330
PARTISAN REVIEW
Pluralism and Humanism
WORDS AND LIFE. By Hilary Putnam. Edited by James
Conant.
Harvard University Press. $47.50.
PRAGMATISM: AN OPEN QUESTION. By Hilary Putnam.
Blackwell Press. $16.95.
Hilary Putnam's many essays cover a fairly wide range of subjects in–
cluding logic, the history of philosophy, science and scientism, philosophy
of language, and philosophy of mind. Of these the philosophy of lan–
guage, in the form of a theory of reference, is probably the most
important.
It
is central to Putnam's thinking and constitutes one of the
starting points for his sustained criticisms of logical positivism, Tarskian
theories of truth, Fodorian theories of reference, and the physicalism and
utilitarianism of authors grouped (in
Reason, Truth and History)
under the
delightfully catty label "the Guru of Sydney."
Putnam's readers will notice that
Words and Life
returns to familiar
themes. There are, however, new slants and some new topics. For exam–
ple, one essay discusses Newton's influence on English poetry while
another, written with Ruth Anna Putnam, is about multiculturalism.
Four essays are devoted to the inheritance of pragmatism. This subject is
taken up again in
Pragmatism: An Open Question,
a slim volume contain–
ing three lectures given in Rome in 1992 ("The Permanence of William
James," "Was Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?" and "Pragmatism and the
Contemporary Debate"). Nowadays Putnam is weaving together insights
from James and Dewey, Wittgenstein and Kant, and his own insights
about truth and reference.
Putnam points out that certain Western philosophical theories - those
which state that words get their meanings from mental pictures, or events
in the brain, or homunculi in the head - have a parallel in the belief of
other cultures in the magical powers of words. For example, in some
communities in India and the Far East parents do not tell strangers the
real names of their children; it is thought that knowledge of the "true
name" makes possible a sinister control over the child itself. Putnam
demonstrates that there are actually no magical necessary connections
between pictures and things, words and things, images and things.
How then do words get meanings? Not from magical connections
and not from causal connections either. According to Putnam in
Reason,
Truth and History,"
...
signs do not intrinsically correspond to objects in–
dependently of how those signs are employed and by whom ... 'Objects'
do not exist independently of conceptual schemes.
We
cut up the world
