Hilary Putnam (Cambridge/Mass.)

AHer Metaphysics, what?1.

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The death of metapliYsics is a theme that enter~d philosophy with Kant.In our own ccnhlJ"yT'a"towering figure - Ludwig Wittgenstein - sound-

.. ed that note both powerful1y ani1 in a uniquely personal way; and hedid not hesitate to IJ.1mp epist~m61ogy together with metaphysics. (Ac-

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iHgenstein's..interpreters, what is today called "ana- \lytic philosophy" was, for Wittgenstein, the most confused form ofmetaphysics!) At tIfe same time, even the man on the street could seethat ~netaphysica'l discussion did not abate. A simple Ipduction from thehistory of thought suggests that metaphysical discuss~(:m.is not going todisappear as long as reflective people remaip in""tlW"world. As Gilsonsaid at the end of a famous hook; "Philosophy always buries its under-takers."

The purpose of this lecture is not to engage in a further debate aboutthe question "Is :(or: 'In what sense is') metaphysics dead." I take it asa fact of life that there is a sense in which the t;skof philosophy is toovercome metaphysics and a sense in vyhich Its task is to continue meta-

" physical discussio.n. In every philosopher there is a part that cries, "This"enterprise is .vain, frivoloUs, ~raiy -;-,we must say, 'Stop!''', and a partthat cries, "This' enterprise is simply reflection at the most general andmost abstract level;.- to put~~ stop ito'it would be a crime against reason."-Of coursc, philos"ophical problen3~ are unsolvablei but as Stanley Cavellonce remarked, "Ther"~ -are better :and worse ways of thinking aboutthem.". ":: "

What I just said ;could have been said at virtually any time since the. beginning of modernity. .: also tak~"it - and this too is something I am \not going to argue~ but take as another fact of life, although I ,knowthat there are still th9sewho woui1- disagree - that the enterprises of

1. An anccstor of this papcr was read to a cOl\ference on ,,Newton al'\d..Realism"which took place at Tcl Aviv University and at the Van Leer-jerusafem Foundationunder the IIponsorshlp of thc Institute for History and Philosophy of Science ofTcl Aviv University, April :1.987.

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providing' a foulldatio11 for Being and Knowledge - a successful des-cription of the FurnituJe of the World or a successful description of theCanons of Justification - are enterprises that have disastrously failed,and this could not have been seen until these enterprises had been giventime to prove their futility (although Kant did say something like thisabout the former enterprise long ago). There is a sense in which thefutility of something that was called metaphysics and the futility ofsomething that was called epistemology is a sharper,' more painful,problem for ollr period - a period that hankers to be called "Post-Modern" rather than modern. '.

What I want to do is layout some principles that we sl,ould /lotabandon in our despair at the failure of something that was called meta-physics and something that was called epistemology. It will soon beevident that I have been inspired to do this, in large part, by a veryfruitful ongoing exchange with my friend Richard Rorty, and this papermay be viewed as yet another contribution: to that e~change. For Rorty,as for the French thinkers that he admires, two ideas seem gripping:(:I.) the failure of our philosophi~al "foundations" is a failure of thewhole culture, and accepting that we were wrong in wanting or think-

.ing we could have a "fOlU1'dalion" requires us to be I'hilosor,l,icnl re-visionists. Uy this I mean' that, for Rorty or Foucault or Dcrrida, thefailure of foundationalism. makes a difference 10 how we are aHowedto talk in ordinary life -"a difference as to whether and when we area\lowed to use words like "know", and "objective", and "fact", and"reason". The picture is that philosophy was not a reflection 011 theculture, ~ reflection some of whose ambitious projects failed, but a basis,

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a sort of pedestal, on which the culture rested, and which has been ab-ruptly yanked out. Under the pretense that philosophy"i5 no longer"serious" there lies hidden a gigantic seriousness. If I am right, Rortyhope~. to be a doctor to the modern soul. (2) At the same time, Rorty'sanalytic past sho\",'s up in this: when he rejects a philosophical contro-versy, as, for example, he rejects the "realism anti-realism" controversy,or the "emotive cognitive" controversy, his rejection is expressed in aCarnapian tone of voice - he scorns, the controversy.

