Philosophy in an Age of Science – Hilary Putnam

A Walk Through the Interplay of Scientific Knowledge and Philosophical Inquiry

Introduction: The Project of Renewing Philosophy

We are at the outset of the work, where Putnam establishes the central motivation for the collection: to defend a vision of philosophy that remains rigorous and relevant in the face of scientific dominance, without surrendering its distinctive questions to the methods of natural science.

Putnam opens by confronting a prevailing sentiment in contemporary intellectual culture—the view that philosophy has been “overtaken” by science, that its traditional problems are either illusory or best handed over to empirical investigation. He writes, “Philosophy is not, and should not try to be, a science.” This declaration sets the tone for the entire volume. The core problem, as Putnam sees it, is not that science is unimportant—it is crucially important—but that a certain scientistic attitude has corrupted both philosophy and the public understanding of knowledge. This scientism holds that only the methods of natural science yield genuine knowledge, and that all other forms of inquiry are merely provisional or expressive.

Putnam rejects this picture forcefully. He argues that philosophy has its own legitimate questions—questions about meaning, reference, truth, rationality, and values—that cannot be reduced to or replaced by scientific investigation. These questions are not “pre-scientific” remnants; they are permanent features of human reflection. The task of philosophy in an age of science is to clarify these questions without pretending to be a science itself, and without retreating into a purely literary or cultural commentary. The philosophical tradition, from Plato through Kant to the present, offers resources for this task—resources that Putnam aims to retrieve and rework.

This introductory framing matters because it establishes a tension that runs through every essay in the collection: how to take science seriously without being dominated by it. Putnam insists that philosophy must be empirically responsible—it must pay attention to what science tells us about the world and the mind—but it must not become a handmaiden to science. The philosophical voice is autonomous, even if it is informed by scientific findings. Putnam positions his own work as a form of pragmatism that can navigate this middle path, drawing on the insights of American pragmatists like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.

Part I: The Return of Pragmatism

The first major section of the work gathers essays that articulate Putnam’s version of pragmatism, or what he sometimes calls “pragmatic realism.” We are at the foundation of the book, where the philosophical commitments that govern the later, more specialized discussions are laid out in detail.

Putnam begins by distinguishing his pragmatism from two extremes that dominated twentieth-century philosophy: logical positivism and metaphysical realism. Logical positivism, with its verificationist theory of meaning and its dismissal of metaphysics as nonsense, failed to account for the richness of ordinary language and the normative dimension of thought. Metaphysical realism, on the other hand, held that there is a single, fixed, mind-independent way the world is, and that truth consists in correspondence to that reality. Putnam argues that both views are flawed, and that pragmatism offers a superior alternative.

The key insight of pragmatism, as Putnam presents it, is that meaning and truth are inseparable from human practice and inquiry. There is no “God’s-eye view” from which we can compare our beliefs with the world as it is in itself. Instead, we are always within some conceptual scheme, using some set of standards for what counts as a good reason or a true belief. This does not lead to relativism, however, because our practices are not arbitrary; they are subject to correction and improvement over time through the very processes of inquiry that pragmatism emphasizes. Putnam writes, “The notion of truth is, in fact, inseparable from the notion of rational acceptability.” Truth is not something we grasp directly; it is what would be justified under ideal epistemic conditions—conditions that we can approximate but never fully achieve.

This leads Putnam to a distinctive position on the nature of reference and representation. Against the view that words and thoughts “hook onto” the world by some intrinsic relation, he argues that reference is partly determined by the social context of language users and by the causal history of how terms are introduced and transmitted. This is his famous “meaning ain’t in the head” thesis, which he developed in earlier work but refines here. The idea is that what a term refers to depends not just on the mental state of an individual speaker, but on the environment and the linguistic community in which that speaker participates. For example, the word “water” refers to H₂O not because every speaker knows that fact, but because the substance in our environment has that chemical structure, and our linguistic practice is anchored to it through causal chains.

The political and ethical implications of this pragmatism are also drawn. Putnam argues that values are not merely subjective preferences or expressions of emotion, as many positivists claimed. Rather, value judgments can be rationally discussed and evaluated, and they play an essential role in inquiry itself. The very notion of a “good reason” involves an evaluative component. This theme—the entanglement of fact and value—will reappear throughout the volume.

The Entanglement of Fact and Value

In this essay, Putnam directly confronts the fact/value dichotomy, one of the most influential and, in his view, most damaging legacies of logical positivism. We are at a key juncture where the philosophical consequences of pragmatism for ethics and social thought are spelled out.

Putnam begins by noting that the dichotomy between facts (objective, scientific, value-neutral) and values (subjective, emotional, not subject to rational argument) has been taken for granted by much of modern philosophy and social science. This dichotomy was famously codified by the logical positivists, who held that statements of fact are either true or false (and thus meaningful), while value judgments are merely expressions of emotion (and thus cognitively meaningless). Putnam argues that this picture is deeply mistaken. He writes, “The dichotomy between facts and values is, I believe, one of the most harmful philosophical doctrines of the twentieth century.”

The argument against the dichotomy proceeds by showing that the two domains are profoundly entangled. For example, consider the concept of cruelty. To call an action cruel is both to describe it (it involves causing unnecessary suffering) and to evaluate it (it is wrong). The descriptive and evaluative components cannot be neatly separated. Similarly, terms like “courageous,” “thoughtful,” “reasonable,” and “sensible” have both factual and evaluative dimensions. Putnam draws on the work of the philosopher Iris Murdoch to argue that moral concepts are “thick” —they carry both descriptive and normative content in a single package. There is no way to break them down into a pure fact plus a pure value without losing what is most important about them.

