Reference, Truth and Conceptual Schemes: A Defense of Internal Realism (Synthese Library, 296)

vii

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1

1.1. 1.2.

Historical Background The Plan of the Book

1 8

CHAPTER 2

METAPHYSICAL REALISM AND INTERNAL REALISM 10

2.1. 2.2.

Metaphysical Realism Internal Realism

10 23

CHAPTER 3

REFERENCE

40

3.1. 3.2. 3.3.

An Internal Realist Account of Reference Quinean Indeterminacy and Misclassification Twin Earth and Mental Content

40 51 62

CHAPTER 4

TRUTH

73

4.1. 4.2. 4.3.

Truth Within a Conceptual Scheme The Adequacy of Conceptual Schemes Global Skepticism and Brains in a Vat

74 83 96

CHAPTER 5

CONCEPTUAL PLURALISM

110

5.1. 5.2. 5.3.

On Sharing a Domain Davidson’s Challenge Physicalism, Naturalism, and Relativism

110 117 123

Notes References Index

133 139 147

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The purpose of the book is to develop internal realism, the metaphysical-epistemological doctrine initiated by Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History, “Introduction”, Many Faces). In doing so I shall rely – sometimes quite heavily – on the notion of conceptual scheme. I shall use the notion in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, which, however, has some affinities with the ways the notion has been used during its history. So I shall start by sketching the history of the notion. This will provide some background, and it will also give opportunity to raise some of the most important problems I will have to solve in the later chapters. The story starts with Kant. Kant thought that the world as we know it, the world of tables, chairs and hippopotami, is constituted in part by the human mind. His central argument relied on an analysis of space and time, and presupposed his famous doctrine that knowledge cannot extend beyond all possible experience. It is a central property of experience – he claimed – that it is structured spatially and temporally. However, for various reasons, space and time cannot be features of the world, as it is independently of our experience. So he concluded that they must be the forms of human sensibility, i. e. necessary ingredients of the way things appear to our senses. Consequently, the world as it is independently of experience should be distinguished sharply from the world we experience. The former, the non-temporal and non-spatial world of ‘things in themselves’ or ‘noumena’, cannot be known; since human experience is spatial and temporal, the world of things in themselves outstrips the bounds of possible experience. The latter, the world of ‘appearances’ or ‘phenomena’, can be known and is known to some extent; but it is partly our own making, because space and time are additions by the human mind. The constitution of the world of knowledge by the human mind is not accomplished solely by space and time. Space and time have to do with ‘receptivity’, the passive faculty of the mind. In virtue of this faculty, the mind is like a surface which is altered as a result of the changes which take place in the environment. By suffering transformations, it provides information about the forces which act on it. But this information is not yet knowledge. It is just a ‘sensory manifold’, a series of impressions, chaotic, unorganized, and accidental. It does not yield anything like a picture of a relatively stable and law-governed environment. It is, therefore, just the raw material for knowledge. The task of ‘spontaneity’, the active faculty, is to transform this raw material into knowledge by imposing on it divisions,