I . .. '1 ~llh often asked, "Just where do you disagree with Rorty." Apartfr~m technical issues - of course, any two philosophers have a host oftech~i~al disagreements - I think our disagreement concerns, at bottom,thes.e.two broad attitudes. I hope that philosophical reflection may b.eof some real cultural value; but I do not think it has been the pedestalon which the culture rested, and I do not think our reaction to thefailure of a philosophical project - even a project as central as "meta-,physics" '- should be to abandon ways of talking and thinking whichhave practical and spiritual weight. I am not, in that ,sense, a philoso-

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phical revisionist. And I think that what is important in philosophy isnot just to say, "1 reject the realist anti-realist controversy""but to showthat (and 11010)both !;ides lIIisl:cpresellt the lives we live with our con-cepts. That a controversy is "futile" does not mean the rival pictures areunimportant. In~leed, to reject a controversy without examining the pic-'tures involved is almost always just a way of defending one of thosepichires (usually the oi1e.that claims t~.be "anti-metaphysical"). In short,I think philosophy is both more j~portant and less important thanRorty does. It is not a pedestal on\vJ:iich we rest (or have rested untilRorty). The illusion:; t~~t .philosophy .spins are illusions that belong tothe nature of human Ilfe itself, and that need to be illuminated. Justsaying, "That's a pseu,c!9-:issue", is !Jot of itself therapeutic; it is an

.aggressive form of the Inetaphysical disease itself..These remarks are, 'of course, much,~oo general to serve as answers to

.the question which titles.'thislectm'e. But no one philosopher can answerthat question. "After metaphysics" there can only be pltilosopl1ers -that is, there can only b,e the search for those "better and worse waysof thinking" that Cavell called for. In the rest of this lecture I want tobegin 511Cha search by laying out some principles. I hope...that this may'evcntllally provoke ~~orty to indicate yvhich of the pr~!1Ci~.lesI shall listhe can accc'pt, "lid whic:h ~>I1CShis yhilo!1ophical rcvision!sm would leadhim to scorn.

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Warrant and communal agreement.;: ,.. I

I shall begin by laying out some prh~ciples ~oncerning w~rranted beliefand assertion. Since"jllstifica~ion" i~' a notion that applies to only cer-tain sorts of stateme~ts 2, I 'shall tj,seJphn Dewey's tedmcial term "war-

rantell assertability" (or just "~arra1}t'.~~ for short) instead of the term"justification". ... :- .!,

The first is the one with which ~or~y is certain to disagree; and itseis the stage for all the othe,~.s:

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(1) In ordinary circllmstances, there is usually n fnct of tI,e matter ns. to whetlzer the stcitemel1tspeople 1111l1ce are warranted or not.

Some of the principl!?s that' follow are like to puzzle or disquiet va-rious philosophers (including Rorty); b~tt let me list the whole groupbefore I deal with "disqu~.ets"~:Here are::the others 3:

. :.':':1 2. If I am sincerly convinced that I had eggs for breakfast, it 'makes sense to. ask

if I am right, but no sense to ask if I have a "justification", for example.3 Readers of Rcnson, Tr"1I111 nnd Hislory will recognize that each of these principles

played a role In the argument of that book.

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(2) WlleLller a slatemcm,1 is TVtIITtl1Ited or llOt is il1dcpendc?IIt of whether,

'tile IIIajority of Olle's c/lltllml peers wOllld say it is tVarrnllted orIl/Iwarrcmtecl.

(3) Our norllls mid standards of tVt11Tmlted C/ssel'libility are 11istoricC/1prodllcls; tlley enolve ill lillle., '

(4) 0111' norms and staudards always reflect 0111' illierests C/lld vallles.Our picl'llre of intellectual flourishillg is part of, tllld <Jllly /11akes

,sense as Imrt ,of, 0111'pictllre of IIICl/UlI1flourishing ill geJlernl.

