Philosophy as a Human Endeavor: Rejecting Dichotomies and Reclaiming Objectivity
Introduction: The Philosopher’s Task
We begin with the opening essay, “Realism with a Human Face,” which serves as the title piece and establishes the central concern of the entire collection. Putnam is locating himself in a specific philosophical moment: the late twentieth-century impasse between metaphysical realism on one side and radical relativism or skepticism on the other. He aims to show that this is a false dichotomy and that a viable realism is possible—one that is “internal” or “human-faced.”
Putnam opens by stating his dissatisfaction with the way philosophy has been practiced in the analytic tradition. He says that too many philosophers have adopted a “scientistic” view, one that takes natural science as the only legitimate form of inquiry and reduces all questions to questions of fact. This view, he argues, is self-undermining because it cannot account for the norms and values that make science itself possible—norms like coherence, simplicity, and truthfulness. He writes:
“The attempt to reduce all forms of inquiry to one, and that one the scientific, is something I have opposed for many years.”
Putnam then introduces the core problem: the tension between the desire for objectivity and the recognition that all our knowledge is shaped by human perspectives, concepts, and language. The traditional “realist” insists that truth is a matter of correspondence to a mind-independent reality. The “relativist” or “antirealist” replies that such a correspondence is impossible, so truth must be relative to a culture, a language, or a conceptual scheme. Putnam rejects both extremes. He proposes instead a view he calls “internal realism” or “pragmatic realism.” On this view, the question “What objects does the world consist of?” only makes sense inside a conceptual scheme. There is no God’s-eye view from which we can compare our language to the world as it is in itself. But this does not mean that truth is simply a matter of convention. There are better and worse conceptual schemes, and we can judge them by criteria that are themselves part of our evolving human practices—criteria such as coherence, adequacy to experience, and practical success.
The argument matters because it reframes the entire debate. Putnam is not trying to find a middle ground between two stable positions; he is arguing that both positions are built on the same mistaken premise—the idea that we can step outside all conceptual schemes and compare them to an unconceptualized reality. Once we abandon that premise, we can see that objectivity is possible *within* our practices, and that such objectivity does not require metaphysical guarantees. The human face of realism is not a weakness; it is the only kind of realism we can coherently have.
1: The Interdependence of Fact and Value
We now turn to the essay “The Interdependence of Fact and Value,” where Putnam directly challenges the long-standing distinction between facts (objective, value-neutral, scientific) and values (subjective, emotional, unscientific). He is here continuing the work of his earlier writings, particularly *Reason, Truth and History*, but applying it to a specific philosophical problem: the fact/value dichotomy as it operates in economics, ethics, and social science.
Putnam begins by recounting the history of the dichotomy. He traces it to David Hume’s claim that you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is,” and to the logical positivists’ insistence that value judgments are merely expressions of emotion and thus cognitively meaningless. The result, he says, has been a deeply entrenched view: facts are objective, values are subjective; facts are matters of reason, values are matters of feeling; facts can be true or false, values can only be commended or condemned. This dichotomy, he argues, is not only wrong but harmful—it has impoverished our understanding of both facts and values.
Putnam then presents his positive argument. He introduces the concept of “thick ethical concepts” —concepts like *cruel*, *brave*, *generous*, *selfish*, *chaste*, *sinful*. These concepts, he notes, have both a descriptive and an evaluative dimension. To call someone “cruel” is to describe their behavior (they cause unnecessary suffering) and to condemn it (suffering caused for no good reason is wrong). The descriptive and evaluative components are not separable; you cannot understand what “cruel” means without understanding that cruelty is a bad thing. He writes:
“The attempt to treat these concepts as simply ‘factual’ plus a ‘prescriptive force’ that is something separate from the concept itself is a failure.”
Putnam extends this argument to the concept of “welfare” in economics. He points out that standard economic theory defines welfare in terms of preference satisfaction, and claims that this is a purely factual, value-neutral definition. But, Putnam argues, the very choice of what counts as a “preference” already involves value judgments. Should we count sadistic preferences? Should we count preferences that are based on false information? The concept of welfare is itself a “thick ethical concept” —it cannot be purified of value without losing its meaning.
He then takes on the notion of “epistemic values” —values like coherence, simplicity, and explanatory power. These are the values that scientists use to judge the worth of theories. If value judgments are merely subjective, then scientific judgments of better and worse theories would be merely subjective too. But scientists do not treat them that way. They argue about which theory is simpler or more coherent, and they treat these as genuine disputes about the merits of the theory. This shows that epistemic values function as *norms* in our cognitive life. They are not reducible to facts, but they are also not mere expressions of feeling.
The importance of this argument is that it dissolves the idea that objectivity requires the elimination of all value. If even our most basic cognitive practices depend on value judgments, then the fact/value dichotomy cannot be a barrier to ethical and political thought. Putnam is clearing the ground for a view in which ethical reasoning can be just as rigorous and objective as scientific reasoning, without being the same kind of thing.
2: The Place of Facts in a World of Values
The next essay in the collection, “The Place of Facts in a World of Values,” deepens the previous argument by examining the role of “factual” claims in ethical discourse. Here, Putnam addresses a common objection: if facts and values are interdependent, does that mean there are no objective facts at all? Does it mean that everything is relative to our value commitments? He wants to block that conclusion.