Putnam also addresses the objection that science itself is value-free, and that this is its strength. He responds by pointing out that even scientific inquiry presupposes epistemic values—such as coherence, simplicity, and explanatory power—that are not themselves empirically verifiable. These are not arbitrary preferences; they are norms that guide rational inquiry. If science depends on such values, then the fact/value dichotomy cannot be maintained as a sharp distinction. Instead, we should see factual and evaluative reasoning as continuous and mutually informing.

The clarification here is that rejecting the dichotomy does not mean collapsing all distinctions. Putnam is not saying that every factual claim is also evaluative, or that every evaluative claim is factual. He is saying that the two dimensions are interwoven in ways that the traditional dichotomy obscures. Recognizing this interweaving has profound consequences for ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of social science, because it opens the door to rational discussion of values without requiring them to be “objective” in the narrow sense of scientific objectivity.

The Diversity of the Sciences

Putnam turns his attention to the question of what the sciences themselves look like when one abandons the idea that they share a single method or reductionist goal. We are examining his account of the plurality of scientific practices and the philosophical lessons that follow.

The essay challenges the unity of science thesis, which was a central dogma of logical positivism. According to this thesis, all sciences are ultimately reducible to physics, and the ideal of scientific explanation is the deduction of particular phenomena from universal laws. Putnam argues that this picture is both empirically false and philosophically misleading. The actual practice of science is far more diverse and messy. Biology, for example, uses concepts like function and adaptation that are not reducible to physics. Psychology and the social sciences employ intentional and normative concepts that resist reduction to the neurosciences.

Putnam emphasizes that different sciences explain different kinds of phenomena using different kinds of laws and models. There is no single “scientific method” that applies across all domains. He draws on the work of the biologist Ernst Mayr and the philosopher of biology David Hull to illustrate how biology employs teleological explanations—explanations in terms of goals or functions—that are not eliminable in favor of mechanistic laws. Similarly, the social sciences rely on interpretations of meaning and intention that cannot be captured by purely causal models.

This pluralism has important implications for the philosophy of mind. If the sciences are diverse, then there is no reason to think that mental phenomena must be reduced to physical phenomena. Putnam defends a kind of non-reductive materialism: mental states are real, and they are realized in physical systems, but they cannot be defined in physical terms. This is a version of his earlier functionalism—the view that mental states are defined by their causal roles, not by their physical composition—but it is now embedded within a broader pluralistic picture of science.

The clarification here is that Putnam is not attacking science; he is attacking a particular philosophical interpretation of science—the scientistic view that science alone gives us knowledge and that all genuine knowledge must eventually look like physics. By showing that the sciences themselves are diverse and locally autonomous, he opens space for philosophy to engage with norms, values, and meanings without feeling that it is doing something “unscientific.” The sciences themselves, in their actual practice, already involve norms and values, as the previous essay argued.

Pragmatism and the Problem of Realism

We are now in the second major movement of Part I, where Putnam turns from the general defenses of pragmatism toward a specific epistemological problem that has occupied him throughout his career: the nature of realism and how pragmatism offers a way beyond the sterile opposition between metaphysical realism and radical relativism.

Putnam begins by locating the core tension: traditional realism holds that there is one true description of the world, one way things “really are” independent of our conceptual schemes, while various forms of antirealism or relativism hold that truth is always relative to a framework or language. Both positions, he argues, share a hidden assumption. The metaphysical realist assumes that truth is correspondence to a fixed, mind-independent reality. The relativist, seeing that correspondence cannot work, gives up on truth altogether. But both assume that correspondence is the only possible account of truth. Putnam’s pragmatist intervention is to reject this shared assumption.

“The danger to which the metaphysical realist is subject is that of turning our representations into mere copies of a reality that is, as it were, ready-made and already articulated; the danger to which the antirealist is subject is that of denying that there is any fact of the matter as to what is really true.”

Putnam presents his alternative—pragmatic realism or internal realism, as he has variously called it. The key move is to accept that there is a world independent of our minds, but to deny that the world comes pre-sorted into “natural kinds” or “objects” that our language simply labels. Instead, the distinction between “object” and “property,” between “real” and “unreal,” is always made from within a conceptual scheme. This does not mean that we make up the world; it means that our ways of carving up the world are partly a matter of our interests, practices, and purposes. The world constrains what we can truly say, but it does not dictate a single description.

The clarification here is that Putnam is trying to occupy a middle ground that is notoriously difficult to hold. On one side, he insists that truth is not merely “what our peers will let us get away with” (a jab at Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism). On the other side, he insists that truth is not a mysterious relation of “correspondence” to a noumenal reality. Truth, for Putnam, is idealized rational acceptability: what would be agreed upon under epistemically ideal conditions. This is not relativism, because it posits an ideal limit; it is not metaphysical realism, because that limit is internal to our practices and cannot be understood as “matching” a world-in-itself.

The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and the Return of the Moral

We now move to one of the most sustained and developed sections of the collection: Putnam’s extended engagement with the fact/value dichotomy, building on his earlier Dewey Lectures and his book *The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy*. Here he presents the detailed argument for why the dichotomy cannot stand, and what follows for ethics.

Putnam begins by tracing the dichotomy to its sources in early twentieth-century philosophy. The logical positivists, particularly A. J. Ryle and Rudolf Carnap, argued that factual statements are empirically verifiable while value judgments are expressions of emotion or attitude—literally meaningless as statements of fact. This view, which Putnam calls noncognitivism, held that “good” means something like “I approve of this; do so as well.” Putnam presents the famous critique by Philippa Foot, who argued that the fact/value dichotomy cannot be sustained because our evaluations depend on our understanding of the facts. But Putnam goes further: he argues that the very notion of a “fact” is thicker than the positivists assumed.