INTRODUCTION

2

classifications, and various kinds of ordering. This systematization is accomplished through the application of concepts. Kant distinguished between two kinds of concepts, a priori and a posteriori. The latter are contingent; they are introduced to cope with the impressions the mind happens to receive. So Kant, whose transcendental project was to unearth the necessary preconditions of human knowledge, had no interest in them. The a priori concepts, such as ‘cause’ and ‘substance’, are different. They are not introduced on a case by case basis depending on what sort of impressions the mind receives through its passive faculty: the mind possesses them prior to any experience. They are necessary if we are to construct the picture of a stable and law-governed world out of the chaos of impressions. Without them there would be no orderly world, which could be known. Like space and time, they contribute to the constitution of the world we know. Putting it tendentiously and imprecisely, Kant held that the world as we know it is constituted, in part, by a conceptual scheme. This is tendentious, because Kant – like many other authors mentioned or hinted at in this sketch – never used the term ’conceptual scheme’. It is also imprecise, because it lumps together two things: the forms of sensibility – space and time –, which are not conceptual and play part in shaping the sensory manifold, and the a priori concepts, the ‘categories’, which create the world of appearances out of the sensory manifold. Nevertheless, the view to be developed here is a distant descendant of Kant’s view, and the notion of conceptual scheme, as I shall understand it, is indeed rooted in his work. I shall maintain that there is a distinction between the world as it is and the way it appears to us, the noumena and the phenomena, in Kant’s terms. The world as we know it is constituted by conceptual schemes. What conceptual schemes do is thus roughly similar to what Kant’s forms of sensibility and a priori concepts do. So let me continue with the history of the notion. In Kant’s view there is but one conceptual scheme, which is shared by the whole of humankind. This assumption was challenged by the next generation of German philosophers, notably by Herder and Humboldt, who put the notion to a rather different use. They were more sensitive to historical and cultural differences, and came to regard these differences as incompatible with the Kantian assumption of one universal conceptual scheme. They held that if another group of people think in ways which seem odd to us and which are difficult to make sense of, they have to be credited with a conceptual scheme different from our own. So they changed the notion into a hermeneutic device, which could be invoked in cases of cultural confrontation. Suppose there is an ancient text or an alien people which or who we find difficult to understand. We are trying to make sense of what is written or said, but what we come up with seems strange, irrational, or outright crazy. If there is no clear evidence to the contrary, we prefer to regard the other as a sensible being. But then the oddity calls for an explanation. If the other is just as sensible as we are, how come her ways seem so weird? It is at this point that the notion of conceptual scheme comes in. The weirdness is due to the fact that she is using a different conceptual scheme. Once we manage to explore her conceptual scheme, we shall find that, viewed from within her scheme, her opinions are reasonable and wellmotivated – or, at least, her mistakes are not that numerous or serious. Thus Kant’s

3

INTRODUCTION

universal scheme was dissolved into a plurality of historically and culturally bound schemes. This transformation cannot be reconciled with the Kantian sense of a priori. Kant’s a priori concepts are indispensable for any sort of human knowledge. If some people did not share this set of a priori concepts, this would entail that they cannot have knowledge. Hence, at the hands of the post-Kantian generation the conceptual scheme has lost its a priori status. Nevertheless, it has remained fundamental in the following sense. It has come to signify the constitutive elements of some worldview, the elements which together endow it with a particular sort of unity or cohesion which distinguishes it from other worldviews; the sort of elements which are all-important for understanding the view, without the grasp of which the view is fragmented into incongruous bits and pieces. This historical and cultural notion of conceptual scheme has had serious repercussions throughout the humanities and the social sciences, partly because it has captured something of the experience of those who study alien cultures, like historians, field linguists and anthropologists. However, it has also made it easy to arrive at two rather worrying conclusions. The first is a strong form of relativism. Suppose that the dissimilarities between conceptual schemes are so huge that thoughts from one scheme cannot be translated into or interpreted in another scheme; i. e., the resources of different conceptual schemes are so disparate that each is incapable of expressing what can be expressed in other schemes. This would make it impossible to judge a claim formulated within a conceptual scheme from outside the scheme. Within scheme A we could not evaluate the claims formulated within scheme B, since the claims could not be reformulated within A without distortions so serious that the reformulations could no longer be considered identical to the original claims. For the same reasons, there would be no hope for the construction of a common frame of reference within which the relationship between different schemes could be clarified, and we could examine their compatibility and truth. If this were the case, the idea of truth as a universal notion which ranges over all conceptual schemes would become empty and superfluous. It would have to be replaced by a notion of truth which is relativized to conceptual schemes. Instead of truth we would have to speak of truth within a conceptual scheme. This would be relativism, straight and simple. To sum it up, if the hermeneutic notion of conceptual scheme is supplemented with the idea that there can be no translation between conceptual schemes, the likely result is relativism. The second and even more drastic conclusion emerges only if we add two more premises. The first one is that conceptual schemes are constitutive of the world as it appears to us, just as Kant thought. The second one is the un-Kantian thought that the only notion of the world which makes sense is the world as it appears to us. In other words, the phenomena are retained but the noumena are dismissed. If the world of appearances is different within different conceptual schemes, and the notion of a common, neutral world, which is the same even though it appears differently, is rejected as unintelligible, we end up with the thought that there are several different worlds. As it were, each conceptual scheme would constitute its own world. This would be something like idealism with many worlds instead of one. This is even more worrying than relativism. Relativism raises barriers in the