Putnam begins by reminding us of a crucial distinction: the fact/value *dichotomy* is different from the fact/value *distinction*. He is not claiming that there is no distinction at all between factual and evaluative statements. The distinction is real and useful in many contexts. What he is rejecting is the *dichotomy*—the idea that the two are completely separate, that they belong to two different realms of discourse, and that one is objective while the other is not. The dichotomy, he says, is a “philosophical picture” that has outlived its usefulness.
Putnam then turns to a concrete example: the debate over whether a woman has a right to an abortion. He observes that much of the controversy hinges on factual questions—for example, “Is a fetus a person?” or “When does life begin?” But these are not straightforward factual questions; they are questions that involve conceptual and evaluative choices. The concept of a “person” is not a purely biological concept; it has ethical and legal dimensions. The question “When does life begin?” can be answered differently depending on whether one is thinking about biological life, conscious life, or personal life. The very framing of the factual question already involves value judgments. He writes:
“What is at stake in these disputes is not simply ‘the facts’ but the very shape of the factual/evaluative distinction itself.”
He uses this example to show that the interdependence of fact and value does not lead to subjectivism. In the abortion debate, people are not merely expressing their feelings; they are arguing about what the correct description of the situation is. They appeal to evidence, to principles, to consequences, to analogies. They are engaged in a form of reasoning that is neither purely factual nor purely emotional. This reasoning is *objective* in the sense that it is answerable to reasons and evidence, but it is not *neutral* in the way that the fact/value dichotomy would require.
Putnam also takes up the notion of “warranted assertibility” —a term he borrows from John Dewey. He says that when we say a statement is true, we are saying that it is warranted under ideal conditions. But what counts as an ideal condition depends on our interests, our purposes, and our values. There is no single standard of warrant that applies to all domains. The warrant for a claim in physics is different from the warrant for a claim in ethics, but both are real. The key is to recognize that warrant is always *context-dependent* but not *arbitrary*.
This matters because it shows that the collapse of the fact/value dichotomy does not entail relativism. Putnam is preserving objectivity while rejecting the metaphysical picture that supported it. He is arguing that we can have facts that depend on values without those facts being any less factual—and we can have values that depend on facts without those values being any less binding. The world of values is a world of facts, and the world of facts is a world of values.
3: The Craving for Objectivity
The essay “The Craving for Objectivity” examines the psychological and philosophical roots of the demand for a reality that is completely independent of human thought. Putnam connects this craving to a deep human desire for certainty, for a foundation that will secure our knowledge against doubt. He argues that this craving is understandable but ultimately self-defeating, and that we must learn to live without it.
Putnam begins by describing the project of metaphysical realism. The metaphysical realist holds that the world consists of a fixed totality of mind-independent objects, and that truth consists in a correspondence between language and that fixed totality. This view, he says, has an intuitive appeal: it seems commonsensical that the world is just “out there,” waiting to be discovered. But when pressed, the view becomes incoherent. For the metaphysical realist cannot explain how we could ever *know* that our representations correspond to reality; to know that, we would need to step outside our representations and compare them directly to the things themselves. That is impossible. So the metaphysical realist’s world is one we can never access—it is a “noumenal” world, a world of things-in-themselves in Kant’s sense. Putnam writes:
“The attempt to have a God’s-eye view of the world leads to a view which makes the world inaccessible to us, and that is a view which makes our own knowledge unintelligible.”
Putnam then traces the historical development of this craving. He discusses Descartes’s search for certainty, which led to the idea of a mind that can know itself directly and the external world only indirectly. He discusses the logical positivists’ attempt to reduce all knowledge to sense-data, which was another attempt to find an indubitable foundation. Both projects failed, he argues, because they tried to ground knowledge on something that was supposed to be prior to all conceptuality. But there is no such thing. All knowledge is conceptually mediated; there is no “given” that is not already interpreted and shaped by our concepts.
He then introduces an alternative, which he calls “pragmatic fallibilism.” This is the view that we can have knowledge without certainty, that our claims are always open to revision, and that objectivity is a regulative ideal rather than a metaphysical state. On this view, we do not need to find a foundation for knowledge; we need only to improve our methods, our concepts, and our theories. We do not need to escape our human perspective; we need only to broaden and deepen it. This is what he means by “realism with a human face.”
The significance of this essay is that it identifies the *motivation* behind the fact/value dichotomy and the metaphysical realism that supports it. The craving for objectivity is the craving for a world that is untouched by human values, human interests, human fallibility. Putnam is saying that this craving is impossible to satisfy, and that the attempt to satisfy it leads to philosophical confusion. The cure is to recognize that objectivity does not require the elimination of the human; it requires the refinement of the human.
4: The Rationality of Scientific Inquiry
We now move to “The Rationality of Scientific Inquiry,” an essay in which Putnam directly confronts the claim—advanced by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and others—that scientific change is not rational but is rather a matter of social convention, political power, or paradigm shift. Putnam wants to defend the rationality of science without falling back on a simplistic logical empiricism.
Putnam begins by acknowledging the force of the Kuhnian critique. Kuhn showed that scientific revolutions involve changes in the very standards of rationality that scientists use. What counts as a good explanation, a valid proof, or a relevant observation can shift dramatically between paradigms. This suggests that there is no *transcendent* standard of rationality that stands outside all paradigms and can judge them. Many philosophers concluded from this that scientific change is therefore *irrational*—that it is driven by nonrational factors like authority, fashion, or political power.