“The logical positivists wanted to divide all statements into two classes: the ‘cognitive’ and the ‘noncognitive.’ The cognitive statements were to be those that could be verified or falsified by experience, and these were to be the factual statements. Value judgments, they said, were not verifiable; they were expressions of emotion or prescriptions for action, and therefore ‘noncognitive.’ The problem is that the line between the cognitive and the noncognitive cannot be drawn in the way they supposed.”

Putnam presents a series of examples to demonstrate the entanglement. He uses the term thick ethical concepts (borrowed from Bernard Williams) to describe words like “cruel,” “brave,” “generous,” “chaste.” These words simultaneously describe and evaluate. To call an action “cruel” is both to describe it (it involves causing unnecessary suffering) and to condemn it. One cannot separate the descriptive component from the evaluative one—the evaluation is built into the description. If the fact/value dichotomy were correct, we would have to say that “cruel” has a factual meaning (causing suffering) and an emotional meaning (disapproval), but this analysis fails because the descriptive content itself is shaped by the evaluation.

The clarification here is that Putnam is not merely arguing that facts and values are connected; he is arguing that the *dichotomy*—the idea that there are two distinct kinds of statements, one factual and one evaluative, with different logics—is a philosophical error. In everyday language, and even in scientific language, description and evaluation are often inseparable. The dichotomy was an artifact of a particular metaphysical picture (logical positivism) that has been largely abandoned, yet its ghost continues to haunt ethics, economics, and social science. If Putnam is right, then the project of “value-free” social science is not only impossible but conceptually confused.

Reconsidering the Fact/Value Dichotomy: Economics and the “Is/Ought” Problem

Putnam now turns to a specific domain where the fact/value dichotomy has had enormous practical consequences: economics. He presents a detailed case study of how the dichotomy has shaped neoclassical economics and its claim to be a value-free science.

Putnam locates the problem in the work of Lionel Robbins and the subsequent development of welfare economics. Robbins argued that economics could only deal with efficiency (Pareto optimality) as a technical concept, not with welfare or well-being, because those involve value judgments that cannot be scientifically grounded. Putnam presents the standard narrative: economics was to become a science by restricting itself to factual claims about means-ends relationships, leaving ends themselves to philosophy or politics. The result was that economics retreated from any serious engagement with human flourishing.

“The fact/value dichotomy served as a way of insulating economics from moral criticism. By declaring that normative judgments are ‘unscientific’ and that economics is a science, economists could dismiss questions about the justice or fairness of economic arrangements as beyond the scope of their discipline.”

Putnam then presents the counter-argument developed by the economist Amartya Sen, who showed that the Pareto principle itself is not value-neutral. If one person’s utility is increased by another’s starvation, and no one’s utility is decreased, Pareto optimality is satisfied—yet this is clearly not a just state of affairs. Sen’s capabilities approach represents an attempt to bring normative considerations back into economics by focusing on what people are actually able to do and be, rather than on subjective preferences. Putnam shows that Sen’s work presupposes the entanglement of fact and value: judgments about what capabilities matter involve both factual knowledge about human beings and normative judgments about what constitutes a good life.

The clarification here is that the fact/value dichotomy has not merely been an abstract philosophical problem; it has had real-world consequences in how economics is practiced, how public policy is justified, and how social science understands its own role. By showing that economics cannot actually be value-free—that values are built into its concepts of “efficiency,” “utility,” and “preference”—Putnam is arguing for a more honest and philosophically rigorous social science. Economics should not pretend to be a purely technical discipline; it should recognize that it is already engaged in normative reasoning and should do so explicitly and responsibly.

Pragmatism and the Problem of Perception

We now move to a cluster of essays addressing an issue that preoccupied Putnam in his later work: the philosophy of perception. Here he applies his pragmatist commitments to the perennial problem of how we perceive the external world, and he develops a position he calls natural realism or direct realism.

Putnam locates the problem historically: since the seventeenth century, most philosophers have accepted a representationalist or indirect realist view of perception. According to this view, we do not perceive external objects directly; we perceive only our own mental representations—ideas, sense data, or the like—and infer external objects from these representations. Putnam traces this view through Descartes, Locke, Hume, and into twentieth-century philosophy of mind. The problem with indirect realism, he argues, is that it inevitably leads to skepticism: if we only have access to our representations, we can never be sure that they correspond to anything external.

“The deepest error in modern philosophy is to think that the mind can be understood as a kind of machine that processes ‘representations.’ If we think of the mind as a processor of representations, then perception becomes a matter of having internal representations that stand in some relation to external objects—and then we are lost in the hopeless attempt to explain what that relation could be.”

Putnam presents an alternative: the disjunctive theory of perception, which he develops in dialogue with the work of J. M. Hinton, John McDowell, and William James. The disjunctive theory holds that perceptual experience is not a single kind of state that could be either veridical or illusory. Instead, a veridical perception (seeing that something is red) and an illusory experience (hallucinating that something is red) are fundamentally different kinds of states—they have different natures, not just different causes. The veridical perception puts us in direct contact with the object, while the illusory experience does not. This “disjuncts” the two cases: they do not share a common “internal” character that could be specified independently of the object.

The clarification is that Putnam is trying to recover a naive realism—the commonsense view that when we see a tree, we are directly seeing the tree, not an internal image of the tree—but in a philosophically sophisticated form. The disjunctive theory blocks the skeptic’s move by denying that perception is always mediated by representations. If veridical perception is *sui generis*, then the skeptic cannot argue that we are trapped behind a veil of ideas. This is deeply continuous with Putnam’s pragmatism: instead of beginning with the skeptical problem (how do we get from representations to the world?), he begins with our actual practices of perception and judgment, and he constructs an account from there.