INTRODUCTION

4

way of communication and prevents us from viewing the whole of humankind as participating in the same cognitive and moral enterprise. The many world view adds this: we do not even have anything to communicate about. People with different conceptual schemes are as if they were locked into separate universes in some weird science fiction story. These conclusions do not automatically follow from the historical-cultural notion of conceptual scheme. But this notion has never been worked out in sufficient detail to see what exactly it involves. A much better developed notion emerges from the work of the logical positivists. The logical positivists did not follow Kant, and they were not interested in cross-cultural understanding either. They were concerned with the rational reconstruction of our knowledge, especially of scientific theories. As radical empiricists, they believed that all knowledge comes from the senses; in fact, all knowledge is about what can be observed. Consequently, all that there is to know could be formulated in observational terms, at least in principle. In practice, however, descriptions couched exclusively in observational terms would be far too complicated to use. It takes a vast number of purely observational sentences to express very simple things. It would be very difficult to obtain predictions and explanations. This is why we introduce theories. Theoretical terms are merely abbreviations intended to express complex observable conditions concisely. Since what the theories say can in principle be put in observational terms alone, theoretical terms do not have surplus meaning, which does not come from observation. (In fact, all surplus meaning would be banished by the principle of verifiability, which asserts that all meaning is observational meaning.) It follows from this that the sentences which link theoretical terms to observational terms, the ‘correspondence rules’ or ‘coordinative definitions’, are analytic. They do not provide factual information about how two different sorts of things are related. Rather, they are conventions, which merely record abbreviations. In addition to these analytic sentences, science contains two sorts of synthetic sentences. First, observation reports, which contain only observational terms. These can be used to test scientific theories. Second, sentences containing only theoretical terms, such as the laws of a theory. To sum it up, the logical positivists considered scientific knowledge as a twolevel structure. The lower level is that observation, the upper level is that of theory, and the two are connected by correspondence rules. The sentences on the lower and the upper level are synthetic, the sentences which connect the two levels are analytic. This picture is related to the idea of conceptual schemes in the following way. What the theoretical terms accomplish is somewhat similar to what the a priori concepts do in Kant. They organize what is given to the senses in such a way that they make it a suitable subject for knowledge. Of course, they transform it into a suitable subject for knowledge in a different way. In Kant, the application of categories is necessary for any kind of empirical knowledge. According to the logical positivists, there can be empirical knowledge without theoretical terms, but this knowledge would be rather limited and unsystematic. So the theoretical terms are only practically necessary if we are to have a powerful and easy-to-handle account. If we disre-

