2020/11/13 by Hilary Putnam · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Classical Philosophy and Thought #Philosophical Ethics and Theory #Philosophy, Science, and History
paper · doi:10.4324/9781003061502-12
openalex publication_date 2020/11/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In appealing to the commonsense feeling, Realism reminds the author of the Seducer in the old-fashioned melodrama. The kind of scientific realism we have inherited from the seventeenth century has not lost all its prestige even yet, but it has saddled us with a disastrous picture of the world. The author suggests that the problem with the "Objectivist" picture of the world lies deeper than the postulation of "sense data"; sense data are, so to speak, the visible symptoms of a systemic disease, like the pock marks in the case of smallpox. If seventeenth-century Objectivism has led twentieth-century philosophy into a blind alley, the solution is neither to fall into extreme relativism, as French philosophy has been doing, nor to deny our commonsense realism. The chapter illustrates the standpoint of pragmatic realism in ethics by taking a look at some of our moral images, and particularly at the ones that underlie the central democratic value of equality.