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Introduction |
Putnam on The Threefold Cord |
Questions and Answers |
Transcript of Friday Forum, February 11:
Hilary Putnam on The Threefold Cord
Professor Hillary Putnam:
Thank you. It turns out that when you try to write about perception you get entangled… I feel for you back there. The one time I tried to come to one of these events was when my dear friend Martha Nussbaum was speaking and I came at what I thought was just about on time, and I ended up just about where Marty is right now. [laughter] That’s the way it is… But… it’s hamish, anyway. You get involved in just about every one of the great issues of philosophy. And, in fact, I’ve come to realize that differences about perception are much more central even to understanding classical philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy, which was a hobby of mine and something that conversations with Martha Nussbaum when she was still here and discussion meetings in her apartment helped very much with the beginning of my serious work in Greek philosophy. And yet, it is rarely told that way, partly because a certain picture of perception was coercive over almost all of Greek thought, with the great and shiny exception of Aristotle, and almost the same picture has been coercive over what’s called modern philosophy, by which, strangely, we mean philosophy after Descartes. Philosophy is the only field in which "the modern" goes back to the 16th century.
But, in fact, it was not original. In fact, for a long time -- because the profession has these fads -- it is very hard to resist being swept along with them. And although perception was a very central topic -- I’m in my early seventies [and] perception was a very central topic when I was in graduate school -- it became, in a way, unfashionable. I mean, by perception I don’t mean cognitive science, I don’t mean neurology, I mean serious philosophical thinking about perception. Today, philosophers tend to be… who think are interested in perception tend to defer to neurologists and cognitive scientists who are themselves amateur philosophers, and with the emphasis on amateur. So, you now have the interesting spectacle of trained philosophers deferring to amateur philosophers who know a lot of facts, but are still amateur philosophers… And I became… and I began… And actually the suggestion that what was wrong with the position I tried to defend for a number of years -- a position on realism called "internal realism" -- what was wrong was a certain naïveté about perception [which] was made to me by one of the world’s great theoretical physicists, not by a professional philosopher: Faiza Gomez of the Center for Research in Madrid and Lucerne, who I got to know originally when he visited Harvard, at a conference in Madrid many years ago said : "Maybe the answer to your problems about realism is Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia" My instant response was: Even if Austin was right -- which I didn’t believe at that time -- it wouldn’t have helped. But I later came to see that he was right. So it is interesting, in a way, that it took -- the emperor has no clothes phenomenon -- an amateur, a gifted amateur, to set me on the right track.
Also, as you will notice, if you buy this book -- which I hope you all will -- it owes debts to both William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein. And that may look like a really odd couple. In some ways it is. At times, certainly, James has metaphysical speculations which I think Wittgenstein would deeply disapprove of, but their attitude towards perception, I think, is remarkably similar. What, I think, William James called a "natural realism of the common man" is, I think, an attitude which Wittgenstein would have approved of. Also, I myself think that even if… the question of whether Wittgenstein was an anti-metaphysical philosopher is in a certain way an open question. Maybe he intended to be, but I’m not… my question… I don’t intend… I don’t pose that question as a question about Wittgenstein’s intentions. In fact, I think that some of Wittgenstein’s weakest remarks are his attempts to describe what he is doing. It’s very hard to describe what you are doing, and when he drives us to, so to speak, the meta-level about himself, you know, I often find that he seems to be missing a lot about himself that I find the most interesting. But in any case, I see Wittgenstein both as urging a return to what James called "the natural realism of the common man," and coupling that with a second thought which you also find all over the place in William James. That thought is associated by mind with the word a "motley."
Wittgenstein famously used it in describing mathematics. He said: "Mathematics is a motley." Now, not at all the way say, Russell or Frege, the great founders of modern logic, or Van Quine here at Harvard view mathematics. Mathematics looks to them anything like a motley. You have a small number… You look for a small number of axioms, the smallest possible number, a small number of abstract entities -- the more abstract the better -- and mathematics is just the working out of the consequences of this tiny group of axioms, using nothing but formal logic. And yet, if you look … I was… by the way, [I] had a second career as a mathematician, and if you look at the actual practice of mathematics, Wittgenstein is unquestionably right. It’s an enormous number of different activities, which overlap but which have very, very divergent aims, methods, goals -- what you talk about, how you think, may be utterly different from one branch of mathematics to another. And, in fact, it is more a motley than Wittgenstein himself knew, because his knowledge of mathematics… he had an engineering degree... in the Vienna phonebook he listed himself as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect. (laughter). The more you know mathematics, the more you see the motley. And of course, Wittgenstein didn’t mean that only mathematics is a motley, he would have said science is a motley. All this talk about the philosophy of science…no matter which way the sense of proprietorship; I am a philosopher of science, but I am always bothered by the notion/ the kind of proprietorship which goes both ways: sometimes the philosophy of science suggests that the philosophers own science -- Karl Popper -- whoever can tell the scientists what they are really doing and sometimes the proprietorship goes the other way, this claims to be... logical positivism claims to be the scientist…the philosophy that the scientists have, so the scientist can tell the philosopher what the philosopher should be doing. And Wittgenstein would certainly have said that science is a motley, which we tend to forget too much.