5

INTRODUCTION

gard this very important difference, i. e. if we allow the notion of conceptual scheme to be rather loose, we may say that for the logical positivists a conceptual scheme is a set of theoretical terms. This notion of conceptual scheme is just as pluralistic as the historical-hermeneutic notion. There have been and there are several different theoretical vocabularies, so there are several conceptual schemes. At the same time, it offers no possibilities to arrive at the worrying conclusions which could perhaps be drawn from the hermeneutic notion. The inference to relativism hinges on the assumption that there can be no translation between claims within different conceptual schemes. This assumption is rejected in the logical positivist picture: theoretical terms can be translated into observational ones with the help of the correspondence rules. So all conceptual schemes can be understood in observational terms. The problems we may face in understanding an alien conceptual scheme are merely practical. The inference to the idea that there are many worlds is blocked in a similar way. All conceptual schemes organize the same thing, i. e. the observations. The observations are independent of the conceptual schemes. The world we see and hear is the same. It is only our theoretical pictures of it which differ. So we have here a fairly neat distinction between conceptual schemes and their content. The content is the set of observations, which is shared by all conceptual schemes. Conceptual schemes are simply theoretical vocabularies which structure this neutral content in different ways. This account also has a nice way of distinguishing a conceptual scheme from the various theoretical claims it can accommodate. The scheme is just the theoretical vocabulary. The theoretical claims are the various sentences which can be formulated in this vocabulary. The same point can be expressed in terms of the analytic-synthetic distinction. The theoretical terms are introduced through correspondence rules, which are analytic. Hence, the conceptual scheme is fixed by a set of analytic sentences. The particular theories, on the other hand, are the various synthetic sentences couched in the theoretical vocabulary. So the logical positivists could easily distinguish between conceptual and ‘merely’ theoretical changes. Changes in the correspondence rules result in conceptual change, whereas changes in the synthetic theoretical sentences amount to change in the theory only. Neat as the logical positivist picture was, it was based on a very implausible idea, namely the identification of the world with the set of possible observations. According to this picture, all that there really is is what can be observed. Theoretical terms are just of means of organizing what is observable. They do not stand for unobservable entities. This is not the way scientists understand their theoretical vocabulary. Most of them believe that there are things over and above what can be observed, and that theoretical terms are needed to capture these, rather than to provide shorthand for complicated observable states of affairs. The Kantian and the historical-hermeneutic notion did not suffer from this problem. According to Kant, the world as it appears to us is transcendentally ideal for it is constituted by the human mind, and it is real only in the empirical sense. But he would have regarded the unobservable entities introduced in the sciences as enjoying the same degree of empirical reality as the observable things. The historical-hermeneutic view left the door open to complete – rather than transcendental – idealism, but it did not assign

INTRODUCTION

6

different ontological status to observable and unobservable things. In contrast, the logical positivist could claim to be realists about the observable,i but the price they paid was anti-realism about the unobservable. This was one of the reasons which led to the downfall of logical positivism. But there were two other reasons as well, which are more important for our purposes. The first one was Quine’s criticism of the analytic-synthetic distinction (“Two dogmas”). The idea behind the distinction was that there are certain sentences which are true only in virtue of the conventions which specify the meanings of terms. In Quine’s view truth always depends on the facts as well. In other words, all sentences serve two purposes. They make factual claims and contribute to the fixation of the meanings of the terms they contain.ii There is no sentence whose only job is to fix meaning. But the correspondence rules were supposed to be exactly sentences of this kind. They were conceived as conventions which assign meaning to the theoretical terms. As a result, the logical positivist account of correspondence rules has to be abandoned. The sentences which bridge the gap between observation and theory cannot be analytic; they must be synthetic sentences, which make factual claims. This development has obscured the difference between conceptual schemes and the theories they can accommodate. If a conceptual scheme is a theoretical vocabulary, it must be more than that. The sentences which assign meaning to the theoretical terms make factual claims as well. Therefore, theoretical vocabularies come with theories. To be committed to a conceptual scheme is to be committed to some theory. The second reason which led to the demise of logical positivism was the criticism of the idea of pure observation. The new generation of historians and philosophers of science – Kuhn, Hanson, Feyerabend et al. – claimed that there is no such thing as raw experience. What we experience is not simply given to the senses. Experiences, even of the most primitive sort, are already shaped by concepts and theories. We cannot, so to speak, peel off what has been contributed by our conceptual apparatus to arrive at something which is independent of and antecedent to theorizing.iii As a result, theoretical changes may occasionally bring about changes in experience. What this means with respect to the notion of conceptual scheme is that the distinction between the scheme and the content organized by the scheme becomes impossible to draw. The theory permeates observation. One may still say that the theoretical vocabulary in a way structures the observational level. But the two ingredients, the one which is to be structured and the one which does the structuring cannot be separated. So the breakdown of the distinctions between the analytic and the synthetic on the one hand, and the observational and the theoretical on the other hand destroys the nice architecture of the logical positivist view. In the original picture one could clearly mark off the conceptual scheme both from the particular claims that can be expressed in its terms and from the content it organizes. Now these three things seem to be lumped together as an amorphous whole. Yet, it was exactly on the ruins of the logical positivist conception that a new notion of conceptual scheme has arisen. A new notion, which has affinities not only with the logical positivist view, but also with the Kantian and the historical-