Putnam argues that this conclusion is a non sequitur. The fact that standards change does not mean that change is irrational. He proposes that we think of scientific rationality as a “historically evolving” institution. The standards of science are not fixed for all time; they are themselves subject to criticism and improvement. But this does not mean that they are arbitrary. We can give reasons for changing a standard—for example, we can show that the new standard leads to better predictions, or greater coherence, or more fruitful research programs. These reasons are themselves *internal* to our scientific practice; they do not appeal to an Archimedean point outside all practice. He writes:
“Rationality is not a fixed set of rules; it is a capacity to reflect on and modify one’s own standards in light of new experience and new criticism.”
Putnam then introduces the concept of “idealized rationality” as a regulative idea. In any actual inquiry, we are constrained by our limited time, information, and cognitive abilities. But we can imagine an idealized inquirer who has unlimited time, unlimited information, and unlimited cognitive abilities. What such an inquirer would accept is what is *true*—but only, Putnam emphasizes, from within our conceptual scheme. There is no way to say what an absolutely ideal inquirer would accept from a God’s-eye perspective, because that would require us to imagine a perspective that is no perspective at all. The idealization is always relative to our current best understanding of what inquiry is.
He also defends the role of “values” in scientific reasoning. The choice of a theory is not just a matter of logic and observation; it involves value judgments about simplicity, coherence, explanatory power, fertility, and so on. These values are not merely subjective preferences; they are part of what it means to be a good scientific theory. A scientist who ignored these values would not be doing science. So the rationality of science *depends on* values that are themselves rational—they can be defended, criticized, and refined. This is another instance of the interdependence of fact and value.
This essay matters because it bridges the gap between the general philosophical themes of the collection and the specific problem of scientific change. Putnam is showing that his “internal realism” is not a retreat from science; it is a better account of what scientists actually do. Scientists do not claim to have a God’s-eye view; they claim to have the best available account, subject to revision. And that is enough for a robust realism.
5: Realism and Reason
We are in the middle of the collection, where Putnam is now directly articulating the positive doctrine of internal realism in contrast to the metaphysical realism he has been criticizing.
The core of this essay is a distinction between two ways of understanding what it means for a statement to be true. Metaphysical realism holds that truth is a matter of correspondence between our words and a ready-made world—a world that has a fixed, determinate structure independent of any conceptual scheme. On this view, there is exactly one true and complete description of reality, the “God’s-eye view.” Internal realism, by contrast, holds that the question “What objects does the world consist of?” only makes sense *within* a conceptual scheme, a theory, or a description. “What is *really* the case?” cannot be asked from outside all frameworks.
Putnam introduces a key argument against metaphysical realism: the model-theoretic argument. This is a technical argument from logic, but its conclusion is simple. For any consistent theory that we take to be true, there exist many different interpretations (models) that satisfy it. That is, we can assign objects and relations to the terms of the theory in many different ways, and the theory will still come out true. If truth were simply a matter of “correspondence” to a fixed reality, then the theory would pick out exactly one correspondence. But it does not. The metaphysical realist cannot explain why our theory corresponds to *this* world rather than to one of the many other models that also make the theory true. The only way to fix the reference is to appeal to our *use* of language, our causal interactions with the world, our practices—but that is to admit that reference is determined from within our conceptual scheme, not from a God’s-eye viewpoint.
“‘Truth,’ in an internal realist view, is some sort of (idealized) rational acceptability—some sort of ideal coherence of our beliefs with each other and with our experiences as those experiences are themselves represented in our belief system—and not correspondence with mind-independent ‘states of affairs’.”
Putnam then addresses a common objection: that internal realism collapses into a kind of relativism. If truth is “ideal rational acceptability,” then does it not follow that what is true for one community might be false for another? Putnam insists this is a misunderstanding. “Ideal” rational acceptability is not the same as what *we* currently find acceptable. It is a limit concept: what would be accepted if we had perfect epistemic conditions—sufficient evidence, full logical scrutiny, no hidden biases. This is *not* relativism, because it posits a standard of correctness that is independent of any particular culture or moment in time. However, it is also not metaphysical realism, because this standard is still *our* standard—it is the notion of rationality that we actually employ and refine in our scientific and practical inquiries. There is no guarantee that this standard corresponds to a noumenal world beyond our experience.
What this means is that internal realism is a non-reductive view. It does not reduce truth to something non-normative (like physical causality), nor does it reduce it to mere social convention. Truth remains a *normative* notion—it is what we ought to believe, given the best procedures of inquiry. But it is a notion that we cannot step outside of. We cannot compare our beliefs to the world “as it is in itself”; we can only compare them to other beliefs, to experience, and to the evolving standards of rationality that we have developed.
This section matters because it gives the technical philosophical backbone to the book’s title. A realism “with a human face” is a realism that gives up the fantasy of a God’s-eye view, but does not give up the idea that there is a real world that constrains our beliefs. The constraint comes not from a mysterious relation of “correspondence,” but from the fact that our beliefs must cohere with each other and with experience—and that coherence is not arbitrary, but is judged by standards that themselves evolve through rational inquiry.
