The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1991) Volume XXIX, No. 2

TWO KINDS OF CONCEPTUAL-SCHEME REALISM Philip Clayton Williams College

It is almost a truism in contemporary philosophy that we have no direct access to reality. Everything that we say, think or perceive is filtered through some conceptual scheme (CS). Along with debating the precise nature and role of CSs-a debate that I will not pretend to summarize here- philosophers have wrestled with the implications of such CSs for realist theories of language. Still unresolved is the claim that CS-philosophers may at the same time be realist. I wish to analyze and defend that claim here.

Positions of this type I shall call “conceptual-scheme realisms.” It is an extended family, with close to a dozen related members appearing in a recent census entitled Realism and Antirealism.’ The volume’s absent presence is Hilary Putnam, whose “internal realism” refuses to give up judgments of rightness and talk of “the same entities,” while insisting at the same time that such judgments are “internal” to scientific practice and involve “the verdict on which inquiry would ultimately settle.”2

I propose starting with Putnam’s case for CS-realism as an instance of an attractive mediating p~s i t ion .~ I show how Putnam has correctly retained both CSs and the rightness of realism, while arguing that his particular fusion of the two is unsuccessful. This critique will allow me to contrast his version of CS-realism with another version, which I shall call ‘regulative realism.’ My hope is to convince the reader of the superiority of the latter.

Philip Clayton is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Williams College and currently Fulbright Professor at the University of Munich, Germany. He has published Explanation from Physics to Theology: An Essay in Rationality and Religion (Yale U. P., 1989), and is currently working on a book manuscript, Toward a Pluralistic Metaphysics: Models of God in Early Modem Philosophy.

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I. Realism vs. Conventionalism

In the debate one has to deal with several different realisms and a variety of Putnams. Realisms run rampant these days; I focus on four here: (a) the so-called metaphysical realist holds that there is a mind-independent reality (MIR) to which we can have some sort of access. I will refer to this position as MIR-realism. (b) Advocates of MIR-realism may or may not hold that this reality is useful as a n epistemological tool, e.g., for justifying particular knowledge claims. When they hold that it is, we might call them justificatory (metaphysical) realists.4 (c) Putnam has defended internal or pragmatic realism, that is, the position t h a t there is good reason to construe our language realistically, even though we can only specify which objects the world consists of from within a particular theory. (d) Regulative realism makes its appearance in the final section (and proleptically throughout); it is the position that realist language serves a n indispensable role as a regulative principle, that is, as a statement of the intended ideal limit of our referential language. Even if one is skeptical regarding arguments for the convergence of language and reality, I argue, the postulation of some sort of convergence between our language and reality remains fundamental to our language use.

Let the term non-realism stand for the position(s) opposed to realism. It should follow that there will be in principle a variety of non-realisms, depending on which realism a particular critic takes to be unjustified or unintelligible. In the present discussion the non-realism that most often serves as sparring partner is conventionalism. More accurately, it is ontological conventionalism: the position that we create our realities, so that a realist construal of our language is never justified.5

There may be as many Putnams as realisms. I will follow Devitt in distinguishing three Putnams6 (taking worries about their correspondence to some imagined Real Putnam to be beside the point, at least for the latest Putnam). This paper analyzes three different (but related) authors: Early Putnam, defender of MIR-realism; Middle Putnam, troubled MIR-realist, already slipping; and Late Putnam (vintage Putnam?), internal or pragmatic realist.

All t he Pu tnams have opposed ontological conventionalism, which they take to be a n untenable position because self-refuting. “The Refutation of Conventionalism” (2:153ff), for instance, is a sustained

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attack on the notion of ontological relativity: Goodman (idealism generally) is wrong in moving from the fact that there are (observationally) equivalent descriptions to the conclusion that there is “no fact of the matter.” Siding with Goodman would entai l dispensing with the use of counterfactuals, as well as accepting some form of verificationism. But the fact that we observe no difference (between say, assertions t h a t do a n d do not support counterfactuals) is insufficient to prove tha t talk of a difference is nonsensical.