Skepticism and the End of Epistemology

We are now in a section where Putnam directly confronts the skeptical tradition. He argues that pragmatism offers a way to dissolve skeptical problems rather than trying to solve them on the skeptic’s own terms—a strategy he calls anti-skepticism without foundationalism.

Putnam locates the problem in what he calls the Cartesian circle of epistemology. Descartes began by doubting everything that could be doubted, hoping to find an indubitable foundation (the *cogito*) on which to rebuild knowledge. But this project presupposes what it tries to establish: it assumes that knowledge requires certainty, that the mind is transparent to itself, and that the external world is something we must infer from our inner states. Putnam argues that these assumptions, not the skeptic’s arguments, are the real source of the problem.

“The skeptical problem is a product of bad philosophy. It arises from a picture of the mind as a ‘space’ of representations, and of knowledge as a relation between those representations and something outside. If we give up that picture, the skeptical problem simply disappears.”

Putnam presents the pragmatist alternative: knowledge does not require foundations. Our beliefs are held in a web, as Quine argued, but against Quine, Putnam insists that the web does not stop at the boundaries of empirical science. Normative beliefs, logical beliefs, mathematical beliefs, and perceptual beliefs are all part of the same fabric, and none are absolutely foundational. We can revise any belief in the face of experience, but we cannot revise all of them at once. This is the reciprocal interdependence of belief that Peirce and Dewey described.

The clarification is that Putnam’s anti-skepticism does not provide a “refutation” of the skeptic in the traditional sense. It does not prove that skepticism is false; it argues that the skeptical problem is based on a misleading picture of the mind-world relation. If the picture is not forced on us—and Putnam argues it is not—then we can simply decline to enter the skeptic’s game. This is not an evasion, but a philosophical diagnosis: the skeptic’s arguments have force only if we accept the representationalist picture of the mind. Once we adopt a pragmatist, direct-realist picture of perception and knowledge, the skeptic’s questions lose their grip.

The Fact/Value Dichotomy and the Return of the Moral (Part 2)

We are now in the middle of Part II of the collection, where Putnam deepens the critique of the fact/value dichotomy by examining its philosophical roots and its practical consequences, particularly in the realms of ethics and social science.

The central argument is that the fact/value dichotomy is not simply a neutral philosophical distinction but a deeply damaging error that has distorted our understanding of ethics, rationality, and even science itself. Putnam traces this error back to a specific philosophical tradition, from Hume through the logical positivists, who insisted that all factual statements are “descriptive” and all value statements are merely “expressive” of emotion or attitude. The consequence, as Putnam sees it, is a “scientistic” picture of rationality that excludes ethical deliberation from the domain of genuine knowledge.

Putnam argues that the dichotomy collapses when we examine how language actually functions. He points to “thick ethical concepts” —terms like “cruel,” “brave,” “generous,” “selfish,” “chaste,” “lewd”—as a decisive counterexample. These concepts are simultaneously descriptive and evaluative. To call an act “cruel” is both to describe a kind of behavior (e.g., causing unnecessary suffering) and to evaluate it as morally wrong. One cannot separate the descriptive component from the evaluative component and still have the same concept. As Putnam writes:

“The claim that the logical positivists and their followers made for the fact/value dichotomy cannot be sustained. The dichotomy rests on a series of confusions and a deep misunderstanding of the nature of both facts and values.”

The clarification here is that thick ethical concepts demonstrate that evaluation is not a separate layer added to a neutral description, but is woven into the very fabric of our perception of the world. When we see someone acting cruelly, we do not first perceive a set of “brute facts” and then add a subjective “value judgment”; rather, we directly perceive the cruelty of the action. This challenges the entire empiricist framework that separates the mind’s “passive” reception of facts from its “active” projection of values. The existence of thick concepts shows that our value-laden language can be just as objective, just as subject to rational criticism, as our descriptive language.

Reason, Truth, and Ethics: The Case of Amartya Sen

Within this Part, Putnam engages substantially with the work of the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen. The focus is on Sen’s critique of the dominant models of rationality in economics and his development of a richer, more Aristotelian conception of ethical reasoning. Putnam uses Sen’s work as a concrete example of what a philosophy that has overcome the fact/value dichotomy looks like in practice.

Putnam presents Sen’s argument that the standard economic model of “rational choice” —which defines rationality as the efficient maximization of self-interest—is not only empirically false but conceptually impoverished. Sen, like Putnam, believes that human beings are capable of acting on “commitments” —values that transcend narrow self-interest. A person who fights for social justice, or who keeps a promise even when it is disadvantageous, is not acting “irrationally”; rather, they are acting on a richer conception of rationality that includes ethical ends. Sen’s concept of “capabilities” —what people are actually able to do and be—is presented as a way of making welfare economics sensitive to real human flourishing, rather than reducing it to abstract measures of utility or income.

The work then examines how Sen’s approach resolves the “Is/Ought” problem in economics. Putnam notes that Sen does not try to derive ethical conclusions from purely factual premises. Instead, Sen argues that ethical evaluation is built into the very framing of economic questions. When we ask “What is a good society?” or “What is a just distribution of resources?”, we are not imposing alien values onto a value-free science; we are asking the kinds of questions that social science cannot avoid if it is to be relevant to human life. Putnam quotes Sen’s work approvingly:

“The exercise of describing a person’s well-being cannot be entirely value-free, for it involves judgment as to what is valuable in human life.”