6: The Meaning of “Meaning”
We shift now to one of Putnam’s most famous papers, included in this collection, which fundamentally changed the philosophy of language. The essay addresses the question: what determines the meaning of a word? The traditional view, which Putnam calls the Fregean view, holds that meaning is a mental entity—a concept or idea that a speaker grasps, and that determines the reference of the term.
Putnam attacks this view with a series of twin-earth thought experiments. Imagine a planet, Twin Earth, which is identical to Earth in every respect except for one detail. On Twin Earth, the liquid that flows in rivers, falls from the sky, and quenches thirst is not H₂O, but a chemically different substance with a complex formula XYZ. The Twin Earthians call it “water.” In 1750, before the chemical composition of water was discovered, an Earthian and a Twin Earthian would have been in exactly the same *psychological state* when they thought about “water.” They would have associated the same descriptions with the word—”clear, drinkable liquid, found in lakes, etc.” Yet, Putnam argues, the word “water” on Earth *refers to H₂O*, while on Twin Earth it refers to XYZ. The meaning is different, even though the psychological states are identical. Therefore, “meanings just ain’t in the head.”
“‘Cut the pie any way you like, ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head!'”
Putnam draws two crucial conclusions. First, the division of linguistic labor. Not every speaker needs to know the full criteria for applying a term; we rely on experts. When I say “water,” I defer to chemists and geologists to determine what the substance really is. The meaning is partly determined by the linguistic community and its contact with the world, not just by my individual mental state. Second, the indexicality of natural kind terms. Putnam argues that terms like “water,” “gold,” “tiger,” and “elektrik” function like indexicals—like “I” or “now.” Their reference is fixed by a *causal-historical* connection to an exemplar. “Water” means whatever is the same substance as *this* (pointing to a sample), wherever it occurs. Meaning, therefore, involves a relation to the environment.
This argument has devastating implications for traditional views of mind and language. If meaning is not in the head, then mental states are not self-contained; they depend on the external world. A person on Earth and their exact duplicate on Twin Earth, despite being psychologically identical, do not mean the same thing by “water.” Their thoughts have different truth conditions. This is the basis for semantic externalism—the view that the content of our thoughts and utterances is partially determined by our causal history with objects in the world.
This essay matters for the overall project of *Realism with a Human Face* because it shows that the realist intuition—that our words refer to real things in the world—can be preserved without metaphysical realism. Putnam is not saying that the world is a social construction; he is saying that reference is determined by our interaction with the world, not by a mysterious “matching” of mental pictures to objects. The world contributes to what we mean. But the way it contributes is through our practices, our causal connections, and our division of labor—all “human” phenomena. Thus, the essay provides a linguistic foundation for internal realism: we can be realists about reference without being metaphysical realists.
7: Why Is a Philosopher?
This essay is a reflection on the nature of philosophy itself. Putnam asks what philosophy is for, given that it does not produce empirical knowledge like science, nor does it produce formal proofs like mathematics. The question is not merely rhetorical; it gets at the heart of the self-understanding of the philosopher in the late twentieth century.
Putnam begins by reviewing several historical answers. The logical positivists, he says, saw philosophy as the analysis of scientific language—a kind of handmaiden to science. The later Wittgenstein saw philosophy as a kind of therapy, aimed at dissolving confusions created by language. The existentialists saw philosophy as a quest for authentic self-understanding. Putnam finds each of these partially right but wholly inadequate. The positivists, for example, ended up ruling most of traditional philosophy as meaningless, but this is a position that is self-refuting (the verification principle itself cannot be verified). Wittgenstein’s therapy, for all its insights, seems to leave us with no positive philosophical knowledge at all. And existentialism, for all its passion, often abandons the rigorous argumentation that is philosophy’s hallmark.
Putnam’s own answer emerges from his other work. Philosophy is not an *alternative* to science, nor a *foundation* for it, nor a *therapy* against it. Philosophy is the activity of reflective inquiry into the concepts and commitments that we already have. It asks: what do we mean by “truth,” “reality,” “knowledge,” “value,” “meaning”? It does not give us new facts, but it clarifies the framework within which facts are understood. This is why philosophy is inescapable: every time we make a claim about what is real, we are already employing a philosophical concept of reality. The task of the philosopher is to make these concepts explicit, to criticize them, and to propose better ones.
“Philosophy is an attempt to achieve a ‘synoptic vision’ of reality, to see how the various pieces of our knowledge—scientific, mathematical, ethical, aesthetic, religious, historical, common-sensical—hang together.”
Putnam then confronts the charge that this is mere “conceptual analysis” of a weak sort. He insists that it is much more. Because our concepts are not fixed; they evolve. And because they are intertwined with our values, with our practices, and with our history, philosophical reflection is necessarily a *critical* and *normative* enterprise. The philosopher does not simply describe how we use the word “truth”; she asks whether that usage is coherent, whether it can be defended, and whether it ought to be revised. This is why philosophy matters to *Realism with a Human Face*: the book itself is an exercise in this kind of reflection. It is not telling us new scientific facts; it is urging us to reconsider what we mean by “fact,” “value,” and “reality” in the first place.
This essay matters because it provides the methodological self-awareness of the entire collection. Putnam is not just arguing for a doctrine; he is arguing for a certain way of *doing* philosophy—one that is rigorous but not scientistic, humanistic but not relativistic. It is a philosophy that takes science seriously, but also takes our ethical and aesthetic experience seriously, and that refuses to reduce one to the other.