Sometimes we make very little inroads, I mean Jerry Fodor, who I agree with on this, said years ago that you can’t reduce the so-called special sciences like economics or geology to physics. The idea that you can really define terms like "mountain," for that matter, or terms like "glacier" rigorously in the language of physics is an illusion. The… the… the texture -- so to speak -- of the language is entirely different. It’s not that geology conflicts with physics, nor that geological entities are mysterious transcendental entities; mountains and glaciers are not transcendental, but the alternative isn’t either they are transcendental or we’ve got to have a total reduction. Although Fodor himself thinks we’ve got to have a reduction of semantics to the non-semantical, without argument, by the way. At that point he himself succumbs to the "either reduction or nothing." I mean this issue… the Pittsburgh philosopher for many years, Wilfrid Sellars, posed the issue very sharply. I think he came down on the opposite side, but he said: "Well, you know, to the layman nothing is more real than these sorts of objectives. This thing is massive, has a certain feel; if you’re not careful you can sometimes get a paper cut. It’s black. Sometimes I heard…somewhere I heard someone use the term for the colors as we actually see them as "sensuous": it’s "sensuously" black or "sensuously" beige. I guess Sellars -- I’ve never done this -- but I guess Sellars must have poured cranberry juice in an ice-cube tray, because he kept using the example of a pink ice cube. Well, let’s suppose we do that, all right, are there really pink ice cubes? And he said no, not really, because science has shown… because the ordinary concept idea of a pink ice cube requires that it be solid all the way through, but the scientific object is not solid, is mainly empty space, something that Newton already pointed out. It’s not really colored and, of course, we’ve been told that the particles of physics are not really colored, for several centuries now. So that we have two images of the world: The scientific image -- and of course when you use a phrase like the "scientific image," as Sellars said, you don’t think of science as a motley -- there is just the scientific image. And there is the manifest image, the world we all live in. And the manifest image, Sellars claimed, is false.
Now, almost all of my philosophical life I’ve been battling that idea, that the manifest image is false. But that’s immensely hard to do. Consider -- to bring it to perception again -- consider what happens when I look at that pink ice cube. The ancient Greeks already, again with the exception of Aristotle, thought that -- except those that are materialists -- and both the Stoics and the Deomocritians were materialists -- had thought that what happens is that a little picture is created somewhere in my body. Of course it goes with that… although the Greeks didn’t use the term consciousness, or any term that you can translate as consciousness … that goes with the idea that consciousness extends to that picture inside you and not beyond. Suddenly perception becomes not a mode of access to the world, but only a mode of access to a kind of movie screen between you and the world; this is something Sellars himself pointed out. So there is a deep tension between the different aspects of Sellars’ thought.
The Greeks used the word tuposis, which is literally the stamp made by a signet ring, when you sign your name by pressing your signet in hot wax. You make an impression. Impression is the English from the Latin word that corresponds to the Greek tuposis. So a picture or an impression, and all we extend to is these pictures. And today neurologists sometimes claim they have found these pictures in this or that part of the brain. Usually some small group of neurons, firing under certain simulations. So they were right in some way: you could have a sense statum in a test tube. Just cut out that little piece of the brain, support it properly with nutrients, hook it up to the proper wires, and lo and behold, there’s this sense statum in this test tube.
