336
PARTISAN REVIEW
Kant, of course, provides "transcendental" explanations of human
knowledge. His strategy with regard to moral knowledge and to meta–
physics thereby eschews both induction and formal logic. Putnam, when
in a transcendental or quasi-Kantian mood, speaks as follows:
As beings who make judgments every day we are committed to a
certain practice which carries with it the idea that value judgments are
true (or false) . Now, what must be the case for this practice to exist
and for those judgments to be true?
He believes that Wittgenstein has an answer to this question about
the transcendental grounds of moral judgment. The big message of all
Wittgenstein's post-
Tractatus
work is that there are many language games,
none of which should be given privileges over the others. The language
of physics is specialized, aiming only at the prediction and control of
non-
I
human
events. The rest of language is not like that. To insist that physical
\
science gives the only correct picture of the world is to give scientific lan-
guage an enormous unwarranted privilege, a privilege, moreover, which
has no better foundation than a few little scraps of metaphysics. We need
to remember that, according to Wittgenstein, metaphysics is empty and
nonsensical while ordinary language is "all right." Putnam holds that
those who engage in reductive philosophy, for instance, those who say
that only science is truly "cognitive," are hankering after tidiness and
completeness. (Some of them even look to Utopias in which everything
is planned and only one language is spoken.) In other words, the thinkers
who downgrade moral judgment and the human life-world do so because
of a temperamental attachment to cultural monotony. Putnam himself, on
the other hand, is a pluralist and a humanist.
I shall end this review with a small grumble. Although Putnam's
work doesn't usually display any felt need to be fashionable , he seems in
recent years to be giving way to pressures from editors and publishers
suffering from the trendy disease of hyperscholism, or footnote-itis.
Words
and Life
has four hundred eighty-three footnotes , plus a number of foot–
noted references not included in the credits. The book's introduction, by
editor James Conant, has another ninety-five making its total footnotes
five hundred seventy-eight plus some extras. Compare this to
R easoN,
Truth, and History,
which has a grand total of sixty-two footnotes. Ad–
mittedly
Words and Life
is a longer book, but it isn't nine-and-a-half times
longer. Hyperscholism is an infantile disorder which affects adults. Its
virulence is set to increase geometrically unless authors do something to
stop it in its tracks. Probably at this moment some bug-eyed scholar with