(5) 0111' norl1ls and standards of ttllytlIil1g - il1cludillg warrc1llied asser-tability - (lTe capable of reform. Tlzerc are [Jetler tlnd worse 1101'/115and standards.

Although there is a tension - some will say, an unbearable tension-between these principles, I do not think I am the first to believe thatthey can and should be held jointly. From Peirce's earliest writing, theyhave, I believe been held by pragmatists, even if this particular formu-lation be new. However, my defense of them will not depend on thearguments of particular pragmatist predecessors.

Lct me begin my discussion with the first two principles: the exist-ence of stich a thing as "warrant" and its indcpcndence from the opinionof one's cultural peers. There is one way of defending these principleswhich is sure to provokec)bjections from anti-<lnd/or-non-realists: thatis to posit the existence of trnns-historical"canons" of warranted beliefwhich defiuc warmnt, inllependently of whcther <lny givcn person orculture is ,able to state those canons. But that is not the W<lYin whichone should defend the independence of warrant horl1 majority opinion.Rather than viewing the fad that warrant is indcpcndcnt of majorityopinion as a fact about a hansccntl(!11t re<llily, onc slwuhl rccogni7.e thatit is nothing but a property of the concept of warrant itself; or, sincetalk of "properties of concepts~' has led somc philosophers to overworkthe <\palytic/synthctic distinction, let mc say simply lhat it is a centralpart of our picture of warrant. To say that whelhcr or not it is warrant-ed in a given problematical situation to accept a given judgmcnt is in-de~)endent of whether a majority of one's peers would agree that it iswarrfl,nted in that situation is just to show that one has the concept ofWClr'rant.

,Indeed, that this is so is shown by the praxis of the Relativists them-selv~!i. 'they know very well that the majority of their cultural peers arenot convinced by Relativist arguments but they keep on 'argtJing be-cause they think they are justificd (warranted) in doing so, and theyshare the picture of warrant as indepen~lent of majority opinion.

But, it may he objected, surely the Relativist can rcformulate his vicwso as to avoid this argument? Instead of claiming that he is describingour ordinary notion of warrant, the careful Rclativist ought to say he

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is propor.ing a uellel' c011cept. "Yes, this is a feature of our ordinaryconcept of warrant," the Relativist ought to admit, "but it is a badfeature."

I3ut what can "bad" possibly mean here but "b<lsed on a wrong meta-physical picture"? And how can a Relativist speak Tiglzt (lnd wrol1gmet<lphysical pictures? I am, of course, assuming the Relativist is a Re-lativist about lJotl1 tntth and warra~H; a Realist about truth who hap-pens to be a Relativist about wa{r:a:l1t (there actually are such philoso-phers, I believe) cancpnsistently 11()ld that "1 can't justify this belief,but I nonethcless 1i>elicye:that it is h'ile that a statement S is warrantedjf and only if the maj~rity of one's cultural peers would agree that it iswarranted." Such a. phUosopher can hold without self-refutation that hisown belief is true hut i;oLwarranted; but there is a kind of pragmaticipc':bnsistency about 'his position. Th~ point I have just made is one thatr have oflen made in' 'the past: Relgitivism, just as much as Realism,assumes that one can ~tand within one's language and outside it at thesame time. In the case qf Realism this is not an immediate contradiction,since the whole content o( Rcalism lies in the claim that' it ma1<es senseto think of a God'r. Eyc View (or, bdtcr, of a "View fro"m,Nowhere");but in the ci'lse (If Relativism it constitutes a self-refuta~i'on.

Let mc now discuss the l<lst of Ihy five principles, a-hd in particularthe cI<lil11,which is the heart of tl~at in'incir1e, that "there are bettcr andworse norms <Inti r.tandanls." And this time I slll1l1 discllss Rorty's po-sition.: .,' :

Superficially, it niight seem that Rorty and I agree OJ\ this. He oftenspeaks of filllling bellcr ways of i1cling <lnd thinking, ways that enable,us to "cope beUer." Why shoulcln't.chi'lllging ollr norms anti standardssometimes en<lble n,s to "cop~ bctter{'?