The ontological conventionalism here left behind is one well lost. It unnecessarily makes even semantic notions (reference, truth) theory-dependent. Further, i t cannot account for the reference of different theories to the same thing. With irony, Putnam has shown that conventionalists claim to know too much. Thinkers like Feyerabend claim to know that nothing could fix the extension of terms beyond the sorts of (conventional) parameters that they list; but this makes them closet essentialists (2162ff). Early Putnam’s ultimate reason for rejecting positivist conventionalisms was that they are based on a n “idealist or idealist-tending world view, and . . . that view does not correspond to reality” (2207). At bottom, conventionalism provides a n inadequate account of how we actually employ terms like reference and truth; it is a bad reconstruction of our language use.

On the other hand , one cannot defend particular knowledge claims simply by asserting that our language use directly mirrors reality, for we never actually speak of reality in the absence of a n interpretative framework. It is not hard to show that Early Putnam’s arguments against this sort of justificatory realist position (and later, his arguments against metaphysical realism tout court) depend crucially upon the pervasiveness of conceptual schemes. For example, the famous model-theoretic argument against metaphysical realism (3:l-25; MMS 125ff) begins from the fact that for every model some interpretation must be chosen. Similarly, the progress of any science depends on a wide array of interpretative decisions, which determine everything from decisions between theories to the reference of key observational terms (RTH 32ff).

Early Putnam believed he could still defend a causal realism in the face of CS arguments. But the problem with the Early Putnam’s realism, as the Late Putnam has effectively argued, is that it paid insufficient attention to the ubiquity of our dependence on CSs. The multitude of possible interpretive frameworks t h a t contributed to Quine’s

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underdeterminism thesis requires a much more radical response. For one, Early Putnam’s semantics remained rule- based (e.g., 2:126ff), which conflicted with the holism (the centrality of systematic concerns) defended by Quine. Where Putnam went right was that, as he became more and more aware of the impact of CSs, he still fought to hold onto the realism of his earlier theories of meaning and reference. Suppose it is the case that we cannot get outside of our conceptual structure without implying tha t we possess justified true beliefs about whatever world really is, and suppose that such knowledge claims are untenable. Might it not still be possible to preserve the realist intuitions that underlie metaphysical realism? What was right in the dying days of Putnam’s causal realism was his attempt to do just that. Crucial in this transitory Putnam, then-the one that actually had it right in the movement from the Scylla of justificatory realism to the Charybdis of internal realism- was the insistence that we hold onto both CS and world, without giving up either.

11. Against Internal Realism The “internal” or “pragmatic” realism (IR) of Late

Putnam, as is well known, is the position that the very idea of metaphysical realism is incoherent. That is, questions such as what a n object Really is, how to know the True reference of a word or sentence, or how to interpret the Objective Facts of the matter are wrongheaded from the start. Each locution presupposes a “God’s Eye point of view”; yet the very notion of Objective Reality appears no longer tenable as soon as we realize the interpretation- boundness of a l l our beliefs. All t h a t Pu tnam now countenances is the observation that, from within our CS, we still accept a referential orientation of our theories; our CS sti l l posits a world, albeit a world-under-an- interpretation. For Late Putnam, such theory-internal realism is all the realism one needs.

Many of the consequences of IR are ones familiar to readers of non-realist philosophies. Truth becomes a variant on warranted assertability, “idealized rational accept- ability.” We can accept a statement if it fits well with other statements that we hold, and truth is “perfect goodness of fit” (RTH, chap. 3). Talk of essences and unknowable things- in-themselves is banned: to claim more objectivity than we actually possess is to reintroduce the idea of a n Absolute Perspective, a move ruled out (among other things) by Einstein’s special relativity theory. Science can be said to

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progress, though the progress claim is relative to the conceptual scheme that scientists have decided to employ.