8. Truth and Convention: On Davidson’s Refutation of Conceptual Relativism
LOCATION: We are now in a section where Putnam engages directly with Donald Davidson’s influential argument against conceptual schemes, which Davidson claimed refuted the very idea of conceptual relativism.
PRESENTATION: Putnam begins by acknowledging that Davidson’s argument is widely regarded as devastating to any form of conceptual relativism. Davidson’s core claim, as Putnam presents it, is that the notion of a conceptual scheme—a set of categories or a language that organizes experience in a way fundamentally different from our own—is incoherent. Davidson argues that if we encountered a genuinely alternative conceptual scheme, we would not even be able to identify it *as* a scheme; we would have no way of translating its utterances or recognizing its beliefs. The very idea of “different schemes” presupposes a distinction between scheme and content, between organizing system and uninterpreted given—and Davidson denies that any such distinction is intelligible.
Putnam then lays out Davidson’s argument in more detail. The argument proceeds by examining what it would mean for a scheme to be “largely true but untranslatable.” Davidson contends that the only evidence we could have that something is a language is that we can translate it into our own. If we cannot translate it, we have no grounds for calling it a language at all. And if we can translate it, then it is not genuinely alternative—it is simply our own scheme in different words. Davidson further argues that most of the beliefs of any speaker must be true, on the grounds that belief is by its nature veridical: we can only interpret another’s utterances as beliefs against a background of massive agreement about how the world is. Radical disagreement would be unintelligible, because we could not identify the content of the disagreeing beliefs.
“If conceptual relativism is the idea that there can be alternative conceptual schemes, each of which is ‘equally valid,’ then Davidson’s argument is that this idea is incoherent because the very notion of a conceptual scheme makes no sense.”
Putnam, however, does not accept this conclusion. He argues that Davidson’s argument is too strong—it proves too much. If Davidson were right, then not only would conceptual relativism be refuted, but so would any notion of alternative descriptions of the same reality. Yet we know that alternative descriptions exist: the same objects can be described using different part-whole structures, different systems of measurement, different geometrical frameworks. Putnam gives the example of describing a table: one can say it is composed of molecules, or of atoms, or of quarks, or that it is a single solid object. These are not contradictory descriptions; they are different ways of carving up the same reality. But Davidson’s argument, if pushed, would seem to imply that such alternative descriptions are impossible—that there is only one correct way to describe the world.
Putnam’s response is to distinguish between what he calls “hard” conceptual relativism—the view that there are radically incommensurable schemes with no common measure—and a “softer” conceptual pluralism that he endorses. The soft version does not claim that there are untranslatable languages or that truth is relative to a scheme in any strong sense. Rather, it claims that there are many different but equally legitimate ways of describing and classifying reality, each of which captures something real, and none of which is the “one true description.” This is the view Putnam has been developing throughout the book: reality does not dictate a single canonical vocabulary. We have many legitimate interests, and our descriptions serve those interests.
CLARIFICATION: This section is crucial because it shows Putnam navigating between two positions he rejects: on one side, the strong relativism that says truth is entirely scheme-relative; on the other, the metaphysical realism that says there is exactly one true description of the world. Davidson’s argument, Putnam believes, rightly refutes the strong relativist but mistakenly threatens the more moderate pluralist as well. Putnam wants to salvage a form of pluralism that is compatible with realism—hence “Realism with a Human Face.” The key move is to deny that alternative descriptions are untranslatable or incommensurable. They are simply different, each adequate for different purposes, and each capable of being understood from within the other perspective once we learn the relevant conventions. This is not relativism, because truth is not relative to a scheme; it is pluralism, because there are many truths.
9. The Question of Realism: A Lecture
LOCATION: In this lecture, Putnam steps back to give a systematic overview of what he takes realism to mean, why it has become a contested notion, and what form of realism he is defending.
PRESENTATION: Putnam begins by acknowledging that “realism” has become a deeply ambiguous term. There are almost as many realisms as there are philosophers: scientific realism, moral realism, realism about the external world, realism about universals, realism about mathematical objects. The central question, as Putnam frames it, is whether our statements are true or false in virtue of something independent of our minds. The metaphysical realist holds that there is a fixed, mind-independent world that determines the truth or falsity of every statement, whether or not we can ever know which. The anti-realist (of various stripes) holds that truth is somehow tied to what we can verify, or to our conceptual schemes, or to our practices.
Putnam then gives a history of the debate, tracing it back to the conflict between realism and idealism in the nineteenth century. The idealists (Berkeley, Kant, Hegel) argued that the world cannot be entirely independent of mind, because the very notion of a “world” involves categories and concepts that are supplied by the mind. The realists (Moore, Russell, the early logical positivists) insisted that there is a world out there, independent of our thinking. Putnam notes that the early twentieth-century realists often made the mistake of thinking that science gives us a “God’s-eye view” of reality—a description of things as they are in themselves, not just as they appear to us. This is the view he calls “externalist realism” or “metaphysical realism.”
Putnam then presents his own alternative, which he calls “internal realism.” The internal realist holds that the question “What objects does the world consist of?” only makes sense *within* a conceptual scheme. Different schemes may carve up the world differently, and there is no neutral standpoint from which to judge which scheme is “correct.” This does not mean that anything goes: within a scheme, statements can be objectively true or false. But the scheme itself is not forced upon us by reality; it is a product of our interests, our history, our biology. The internal realist rejects the idea of a “ready-made world” that comes pre-divided into objects, properties, and kinds.