The clarification is that Sen’s work demonstrates how a pragmatist approach to ethics and social science can be both rigorous and humane. It does not abandon objectivity; it reconceives objectivity as something achieved through open, democratic deliberation about values, not through the imposition of a single metric (like utility) that pretends to be value-neutral. Putnam sees Sen as a living example of the kind of philosophy he advocates: one that treats ethical questions as cognitively meaningful, subject to rational argument, and inseparable from our understanding of the facts of human life.

Ethics Without Ontology: The Legacy of Levinas and the Primacy of the Ethical

The collection includes a significant engagement with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, the French philosopher who argued for the “primacy of ethics” as “first philosophy.” Putnam is deeply sympathetic to Levinas’s insistence that our encounter with the “face of the Other” places us under an infinite ethical obligation—an obligation that precedes and grounds any theoretical or ontological inquiry. For Levinas, the fundamental human experience is not the Cartesian cogito’s self-certainty, but the overwhelming call of the other person’s vulnerability and need.

Putnam presents Levinas’s radical claim that ethics is not a branch of philosophy that asks “What should I do?” after I have established what the world is like. Instead, the ethical relation to the Other is what first makes me a subject at all. The encounter with the face of the other person—their “Thou shalt not kill” written in their very vulnerability—calls my own existence into question. This is not a theoretical argument but a phenomenological description of an experience that is prior to any theory. Putnam notes that Levinas criticized the entire Western philosophical tradition, from Plato to Heidegger, for privileging “ontology” (the study of Being) over ethics, thereby reducing the other person to an object of theoretical knowledge rather than acknowledging them as a source of infinite demand.

However, Putnam does not accept Levinas’s entire framework uncritically. He pushes back against what he sees as Levinas’s overly stark opposition between ethics and politics, and between the “Saying” of the ethical encounter and the “Said” of propositional language. Putnam argues that we cannot simply remain in the infinite, asymmetrical relation of responsibility to the single Other; we must also enter the realm of politics, law, and social justice, where we treat others as equals and make judgments about competing claims. As Putnam puts it:

“Levinas is a great philosopher, but his vision is incomplete. We need both the infinite responsibility to the Other and the finite responsibility to the community. We need both the face and the system.”

The clarification is that Putnam uses Levinas to show what a fully ethical philosophy might look like—one that does not treat values as secondary or subjective. At the same time, he corrects Levinas in a pragmatist direction: the ethical demand, however absolute, must be cashed out in democratic, public deliberation and institutional design. The “face-to-face” encounter must be supplemented by a commitment to social justice, to fair institutions, and to the messy work of moral reasoning in a world of plural and conflicting values. This is Putnam’s way of holding on to the deep seriousness of ethics without falling into a mystical or quietist politics.

God, Religion, and the Limits of Philosophy

A notable feature of this Part of the collection is Putnam’s willingness to engage with religious and theological questions—a topic that many secular analytic philosophers avoid. Putnam was himself a religiously observant Jew, and his essays on religion are not confessional but philosophical: they ask what it means to take religious language seriously without reducing it to either literalistic metaphysics or mere emotional expression.

Putnam examines the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein on religion, particularly Wittgenstein’s idea that religious language constitutes a distinct “language-game” with its own criteria of meaning and validity. Wittgenstein argued that it is a mistake to judge religious beliefs (like belief in the Last Judgment) by the standards of scientific hypotheses. The believer is not making a prediction about a future event; they are expressing a commitment to a way of life, a way of seeing the world and acting in it. Putnam is drawn to Wittgenstein’s anti-reductionism, but he worries that it can slide into a kind of “fideism” —the view that religious beliefs are insulated from rational criticism because they belong to a self-contained form of life.

Putnam also engages with the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, whose distinction between “I-Thou” and “I-It” relations parallels some of Levinas’s themes. The I-Thou relation is a direct, mutual, dialogical encounter with another person (or with God), while the I-It relation is an instrumental, objectifying stance. Putnam uses Buber to argue that a fully human life requires both kinds of relations, but that modern society has dangerously overemphasized the I-It at the expense of the I-Thou. The religious dimension of life, for Putnam, is not about believing a set of propositions about a supernatural being; it is about cultivating the capacity for genuine I-Thou encounters—with other people, with nature, and with the mystery of existence itself.

The clarification is that Putnam’s treatment of religion is continuous with his pragmatism. He rejects both the dogmatic atheist who dismisses religion as nonsense and the dogmatic believer who demands literal assent to creedal formulas. Instead, he sees religious language as a profound human attempt to articulate ethical and existential commitments—commitments that are meaningful, that can be lived, and that are subject to their own kind of rational evaluation. Religion, for Putnam, is not a rival to science or philosophy, but a domain of human experience that demands serious philosophical attention without reduction or condescension.

The Return of the Moral: A Pragmatist Ethics

This brings us to the culminating movement of this Part of the collection, where Putnam attempts to articulate what a “pragmatist ethics” would look like in positive terms. Having cleared away the obstacles of the fact/value dichotomy, the scientistic model of rationality, and the various forms of moral skepticism, he sketches a vision of ethics as a rational, fallible, and socially engaged enterprise.

Putnam draws heavily on John Dewey, for whom ethics is not about discovering eternal moral laws or calculating utilities, but about “intelligent problem-solving” in concrete human situations. Dewey rejected the search for fixed moral ends or supreme principles; instead, he saw moral life as a continuous process of “dramatic rehearsal” —imagining alternative courses of action, weighing their consequences, and revising our ends in light of experience. For Dewey, as for Putnam, moral knowledge is real knowledge, but it is not a matter of correspondence to a moral reality “out there.” It is a matter of what works, what leads to human flourishing, what solves problems and opens up new possibilities for growth.

