims) with much more readable discussions of issues of general philosophical interest. I have met Putnam in person, and this book gives you a feel for what he is like: brilliant, intellectually broad and quick, but sometimes a bit glib.
Putnam has fundamentally changed his philosophical views several times. (He published this book in 1981.) But you will get a taste of his most famous claims from this work. There is a warning on p. viii that many readers may want to begin with Chapter 5 (a non-technical chapter). This is good advice. I am a professional philosopher, and even I found my eyes glazing over at points in Chapters 1-4.
Overall, you can see Putnam as *rejecting* the following common conception. The content of the meanings of our words and our beliefs is given by something internal to our minds or brains. Our beliefs are true just in case they "correspond" to a world that is completely independent of our beliefs. Science is the best (and perhaps the only) method for determining the correspondence between beliefs and the world. Science can "prove" its claims via a strict, logical scientific method. Ethics and values are subjective matters of opinion, since they are not proveable like science.
Putnam is similar to many critics (including Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and the so-called "postmodern" philosophers) in recognizing that the picture given by the preceding paragraph must (and I mean MUST) be mistaken. The content of our beliefs and concepts is determined, in part, by things external to them (Chapter 1). There is no way to make sense of concepts and beliefs corresponding to the world, at least not if we think of the world as completely independent of our mental states (Chapter 2). The methodology of science cannot be reduced to formal logic and mathematics (Chapter 8). Fact and value cannot be neatly separated (Chapter 6).
However, Putnam diverges from many "postmodernists" in rejecting relativism and wanting to maintain some notions of truth and rationality. His basic move is to say that we can continue to ask questions like "What is real?" "Is theory A more rational than theory B?" and "Is X true?" but we can only ask them internally to our theories. Putnam argues that this does not land us in relativism or chaos because we are committed (by the very nature of our human practices) to treating other humans as rational in a way that is comprehensible to us (even if we end up disagreeing with them). In short, to treat someone as a "person" is to treat them as potentially disagreeing with us, but as disagreeing with us about the same world, and disagreeing in way that we can understand (and hence rationally argue with).
Overall, if you are going to read only one work by Putnam, I would recommend this one. But if you have not read any analytic philosophy before, be prepared to skim parts.
22 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Philosophy Analytically Done
By D. S. Heersink
Analytic philosophy is often forebidding, and Prof. Putnam is a quintessential analytic philosopher. But, for those wanting an accessible book to try their minds in the analytical tradition without being overwhelmed, this is a nice start. The "Brains in a Vat" chapter is a bit tiresome as an analytic tool, but the remainder of the book is less obscure and more provocative. The book covers metaphysics, value theory, ethics, and epistemology in a highly engaging manner. If only more analytic philosophers wrote with such clarity and easy style. Don't be fooled. This book will be a mental workout, but one you'll enjoy rather than belabor.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
PUTNAM CRITIQUES THE "OBJECTIVE" AND "SUBJECTIVE" DICHOTOMY
By Steven H Propp
Hilary Whitehall Putnam (born 1926) is an American analytic philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist who taught at Harvard for many years. He wrote many other books, such as Realism with a Human Face, Pragmatism: An Open Question, Reason, Truth and History, etc.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1981 book, “In the present work, the aim which I have in mind is to break the strangle hold which a number of dichotomies appear to have on the thinking of both philosophers and laymen. Chief among these is the dichotomy between objective and subjective views of truth or reason… The view which I shall defend holds… that there is an extremely close connection between the notions of TRUTH and RATIONALITY; that… the only criterion for what is a fact is what it is RATIONAL to accept.”
He explains, “The perspective I shall defend has no unambiguous name… I shall refer to it as the ‘internalist’ perspective, because it is characteristic of this view to hold that ‘what objects does the world consist of?’ is a question that only makes sense to ask WITHIN a theory or description… ‘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.’ There is no God’s Eye point of view that we can know or usefully imagine; there are only the various points of view of actual persons reflecting various interests and purposes that their descriptions and theories subserve.” (Pg.49-50)
He comments on Thomas Nagel’s essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’: “Now, imagine a debate between two philosophers or psychologists, one of whom says NO bat QUALE is at all like any human QUALE. Bat QUALIA are unimaginably different from human Qualia. You will never be able to imagine what it feels like to be a bat (or even a dog or cat). The other philosopher, we may imagine, replies, ‘Nonsense! Perhaps there are SOME bat sensations I can’t imagine. There are some sensations of other humans (e.g., some sensations of the other sex) I probably can’t imagine, but that doesn’t mean I regard the psychological space of those other humans as unimaginably different from my own. Why shouldn’t I think of the bat’s visual field, for example, as very much like my visual field?… Allowing for some adjustments for the optics of the bat eye, or the bat’s hearing for the range that overlaps with mine, it’s like my hearing, and its pains are like my pains.” (Pg. 92-93)
He recalls, “When I was just starting my teaching career at Princeton University I got to know Rudolph Carnap, who was spending two years at the Institute for Advanced Studies. One memorable afternoon, Carnap described to me how he had come to be a philosopher. Carnap explained to me that he had been a graduate student in physics, studying logic in Frege’s seminar. The text was ‘Principia Mathematica’ (imagine studying Russell and Whitehead’s ‘Principla’ with Frege!). Carnap was fascinated with symbolic logic and equally fascinated with the special theory of relativity. So he decided to make his thesis a formalization of special relativity in the notation of ‘Principia.’ It was because the Physics Department at Jena would not accept this that Carnap became a philosopher, he told me.” (Pg. 125)
He argues, “Rationality may not be defined by a ‘canon’ or set of principles, BUT we do have an evolving conception of the cognitive virtues to guide us. It will be objected that this conception does not ‘get us very far.’ Rudolf Carnap and John Cardinal Newman were both careful and responsible thinkers, and both were committed to the cognitive virtues just mentioned, but no one thinks that one could have convinced the other, had they lived at the same time and been able to meet. But the fact that there is no way to resolve all disputes to everyone’s satisfaction does not show that there is no better and no worse in such a case. Most of us think that Newman’s Catholicism was somewhat obsessive; and most philosophers think that, brilliant as he was, Carnap employed many weak arguments. That we make these judgments shows that we do have a regulative idea of a just, attentive, balanced intellect, and we do think that there is a fact of the matter about why and how particular thinkers fall short of that ideal.” (Pg. 163)
He points out, “One problem with [Karl] Popper’s view is that it is not possible to test all strongly falsifiable theories. For example, the theory that if I put a flour sack on my head and rap the table 99 ties a demon will appear is strongly falsifiable, but I am certainly not going to bother to test it. Even if I were willing to test it I could think of [infinite] similar theories, and a human lifetime, or even the lifetime of the human species, would not suffice to test them all. For logical reasons, then, it is necessary to select, on methodological grounds, a very small number of theories that we will actually bother to test; and this means that something like a prior selection is involved even in the Popperian method.” (Pg. 197)
This is one of Putnam’s more important books, and will be of great interest to anyone studying analytic philosophy.
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