“The internal realist is, in short, a *pluralist*. There is no one true description of the world. The world does not come with a built-in ‘carving’ into objects, properties, and relations.”
Putnam then addresses an obvious objection: does this not lead to relativism? If there is no one true description, then what prevents someone from saying that any description is as good as any other? Putnam’s answer is that the internal realist does not claim that all descriptions are equally good. Descriptions can be evaluated by criteria such as coherence, predictive success, explanatory power, simplicity, and fruitfulness. But these criteria are themselves *internal* to our practices; they are not imposed by a mind-independent reality. We can debate the merits of different schemes, but we cannot appeal to a “view from nowhere” to settle the debate.
CLARIFICATION: This lecture is the heart of Putnam’s positive position. He is trying to carve out a middle ground between two untenable extremes: the metaphysical realist who thinks we can know things as they are in themselves, and the relativist who thinks that truth is nothing more than what a community agrees on. Internal realism is Putnam’s attempt to give a philosophically rigorous account of objectivity that does not depend on a God’s-eye view. The “human face” of the title refers to this recognition that our descriptions are always from within a human perspective, but that does not make them arbitrary or merely subjective. The world is real, but our access to it is mediated by concepts that we bring to it—concepts that are not forced upon us by reality but are nevertheless answerable to reality.
10. Beyond the Fact-Value Distinction: A Conversation
LOCATION: Here Putnam returns to the theme of fact and value, this time in the form of a dialogue or conversation that explores the implications of his earlier arguments for ethics, politics, and everyday reasoning.
PRESENTATION: Putnam stages a conversation between three characters: a positivist, a relativist, and a pragmatist (the character who speaks for Putnam). The positivist insists on the sharp separation between fact and value: facts are objective, verifiable, and universal; values are subjective, emotional, and relative to culture or individual preference. The relativist agrees that values are not objective but draws a different conclusion: since all values are relative, no one can criticize another culture’s values, and the very idea of moral progress is an illusion.
The pragmatist character challenges both. He begins by pointing out that the positivist’s own distinction between fact and value is itself a value-laden distinction: it privileges scientific inquiry over ethical reflection, and it assumes a theory of rationality that is not itself empirically verifiable. The positivist’s criteria for what counts as a “fact” are not neutral; they reflect a particular philosophical commitment—scientism—that is itself a value choice.
The pragmatist then turns to the relativist. He argues that the relativist has made a logical error: from the premise that there is no absolute, God’s-eye standard of value, the relativist concludes that no standard of value can be objective. But this is a false dichotomy. There are many standards of objectivity that are not absolute: standards of coherence, consistency, fairness, accuracy, and so on, that operate within our practices. The pragmatist gives the example of a judge deciding a case: the judge’s decision is not arbitrary, even though there is no algorithm that mechanically determines the correct verdict. The judge appeals to precedent, to principles of justice, to the facts of the case—and these are objective constraints, even if they are not absolute ones.
“The fact/value dichotomy is not a discovery about the nature of language or the world; it is a philosophical construction that has outlived its usefulness.”
The conversation then moves to the topic of moral realism—the view that moral statements can be true or false in a straightforward sense. The positivist objects that moral statements cannot be verified by empirical observation. The pragmatist responds that this criterion of verifiability is too narrow: we verify moral statements not by laboratory experiments but by reflection, debate, and the testing of principles against particular cases. This is how we verify statements in law, in literary criticism, in mathematics—none of which fit the positivist’s narrow model of verification. The pragmatist concludes that the fact-value dichotomy has led philosophers to misunderstand the nature of ethical reasoning. Ethics is not a matter of subjective feeling; it is a form of rational inquiry with its own standards of objectivity, which are continuous with the standards of rationality we use in other domains.
CLARIFICATION: This conversational format allows Putnam to dramatize the philosophical positions he is arguing against and to show the internal tensions within them. The positivist and the relativist, despite their apparent disagreement, share the same fundamental assumption: that objectivity requires an absolute, God’s-eye standpoint. The pragmatist rejects this assumption and in doing so opens up space for a more nuanced understanding of both science and ethics. The “conversation” also illustrates Putnam’s method: he is not content to simply state his position; he wants to show why alternative positions fail from the inside. The section reinforces the book’s central theme: the fact-value dichotomy is not a natural boundary in the world but a philosophical prejudice that distorts our understanding of both facts and values.
11. The Philosophy of Science: An Interview
We are now in an interview format where Putnam responds to questions about his views on the philosophy of science, clarifying and extending themes from earlier sections.
Putnam begins by addressing the question of scientific realism directly. He distinguishes his position from what he calls “metaphysical realism” — the view that there is one complete and true description of the world that is “ready-made” and independent of our conceptual choices. He explains that the success of science does not require us to believe in such a description. Instead, we can accept that scientific theories refer to real entities — electrons, genes, curved spacetime — without committing ourselves to the idea that these are the “ultimate” constituents of reality.
