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There are several matters on which I've found Hilary Putnam to shed a good deal Daedalus, 126, 1 [Winter 1997]: 175-208).

One is how Wittgenstein's later philosophy is to

supplementary, way ofseeing the upshot ofWittgenstein's later philosophy. For Stanley

Cavell's Wittgenstein," he says, "philosophical confusions are not just matters of

language gone wrong, but an expression ofdeep human issues that also express

themselves in a variety ofother ways-political, theological, and literary" (194). In this

connection, Putnam remarks that "many ofthe problems Wittgenstein discusses have to

do with our uneasy relation to the normative."

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need of a

speak, 'superscientific' explanation). Wittgenstein's response was to challenge

the idea that normative talk needs to be 'explained' in one ofthese ways, indeed,

to challenge the idea that there is a problem of 'explanation' here.

From the outset of

heading "the history of philosophy returns." Appealing here to the work ofCharles

Taylor, he takes up again the point that "certain ways of thinking seem obligatory to us."

With Taylor's support, he then argues that "without an investigation into the

that obligatoriness, an investigation that tries to uncover[, for example,] the genealogy of

the conceptual changes that made Cartesianism (or Cartesianism

the onlybe understood. On this he says: [T]he idea that some philosophical problems are illusory is not a new one in the history ofphilosophy;it plays a central role in as pivotal a work as Kant's Critique ofPure Reason. But for the most part the philosophers who find Wittgenstein's thought difficult to grasp are people who have little time for Immanuel Kant. In their memories, the idea that there are 'pseudoproblems in philosophy' is inextricably linked to the name ofRudolfCamap and to logical positivism. Thus, it is natural for them to suppose that the Wittgensteinians' denial ofthe intelligibility ofcertain philosophical issues must stem from a commitment to the positivist 'verifiability theory ofmeaning,' even ifthey deny that it does. That one can come to see that a philosophical issue is a pseudo-issue by working through the considerations that seem to make it not only genuine but somehow obligatory, and not by bringing a 'criterion ofcognitive significance' to bear on it from the outside, is something that can take someone with training in analytic philosophy a long time to see (it certainly took me a long time to see) (193 f.). He then goes on to speak of"another, not incompatible but perhapsBy the 'normative' I do not mean justethics. Consider the nonnativity involved in the notion offollowing a rule. That there is a right and a wrong way to follow a rule is what Wittgenstein would call a 'grammatical' truth; the notion ofa rule goes with the notions ofdoing the right thing and doing the wrong thing, or giving the right answer and giving the wrong answer. But many philosophers feel that they have to reduce this normativity to something else; they seek, for example, to locate it in the brain, but then it turns out that ifthe structures in the brain lead us to follow rules correctly, some ofthe time they also lead us to foHow them incorrectly .... In the past, philosophers who saw that reductive accounts ofrule following did not work [posited either] mysterious mental powers or Platonic entities to which the mind was supposed to have a mysterious relation. Both in the case ofthe scientistic reductionist and the old~time metaphysician, the impulse is the same: to treat normativity, that is, the rightness ofgoing one way as opposed to another, as if it were a phenomenon standing in causal explanation (either an ordinary scientific explanation or a, so to Philosophical Investigations, comfort and discomfort with the normative arc associated with comfort and discomfort with the messiness of language-with the fact that language that is perfectly useful in its context may utterly fail to satisfY the standards of 'precision' and 'clarity' imposed by philosophers and logicians; indeed, with our desire to dcny all this messiness, to force language and thought to fit one or another impo~sibly tidy representation. . . . At the beginning ofPhilosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein emphasizes that such words as 'believe,' 'question,' and 'command' represent (practically speaking) many different things. The desire in contemporary scientific realism to represent all questions as ofone kind, as, in effect, empirical questions, and all justifications as ofone kind, as empirical justifications, is simply another manifestation of the tendency to force a single representation on what is in no sense one unified phenomenon. Wittgenstein wants not to clarify just our concepts, but to clarify us; and, paradoxically, to clarify us by teaching us to live, as we must live, with what is wlclear. On such a reading, a concern witll Wittgenstein and a concern with personal and social transformation are not only not incompatible, but they can reinforce one another (194 f). Another related matter that Putnam helps to clarify is what he treats under thehistOfY of cum materialism) seem possible way of thinking about the mind, we can never come to see how contingent

see that, we will remain stuck in those problems" (199

Putnam's criticism of"the idea that 'philosophy is one thing and history of philosophy is

another,", I feel obliged to insist, as Hartshorne did, that the history of philosophy that

systematic philosophizing itself requires cannot be left to the "history of philosophy," as

it is ordinarily understood. Just as, on my view, the systematic theologian has to engage

in historical theological reflection in order to do

so the systematic philosopher has to engage in the history of philosophy in order to do

systematic philosophy. This means that

so to historians ofphilosophy properly so-called.some of the assumptions that generate our problems are; as long as we do not f.). As much as I welcome (not historical, but) systematic theology, sh~ or he cannot alienate the responsibility to do 3

Yet another matter that Putnam illuminates in a way closely convergent with my

own thinking is '''the meaning ofmeaning." What he had come to realize by 1966, he

says, is that "the whole image oflanguage as something that is entirely 'in the head' of

the individual speaker had tobe wrong." [T]he familiar comparison of words to tools is wrong, ifthe 'tools' one has in mind are tools that one person could in principle use in isolation, such as a hammer or a screwdriver. Iflanguage is a tool, it is a tool like an ocean liner, which requires many people cooperating (and cooperating in a complex division oflabor) to use. What gives one's words the particular meanings they have is not just the state ofone's brain, but the relations one has to both one's non-human environment and to other speakers.... [A]ny complete account ofmeaning must include factors outside the head ofthe speaker (195 f.).Here again, I can only welcome Putnam's argument as confirming, in its way, a point that Hartshorne insisted on all along-namely, that, at least in "the real-world language" (Brummer), "the rules relating concepts to reality" require that "[i]fa concept refers neither to a producible positive entity nor to an inherent aspect ofthe ultimate productive power, then it does not refer and is void ofcoherent meaning. Ifits object is producible, then it mayor may not exist. If it is the ultimate productive power, then either the concept misconceives that power and is logically incoherent, or it correctly conceives it, and then certainly the object exists" ("John Hick on Logical and Ontological Necessity": 163).

I also welcome, by the way, Putnam's comment on Quine'S view that there is no "'fact ofthe matter' about what our words refer to."

There are two other matters that Putnam helpfully clarifies. One is what he says about "good prose." "Good prose, whatever its subject, must communicate something worth communicating to a sensitive reader. If it seeks to persuade, the persuasion must not"It has always seemed to mc," he says, "that a view that is so contrary to our whole sense ofbeing in intellectual and perceptual contact with the world cannot be right" (198). be irrational (which does not exclude the possibility that what is involved may be an appeal to see something one is refusing to see-say, the appeal ofa way oflife, or what actually goes on in our linguistic, or scientific, or ethical, or political practiccs[]and not simply a deduction from already accepted premises, or the presentation ofevidence for an 4empirical hypothesis)" (201

11 November 2007f.). The other matter is what he says about analytic philosophy as a "movement." "Just as we can learn from Kant without calling ourselves Kantians, and from James and Dewey without calling ourselves pragmatists, and from Wittgenstein without calling ourselves Wittgensteinians, so we can learn from Frege and Russell and Carnap and Quine and Davidson without calling ourselves <analytic philosophers.' Why can we not just be 'philosophers' without an adjective?" (203). Exactly!

of light in his essay, "A Half Century ofPhilosophy, Viewed from Within,"