I3ut in one cruciaL place - I have \~ take the risk of quoting him from'memory - he spci1ks of reforms lr10t 'cnable us to cope better ill till!sClIse tlInt it will cO/llci"losee,'11to I/~ t(wt we are cOl'illg /Jetter. It is atprecisely this point that I get the fe~lin'8 that we do not agree at all.

'The gloss Rody puts 011hIs own notion of "coping better" - in thesense Illat it will com,e.1o,pci'!lllto tlzelll tlzat they are coping better-amounts to a rejection,' rather" than a clarification of the notion of "re-forming" the ways we are ;doing ang. thinking invoked in my fifthprinciple. Indeed, for many statements:.p it may wen be the case that ifthose among us who wanf us" to allop(:;-standar~s according to which pis warranted win out, we will "cope better in the sense that it will cometo seem to us that we are coping better" and if those among us whowant tiS to adopt standards according to which -pis warranted win out,we will also "cope better" ill tlte scnse tllat it will come to seem to ',ISt"at we are coping [leUer. For example, since the community Rorty

speaks of is normally all of Weslern culLlIl'c, it could happcn that a lICO-fascist tendency wins out, ,and people "cope' beUcr" in thc sense thatit cOllles'to seem to thelll that they are copillg beller by dealil/g stlvngelywith those terrible Jews, foreig/lers alld cO/ll/l1l/Ilists while if th~ forcesof good win out it will also be the case that people "cope better" ill tl,csellse that itcOIites fa seem to tl/em tlllli tllcy tire, Of course, Rorty him-self woul~ not fecl"solidarity" with the cuJtme if it went the first way.But the point is that tbis concept of "coping better" isn't' the concept ofthere being better and worse norms and standards at all, Just as it isinternal to our picture of warrant that warrant is logically independentof opinion of the majority of our cuJtmal peers, so- it is internal fo ourpicture of "reform" that whether the outcome of a change is good (ardorm) 01' bild (lhe opposilc) is logically inde(JcndC'nt' of whether itseems good or bad. (That is why it makes sense Loargue that somethingmost people take to be a reform in fact isn't one.) I beli.cve, thereforc,that Rorty rejects my fifth principle.

Is Rorty trapped in the sillne bind as the Relativist, then? Well, hisviews are certainly much more nuanced lhan are typical Relativist views.I Ie has also changed tl1CI11,oflen in WilYS1 ilppl'OVe of. So I illn not surcjust what he is prepar,cd to defend. Bnl I shall take lhc risk of putlingforward an mnalgam of Rorty's published views ilS the Io'icwI l!lill/, hcholds now.,

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In 1'1lilosopilY 11111'1tfw Mirror nf Nail//'(' Rorty dislinguished hctwecn"norlnill" and "he1'1l1al1culic" discoursc. Discourse is normal when theculture is in agreement on the relevant stimdards imd lIorms. Tillk aboultables and dlairs is' normal discourse in our culture, we all have pretty'Illll<:hthe same WilYSof answering such qucstions as "Are thcrc enough'chairs for the dinner party tonight?". When there is unrcsolvable dis-

, agreement, discourse which attempts to bridgc the paradigm-gap is forc-ed to be "hermaneu tic".

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What happens when somcone criticizes fllC! accepted cultural norms, and standards?

Here, I think Rorty's answer is that I can say of the critic's views(I. assume, for the sake of the example, that I agree with the critic inquestion) that they are "true", "more rationill", or whatever seemsappropriate, bU,t these seman tical and epistemic adjectives are reallytlsed emotively. J am "complimenting" the critic's proposals, not say..iI'Ig that they have particular attributes.

'In particular, when Rorty argues that his own views are more helpfulphilosophically, have more content, than the views he criticizes, he is,engaged in hermaneutic cliscoursc (which is to say, in rhetoric). But whatis the purpose of his rhetoric?