The interviewer presses him on the problem of theory change in science. How can we say that later theories are better approximations to the truth if earlier theories had different ontologies? Putnam responds by invoking his earlier work on the “no-miracles” argument for realism: the best explanation for the success of science is that our theories are approximately true. But he now adds a crucial nuance. This argument does not require us to believe that each successive theory gets closer to a single “final” theory. What it requires is that we can recognize genuine progress — that we have better instruments, more accurate predictions, deeper explanations — without positing a God’s-eye point from which to measure this progress.
“The fact that a scientific theory is successful is evidence that it is approximately true, but ‘approximately true’ does not mean ‘corresponds to the noumenal reality.’ It means that the theory works, that it enables us to predict and control phenomena, and that it coheres with our other beliefs.”
Putnam then addresses the value-ladenness of scientific inquiry. He argues that the choice between competing theories is never purely a matter of “the facts.” Scientists appeal to values like simplicity, coherence, explanatory power, and fertility. These are epistemic values, but they are values nonetheless. The positivist attempt to separate “context of discovery” (where values might play a role) from “context of justification” (where only logic and evidence should operate) collapses, because the very criteria of justification are value-laden.
This observation connects to Putnam’s broader critique of the fact-value dichotomy. If scientific method itself requires value judgments, then the line between “factual” and “evaluative” discourse is not as sharp as the positivists believed. The interviewer asks whether this leads to relativism. Putnam answers firmly: no. The fact that our criteria for rational acceptability are not absolute does not mean that anything goes. We can still distinguish between better and worse arguments, between genuine science and pseudoscience, between informed judgment and wishful thinking. What we lose is not objectivity but the illusion of an absolute, context-independent standard of objectivity.
The interview format allows Putnam to respond to objections and clarify his positions in a conversational manner. He acknowledges that his view is “messier” than the tidy picture offered by logical positivism, but he insists that this messiness is required by the actual practice of science. A philosophical account that cannot accommodate the values that scientists actually use — simplicity, elegance, explanatory depth — is not more rigorous; it is simply less faithful to the phenomenon.
This section matters because it shows Putnam applying his pragmatic pluralism to the specific case of scientific inquiry. The key move is the denial that scientific objectivity requires a “God’s-eye view.” Objectivity, for Putnam, is an achievement within human practices, not a correspondence between our theories and a mind-independent world. The interview format underscores this point by showing Putnam in dialogue, offering a model of rational inquiry that is collaborative, fallibilistic, and value-laden.
12. The Fact-Value Fallacy: A Lecture
We move to a formal lecture setting where Putnam directly addresses the historical origins and philosophical consequences of the fact-value dichotomy.
Putnam begins by tracing the dichotomy back to David Hume, who argued that you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” This principle — the so-called “naturalistic fallacy” — became a cornerstone of empiricist philosophy. But Putnam argues that Hume’s insight has been misunderstood and misapplied. Hume was making a logical point about valid inferences, not a metaphysical claim about the inherent separation of facts and values. The slide from “you cannot logically deduce an ‘ought’ from an ‘is'” to “values are not objective” is a non sequitur.
The lecture then moves to the twentieth century, where the fact-value dichotomy was hardened into dogma by the logical positivists. Their verification principle — that a statement is meaningful only if it is empirically verifiable or logically necessary — seemed to relegate ethical judgments to the realm of “emotive” or “expressive” utterances. But, as Putnam points out, the verification principle itself cannot be verified. It is a philosophical proposal, not a scientific discovery. The positivists were therefore in the awkward position of declaring their own core principle meaningless by their own criteria.
“The verification principle is not an empirical statement, and it is not a logical truth. So by its own lights, it is meaningless. This is not just a clever paradox; it is a sign that the entire framework is flawed.”
Putnam then examines the work of J.L. Mackie, who argued for an “error theory” of ethics: all moral judgments are false because they claim objective validity for values that do not exist. Mackie’s argument, Putnam contends, depends on the assumption that objectivity requires a special kind of metaphysical reality — what philosophers call “ontological objectivity.” If values were objective, they would have to be “queer” entities, somehow both factual and motivating. But this assumption about what objectivity requires is precisely what Putnam rejects.
The pragmatist alternative, which Putnam develops in this lecture, is to treat ethical objectivity on the model of scientific objectivity. In science, we have criteria for what counts as a good explanation, and these criteria are not arbitrary. Similarly, in ethics, we have criteria for what counts as a good reason for action, and these criteria are not arbitrary either. The difference is one of degree, not of kind. Both domains involve norms of rational acceptability that are neither “absolute” nor “subjective” but are embedded in practices that we can criticize and improve.
Putnam concludes the lecture by noting that the fact-value dichotomy has had damaging consequences outside philosophy. It has been used to argue that ethical discourse is merely “subjective preference,” a move that has weakened our ability to challenge policies on moral grounds. If values are just expressions of emotion, then there is no rational way to argue about them. Putnam wants to restore the cognitive dimension of ethical talk — not by making values into “facts” of the old metaphysical kind, but by showing that our ethical judgments are subject to the same kind of rational criticism that our factual judgments are.
This lecture is crucial because it makes explicit the historical narrative that underlies much of the book. Putnam is not just making a philosophical argument; he is offering a diagnosis of why the fact-value dichotomy has seemed so compelling. By showing that the dichotomy rests on a series of untenable assumptions — about meaning, about objectivity, about the nature of philosophical analysis — he clears the ground for his own positive account.
