Mike Maxim
06 Mar 02
Seidenfeld
Rationality
Many questions in philosophy directly or indirectly relate to the problem of finding a consistent concept of rationality. Particularly we are faced with the question of what it means for a scientific theory, or any other type of theory, to be rationally acceptable. Over the past century philosophy has attempted to give accounts of rationality in various forms. The two most popular theories are known as logical positivism, more generally referred to as a theory of meaning, and radical relativism, sometimes called anarchism. Hilary Putnam and others have shown that both of these theories are inconsistent. In addition, Putnam introduces his own theory of rationality that attempts to avoid the pitfalls of the aforementioned two theories. We will analyze here Putnam’s arguments against both logical positivism and radical relativism as well as analyzing whether or not Putnam’s positive theory avoids the downfalls of the very theories he attempts to debunk.
Logical positivism came into public prominence in the late 1920’s and early
1930’s as a way to explain empirical meaningfulness. The claim of the logical positivists is that the meaning of a sentence is based upon its method of verification. In other words, for someone to understand a statement, the person needs to look only to the methods of verifying the statement to be true. A refinement of this is to say a statement is either analytically true, like statements in logic or mathematics, or is empirically testable. All statements that do not have a verification scheme are labeled “pseudo-statements” and have no meaning. In order to expose the weaknesses of logical positivism, Putnam
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attempts to show that the theory is self-refuting . What he will try to show is that logical positivism by definition regards itself as a “pseudo statement”.
The point Putnam develops relies on analyzing the various forms of “verification” the positivists would accept. The acceptable forms of verification are those that have become institutionalized in society such that what can be verified in a positivist sense is what is deemed correct, probably correct, or “highly successful science”. For example, the nature of my response to a skeptic who asks me to “prove” the statement, “I am standing on the floor”, requires that there must be some norm in society where claims like, “I am standing on the floor” are implicitly accepted in appropriate circumstances.
Wittgenstein, who shared some beliefs with the logical positivists, argued that without such accepted public norms that virtually all knowledge would be impossible to obtain.
Wittgenstein showed this by examining any argument a philosopher could give that cats do not grow on trees. Any argument given does not start with anything more sure, in the institutionalized sense of sure, than cats do not grow on trees. So what has been made clear from this discussion is that verification of statements, in the positivist sense, requires some sort of criteria of institutionalized norms, and only statements of this nature have any meaning.
We now return to the issue of the self-refuting nature of logical positivism and attempt to extend it to other “criterial” accounts of rational acceptability. By criterial we mean those theories that refer to verification through institutionalized public norms as means for defining meaning and rationality. Putnam claims that no philosophical claim of any importance can be verified beyond doubt in a cultural and public sense. So if we make the statement: the rational acceptability of a statement relies on the means for
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criterially verifying it, that statement itself is not criterially verifiable and therefore it is not rationally acceptable. Therefore if we commit ourselves to accepting that some form of rationality exists, arguing that rationality is somehow contained in what the institutionalized norms say are instances of it is self-refuting because the argument can not be verified applied to the norms alone. Therefore arguing about logical positivism presupposes a notion of rationality that is beyond the notion of the positivists, because the argument cannot be verified unless logical positivism is assumed true, which is highly circular logic. Putnam’s analysis here is of great philosophical significance because it applies to all theories of rationality that define rational acceptability in terms of criterial verification.
The second major theory of rationality that has emerged in the past century is that of radical relativism as neatly emphasized by Kuhn and taken to new levels by
Feyerabend and Foucault. The main claim of radical relativism is that what defines rational acceptability in science is nothing more than “conversions” from one set of beliefs to a different one. The idea is that some advance takes place in how measurements are taken or some other instrumental advance that allows us to be transported to another
“world” of thought and scientific theory, or a new system of rationality. Feyerabend goes one step farther claiming that our own scientific conception of rationality is a fraud by its own standards. Putnam is not concerned with some of the more radical claims from
Feyerabend, but he does take issue with a claim common to both Kuhn and Feyerabend, that is the notion of incommensurability. Incommensurability encapsulates the notion that scientists in different cultures or time periods occupy different “worlds” and that terms used in those worlds cannot be equated in meaning or reference with the same
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terms used in our world. For instance a 19 th
century physicist talking about “electrons” would inhabit a different world than a modern physicist talking about the same word. The two would have completely different concepts of the electron and thus could not understand anything across worlds. So the point is that rationality is local to the worlds, that is the meaning and rational acceptability of statements about electrons is relative to the world that the electron is being discussed. A corollary to this claim is that because of incommensurability there is no way to make comparisons of worlds or cultures.