Putnam emphasizes that a pragmatist ethics is “pluralistic” without being “relativistic.” It recognizes that there are many genuine values—justice, compassion, freedom, loyalty, creativity—that may conflict with one another in particular situations. There is no single algorithm for resolving such conflicts; instead, we must use our intelligence, our imagination, and our capacity for sympathy to find the best way forward in each unique context. This is not relativism because it insists that some solutions are genuinely better than others, and that we can give reasons for our judgments—reasons that appeal to shared experiences and common needs.

“The pragmatist does not deny that there are better and worse answers to moral questions. What she denies is that there is a method—whether it be a ‘scientific’ method of reducing values to facts, or a ‘metaphysical’ method of intuiting a moral reality—that will give us certainty or finality.”

The clarification is that Putnam’s return to the moral is not a step backward to pre-modern dogmatism, nor a step sideways to postmodern irony. It is a way of taking ethics seriously as a domain of genuine knowledge and rational argument, while acknowledging that such knowledge is fallible, historically situated, and inseparable from the messy particularities of human life. The “return of the moral” in Putnam’s title means the recovery of a sense that questions about how to live, what to value, and what to care about are among the most important questions we can ask—and that philosophy, freed from its self-imposed shackles of scientism and dichotomous thinking, can help us ask them better.

We are in the middle of Part I, where Putnam is deploying pragmatist resources to dismantle persistent philosophical problems. This section takes up the vexed issue of perception—specifically, the question of whether perception gives us direct access to the world or only to mental representations.

Putnam begins by stating the problem bluntly: “The problem of perception is the problem of how we can have any knowledge of the external world at all.” He notes that the traditional philosophical answer has been a variation on what he calls “conceptual relativism” —the idea that we never perceive objects directly, but only through the filter of concepts, categories, or sense-data. This view, which Putnam traces from Descartes through Locke and Hume to contemporary cognitive science, creates an immediate and seemingly insurmountable gap between the perceiving subject and the world perceived.

The author then presents the pragmatist alternative, drawing heavily on William James’s radical empiricism. For James, perception is not a matter of having inner mental representations that somehow correspond to outer objects. Rather, “perception is already a transaction with the environment.” Putnam explains that James rejected the very idea of a “veil of perception”—the notion that what we directly experience are mental images or sense-data that stand between us and the world. Instead, James argued that when we perceive a tree, we are directly in contact with the tree itself, not with a mental picture of the tree. This directness is not a matter of naive realism; it is a matter of understanding perception as an active, embodied engagement with the environment.

Putnam deepens this account by introducing the concept of “transaction” —a term he borrows from John Dewey. A transaction is not a one-way flow from world to mind, nor from mind to world, but a mutual, ongoing process in which both perceiver and perceived are transformed. When you see a red apple, the redness is not a property of the apple alone, nor of your mind alone, but of the transaction between you and the apple under specific conditions of lighting, attention, and perceptual history. This transactional view, Putnam argues, dissolves the traditional problem of perception because it rejects the very terms in which that problem is posed: the isolated subject confronting a foreign object.

“The idea that perception is a transaction with the environment, rather than a passive reception of sense-data, is one of the central insights of pragmatism.”

The clarification here is that Putnam is not offering a solution to the problem of perception within the old framework; he is showing that the framework itself is the source of the problem. By taking the transactional, embodied, and engaged character of perception seriously, the need for a mediating “veil” of representations disappears. This is a paradigmatic example of how pragmatism works: it changes the questions rather than trying to answer them on their own terms.

This section directly follows the discussion of perception, extending the pragmatist critique from the problem of perception to the entire enterprise of epistemology as traditionally conceived. Putnam is now attacking the core of modern philosophy: the attempt to refute skepticism by finding indubitable foundations for knowledge.

Putnam begins by characterizing the skeptical challenge: “How can we know anything at all if our senses can deceive us, if we might be dreaming, if we could be brains in a vat?” He notes that the standard philosophical response has been to seek “foundational” knowledge—beliefs that are so certain they cannot be doubted, from which all other knowledge can be derived. This is the project of epistemology from Descartes to the present. Putnam’s claim is that this project has failed, not because the skeptics are right, but because the foundationalist response misunderstands the nature of knowledge and justification.

The author then presents the pragmatist alternative, drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey. For Peirce, “inquiry begins with doubt and ends with the settlement of belief” —but the doubt that actually motivates inquiry is real, living doubt, not the artificial, methodological doubt of the Cartesian meditator. Peirce argued that we cannot “feign” doubt by simply deciding to doubt everything; genuine doubt arises from concrete problems and surprises in our experience. Dewey radicalized this point by arguing that knowledge is not a state of mind that corresponds to reality, but a “warranted assertion” —a claim that has been tested and found reliable in the course of ongoing inquiry.

Putnam extends this pragmatist epistemology by introducing the concept of “epistemic values” . He argues that our standards for what counts as a good reason, a valid inference, or a justified belief are not given by pure reason or by sense-experience alone. They are “internal” to our practices of inquiry—they evolve over time, they vary across domains, and they are inseparable from our values about what kinds of inquiry are worth pursuing. This leads to what Putnam calls “pragmatic pluralism” about epistemic norms: there is no single, universal method for acquiring knowledge, but there are better and worse ways of going about inquiry within specific contexts.

“The idea that there is a single, universal, ahistorical standard of rationality is one of the last dogmas of empiricism.”

The clarification is that Putnam is not embracing skepticism or relativism. He is arguing that the traditional problem of skepticism is a pseudo-problem generated by a faulty picture of knowledge as requiring absolute foundations. Once we give up that picture, skepticism loses its grip, not because we have refuted it, but because we have dissolved it. The “end of epistemology” in the title of this section means the end of the kind of epistemology that seeks to ground all knowledge in indubitable foundations—but it also means the beginning of a new kind of epistemology, one that is naturalistic, fallibilistic, and pluralistic.

