Why There Isnt a ReadyMade World

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Why There Isnt a Ready-Made World
Vincent Urso PHH3600

• by Hilary Putnam

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Hilary Whitehall Putnam

• Born in Chicago in 1926 and lived in France until
  1934.
• After graduating from the University of
  Pennsylvania he obtained his Ph.D. from the
  University of California in 1951.
• Taught at Northwestern, Princeton and MIT, before
  becoming professor of mathematical logic and
  philosophy at Harvard.

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Works by Hilary Putnam
Over his career Hilary Putnam published many
papers and wrote several books. Some of his
works include

• Philosophical Papers
• Realism with a Human Face
• Reason Truth and History
• Representation and Reality
• Renewing Philosophy
• Pragmatism
• Why There Isnt a Ready-Made World

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Early Philosophy

• Focuses on philosophy of science and mathematics.
• In The Nature of Mental States (1967) Putnam
  supports machine functionalism, the idea that
  mental states are computational, and compares
  them to a Turing Maching. Supported the idea
  that the nature of mental states depends on
  organization rather than composition.
• In Meaning and Reference (1973) Putnam argues
  for a causal theory of reference in which words
  refer directly through their causal connections
  rather than through some Fregean sense.

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Later Philosophy

• Focuses on the reconciliation of values and
  science. He no longer supports machine
  functionalism.
• Argues that there can be no fact/value
  distinction because there can be no interest-free
  description of facts.
• Argues against the idea that science can describe
  the world as it is independently of the mind, and
  rejects an absolute conception of reality.
• Supports internal realism, a view in between
  metaphysical realism and relativism.

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Why There Isnt a Ready-Made World

• In this paper Putnam argues against the
  materialist version of metaphysical realism, the
  idea that there is an absolutely
  mind-independent, ready-made world.
• Metaphysical realism requires a definite
  correspondence between sentences and states of
  affairs or between words and objects Putnam
  argues that such a correspondence is impossible.
• Putnam examines different questions to structure
  his argument
• Can the appropriate notion of correspondence be
  understood in terms of causality?
• Can the claim that objects have essential
  properties be used to support materialism?
• Can reference be defined physically?
• To conclude his paper Putnam suggests internal
  realism as an alternative to metaphysical
  realism.

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Causal Correspondence

• The metaphysical realist believes that we can
  think and talk about things independently of our
  minds due to a correspondence between the terms
  we use and mind-independent entities.

• This correspondence is seen as a sort of
  causal relation. Meaning that to refer to an
  object you must have a causal transaction of the
  appropriate type with that object.
• Therefore, according to this view, we can
  easily refer to physical things, but reference to
  numbers, sets, moral values, or anything not
  physical is problematic, if not impossible.

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Essential Properties

• Lockes rejection of substantial forms
  presaged the idea that there are no essential
  properties.
• Locke argued that the terms we use to classify
  things are not in any sense the real essences
  of those things.
• In our minds are conventional marks
  (properties) that we put together into a
  descriptive idea based on certain interests we
  have. However, the idea that these conventional
  marks are the real essence of anything is
  unwarranted.
• It only makes sense to speak of an essential
  property of something relative to a description.

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Problems with Metaphysical Realism

• The notion of correspondence is a problem in
  metaphysical realism.
• There are many different ways of putting the
  signs of a language and things in a set in
  correspondence to one another.
• Knowing this, how do we pick any one
  correspondence between our words and the
  mind-independent things without having access to
  the mind-independent things?
• Kants answer we cant
• We cannot pick out any one correspondence
  because to do so one would need to already be
  able to think about the correspondence, which
  exists outside of the mind.
• If we cannot grasp the correspondence directly,
  then no mental act can give anymore insight as to
  be able to single out a correspondence.

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The Total Failure of Materialism

• To say materialism is almost true the world
  is completely describable in the language of
  physics plus the one little added notion that
  some events intrinsically explain other events
  would be ridiculous.
• If events intrinsically explain other events, if
  there are saliencies, relevancies, standards of
  what are normal conditions, and so on, built
  into the world itself independently of minds,
  then the world is in many ways like a mind, or
  infused with something very much like reason.
• And if that is true, materialism cannot be true.