The problem is, IR gives up too much. Whatever the problems with MIR-realism (and they are serious), they are not conceptual. None of Putnam’s arguments force us to abandon the very idea of reference to some mind- independent reality (however much his rhetoric pushes us in this direction). Imagine for instance a MIR-realist who, like Putnam, posits a n ideal theory that meets all our operational constraints, but who is not a justificatory realist. By hypothesis, she, too, would hold that we could never observe anything about reality that would be inconsistent with such a theory. However, she is the more skeptical of the two: the ideal theory might still be false for, in Devitt’s phrase, “Being ideal is species-relative” (p. 186). That is, there is nothing contradictory in the supposition that there just may be aspects of reality that even the ideal human theory fails to grasp, or to grasp correctly.

A similar point can be made in defense of the intelligibility of causal realism. The causal realist may not be able to define ‘cause’ in a way that picks out one and only one relation between the causing reality and the caused term. But the non-internal realist does not need to hold that sentences containing the word ‘cause’ fix this relation; the causal relation itself fixes the relation (makes it true or false), whether our sentences pick it out correctly or Both of the last two examples suggest that IR is guilty of insufficiently distinguishing MIR-realism from justificatory realism. Putnam’s a t tack on “metaphysical” realism presupposes that MIR-realist talk is bankrupt if its former justificatory role collapses (e.g., RTH 63-4). Of course it is true that MIR-realism cannot still play a justificatory role if justificatory realism is untenable. But, as we will see, it is thoroughly plausible that MIR-realism could play roles other than epistemological.

The internal realist wants to eliminate ontological questions which arise in contexts that are not decidable. But this move, best intentions notwithstanding, must give our existing CS de facto control. Putnam will not delegate decisions about allowable questions to a final realist telos, or even to a future CS; must this not mean that such decisions can be made only from the perspective of the now- ruling CS? Yet if all theoretical progress is CS-relative, and the ideal of a reality on which various CSs converge drops out, it becomes difficult to see how IR really differs from the conventionalism that Putnam has so frequently attacked.

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Make no mistake: IR differs verbally from conventionalist positions. Putnam’s t ru th is “idealized ra t iona l acceptability” (RTH 49), or “correct assertability (under the right conditions)” (“SR” 198), or (with caveats) “being verified, or accepted, or accepted in the long run” (3:22n). Still, in each incarnation of what I shall call the idealization theory of truth, two elements recur: (1) Putnam emphasizes the conditions of acceptance for us. He makes (can make) no appeal to some possible correspondence with mind- independent states of affairs (thus the rhetorical flourish of the dreaded “God’s Eye Point of View”), but instead advances a concept of truth determined solely from within our own rationality. (2) In each case Putnam includes some appeal to “ideal” epistemic conditions or a perfect state of knowledge. This move reveals his wish that truth not be reduced to the coincidental parameters of one culture’s notion of rationality, to mere justification-here-and-now; for “truth is supposed to be a property of a statement that cannot be lost, whereas justification can be lost” (RTH 55). In this passage Putnam flirts with a convergence theory of truth: “We speak as if there were such things as epis- temically ideal conditions, and we call a statement ‘true’ if it would be justified under such conditions.” But such conditions, like the fiction of a frictionless plane, are never achieved; they function as a goal that we can approximate “to a very high degree of approximation.” Is Putnam claiming to know, then, that science is converging on the ideal?