We are now in the second major section of the book, where Putnam returns to the fact/value dichotomy with renewed force, this time connecting it explicitly to ethical theory. This section deepens the earlier analysis by showing how the dichotomy has shaped—and distorted—modern moral philosophy.

Putnam begins by tracing the dichotomy’s influence on ethics. He notes that the dominant view in twentieth-century metaethics was some form of “non-cognitivism” —the claim that moral judgments are not really true or false, but are expressions of emotion, attitudes, or commands. This view, he argues, is a direct consequence of the fact/value dichotomy: if facts are objective and values are subjective, then moral judgments cannot be about facts, so they must be about something else. The result is a picture of ethics as irrational or merely conventional.

The author then presents the alternative: “moral realism” of a pragmatist variety. Putnam argues that moral judgments can be true or false, but not in the way that factual judgments are true or false. Rather, moral truth is a matter of “warranted assertibility” under ideal conditions of inquiry—conditions that include full information, impartiality, and empathy. This is not a relativist position; it is a position that takes moral inquiry seriously as a form of rational inquiry, while acknowledging that it is different from scientific inquiry.

Putnam illustrates this with the example of “cruelty” . He points out that calling an action cruel is not simply describing it in factual terms (e.g., “this action causes pain”) nor simply expressing disapproval (e.g., “boo for this action”). Rather, calling an action cruel involves a complex judgment that includes both factual and evaluative elements: it requires understanding the action’s consequences, the intentions behind it, the social context, and the moral norms that make cruelty a vice. The fact that cruelty is a vice is not something we discover by empirical investigation alone, nor is it something we simply decide to feel. It is something we learn to see through moral education and reflection.

“The idea that there is a sharp line between fact and value is one of the most damaging assumptions of modern philosophy.”

The clarification is that Putnam’s moral realism is a form of “internal realism” applied to ethics: moral properties are real, but they are real within the framework of our moral practices and concepts. They are not “out there” in the world independently of us, but they are not mere projections of our feelings either. They are part of the fabric of our lives, and they make claims on us that are as objective as any factual claim. This is what Putnam means by the “return of the moral”: a recovery of the sense that ethical inquiry is a genuine form of knowledge, not a second-class substitute for science.

This section is a close engagement with the work of economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, particularly his capability approach to welfare economics. Putnam uses Sen as a case study for how the collapse of the fact/value dichotomy can transform practical reasoning in domains like economics and public policy.

Putnam begins by explaining Sen’s critique of standard welfare economics. The dominant approach, “utilitarianism,” measures welfare in terms of utility—typically understood as pleasure, happiness, or preference satisfaction. Sen argues that this approach is deeply flawed because it ignores the “capabilities” that people actually have to function in ways they have reason to value. Two people with the same level of utility may have vastly different capabilities: a healthy person and a severely disabled person might both report being happy, but the disabled person lacks the capability to participate fully in social life. Sen’s “capability approach” shifts the focus from subjective states to objective opportunities.

Putnam then connects Sen’s approach to his own dismantling of the fact/value dichotomy. He argues that Sen’s capabilities are not purely factual nor purely evaluative; they are “thick ethical concepts” that combine description and evaluation in a way that cannot be separated. For example, the concept of “being able to appear in public without shame” involves both factual judgments about social norms and economic conditions, and evaluative judgments about dignity and self-respect. When Sen uses such concepts in his analysis of poverty and development, he is not mixing facts with values in a way that undermines the objectivity of his claims; he is doing exactly what any good social scientist should do—using concepts that are adequate to the phenomena being studied.

“Sen’s capability approach shows that the most fruitful way to think about human welfare is to employ concepts that are irreducibly both factual and evaluative.”

Putnam goes on to discuss the philosophical underpinnings of Sen’s work, particularly his engagement with the ethical tradition of “public reasoning” and his critique of “transcendental institutionalism” —the idea that justice can be defined by an ideal set of institutions. Sen argues for a “comparative” approach to justice that focuses on reducing actual injustices rather than achieving a perfectly just society. This approach, Putnam notes, is deeply pragmatic: it is about solving concrete problems through public deliberation, not about deriving a priori principles.

The clarification is that Putnam sees Sen’s work as a model for how philosophy can engage with real-world problems without falling into the traps of scientism or relativism. Sen shows that ethical reasoning can be rigorous, empirical, and normative all at once. The fact/value dichotomy, far from being a necessary constraint on rational inquiry, is an obstacle to understanding how reasoning actually works in domains like economics, public health, and social policy.

This section marks a significant turn in the book, as Putnam engages with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher who is not usually associated with pragmatism. Putnam brings Levinas into the conversation to argue for the “primacy of the ethical” —the claim that ethical responsibility is more fundamental than metaphysical or epistemological commitments.

Putnam begins by introducing Levinas’s central idea: “ethics is first philosophy.” For Levinas, the foundational experience of human existence is not the encounter with objects in the world, nor the discovery of the self as a thinking subject, but the encounter with the “face” of the other person. This face-to-face encounter calls us into question; it demands a response; it imposes an infinite responsibility that we cannot evade. Levinas’s claim is that this ethical responsibility is prior to and more fundamental than any philosophical reflection on being, knowledge, or truth.

The author then explains how Levinas’s thought challenges the Western philosophical tradition. From Parmenides to Heidegger, philosophy has been dominated by “ontology” —the study of being. Levinas argues that ontology is a kind of “reduction” of the other to the same; it tries to understand the other by placing them within a framework of categories and concepts that we already possess. But the face of the other resists this reduction; it is absolutely “exterior” to any conceptual scheme. This resistance is not a threat but a gift: it calls us to a responsibility that goes beyond anything we could have chosen or anticipated.