7

INTRODUCTION

hermeneutic view. It is also the notion most people seem to think of nowadays when the word ’conceptual scheme’ is mentioned. The primary source of this notion is Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.iv As a historian of science, Kuhn knew very well how difficult it is to understand old scientific texts and that sticking to the current scientific concepts may actually hinder understanding. So the notion of conceptual scheme is first introduced as means to highlight the differences between the sciences of different periods. The reason why ancient texts seem obscure or even silly is that their authors did not share our conceptual scheme. This is the hermeneutic notion, which derives from the Herderian-Humboldtian heritage. As we noted, the hermeneutic notion has a tendency to be linked to relativism. This tendency is present in the Kuhnian notion as well. The thesis of incommensurability can be easily read as relativistic claim. Kuhn often spells out the difference between various conceptual schemes in terms of similarities perceived. Conceptual schemes tell scientists what is similar to what. They help scientists to notice particular structures in the phenomena, and it is through these structures that their theoretical toolkit can be deployed to describe the phenomena. This is often illuminated by the metaphor of eyeglasses. A conceptual scheme is like a pair of eyeglasses, looking through which it is revealed to us in what ways the thing we see is similar to those things we have already given an account of. The fact that the Kuhnian conceptual scheme does this makes it somewhat similar to the logical positivist notion. After all, what the logical positivist conceptual scheme – the theoretical vocabulary – was supposed to do is to pick out certain relevant constellations of observable conditions, i. e. to capture relevant similarities. In short, both Kuhn and the logical positivists regarded conceptual schemes as theoretical taxonomies or classificatory frameworks. There is a crucial difference though, which we have just mentioned. The Kuhnian conception denies the idea of pure experience. Hence, it denies that there is some neutral content which is not yet structured by any conceptual schemes. The conceptual schemes permeate everything. Whatever we perceive is already structured by our conceptual scheme. This feature reminds one of the Kantian notion. In the Kantian view, the whole world as it appears to us is within our conceptual scheme. Whatever we have access to is inside. But there is an important dissimilarity here between Kant and Kuhn. The Kantian view does not give rise to the second worrying conclusion mentioned in connection with the hermeneutic view, namely that there are many worlds. It has two features, each of which is sufficient to block any such inferences. First of all, in the Kantian view there is just one conceptual scheme, which is shared by the whole of humankind. But even if it allowed a plurality of conceptual schemes – which, of course, would upset the whole Kantian project – the highly implausible conclusion still would not threaten. What would prevent it is the notion of noumena. Kant cannot only talk about the world as it appears to us: he can also talk about the world as it is in itself. The realm of the noumena, or things-in-themselves, is something neutral between conceptual schemes. Even if the world appeared differently to people with different conceptual schemes, there would still be an underlying world, which is the same for everyone – even though it lies beyond our epistemic reach. Kuhn’s account lacks both of these