Therefore since I cannot compare them, I cannot make any claim about some world’s notion of rationality or ethics as being “wrong”. I can only say it does not fit my world’s notion of rational acceptability and ethics. It is this notion of incommensurability that
Putnam wishes to expose as false.
Putnam makes the obvious rejoinder to Kuhn’s line of reasoning by pointing out that it is incoherent to claim that Galileo inhabits a different world and then go on at length discussing Galileo’s scientific theories. We are forced into treating our ancestors and members of other cultures as people. Because of this we must attribute to them shared reference and shared concepts even if our attributed conceptions also differ. In other words, people from the past or other cultures all have some things in common with us, even if they have completely different conceptions about science than we do. To minimally interpret or translate amongst these different “worlds”, means that we only need to be able to render the behavior of the other world as intelligible to us by our standards of intelligible. Putnam claims such a translation scheme always exists because of the fact that we do share some things in common. Regardless of our conceptions or rationality, according to Putnam, there do exist shared references and beliefs about what
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is natural, such that we can interpret minimally even the weirdest culture. As an example, the fact that a 17 th century scientist may have a different conception of temperature than we do, does not rule out the possibility that we could come up with some suitable translation for him. Ultimately we could not make any comment about the difference of the 17 th
century scientist’s conception of temperature and our conception of temperature if such a translation did not exist. Because such translation schemes exist, the thesis of incommensurability looks rather shaky, and indeed quite false.
Putnam seems very upset that these two theories, both of which have been shown to be inconsistent, are the two theories that enjoy the most attention when discussing matters of rationality. The two theories are quite opposite in nature; one claims there is an absolute way to determine what is rational, the other claiming that there is a very relative notion of rational justification. Putnam shows why each theory is incoherent by simply applying the theory to itself in order to expose the fact that each is self-refuting. The question them becomes, what sort of theory of rationality should we hold?
In order to form a more solid theory of rationality we should think of what an ideal theory of rationality would involve. Putnam introduces an example involving gold in order to set up an analogy between an ideal theory of gold and an ideal theory of rationality. Paradigmatic examples of gold are objects that are qualified as gold “on the fly” by appealing to the current institutionalized norms of the culture. However the paradigmatic scheme does not capture the full extension of the term gold, because it does not provide a way to cover all instances of gold in the future. It could be the case that some new property of gold is discovered and some paradigmatic examples turn out to not be gold. The ideal theory of gold then would not only cover the old paradigmatic
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examples, but also be able to take some piece of gold in the future and by applying the theory allow us to understand whether or not the object is actually gold. For gold constructing such a theory is not an unreasonable task because gold exhibits various universal properties. The question is, do there exist broad universal properties of rational belief that would make construction of an ideal theory of rationality a possibility? In other words, does rational belief depend on some unknown ideal theory rather than the norms of some culture? Such a theory would have to be able to not only account for the paradigmatic examples of rational belief, but also account for those cases that we presently do not fully understand.
Putnam thinks the answer is no mainly because of results from inductive logic and says that this implies certain things about theories of rationality. It implies that we cannot expect researchers into this problem to converge onto one ultimate theory of rationality, and furthermore that such a convergence is impossible. To some this means that there exists no distinction between right and wrong and that any statement that has to do with intentional phenomena such as belief, desire or meaning has no direct fact of the matter to it. However, this view was dismissed earlier in the discussion of incommensurability.
Putnam believes that the solution to the problem is not to deny that nothing is right or wrong, rational or irrational, but that there is no neutral position to judge what is right or wrong, or rational or irrational. He maintains that each person is a prisoner of their own conception of rationality and that there is no difference in the statements, “justified” and
“justified in my lights”. He paints a picture of a fleet of boats where each boat has one person on it. All the people are trying to modify their boats without causing them to sink.
Each person shouts advice to those working on their boats, boats may sink, or people may
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hop on someone else’s boat. The point is that each person is confined to their own conception of rationality, however that does not stop them from borrowing or even taking another view of rationality on their own terms.
Now that we have seen two theories Putnam deems wrong, and a theory that he deems correct, we now attempt to analyze how Putnam’s positive theory of rationality differs from the rejected two, and how it avoid his own criticism. We first look at how
Putnam’s theory stands in contrast to criterial accounts of rationality. Here is it quite clear that the two stand in stark contrast with each other. Putnam’s account does not deny the importance of verification in a theory of rationality; it just does not rely on verification across public norms as the only means for rational justification. In Putnam’s system verification would be private in the sense that the individual determines the norms by which verification schemes are valid, however the individual’s decision on this would be mutually dependent on others. Therefore Putnam does not deny the importance of verification, he just rejects the public logical positivist scheme. Furthermore it is hard to apply the self-refuting argument to Putnam’s claim because he can always back out of it and say his view is a result of his own personal conception of rationality. So Putnam avoids any arguments he made against criterial accounts largely because his position is based much more on relativism.