Now, there’s something very funny about this. On the one hand, all this is driven by two ideas: one, that the scientific image is the whole story about reality. The pluralism that I found in William James and in Wittgenstein, the idea that science is a motley, and not just science, our language is a motley, and since all our thinking is in words, even when we write poems, not just our scientific thinking, but even when we write poems or listen to music, or pray, if you pray, we are using words; and all of our thoughts are altered by the fact that they are conceptualized. As James says in one place, when we recognize a material object, what you have isn’t pure sensation or pure thought, but thought and sensation fused. And in this world... if language is a motley then thought is a motley, it isn’t all of one kind. And we have a motley of kinds of discourse, some of which are bad kinds of discourse, but even when we peel away the ones… the racist nonsense, the jargon, the advertising, the enormous and systematic and paid for misuse of language and manipulation of thought, you won’t, when you get rid of the nonsense, as Hume’s ambition wants to do, you won’t, at the ends, be left with one kind of thought, or one -- to use a technical term of Wittgenstein -- with just one language game. Wittgenstein said somewhere -- and I use it as the epigraph as one of my books -- "Let us be human." And as long as we manage to be human, as long as we don’t turn it into 1984, in a metaphorical sense, the Orwellian sense, in which fortunately 1984 has not yet arrived, you are going to have, and have to have, for the sake of your humanity, an enormous number of different language games, and the temptation… There will always be those who insist that all but one are illusion, the way Sellars said that the whole manifest image is an illusion.
But now, if one is to defend this kind of view… Well, what kind of view am I talking about? Aristotle thought that, for example, in perception, what you see is real. That is to say that this really is a shiny orange. There really are orange things there. We are in perception of properties like this… (sound fading briefly)… or forms, form is only one of the translations of the Greek word idea, sometimes translated "idea," but it’s somewhere between what today we use "property" for and what we use "concept" for, except that I think that Aristotle rightly opposes the dichotomy, which has become coercive in our minds, between a concept and a property. But, Aristotle says, no, in perception, contrary to all these scientific friends, like Democritus, we are actually aware of properties of the things. But the coercive view has been somewhat different. It is so ridiculous that it is rarely stated explicitly. Perhaps the only one with characteristics daring to state it explicitly was Bertrand Russell, and he was at once laughed at, because when you’ve stated it in such a way that it is obviously ridiculous, you always say "it is not my view." But Russell once said: "When you look at a red object, it is not the object that is red, it’s a part of your brain that’s red." Now, what was going on there? What was going on there was that Russell perceived that, on the one hand, part of the official story -- I’ve put out one of the official story I am combating; I really only have time to tell you the view that I am combating, and the common sense view that I am defending, to get the arguments, you got to buy the book -- part of the view I am combating is that the real truth about the world, the whole truth about the world, is the scientific image. We need a manifest image to get around, but we don’t need to take it seriously. A second part of the view is that science has told us, since Newton, that what’s out there has no color. This is the famous story about the secondary qualities not really being out there. But now, so where is the color? You can’t deny all reality to the red you think you see. So well, for Descartes, that was no problem, Descartes was a dualist, it’s in the mind. But now we are told it is unscientific to be dualist. We are told the mind is the brain. So if the color is in the mind and the mind is in the brain, then the color is in the brain. So what’s "sensuously" colored, the way you thought the book was, is a brain process. But wait a minute, if a brain process can be colored, contrary to common sense, why can’t a book be colored, in accordance with common sense? Where did we go wrong?
This branches out in all kinds of directions. It branches out, for example, into questioning whether, granted that neurologists discover the mechanisms that make it possible for us to be conscious, is consciousness itself, in the first instance, something like a substance, a mysterious kind of paint that is painted over parts of the brain? Or is it a relation between an organism and the world? Should we start… All philosophy is started as if the most typical case of consciousness of dreaming, or perhaps hallucination. What happens if you start with the idea that the fundamental case of consciousness isn’t dreaming, isn’t hallucination, isn’t being mistaken or fooled, that consciousness is in the first instance consciousness of aspects of the environment? What happens if we go back to what James called the "natural realism of the common man?" What does that do to our whole view of epistemology, on the one hand, and since metaphysics is always driven by epistemological assumptions, what does it do to metaphysics? And what does it do… And if you change your view of the mind-world relation in this way, if you think of the mind-world relation -- to use a term of John Dewey’s, another of my heroes -- if the mind-world relation is transactional, if perception is in the first instance, not a state, but a transaction, and a transaction that involves the world, which means my identity, if the identity of all my thoughts depends on the world, then I am, in a sense,… to identify me with just my body is in a sense to make an artificial cut from a living transaction whose boundaries are vague and wide. And so you get a different view of the mind-body relation.
Finally, to say where the title came from. The title of the book came from a line in Ecclesiastes or Kohelet which I was very struck by when I read it: "A threefold cord is not easily broken." What I want is a view in which the relation between mind, world, and body, is one that’s not easily broken. And I should last say that it’s… the book is dedicated to a dear friend who I seduced into leaving mathematics for philosophy; when he was an undergraduate, he took my math logic course at Princeton University and became… changed his major to philosophy. George Boolos, who died four years ago and I’ve dedicated to him with a line of Yeats.
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Introduction |
Putnam on The Threefold Cord |
Questions and Answers |
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