HILARY PUTNAM

translation. There is a notion that our provincial ways of positing objects and
conceiving nature may be best appreciated for what they are by standing off and
seeing them against a cosmopolitan background of alien cultures; but the no-
tion comes to nothing, for there is no no: czh [Greek: "place to stand"; the
expression calls to mind Archimedes' claim that, with a long enough lever and
a point to stand on, he could move the w0rld.1.~. . .

Notes
1 See Richard von Mises, Positivism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
1951), pp. 46 ff.
2 For a fuller development of the foregoing theme see my "Meaning and translation"
in Reuben Brower's anthology On Translation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1959). For criticisms that have benefited the above section of the present
essay and ensuing portions I am grateful to Burton Dreben.

44 After Metaphysics, What?*

Hilary Putnam
The death of metaphysics is a theme that entered philosophy with Kant. In our
own century, a towering figure - Ludwig Wittgenstein - sounded that note
both powerfully and in a uniquely personal way; and he did not hesitate to lump
epistemology together with metaphysics. (According to some of Wittgenstein's
interpreters, what is today called "analytic philosophy" was, for Wittgenstein,
the most confused form of metaphysics!) At the same time, even the man on
the street could see that metaphysical discussion did not abate. A simple induc-
tion fiom the history of thought suggests that metaphysical discussion is not
going to disappear as long as reflective people remain in the world. As Gilson
said at the end of a famous book, "Philosophy always buries its undertakers."
The purpose of this lecture is not to engage in a further debate about the
question "Is (or: 'In what sense is') metaphysics dead?" I take it as a fact of life
that there is a sense in which the task of philosophy is to overcome metaphysics
and a sense in which its task is to continue metaphysical discussion. In every
philosopher there is a part that cries, "This enterprise is vain, frivolous, crazy -
we must say, 'Stop!'," and a part that cries, "This enterprise is simply reflection
at the most general and most abstract level; to put a stop to it would be a crime
against reason." Of course, philosophical problems are unsolvable; but as Stanley
* From Hilary Putnam, "After Metaphysics, What?"in Kieter Henrich and Rolf-Peter Horstmann,
eds, Metaphysik nach Kant? (Stuttgart:Hegel-KongreB, 1987; published in 1988). Reprinted by
permission of the author and Klett-Cotta.
 AFTER METAPHYSICS, WHAT?

Cave11 once remarked, "There are better and worse ways of thinking about
them."
What I just said could have been said at virtually any time since the beginning
of modernity. I also take it - and this too is something I am not going to argue,
but take as another fact of life, although I know that there are still those who
would disagree - that the enterprises of providing a foundation for Being and
Knowledge - a successful description of the Furniture of the World or a success-
ful description of the Canons of Justification - are enterprises that have disas-
trously failed, and this could not have been seen until these enterprises had
been given time to prove their futility (although Kant did say something like
this about the former enterprise long ago). There is a sense in which the futility
of something that was called metaphysics and the futility of something that was
called epistemology is a sharper, more painful, problem for our period - a pe-
riod that hankers to be called "Post-Modern" rather than modern.
What I want to d o is lay out some principles that we should not abandon in
our despair at the failure of something that-was called metaphysics and some-
thing that was called epistemology. It will soon be evident that I have been
inspired to do this, in large part, by a very fkuitful ongoing exchange with my
h e n d Richard Rorty, and this paper may be viewed as yet another contribution
to that exchange. For Rorty, as for the French thinkers that he admires, two
ideas seem gripping: (1)the failure of our philosophical "foundations" is a fail-
ure of the whole culture, and accepting that we were wrong in wanting or
thinking we could have a "foundation" requires us to be philosophical revision-
ists. By this I mean that, for Rorty or Foucault or Derrida, the failure of
& e m makes a difference to how we are allowed to talk inordlnary
life - a difference as to whether and when we are allowed to use words LJke
__---
' c k p r o ~and
~ "o~ective,"
-- -
and "fact ', amFreassrrrU-T re is that philoso-
phywas not a reflection on hte*, a reile&ion s z o s e ambitious
projects failed, but a basis, a sort of pedestal, on which the culture rested, and
which has been abruptly yanked out. Under the pretense that philosophy is no
longer "serious" there lies hidden a gigantic seriousness. If I am right, Rorty
hopes to be a doctor to the modern soul. (2)At the same time, Rorty's analytic
past shows up in this: when he rejects a philosophical controversy, as, for exam-
ple, he rejects the "realism anti-realism" controversy, or the "emotive cogni-
tive" controversy, .his rejection is ex
scorns the controv-y-
1 am often asked, "Just where d o you disagree with Rorty?" Apart from tech-
nical issues - of course, any two philosophers have a host of technical disagree-
ments - I think our disagreementconceris, at bottom, these two broad attitides.
I hope that philosophical reflection may be of some real cultu
not think it Tizbe-e pedestal on which the culture rested, and I do not
think our reaction to the failure of a philosophical project - even a project as
central as "metaphysics" - should be to abandon ways of tallung and thinking
which have practical and spiritual weight. I am not, in that sense, a philosophi-
cal revisionist. And I think that what is important in philosophy is not just to
say, "I reject the realist anti-realist controversy," but to show that (and how)
HILARY PUTNAM