We next examine how Putnam avoids the trouble of radical relativism. It is clear that Putnam’s theory takes some elements of relativism by making the claim that everyone is inevitably stuck in some private conception of rationality. However the main difference between the two is that Putnam does not rely on what he thinks is the bogus notion of incommensurability. If we extend the boat analogy into the realm of the radical
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relativists, we see a largely different picture than the one Putnam gave. The radical relativist boat scheme would still contain a fleet of boats, yet the people would all be modifying their boats in complete isolation, for they would have absolutely no way to understand what exactly was happening with other boats or those who were modifying said boats. With Putnam the situation is different because of the dependence he stresses amongst those in the fleet. Referring back to the example of the 17 th
century scientist and his conception of temperature, we see how Putnam’s theory differs from the radical relativists’. The incommensurability thesis mandates that we cannot translate our conception of electron with the 17 th
century scientist’s, however Putnam’s account says we can. Both of us would still be prisoners of our own conceptions, however we could still translate between each other. There is no notion of incommensurability in Putnam’s account that makes it slightly less relativistic in that sense.
In addition Putnam’s theory does not exhibit some of the other ills of radical relativism such as the claim that all cultures or worlds are equally good. It avoids this notion because the claim that all cultures or worlds are equally good implies that there is some objective or absolute notion of “equally good”. Putnam’s theory denies the existence of such a neutral vantage point of which to make judgments of this nature.
However again going back to the boat example, Putnam does allow for people on the boats to shout out phrases of encouragement or discouragement across boats. So in other words all judgments about the relative “goodness” of cultures are bound to the context of rational acceptability defined on the individual level. But this bound does not keep us from communicating, borrowing from, or understanding other points of view. So we see
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that Putnam employs relativism to an extent, however he resists the radical notions of incommensurability that define the radical relativism that he rejects.
In response to Putnam’s claim of an absence of a neutral vantage point, I would like to examine some possibilities if this proposition was false. Let us introduce some neutral vantage point that is of the transcendental sense and not bound to any one individual. That is no person has “access” to this reference frame. Inside this “privileged” reference frame there would exist answers to all questions about science and ethics and rational justification. So if the vantage point existed then questions like “Is X rationally justifiable” would have an objective answer in that vantage point and would trump any person’s own answer. It is important to note that there can only be one frame of this type in existence. If there could be more, it defeats the notion that this frame is neutral. The defining point in this scenario is that everyone would have the knowledge that answers to questions about certain beliefs all had absolute answers, yet they could not in their current state actually know the answers, just the knowledge that the answers did exist. So a person presented with the question, “Is X rationally justifiable” must refer to the conception of rationality they possess, but would keep in mind that an absolute answer does exist. Naturally because of this knowledge the person would attempt to align his belief on the rational acceptance of X with others around him, provided that he believes that strength in numbers is a strong sign that a belief held by the majority probably corresponds to the absolute answer. Such theorized absolute frames of reference certainly have shown up in the history and still survive in the present. The most obvious example of this is religion, particularly Christianity, where God is the privileged vantage point and each individual of the religion attempts to align their concepts of what is rationally
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acceptable with which those in the religion, using religious text as their basis, hold to be rationally acceptable. The example of religion is not necessarily a good one however since in that case the “answers” given by the privileged vantage point are for the most part known. The vantage point we discussed above does not require answers in the frame to be known, or knowable.
The point of the discussion is to show that unification amongst people’s views of rationality is greatly dependent on the notion of whether or not there is a fact to the matter of whether or not X is justified in some privileged frame. Putnam denies the existence of this frame and henceforth denies that there should be any uniformity of concepts of rationality based on whether or not absolute beliefs exist. Because of this lack of a reason for people to align beliefs to fit a certain scheme that ought to exist, to some extent I find it mildly objectionable that the boats in Putnam’s example would care about the other boat’s views. For them it would seem of little concern what other people were doing as long as what they did fit their own concept of rationality. My point is with the knowledge that absolutes exist, that gives the boat community more reason to communicate and take advice.
In conclusion, we have seen various views of rationality and how they can be shown false. Logical positivism, and more generally any theory based on criterial verification as the basis for rational acceptability, fails because it cannot verify itself in any sort of way. Radical relativism fails because its incommensurability thesis does not explain why it is possible to translate between worlds. We have also seen Putnam’s theory that there is no neutral vantage point by which we can judge the rational acceptability of statements; that is every individual is bound to his or her own personal
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view of rational acceptability. The argument certainly will rage on for many years to come, and in Putnam’s view, this is how it must be.
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