If not, he holds something very much like regulative realism (below). But if so, I am skeptical that a convergence theory of scientific realism can provide the necessary grounds for a n idealization theory of truth. The painful fate of Popper’s analogous theory of verisimilitude revealed how difficult it is to speak of any sort of measurable convergence on truth when we cannot say of any particular statement that it is true. To the extent that Putnam has been unable to provide a n account of idealized rational acceptability, our contemporary conditions of acceptability may make no claim to approximate (or even connect with) some such ideals. In fact, the whole notion of idealized conditions, to the extent that they imply a final telos, sounds rather strange in the mouth of a n internal realist. Pearce and Rantala, for instance, have shown that the statement “ ‘Cow’ refers to cows,” which Putnam labels “analytic” from within a theory, must come out for Putnam as “meaningless or simply false,” insofar as its reference (to cows) on h is own

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assumptions is not absolute but only one of many possible interpretations of the meaning of the sentence.s

If Putnam cannot specify which statements are more than ‘acceptable for me,’ his criticisms of various relativismsg may come back to haunt him. This becomes progressively clearer as one moves through RHT. To take just one example: we judge (and, he claims, are justified in judging) that the Australians’ worldview is “crazy” if they believe that we all are brains in a vat because the guru of Sydney so teaches. Their belief is “incoherent for us,” which we ultimately judge “by ‘seat of the pants’ feel” (133). With this sort of bottom line, it seems impossible that any general standards for ‘idealized’ could ever be given. But if Putnam’s “perfect goodness of fit” threatens to become ‘goodness of fit (by our own lights),’ can it really amount to anything more than another way of worldmaking alongside the other samples outlined in Goodman’s irrealist manifesto?

The same point, it might be noted in passing, could be made by comparing Putnam and Dummett. Putnam speaks of the “inspiration” that he has received from Dummett’s work and uses it as a crucial transition into his own position (e.g., 3:xvi). Putnam has made the comparison simple for us (the same cannot be said of Dummett): for Dummett, “truth is justification”; for Putnam, t ru th is “idealized justification.” Clearly, the whole weight of the distinction between them rests on the one word ‘idealized.’ Either Putnam can give it content, or he can’t. If he can’t, his position dissolves into the conventionalism that he has resisted in Dummett’s work. Yet there seems no way that a n internal realist, working under the limitations imposed by the Late Putnam, could ever provide a theory of idealized conditions without ceasing to be internalist.

111. Conceptual-Scheme Realism

The groundwork for CS-realism has been nicely laid with Putnam’s help-even if his ground has a tendency to landslide into ontological conventionalism. Let us now look at CS-realism on its own, starting from the question of truth. The concept of truth can be called on to play either a n ontological or a n epistemological role. Once upon a time it marched under both banners: for most of the tradition after Aristotle, truth represented what is; at the same time, knowledge was glossed as justified true belief. Today, I will argue, (1) the link of justification and truth can no longer be maintained. ‘Skeptical’ considerations of the CS variety (familiar enough through Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, Quine,

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a n d others) have now removed truth’s formerly unproblematic l ink to epistemological discussions. Arguments against direct realism and correspondence claims, including those championed by Putnam, succeed in ruling out the epistemic use of appeals to truth or truth- connectedness. Epistemology therefore becomes the ‘science’ of warranted assertability. For instance, in natural science we have (comparatively) high warrant or probability (by our lights) for many of our assertions; we are successful with predictions and justified in the use of counterfactuals. But, given the failure of Putnam/Boyd’s convergence argument, such success is just as consistent with a n idealist or pragmatist construal of science, in short, with the view that the world does not consist of the entities posited by current science.ll Thus we cannot be said to know t h a t our warranted assertions are true. As a result, no direct epistemic appropriation or use can be made of the term ‘true.’

On the other hand, (2) truth need not be redefined in an internulist fashion. The CS insight does not compel one also to remove from the concept of t ru th its t radi t ional association with mind-independent reality. In fact, there is every reason not to do so. However much the CS perspective of (1) is stressed, it remains preferable to interpret the denotation of our theories and terms realistically: they mean to be ‘about’ the world. This is the intuition that every realist is scrambling to preserve. The contribution of Putnam’s career has been to show that some sort of realist construal of our language can be maintained without the untenable claim that we can justify specific correspondence claims either individually or as a whole. This insight-the idea of juxtaposing theses (1) and (2)-is the hard core of conceptual- scheme realism.

