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PARTISAN REVIEW
worlds," and, if so, how does one avoid the relativism (and its self–
confuting paradoxes) which is inherent in knowledge derived from
the variability and flux of experience, and from the different stand–
points of the observers? These are the central questions raised by
Hilary Putnam, who had been one of the leading figures in estab–
lishing a "realist" position in contemporary philosophy (based on a
"correspondence theory" of truth) but who has now retreated to a
modified neo-Kantian position of knowledge as "somewhat" mind–
dependent. ("It is not that the thinking mind
makes up
the world . . .
but it doesn't just mirror it either.")
These elementary statements (elementary in the double sense
of being simple, yet of the first order) are intended to introduce the
essays in this issue of
Partisan Review.
They do not seek to "frame" the
issues but to suggest that the current sets of questions and upheavals
in philosophy and social thought are not "simply" one more turn in
intellectual fashion, but epitomize the new efforts of the disciplined
imagination to find some ways of making consistent, meaningful,
and persuasive statements about fundamental issues, when the
established ways have been found wanting or have become ex–
hausted.
What is clear is that the older certitudes in the different fields,
and even the "quest for certainty," which has always marked man's
search for some order to the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of the
world, are giving way to some "new" (or in some instances a return to
older) modes. In philosophy, the dominance of "analytical philoso–
phy" (in its empiricist guise), with its reduction of meanings to
atomistic terms and sentence structure, is eroding, and various forms
of realism, or what Nelson Goodman has called "irrealism" (the
oscillation between idealism and realism) or even "essentialism" (as
with Kripke) have become new foci of interest. The philosophy of
science, which once gave promise of certitude, by establishing log–
ical canons of explanation (e.g. the work of Hempel and Nagel), or
the criteria of falsification as an approach to truth, has come under
attack from the argument that observations are not independent of
theory, and if they are theory-laden, then observations cannot be the
source of confirmation or disconfirmation, and that "incommen–
surable" observations (and even theories, in the most radical version)
can coexist in different and even similar frames. So the imp of
relativism appears again.
Moral discourse, which just a few years ago had been ruled out