both sides misrepresent the lives we live with our concepts. That a controversy is
"futile" does not mean the rival pictures are unimportant. Indeed, to reject a
controversy without examining the pictures involved is almost always just a way
of defending one of those pictures (usually the one that claims to be "anti-
metaphysical"). In short, I think philosophy is both more important and less
important than Rorty does. It is not a pedestal on which we rest (or have rested
until Rorty). The illusions that philosophy spins are illusions that belong to the
nature of human life itself, and that need to be illuminated. Just saying, "That's
a pseudo-issue," is not of itself therapeutic; it is an aggressive form of the meta-
physical disease itself.
These remarks are, of course, much too general to serve as answers to the
question which titles this lecture. But no one philosopher can answer that ques-
tion. "After metaphysics7'there can only be philosophers- that is, there can only
be the search for those "better and worse ways of thinking" that Cave11 called
for.. . .

Realism with a Small "r" and with an "R"

. . . If saying what we say and doing what we do is being a "realist," then we had
better be realists - realists with a small "r." But metaphysical versions of "real-
ism" go beyond realism with a small "r" into certain characteristic lunds of
philosophical fantasy. Here I agree with Rorty.
Here is one feature of our intellectual practice that these versions have enor-
mous difficulty in accommodating. On the one hand, trees and chairs - the
"thises and thats we can point to" - are paradigms of what we call "real," as
Wittgenstein remarked.' But consider now a question about which Quine, Lewis,
Kripke all disagree: what is the relation between the tree or the chair and the
space-time region it occupies? According to the chair and the electro-
magnetic, etc., fields that make it up and the space-time region that contains
these fields are one and the same: so the chair s-i region. According
to Kripke, Quine is just wrong: the chair and the space-time region are two
numerically distinct objects. (They have the same mass, however!) The proof is
that the chair could have occupied a dzferent space-time region. According to
Quine, modal predicates are hopelessly vague, so this "proof' is worthless. Ac-
cording to Lewis, Quine is right about the chair but wrong about the modal
predicates: the correct answer [according] to Lewis is that if the chair could
have been in a different place, as we say, what that means is that a counterpart of
this chair could have been in that place; not that this very chair (in the sense of
the logical notion of identity [=I) could have been in that place.
Well, who is right? Are chairs really identicalwith their matter or does a chair
somehow coexist in the same space-time region with its matter while remaining
numerically distinct from it? And is their matter really identical with the fields?
And are the fields really identical with the space-time regions? T o me it seems
clear that at least the first, and probably all three, of these questions is nonsen-
sical. We can formalize our language in the way Kripke would and we can for-
 AFTER METAPHYSICS, WHAT?