However, with this insight we also reach the point where the two kinds of CS-realism, internal and regulative, part company. I have maintained that there is nothing incoherent in the idea of traditional MIR-realism, that Putnam confuses a n epistemic with a conceptual difficulty. The optimal solution would involve bypassing these epistemic difficulties, approaching the question from another angle. And exactly this is the logic behind defending MIR-realism (or truth) as entailed by the human knowledge endeavor and, in this sense, as regulative for our epistemic practice.

IV. In Defense of Regulative Realism

In opening I defined a regulative principle as a statement of the intended ideal limit of our (referential) language which

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guides linguistic usage. Truth, I wish to claim, is best understood as a regulative principle necessarily implied in any process of seeking knowledge. Except for a crucial limitation, Putnam also has defended the merit of some such principles. Recall that his IR amounts to the position that truth is not equivalent to rational assertability now but is an “idealization” of ra t ional aceptability. Hence his assertion, “we speak as if there were such things as epistemically ideal conditions, and we call a statement “true” if it would be justified under such conditions.”12 This position is not far removed from the postulation of a handful of broadly regulating conditions for human inquiry.

Here is the limitation. Internalists deny that a regulative theory can speak meaningfully of a ‘true’ or ‘objective’ ideal telos which is anyth ing more t h a n ideal verification according to our epistemic standards. A regulative principle of ideal correspondence to what is Really (noumenally) the case would be “unintelligible.” Putnam’s sufficient reason: the “ideal theory, by our lights” could not turn out to be false; to assert this possibility is to assert nothing whatever. But this will not wash: a false ideal theory is only unintelligible under the assumption of a verificationist theory of meaning. Indeed, Putnam confesses that he is still drawn to verificationism as a semantics or theory of understanding (MMS 129). Though a long discussion is required (and can be found, inter alia, in the literature on Dummett), I see nothing to compel us to construe meaning using only verificationist methods. In what follows I shall attack such positions not head-on but by defending a different version of CS-realism on its own terms.

Regulative realism involves a pragmatized Kantian theory of truth, a wedding of Kantian and Peircean insights; for this reason it slips between the metaphysical and internalist horns that realists have consistently impaled themselves on. The position accepts the pervasive role of conceptual schemes: we speak from within perspectives or interpreted systems, and the intended link between our words and their referents can no longer be taken as unproblematic. As a result, we cannot use MIR-realist claims as direct units of epistemic measurement for existing theories. Instead, realism (or truth) is taken as a regulative condition of discourse oriented to knowledge or understanding. Realism receives its warrant not by justifying portions of a theory or even theories as a whole, but through the inevitable role it plays in our discourse about theories that are about the world. The distinction goes back to Kant, who separated

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constitutive statements (e.g., statements within physics about the lawlike behavior of bodies) from regulative ones (statements about the nature and conditions of scientific inquiry in general). In a more recent appropriation, Simon Blackburn defends the distinction “between accepting the maxim of inquiring into nature as though every event has a cause, on the one hand, and believing it to be the case that every event has a cause, on the other.”13

From the perspective of this distinction, internal realists appear as both too optimistic and too skeptical. Too optimistic, because they try to specify ideal in terms of theories and by means of an epistemic use of ‘convergence’: we can use idealized terms (a frictionless plane) as long as our practice approximates them “to a very high degree of approximation.” But it is not clear t h a t there is a n unproblematic while still helpful sense in which we can speak of some theories as being truer than others. Yet such thinkers are also too skeptical, because they believe themselves compelled to give up the ideal of MIR-realism completely. As we saw, this move is not required if we can reinstate MIR-realism as a semantic notion regulating our linguistic practice, without using it as a tool for justification.

