From: denmckinnon@halls1.cc.monash.edu.au (NEIL MCKINNON)
Subject: Re: Having to believe
Organization: Monash University, Melb., Australia.
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1992 04:46:18 GMT

Not long after I made my last posting I looked back over the articles I have 
of Putnam: i.e. Models and Reality, Realism and Reason, Reference and 
Understanding.  I realized then that what I had posted here involved a 
significant misconstruction of Putnam's anti-realism. (I haven't read his 
book, "Reason, Truth and History" - perhaps that would help me understand 
him better?)  So thanks for your replies, Jussi.  (Oh, and someone else 
whom I forget, who made a similar response.)  This is where I am now with 
Putnam.

Putnam's semantics for truth are in terms of verification, after Dummett 
(Realism and Reason, Models and Reality).  As Putnam says, these semantics 
are done in such a way that facts are "soft all the way down".  In other 
words, there are no hard, truth-conditional facts upon which verifications 
are ultimately based.  Instead, the primitive observation statements of
one's language are verified by the very act of our saying them.  Now it 
becomes clear that the objections I offered previously would clearly not 
budge anyone who accepted Putnam's position.  The (A&~A) problem does not 
arise because there is no meta-theoretic concept of truth as Jussi 
pointed out.  There may be different ideal theories true for different 
speakers, formulable (in theory) around the observation statements of each 
speaker.  

Here is where I digress from what is explicit in Putnam.  Hopefully these 
are things implicit in his doctrine.

I suggest a reconstruction of what it is for a sentence to be 
true (hopefully following Putnam).  A sentence is true for person x if and 
only if it is (a) part of an ideal theory for x, or (b) an observational 
sentence consistent with the ideal theory, or (c) it is verified by 
deduction from a set of previously verified sentences.

It follows that truth is relativized to each individual, his/her 
observations, and the ideal theory applicable to him/her at any given time.
There is something else which is interesting to note.  Putnam's criteria for 
the status Ideal Theory were that the theory in question satisfies maximally 
all operational constraints (i.e. observational evidence) and theoretical 
constraints *we* put on theory acceptance.  Now it occurs to me that the 
ideal theory (and therefore much of what is true) applicable to an 
individual is partially dependent upon the theoretical constraints that 
person chooses to impose on theory acceptance.  Not everyone will follow 
Putnam's line (i.e. the ideal theory must be maximally simple, conservative 
etc.).   Some will want to impose a constraint like "must not conflict with 
a literal interpretation of the Bible."  Other things are a mystery to me, 
like what theoretical constraints would be laid down for the ideal theory of 
4 year old Christopher?

What bothers me about this picture now is that it does not seem to explain, 
for example, the convergence of beliefs within a society, and how we use our 
language successfully as a communal device to attain goals.  Putnam feels 
the need to retain realism (though he is an anti-realist at base) as an 
model to explain these things, but I don't see how they can in fact be 
explained if without assuming that there might be a language-independent, 
objective Universe.

Neil.