malize our language in the way Lewis would, and (thank God!) we can leave it
unformalized and not pretend the ordinary language "is" obeys the same rules
as the sign "=" in systems of formal logic. Not even God could tell us if the
chair is "identical" with its matter (or with the space-time region); and not
because there is something H e doesn't know.
So it looks as if even something as paradigmatically "real" as a chair has aspects
that are conventional. That the chair is blue is paradigmatically a "reality," and
yet that the chair [is/is not/don't have t o decide] a space-time region is a matter of
convention.
And what of the space-time region itseli? Some philosophers think of points
as location predicates, not objects. So a space-time region is just a set of proper-
ties (if these philosophers are right) and not an object (in the sense of concrete
object) at all, if this view is right. Again, it doesn't so much seem that there is a
"view" here at all, y t r u c t our lanpuage. But
how can the existence of a concrete object (the space-time region) be a matter
of convention?And how can the identity o f A (the chair) and B (the space-time
region) be a matter of convention? The realist with a small "r" needn't have an
answer to these questions. It is just a fact of life, he may feel, that certain alter-
natives are equally good while others are visibly forced. But metaphysical real-
ism is not just the view that there are, after all, chairs, and some of them are,
after all, blue. and we didn't just make all that up. Metaphysical realism presents
itself as a powerful transcendental picture: a picture in which there is a fixed set
of "language independent" objects (and some of them are abstract and others
are concrete) and a fixed "relation" between terms and their extensions. What I
am saying is that the picture only partly agrees with the common sense view it
purports to interpret; it has consequences which, from a common sense view,
are quite absurd. There is nothing wrong at all with holding on to our realism
with a small "r" and jettisoning the Big "R" Realism of the philosophers.
Although he was far from being a Big " R realist, Hans Reichenbach had a
conception of the task of philosophy2 which, if it had succeeded, might well
have saved Realism from the objection just raised: the task of philosophy, he
wrote, is to &stinnuish whatisfact and what is convention (Vefinition") in our
system of knowled e. The trouble, as Quine pointed out, is that the philosophical
/ ctlon etween "fact" and "definition" on which Reichenbach depended
has collapsed. As another example, not dissimilar to the one I just used, con-
sider the conventional character of any possible answer to the question, "Is a
point identical with a series of spheres that converge to it?" We know that we
can take extended regions as the primitive objects, and "identify" points with
sets of concentric spheres, and all geometric facts are perfectly well represented.
We know that we can also take and take spheres to be sets of
a diffuse back~round
physics could change
. SO "convention" does not mean absolute convention - truth
by stipulation, free of every element of "fact." And, on the other hand, even
when we see such a "reality" as a tree, the possibility of that perception is de-
pendent on a whole conceptual scheme. on a language in place. What is factual
HILARY PUTNAM

and what is conventional is a matter of degree; we cannot say, "these and these
elements of the world are the raw facts; the rest is convention, or a mixture of
these raw facts with convention."
What I am saying, then, is that elements ofwhat we call "language" or "mind"
penetrate so deeply into what we call "reality" that the very project of representin8

language makes up the world," or "our culture makes up the world"; but this is
just another form of the same mistake. If we succumb, once again we view the
wodd - the only world we know - as a product.+ One kind of philosopher views
it as a product from a raw material: Unconceptualized Reality. The other views
it as a creation ex nihilo. But the world isn't a product. It's just the world.
W-h u n tne one hand - this is where I hope Rorty will sympa-
thize with what I am saying - our image of the world cannot be "justified" by
anything but its success as judged by the interests and values which evolve and
get modified at the same time and in interaction with our evolving image of the
world itself. Just as the absolute "convention/fact" dichotomy had to be aban-
doned, so (as Morton White3 long ago urged) the absolute "fact/value" di-
chotomy has to be abandoned, and for similar reasons. O n the other hand, it is
part of that image itself that the world is not the product of our will - or our
dispositions to talk in certain ways, either.

Notes
1 Lecture xxv, Wittgenstein's Lectures on Mathematics, ed. Cora Diamond. "Thises
and thats we can point to" is from this lecture.
2 Hans Reichenbach's Philosophy of Space and Time (New York: Dover, 1957).
3 Morton White, Toward Reunion in Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1956).

45 Truth and Convention*

Hilary Putnam
The 'internal realism' I have defended1 has both a positive and a negative
side. Internal realism denies that there is a fact of the matter as to which of
the conceptual schemes that serve us so well - the conceptual scheme of
From Hilary Putnam, 'Truth and Convention: On Davidson's Rehtation of Conceptual Rela-
tivism,' Dialectics, 41 (1987), pp. 69-77. Reprinted by permission of the author and publisher.