It may be that we will behave better if wc become Rortyians - he

more lolcrant, 11'% prone to fall for various varietics of religious iI\-tolerance and political totalil'ianism. If that is what is at stake, the issueis momenlous ind(!ed. nut (I fascist could well agree with Rorty at a veryabstract level - IVlussolini, let us recan, supported pragmatisni} claiminglhat it 5il11clions unlhinking adivism.4 If our aim be lolerance and theopen sociely, woirlr.\ it not be' bc.Her to argue for these ,directly, ratherthan lo hope thal lhese will cO!l1Efas the by-product of a change in ourmcta'physical pklme?

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It scems morc likely to me that, most of the time anyway, Rortyreally thinks th:lI ijl~t~rhysical r~alism is wrong. We will'be bctter offif we listen to hint"in the s,ense of having fewer, false beliefs; but this,of course, is something he cat:1nq,t admit he really thinks. I think, inshort, that lhc allpl11pt' to SilY ihht f/'OIII n God's Elle View t'lC're is /10

, ,:' God's I;ye View is slillthcrc, ql\d~r all that wi'appiI;g.'

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,The t'hird of my ~jvc jJl'inciples ;was that our norms and standards are',islodc 017jects; lhcy cvol ve anel change in time, and the fifth, and last,Wil!i thilt out nonw: <lnd'standards can be reformed.

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,Thc third and fifth principlcs must, of course, be tiildcrstood as con-,

diliol1in~ one illHlther: lll<' faet is 110tjllst that we do ~hal1gc our normsand stilndill'ds. bllt that doil1g so is often an illlpro'/.)C?I!,iellt,An improvc-111('l1ljudged fWIII where? Fr~mi':,within o/lr picture of the world ofcourse'. Bllt from within that picture itsclf, we say that "better" isn't thesilmc as "we think it's betler".'And if my "culhiral j5eers" don't agree

~with me, sometil11es I 81iJ1 say "bcttcr" (or "wor~'e"). There are timeswhcl1, as 5Ial1l(!)' Cavcll puls it, I "rcst on myself cis my fountlalion"."

HC;11ism with, a ~m~il i'r" (lnd with <In "R",

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,The attempt to S<lYthat wi:\rranf :(al\d truth) is just a matter of com-:munal agrecment,O is~ then,: simul(an~ously a misdescription of the no-,tions we aclually 'have;,ian~1 a self-refllting attempt to both have and

--------.--, ,4 See Ralph Barto" Perry's "The Thal/gllf a/lll 'Character af William lames, Little,

BrowlI, Bonlon '935, ':01. 2, 1'::,575. ror a:nilicism af Perry's partial concession 10Mussolini's view' see Peler Skagestad's "Prilgmalism ilnd Ihe Closed Sociely: A]uxtil!,osilion of Charles Peirce ilnd Gc'i?,rge Orwell" in I'l,i1asapl'Jf and SocialCriticislll, vol. 1" no. 1, Fn).I1986, PI'. 307;::;"329. '

5 The Cillim af Reason. " " ,.:'6 Something like Ihis view is ascribed fo tVittgenstein in Kripke's Wit/genstein on

R//les antll'ritlale l,ll//gnngc, In conversation, Cavell has suggested to me that thismakes it sound 'IS if Wil'l~cnsteln Ihought that truth and warrant arc amatterof ctiql/clle - wanlinG 10 (jnd a justified (or iI'true) hypothesis is like wantingto tlse the same Cork my "cullllral peers" tlse, on such a story. But Wlttgenstcinwouldn't have thought tllis is a description of Ollr form of life at all!

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deny an "absolute perspective". Are we then forced to become "meta-physic<ll realists" - at the end of the d<lY, if not <It the beginning? Isthere no middle way?

If saying what we S<lYand doing what we do is being a "re<l1ist",.then we had better be re<llists - re;dists with a smi"lll"r". But mct<lphy-sie<ll versions of "realism" go beyond rei"llism with i"Isl11<1ll"r" into cer-t<li" charucteristie kinds of philosophic<l1 fi"lntasy. Here I agree ~vithRorty. .

