Hillary Putnam - Ethics Without Ontology (my review!)

This is a series of lectures by one of the most recognizable contemporary philosophers, Hillary Putnam, from 2004. In one sense, it is an introduction to the study of ontology - but it's also Putnam's asnwer to the question whether ethical judgements can be objective. It's a very provoking and captivating text, meant to be read by a general philosophical audience.

In a nutshell, Putnam distinguishes two types of ontology: one posits the existence of things that are unknown to perception and common sense, such as Platonic forms or the Good, which Putnam calls inflationary ontology - because it inflates the set of existing things. The other type is called deflationary ontology, and Putnam distinguishes two variants, one is reductionism ("A" is nothing but "B") the other eliminationism ("A" is an illusion).

Examples of reductionism would include nominalism (properties are nothing but names), utilitarianism (goodness is nothing but pleasure), atomism (the world is nothing but void and atoms). Examples of eliminationism would be Berkeley's idealism (the material world is an illusion), another sort of nominalism (properties don't exist), etc.

Against all that, Putnam forward his own view, called pragmatic pluralism, stating that in philosophising we employ many different kinds of discourses - "language games" in the Wittgensteinian sense - and it's an illusion to think that just one language game would be sufficient for describing all of reality! That leads him to argue that the ontology we choose to describe the world is just a matter of convention, rather than superiority of one way over another (conceptual relativity). Moreover, we can use many ways of describing the world without being able to reduce one way to another (conceptual pluralism). An example would be describing a room with an ontology of furniture vs. an ontology of fields and subatomic particles. The first description loses something of the second and vice versa. There's no ultimate ontology in which to describe the room.

That leads us to the question of whether objectivity is possible without reference to objects. Traditionally it is held that if a claim is objectivitely true, then there have to be some objects to which the claim corresponds. And if there's no obvious natural objects, there have to be some non-natural objects to which the claim corresponds (forms, numbers, goodness, etc.). What Putnam argues, however, is that logical, mathematical and ethical truths don't describe the world, but are more closely related to the notion of conceptual truth. Let's take the claim that the sum of the inner angles of a triangle is 180°. Well, the claim is taken to be true only in euclidean geometry. What makes it "true" is not some reference to geometric objects, but rather, inner conceptual relations. So, accepting the claim is a matter of accepting the procedures by which we do geometry.

Hillary Putnam

In the same way logical and mathematical truths are accounted for, not as descriptions of anything, but rather acquired agreements as to how to go about doing logics and mathematics. In the same sense ethical truths, Putnam contends, aren't a description of the world, but rather something that is related to the conventions about how to go about the study of ethics. All of those truths are corrigible.

The only truths that do describe something, are according to Putnam scientific truths, which consequently present us with a certain ontological commitment. According to the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument, for example, accepting the truth of scientific theories also commits us, along physical entities that it describes, to the existence of mathematical entities, which play a central role in the way our sci. theories are formulated. This is so, because it's the only kind of truth that does indeed describe the world.

Everyday language, for example, makes reference to certain entities and predicates that are indispensable, but according to Quine, have no ontological significance. That's because everyday language does not operate within a theory that aims to accurately describe the world. Since logics, mathematics and ethics don't describe the world aswell, but merely establish conceptual relations, the entities they posit have no real ontological significance either.


REFLECTION: Putnam, at this point in his career, seems to be accepting of some "wholesale" kind of scientific realism, meaning that it seems to be commiting intself to the truth of most claims a (successful & mature) theory is making. He clearly states that he's reluctant to "become an instrumentalist" (which is a kind of scientific anti-realism), but doesn't foresee that many kinds of scientific realism would completely reject the notion of ontological commitment (such as structure realism or even entity realism, which only commits to "manipulatable" things). Philosophers that would follow Putnam in his idea of scientific ontological commitment, would be rather in a minority. However, I think he makes a very insightful point with the notion of "conceptual truth", and while I'm not quite persuaded, I must admit there's something very powerfully intuitive behind it.