“The face of the other commands us: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ This is not a proposition to be verified or a command to be justified; it is the primal ethical event.”

Putnam emphasizes that he is not simply endorsing Levinas’s entire system. He finds Levinas’s language sometimes hyperbolic and his rejection of all conceptual mediation problematic. But he argues that Levinas is pointing to something essential: the irreducibility of ethical experience to any purely naturalistic or metaphysical framework. This aligns with the pragmatist emphasis on the primacy of practice over theory, and with the idea that ethical values are not derivative from facts but are fundamental features of human experience.

The clarification is that Putnam’s “ethics without ontology” is an attempt to take ethical experience seriously without reifying it into a metaphysical entity or reducing it to a natural fact. For Levinas, as for the pragmatists, ethics is not about discovering a special kind of fact or about grounding morality in a special kind of being. It is about recognizing that the demand of the other is the most fundamental thing in our lives—more fundamental than any theory of knowledge or reality we might construct. This is Putnam’s most radical claim: that ethics, not epistemology or metaphysics, is the starting point for philosophy.

In this section, Putnam turns to a topic that is often avoided in analytic philosophy: religion. He does not argue for or against religious belief, but rather examines what philosophy can and cannot say about religious experience and practice.

Putnam begins by acknowledging the tension between his own philosophical commitments and religious belief. As a pragmatist, he is committed to “fallibilism” —the idea that all our beliefs are subject to revision in light of experience. But many religious traditions claim to possess “revealed” truths that are beyond revision. Putnam explores whether this tension is fatal to religious belief, or whether there is a way of understanding religious claims that is compatible with pragmatist fallibilism.

The author then draws on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, particularly his “Lectures on Religious Belief.” Wittgenstein argued that religious language does not function like ordinary factual language. When someone says “I believe in the Last Judgment,” they are not making a hypothesis that could be confirmed or disconfirmed by evidence. They are expressing a “picture” that governs their entire way of life—their attitudes toward death, suffering, morality, and hope. This picture is not something that can be justified by argument or undermined by counter-evidence; it is something that is learned through participation in a religious form of life.

“Wittgenstein taught us that religious beliefs are not hypotheses about the world, but pictures that shape our lives.”

Putnam goes on to discuss his own Jewish faith and how it relates to his philosophy. He describes himself as a “religious but not orthodox” Jew who finds meaning and value in the traditions, rituals, and ethical teachings of Judaism, even while recognizing that many of the historical claims of the tradition cannot be verified in any straightforward way. He argues that religious belief is not a matter of accepting a set of propositions on insufficient evidence, but of participating in a way of life that is oriented toward the “holy” —a concept that resists full conceptual articulation.

The clarification is that Putnam is not offering a defense of religion in general, nor a critique. He is exploring the question of what philosophy can legitimately say about religious experience. His conclusion is that philosophy cannot settle the truth or falsehood of religious claims, but it can help us understand what kind of claims they are. Religious language is not a failed attempt at science; it is a different kind of discourse, one that is closer to ethical and aesthetic discourse than to factual description. This is consistent with the pragmatist theme that there are many legitimate ways of making sense of the world, not just the scientific one.

This final substantive section of the book brings together the threads of the entire work into a positive statement of pragmatist ethics. Putnam is no longer primarily criticizing the fact/value dichotomy; he is now building an alternative.

Putnam begins by stating the core principle of his pragmatist ethics: “The good is not something that is given independently of our inquiries, but something that we discover in the process of trying to live well.” This is a direct challenge to both “moral realism” of the Platonic variety (which holds that the good is a transcendent Form) and “moral relativism” of the postmodern variety (which holds that the good is whatever a culture happens to value). For Putnam, the good is neither discovered nor invented; it is “constructed” through ongoing inquiry and deliberation.

The author then develops this idea through a discussion of “democratic deliberation.” Drawing on Dewey, Putnam argues that ethical inquiry is essentially a public, democratic process. The right thing to do is not something that can be determined by a solitary thinker reasoning from first principles; it is something that emerges from the collective deliberation of people who are affected by the decision, under conditions of equality and mutual respect. This process is not a matter of aggregating preferences (as in utilitarianism) or of applying rules (as in deontology), but of “transforming preferences” through dialogue and the exchange of reasons.

Putnam introduces the concept of “ethical fallibilism” as a central feature of his pragmatist ethics. We can be confident that our moral judgments are sometimes wrong, but we can also be confident that we can improve them through inquiry and discussion. This is not skepticism; it is the recognition that moral knowledge, like all knowledge, is provisional and subject to revision. The alternative to fallibilism is “moral dogmatism” —the claim that we already possess the final truth about ethics—which Putnam argues is both intellectually untenable and politically dangerous.

“Democracy is not just a political system; it is an epistemological requirement. If we want to know what is good, we must listen to everyone who might be affected.”

The clarification is that Putnam’s pragmatist ethics is not a system of moral principles but a method for moral inquiry. It does not tell us what is right or wrong in advance; it tells us how to go about figuring out what is right or wrong in specific situations. This method includes: attending to the facts, listening to the perspectives of those affected, testing our intuitions against consequences, and remaining open to revision in light of new experience. The “return of the moral” in this final section means the restoration of ethical reflection to its proper place—not above or below science, but alongside it as a legitimate form of human inquiry.

*The work ends here, with Putnam having completed his journey from a critique of the fact/value dichotomy through a reconstruction of ethics as a form of rational inquiry, grounded in democratic deliberation and fallibilist humility. The final word is not a conclusion but an opening: the invitation to engage in the ongoing work of ethical reflection, without the comfort of absolute foundations but also without the despair of absolute relativism.*