Here is one feature of ollr intellectual pr<lctice that these versionshave enormous difficulty in accomod<lling. On the one hand, trees andchairs - the "thises and thats we c<ln poin t to" - <Ireparadigms of whatwe call "real", as Wittgenstein rema'fked.' But consider now a question<lbout which Quine, Lewis, Kripke <IIIdisagree: whi"lt is the rc1i"1tionbet-ween the tree or the d,air and the spi"lce-lime region it occupies? Accord-ing to Quine the d,air and the electrom<lgnetic, etc., fields that make itup and the space-time region that cont<lins these fields are one and thes<lme: so the chair is a space-time region. According to Kripke, Quine isjust wrong: the chair and the space-time region are Iwo nUl11eric<lllydistinct objects. (They have the same mass, however!) The proof is thatthe chair cOllld ll/1v~ nCr./Ipiecl a l1iffen~lIt fol1l1ce-lilllc l"I'giclII.Al:conlingto Quine, moeli"ll pi'edic<ltes arc hopelessly vaguc, so this "proof" iswor.thlcss. According to Lewis, Quine is right about the chair but wrongabout the modal predicates: the correct answer to Lewis is that if thechair could have been in a different pli"lcc, as we Si"lY,what that mei"lnsis thi"lt a counterpart of this chair couhl hi"lve been in thi"lt p1«<:e;not Ihi"ltt.llis very chair (in the sense of the logical notion of iden tHy [=] ) couldhave been in that place.

Well, who is right? Are chairs really irhmticlIl with their matter ordoes <I ch<lir somehow <;oe?<istin the S<lI1\Cspace-time region with its

. matter while remaining numerically distinct from it? And is their matterreally identic<ll with the fields? And <Irethe fields re<ll1yidentical withthe sp<lce-time regions? To me it seems clear that at least the first, andprobably all three, of these questions is nonsensical. We can formalize

t. our I<lnguage in the way Kripke would <lnd we can formalize our lan-.guage in the way Lewis would, and (thank Godl) we can leave it Ul1-formalized and not pretend the ordinaryl<lngu<lge "is" obeys the same

:'.niles as the sign "=" in systems of formal logic. Not even God could.teU us if the chair .is "identical" with its matter (or with the space-timeregion); and not because there is something He doesn't know :

7 Lecture XXV, WittgclIstein's I.eell/res 011MntllelJlnlics, cd. Cora Diamond. "Thiscsand thats we can point to" is from this lecture.

So it looks as if even something <ISparadigmatically "real" as a chairllns nspects tllnt. (/rccollve/ltiollnl. Tllat tIle cllltir is blue is paradigl11ati-cally /t "1'et1!ity", m/ft yet t.1zni'the ellllir [is/is not/don't llaveoto decide].a space-time regio/l is a matter of cmmel/tion.

And what of the sp<lce-time region itself? Some philosophers think. of points as .\ocillio!1.predicntes, not objects. So <I space-lime region is.

just a set of properties (if these:philosophers are right) <lnd not an ob-ject '(in the sense of concrete Q~Ject) at all, if this view is right. Again,it doesn't so 111uch.seem that' tl1cre is a "view" here at all, as yet an-odlel' way we c.Qulifreconstrucl obr I<lnguage. But how (:an the existenceof i"I concrete objeot (the space-time region) be a matter of cOllvelltiO/l?