Regulative realism thus turns on a sort of pragmatic transcendental argument.14 In entering into the search for the t ruth of some matter, we implicitly posit a final conclusion to our inquiry, at which (if it were reached) our epistemic s tandards would converge, our various disagreements would be overcome, and justified belief would equal true belief.15 This view claims neither that such a n ultimate consensus will occur, nor that science can be proven to be progressing toward (converging upon) this ideal. I take agnosticism on this question to have been part of Peirce’s convergence theory as well: “Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth.”lG

Given its unwillingness to presume convergence as a fact, the regulating concept of a final truth might then have to be labeled a fiction: in our inquiry we act as i f we are converging on a final truth.17 That regulative realism can be called a fiction shows that it is not a thesis about the way that the world is; it is not a hypothesis alongside theories about electron properties or the constituents of DNA or physical cosmology. Instead, it operates on a different level,

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viz:, as a n account of what is presupposed in the very activity of engaging in inquiry. To dismiss an analysis of the assumptions of scientific activity because they are empirically unverifiable would be patently absurd.

But why introduce convergence at all; why not construe truth as merely a fiction or descriptive label for our present understanding? Because truth has its normative side, its aspect that points beyond the present contingent practices of our linguistic community. This is the insight that spawned Putnam’s strange breed of normative internalism, his introduction of “idealized” in f ront of “rat ional acceptability.” Tha t philosophers now have difficulty analyzing the correspondence (word-world) relation does not negate the normative component in the truth concept. Instead, it suggests to us that we cash out the normativity in a different fashion. In broad outline, the change has involved a shift to theories based on coherence rather than correspondence.18 Assuming t h a t the general shift to coherence is justified, there are good reasons to look to pragmatics, the analysis of how we discourse about theories. First, there is little sign of progress on the more formal questions of what exactly coherence is and why it should be truth-indicative.19 Second, statements about linguistic practice can be normative and yet can be made without needing to place oneself outside language as in the case of correspondence claims. Last, necessary or ideal conditions of inquiry seem perfectly suited to convey our intuitions about the normative component of inquiry, namely that in it we are trying to “get the world right” and can err in the process. The agreement on which investigators would finally converge therefore represents the ideal outcome of the process of inquiry (hence the content of truth), and the techniques that foster reasoned convergence of opinion represent ideal means of inquiry (hence necessary criteria for truth).

If realism is a fiction, then, it is one that is both useful and (in some sense) necessary. With Kant, we could say that without truth as a n idea of reason, we would not have science at all. For science as a corporate intellectual project aims to achieve consensus of understanding based on the discovery of an order of reality independent of the inquiry community. But regulative arguments need not be limited to scientific inquiry. Arguably, the same holds for all discourse aimed at understanding.20 Perhaps the argument can be grounded in the very structure of assertions themselves: to assert is to predicate something (a quality) of something (an

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object). Thus each individual judgment aims at a posited correspondence between what is asserted and what is held to be the case. That the verification of this act is beyond our ken does not prove tha t we meant something less by assertions in the first place. Whether in predication, or in science as the organized pursuit of knowledge, or in our more specific methodological assumptions (such as the epistemic value of replicability), we make regulative use of concepts for which we have (can have) no substantive proof. Without these assumptions, there might still be isolated judgments and empirical generalizations. But without them there would be no organized inquiry as we know it.21

NOTES

1 See Pater French, T. E. Uehling, Jr., and H. K. Wettstein, eds., Realism and Antirealism, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 12 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988).

2 Putnam, “Three Kinds of Scientific Realism” (henceforth ‘SR’), Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982), pp. 199-200. Other abbreviations used in the text are: ‘MMS’ for Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: RKP, 1978); ‘RTH’ for Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: CUP, 1981); and ‘MFR’ for The Many Faces of Realism (LaSalle: Open Court, 1987). All references preceded by a volume number are to Putnam’s Philosophical Papers, 3 vols.; cited are vol. 2, Mind, Language and Reality (CUP, 1978) and vol. 3, Realism and Reason (CUP, 1983).

3 In addition to the philosophical importance of Putnam’s work, one also gets one’s money’s worth from him insofar as he has provided interesting arguments for a t least three different positions on realism over the years. Putnam holds the prize for having rejected more of his own positions than most philosophers formulate during their careers.