13. The Collapse of the Fact-Value Dichotomy: A Conversation with J.L. Mackie
This section presents a fictionalized conversation with the late philosopher J.L. Mackie, allowing Putnam to engage directly with the strongest version of the error theory.
The conversation is structured around Mackie’s famous arguments from queerness and relativity. The argument from queerness holds that if objective values existed, they would be “queer” entities — unlike anything else in our experience — and that positing them is therefore ontologically extravagant. The argument from relativity holds that the widespread disagreement about moral questions is best explained by the hypothesis that there are no objective moral facts to disagree about.
Putnam responds to the argument from queerness by questioning the underlying metaphysics. Why should we think that values would have to be “queer” entities? This assumes a particular ontology — roughly, the ontology of physical science — on which only physical objects and their properties are “real.” But this ontology is itself a philosophical choice, not a deliverance of common sense or science. If we adopt a more generous ontology — one that includes norms, reasons, and values as real features of our experience — then there is nothing queer about moral properties at all.
“The queerness is not in the values but in the picture that makes values seem queer. If you start with a scientistic ontology that excludes norms from the real world, then of course norms will seem like ghosts. But that is a problem with the ontology, not with the norms.”
To the argument from relativity, Putnam responds that moral disagreement is not as radical as Mackie suggests. While there are genuine moral disagreements, there is also a great deal of moral agreement — about the wrongness of murder, the value of kindness, the importance of fairness. Moreover, many apparent moral disagreements turn out to be disagreements about non-moral facts: what the consequences of a policy will be, what the relevant empirical data show. If we factor out these empirical disagreements, the remaining moral disagreements are neither as widespread nor as intractable as the argument from relativity requires.
Mackie’s character presses back: even if there is agreement on some basic moral norms, this could be explained by evolutionary biology or social conditioning. Agreement does not entail truth. Putnam concedes this point but argues that the same can be said of our most basic empirical beliefs. Our agreement that the sun will rise tomorrow is also a product of conditioning — in this case, by the regularities of nature. The fact that a belief is conditioned does not make it false. The relevant question is whether we can give reasons for our moral beliefs, not where those beliefs came from.
The conversation ends with Putnam articulating his positive view: moral statements can be true or false, but their truth conditions are not given by correspondence to some non-natural realm. Instead, they are given by the norms of rational acceptability that govern our ethical practices. This is a pragmatist theory of truth applied to ethics: a moral claim is true if it would be accepted under ideal conditions of rational inquiry.
This section matters because it shows Putnam engaging with the most serious challenge to his view. By staging a direct confrontation with Mackie, he forces himself to articulate his position with maximum clarity. The conversational format also illustrates his methodological commitment: philosophy is a dialogue, not a monologue, and progress comes through engagement with the strongest version of opposing views.
14. Beyond the Fact-Value Dichotomy: Directions for Future Research
In the final substantive section of the book, Putnam steps back from specific arguments to offer a broader vision of where philosophy should go after the collapse of the fact-value dichotomy.
Putnam begins by noting that the critique of the dichotomy is not merely negative. It opens up new possibilities for understanding the relationship between ethics and epistemology, between facts and norms. If the dichotomy is abandoned, then we can see that our factual judgments are already infused with normative commitments — commitments to truth, to rationality, to evidence. And our normative judgments are answerable to facts — facts about human nature, about social arrangements, about the consequences of our actions.
One important direction for future research, Putnam suggests, is the integration of ethics and epistemology. If knowledge is a normative concept — if to say that someone knows something is to make a judgment about the rationality of their belief — then epistemology is already a normative discipline. The attempt to reduce epistemology to empirical psychology or sociology is a mistake, because it misses the evaluative dimension of knowledge. But this does not mean that epistemology is “unscientific”; it means that science itself presupposes norms that science cannot fully account for.
“We need a picture of inquiry on which the inquirer is not a passive mirror of nature but an active participant in a rational enterprise. And this picture requires us to take norms seriously — not as mysterious entities but as constitutive features of the practice of giving and asking for reasons.”
Another direction is the rehabilitation of the notion of human flourishing as a central concept in ethics. If values are not projected onto a value-free world but are discovered in the course of our engagement with the world, then we can talk about what is truly good for human beings without committing the “naturalistic fallacy.” The key is to see that our nature as rational, social, language-using creatures is not value-neutral. To describe what we are is already to describe what we value, and what we should value.
Putnam also touches on the role of literature and the arts in moral education. If ethical knowledge is not a matter of deducing conclusions from universal principles but of developing perception, sensitivity, and judgment, then the arts have a cognitive function. Novels, plays, and films can deepen our understanding of moral situations in ways that abstract philosophical argument cannot. This is not a rejection of philosophy but an expansion of its resources.
The section closes with a call for a pragmatic pluralism that respects the diversity of our cognitive and evaluative practices without lapsing into relativism. We do not need a single, unified account of truth, knowledge, or goodness. What we need is a willingness to engage in rational inquiry across all domains, using the methods appropriate to each, while remaining open to the possibility that these methods can be criticized and improved.
This section matters because it shows Putnam’s positive vision for philosophy after the critique is complete. He is not content to be a critic; he wants to point the way forward. The proposals he offers are programmatic rather than fully worked out, but they indicate the direction in which he thinks philosophy should move: toward a recognition of the entanglement of facts and values, and toward a conception of rationality that is both fallible and objective, both human and normative.