And how can th.e"id~ntity of A (lhe ch<lir) and B (the space-time region)be a matter of ccmt;elll'iol/? The re<llist with a small "r" needn't have an

; ..- answer to Ihese 'questions. It is t~.tsta fact of life, he may feel, that cer-( .' tain <lhernatives <Ire equally goo~l while others are visibly forced. But

metaphysical realisin is not just ihe view th<lt there are, after alI, chairs,<lnd some of Ihem "re,.<lftel' all, blue, and we didn't just make all that

III'. Meti'\ph ysical realism presen ts itself as a powerful transcendentalpicture: <Ipicture iri which there is. a fixed set of "Iangu<lge independent"objeclr. (i'llId SOllIe of them Me <lhstri'lct and others <1re concrete) and <Ifixed "relalion'" b(~t\V(~en tCl'Ill's hnd theit. extensHm&; What I am sayingis that the picture only parti'y agrees with the common sense view itpurports to interpret; it has 'consequcnces which,..from a common senseview, arc quite ;:\bsmd. There is nothing wrong .at' all with holding onto our rei"llism \~ilh a smi"lll "r" <lnd jellisoning the.1~ig "R" Realism ofthe philosophers. .

~ Although he was far from: being a Big "R" realist., Hans Reichenbi'lchhad a conceptio.1l of the t.ask of~philosophy 8 which, if it h<ld succeeded,migh t weIl have sa ved Re<llisil1.:~ron1the objection Just raised: the taskof philosophy, he wrote, is to tfistiltgllish what is fact 1lI\(1wl,at is con-vention (" definitio'j'," ill oi,y Syst~II.I'of lCl1owledge.The trouble, as Quinepointed out, is that the philos()'phk<ll distinction between "fact" and"definition" on whick:Re,ichenhad; depended has collapsed. As anothereX<lmple, not dissin~iIar to the one I just used, consider the conventionalch<lructer of <lny possibl~:answer to the question, "Is a point identicalwith a series of spheres th<lt conveJ;",geto it?" We know th<lt we can takeextended regions as the .primitivei :objects, and "identify" points withsets of concentric sl'fieres, amI i'lWgeome~ric facts are perfectly wellrepresenled. We kno\V that wc,:caI1 also t<lke points as primitives andlake spheres to be sets of )Joints. But the very stcltement "we .can do

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-----..---8 Rcichenhal'h's PI,i/IISlltll,y IIf SpllCC IlIld Tilllc.

either" assumes a diff~se background of empirical facts. Fundamentalchanges in the way we do physics could change the whole picture. So"convention" does not mean absolute cOllvellHolI - truth by stipulation,free of every element of "fact". And, on the other hand, even when wesee such a "reality" as a tree, the possibility of that p~rception is de-pendent on a whole c~nceptual scheme, on a language in place. What isfactual and :what is conventional is a matter of degree; we cannot say,"these and these elements of the world are the raw facts; ~he rest isconvention, or a mixture of these raw facts with convention".

What I am saying, then, is that elements of what we call "language"or "mind" penetrate so deeply into wllnt we call "reality" thnt the veryproject of representing ourselves ns beillg ."mappers" of sOlllc/llillg "Iall-guage independent" is fatally compromised fr01l1 ti,e very start. LikeRelativism, but in a different way, ReCllisJ1\is an impossible attempt toview the world from Nowhere. .

In this si~uation it is a temptation to say, "So we make the world",or "our language makes up the world", or "our culture makes up the

.world"; but this is just another form of the same mistake, If we suc-cumb, once again we view the world - the ~nly'world we know - as aproduct. 011e kind of philQsopher views it as a product from a raw ma-terial: Unconceptualized ;R.eality. The other views it as a creation exnihilo. But tIle world iSl1't a product. It's just the world.

Where are we then? Qn the one hand ~ this is where I hope Rorty

will sympathize with what I am saying - our image of the world cannotbe "justified" by anything but its success as judged by the interestsand values whid, evolve and get modified at .the same time and in inter-action with our evolving image of the world itself. Just as the absolute"convention/fClct" dichofomy had to be abandoned, so (as MortonWhite0 long ago urged) the absolute "fad/value" didiotomy has to beabandoned,.and for similar reasons. On the other hand, it is part of

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thaHmage itself that the world is not the product of our will - or ourdispositions to talk in certain WClYS,either.

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9 Towards Rcullion in P/li/osap/IY.

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C. Kolloquien mit systematischen Themen

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