4 Or, less kindly, ‘hyper-metaphysical’ realists. Hartry Field’s article, “Realism and Relativism,” The Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982), pp. 553- 567, remains one of the clearest defenses of the separability of metaphysical and justificatory realisms.

5 It is not difficult to show that ontological conventionalism bears important similarities to various forms of idealism (the view that objects are mind-constructed); see J. J. C. Smart, “Realism v. Idealism,” Philosophy 61 (1986), pp. 295-312; and Joseph Margolis, “Cognitive Issues in the Realist- Idealist Dispute,” in Peter French et al., eds., Studies in Epistemology, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 5 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1980). But the term ‘idealism’ is so ambiguous and has such a diverse history that it should either be examined at length or not used a t all.

6 See Michael Devitt, “The Renegade Putnam,” Chap. 11 of Realism and Truth (Princeton, 1984). The Devitt reference below is also to this work.

7 See Clark Glymour, “On Conceptual Scheming, or Confessions of a Metaphysical Realist,” Synthese 51 (1982), p. 177.

8 David Pearce and Veikko Rantala, “Realism and Reference,” Synthese

9 For example, in Putnam, “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized,” 3:229ff. 10 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). 11 For a review of the difficulties with the convergence argument see Larry

Laudan, “A Confutation of Convergent Realism,” in Jarrett Leplin, ed., Scientific Realism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984). Margolis has

52 (1982), pp. 439-448.

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given an important defense of the idealist position; see note 5 above. On pragmatism see, e.g., Michael Bradie, “Pragmatism and Internal Realism,” Analysis 39 (1979), pp. 4-10.

12 Putnam, RTH 55. Note also that he writes in “SR” as if a regulative view were part and parcel of his own internalist scientific realism.

13 Simon Blackburn, “Truth, Realism, and the Regulation of Theory,” Studies in Epistemology (note 5 above), p. 363. Blackburn rej&Ets the convergence condition, whereas I argue that a convergence of positions must be at least posited within a regulative view of inquiry.

14 It is interesting to note that Putnam claims his own (slightly different) position also rests on a transcendental argument: “arguing about the nature of rationality is a n activity tha t presupposes a notion of rational justification wider t han the positivist notion, indeed wider t han institutionalized criteria1 rationality” (3:191). I believe that the outcome of the lengthy discussion on the nature of transcendental arguments has justified a sense of ‘necessity’ weaker than Kant’s but strong enough for formulating quasi-transcendental arguments, that is, lists of probable conditions presupposed by a given type of human practice or inquiry.

15 Cf. Kant on the regulative employment of ideas: they can be used for “directing the understanding towards a certain goal upon which the routes marked out by all its rules converge, as upon their point of intersection,” Critioue of Pure Reason, tr. N. K. Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965). A644jB672.

l6 C. S. Peirce. Collected PaDers. 5.565. emDh. mine. An effective defense - I

of this reading has been given by Peter Skagestad, The Road of Inquiry: Charles Peirce’s Pragmatic Realism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1981), esp. pp. 75ff.

17 Of course, ‘fiction’ cannot imply that we know convergence claims to be false: if the necessity of convergence cannot be proved, certainly its impossibility cannot either. So-called ‘hypothetical realism’ bears some affinities to my position here, as long as its convergence remains a hypothesis and not a disguised knowledge claim.

18 Influential statements of this position include Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, and Nicholas Rescher, The Coherence Theory of Truth (Oxford Clarendon, 1973).

l9 But see Lorenz Puntel’s major work, Grundlagen einer Theorie der Wahrheit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), forthcoming in English from de Gruyter.

20 Jurgen Habermas has made the case for this claim in the first volume of The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984), ch. 1.

21 This paper has profited from criticisms from Simon Blackburn, Peter Lipton, Lorenz Puntel, Edward Stein, and an anonymous reader for this Journal.

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