Is Pragmatic Realism a Form of Realism?

It is natural to think, and most realists about most kinds of things have thought (though not so much any more, in part because of Putnam) that if what there is is independent of us, then there can't be different things for different people, or in different languages, or for different purposes, and so it seems paradoxical for Putnam to call his view realism. After all, one standard form of realism developed in opposition to idealism, and the central point of realism is that what there is is not up to us, and hence not in our heads, it is wholly "outside" of us. If that is what realism is like, how can Putnam claim both that

• Whether there are tables and chairs depends on our interests and purposes, or our language?

and

* That he is a realist?

Surely calling the part that is up to us language, interests, and purposes instead of ideas can't make the difference.

The first part of his response is that what the various languages posit are posits about the same world and that the things in one are somehow related to the things in another.

The obvious thing to say would be, for example, that to each chair corresponds a certain collection of particles that is, in some sense Putnam would have to spell out, "the same thing." If we could just translate talk of chairs into talk of particles, life would be comparatively easy: we'd have a reduction of talk of chairs to talk of particles, and so we would have a principled way of lining them up. But that was the standard Realist (with a capital R) hope that Putnam argues against, and Realists thought that there weren't any chairs. Something confusing is going on: the realist's best case is the same as the Realist's best case, but the Realist says there are no chairs when the realist, at least sometimes, wants to say that there are. This is yet another example showing that reduction and realism are not related in any simple way.

Dummett discusses the situation of reduction. He concludes that, though reductions have usually been favored by philosophers who think of themselves as antirealists, they in fact license realism. The example he gives is mind-brain identity theory---philosophers who hold that mental states just are particular states. In that case, there are ideas: they are made of neurons.

If Dummett is right, the Putnam is wrong about the goal of the Realists: according to Dummett, if we succeed in reducing talk of tables and chairs to talk of atoms, that shows that tables and chairs are Real, and so, according to Dummett, the Realist is Dudley Doright, not Snidely Whiplash as Putnam argues. Of course, there are no simple reductions of the sort the Realist (and the Idealist) yearned for. That makes the situation much more complex, and that is also something about which Dummett and Putnam disagree. Dummett distinguishes between a "naive realist" and a "sophisticated realist": a naive realist thinks that the real things just are what they are nothing more, while the sophisticated realist takes them to have some important relation to some other class of usually "more basic" things. The sophisticated realist gets at least the beginning of an explanation of how the things are the way they are, the naive realist denies that such an explanation is available or required.

-- ShaughanLavine - 14 Mar 2008