Putnam's paradox: Metaphysical realism revamped and evaded

Nous-Supplement: Philosophical Perspectives

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 17-42

  Van Fraassen, Bas C ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 35348826174     PISSN: 15208583     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (18)

1. "Realism and reason", Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, December 1976; reprinted in his Meaning and the Moral Sciences, 1978, pp. 123-140.
2. David K. Lewis "Putnam's Paradox", Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62 (1984), 221-236.
3. For extensive discussion, see D. Lewis, "New work for a theory of universals", Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (1983), 343-377
4. and e.g. my Laws and Symmetry (Oxford 1989), Ch. 3, section 5, and Elgin (see below).
5. As Lewis notes, Putnam explicitly rejects Lewis' response to his model theoretic argument (cf. H. Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge 1981), p. 53).
6. As Lewis also notes, the antinominalist solution was first discussed (but not advocated) by Gary Merrill, "The model-theoretic argument against realism", Philosophy of Science 47 (1980), 69-81.
7. Catherine Z. Elgin, "Unnatural science", Journal of Philosophy 92 (1995), 289-302;
8. see also my "Elgin on Lewis' Putnam's Paradox", Journal of Philosophy, 94 (1997), 85-93.
9. David K. Lewis, "How to define theoretical terms", Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970), 427-446;
10. reprinted as Chapter Six of his Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1986); citations are from p. 79, 80. These passages are part of Lewis's response to John Winnie's argument that every theory must have multiple realizations; Winnie's argument relies on variation in the extensions of the Old terms.
11. See J. Winnie, "The Implicit Definition of Theoretical Terms", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 18 (1967); 223-229.
12. As Lewis also notes in "Putnam's Paradox", and as had been pointed out by W. Demopoulos and M. Friedman ("Critical Notice: Bertrand Russell's The Analysis of Matter: its Historical Context and Contemporary Interest", Philosophy of Science 52 (1985), 621-639)
13. this was exactly the criticism that had earlier been given by M.H.A. Newman of Russell's structuralism, in his "Mr. Russell's 'Causal Theory of Perception'" Mind 37 (1928), 137-148.
14. The sentence "'Paul is a cat' is true if and only if Paul is a cat", as understood by me, is false in that other envisaged situation. We are here envisaging a possible situation in which people use "cat" as a word for e.g. gnats, but would of course themselves also assert the sentence (= wellformed bit of syntax) "'cat' is a word for cats". When we describe that situation, all the words we use have their normal everyday meaning. But some of those words we also mention; those we mention, we say, have a different meaning in that other situation. Accordingly, the general format for discussion of truth becomes A, as understood in x, is true in y. There exists a hybrid of semantics and pragmatics called "two-dimensional semantics", in which such distinctions are represented in a certain way. I used to be enamored of it more than I am now. See my "The only necessity is verbal necessity" (Journal of Philosophy 74 (1977), pp. 71-85) for, among other applications, a sort of semantic representation of the sentences I would now classify as pragmatic tautologies.
15. This problem has so far been studied mainly in connection with another controversial candidate for the status of pragmatic tautology: the Reflection Principle for subjective probability ("It seems very likely to me that it will rain tomorrow, on the supposition that tomorrow morning it will seem very likely to me that it is going to rain"). See my "Belief and the Will" (Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984), pp. 235-256)
16. and "Belief and the problem of Ulysses and the Sirens" (Philosophical Studies 77 (1995), 7-37).
17. For the sake of example I am here pretending that Dutch and English are two separate languages in actu. I usually think of one's language as everything one has learned to speak, and of natural language as consisting in all the resources we have for speaking and writing. See my "The World We Speak Of, and the Language We Live In", pp. 213-221.
18. Philosophy and Culture: Proc. of the XVII-th World Congress of Philosophy, Montreal 1983 (Montreal: Editions du Beffroi, 1986).