INTRODUCTION

8

features. First, denying the plurality of conceptual schemes would make the notion useless for hermeneutic purposes, and this would destroy his primary motivation for the notion. Second, he has no systematic way to talk about things outside conceptual schemes either. So it is not purely by chance that he says that ‘after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world’ (Structure, 111) or that ‘the scientist afterward works in a different world’ (ibid., 121). In the final analysis, he does not want these sentences to be taken literally.v He wants to retain the common sense idea that there is really just one world. For instance, he mentions that the same sorts of light rays hit our retinas (ibid., 192-3). But that is not sufficient defense against the drastic conclusion. After all, according to his account light rays are also theoretical constructs within conceptual schemes. So more needs to be said if they are to be understood as parts of a mind-independent world. It should be clear from this brief review of the history of the notion of conceptual scheme is that the notion is highly problematic. Worse, Davidson (“On the Very Idea”) has argued that it is actually incoherent. Briefly put, his argument is this. The notion is supposed to do some genuine philosophical work. Therefore, a conceptual scheme should not be simply a language or a theory. But then what is it? We need some criterion of identity. The criteria the advocates of the notion seem to propose have to do with untranslatability. Different conceptual schemes are supposed to be sets of languages which cannot be translated into one another. To say that some people have a conceptual scheme different from our own amounts to saying that we cannot translate their language. But if we cannot translate what they say, we can have no evidence that they speak a language. So the very criterion of identity for conceptual schemes seems to exclude the possibility that there can be different conceptual schemes. 2. THE PLAN OF THE BOOK The purpose of the book is to develop Putnam’s internal realism. Even though I make few references to Putnam, and I do not undertake to comment on his views, my debt to him is huge. The most important ideas presented here have grown out of an attempt to understand what Putnam had in mind. Internal realism is characterized by three major commitments. First, the world is in a way dependent on the human mind. Second, truth is not completely independent of verification. Third, the world can be approached through many conceptual schemes. At first sight, this set of doctrines may look like a sort of idealism. I shall argue, however, that it accounts for our realist intuitions. Indeed, it accounts for our realist intuitions just as well as a very different version of realism, which – following Putnam – I shall call metaphysical realism. I shall also propose a way to understand the notion of conceptual scheme. It will take up many elements of the earlier notions. It will be Kantian in the sense that it will have a role in the constitution of the world as we know it. Conceptual schemes will be described as classificatory frameworks, which is similar to the positivist and the Kuhnian conception. I will also claim – as the advocates of the notion with the exception of Kant did – that there are several conceptual schemes. However, I shall also depart from the earlier notions, and, in

9

INTRODUCTION

this way, I hope to eliminate the problems which the notion is thought to give rise to. Internal realism will be developed in the following steps. In Chapter 2, Metaphysical Realism and Internal Realism, I describe the two diametrically opposed version of realism. Since metaphysical realism is a familiar sort of doctrine, I will devote more space to the exposition of internal realism. I will put all the central issues on the table and I indicate briefly how I plan to deal with them. The details will be left for the later chapters. Chapter 3 is about reference. The first section contains the details of my positive view, which is a version of verificationist semantics. The following two sections reply to possible objections. They will also treat some very familiar issues like Quine’s thesis about the indeterminacy of reference, the Twin Earth argument and the recent discussions about mental content Chapter 4 is about truth. The first section discusses how truth should be understood if we have a conceptual scheme in place. However, not all conceptual schemes are equally good. The second section spells out how conceptual schemes can be evaluated. The final section uses Putnam’s brains in a vat argument to show that internal realism has a better to chance to avoid skepticism than internal realism. Chapter 5 deals with three rather different issues. First I explain in some detail what it means for different conceptual schemes to be concerned with the same domain. Then I take up Davidson’s attack on the notion of conceptual scheme. I will not provide a full-scale evaluation of his argument. I shall merely try to show that it does not work against my account. In the concluding section I discuss how internal realism is related to physicalism, naturalism, and relativism. I shall argue that it is compatible with certain versions of physicalism and naturalism, and it is not committed to relativism. The issue of relativism will be addressed at several places in the book, so what I give here is just a summary of the points made earlier.

CHAPTER 2 METAPHYSICAL REALISM AND INTERNAL REALISM

All of us agree that some sentences are true and some are false. We further agree that the truth values of sentences are determined by two factors: language and reality. The truth of ‘Mount Everest is higher than Mont Blanc’ is due partly to the meanings of the expressions occurring in it, partly to the way things in fact are. If ‘Mount Everest’ meant Eiger, it would be false. It would also be false if Mount Everest were not actually higher than Mont Blanc. We also agree that the truth values of most sentences are in some sense independent of us. Of course, we may conspire to change the meanings of the words or transform the world and thereby change the truth values of the sentences, but if we keep the meanings fixed and the world unchanged, the truth values will be independent of our beliefs, desires, fears or hopes. We usually explain this independence by saying that reality, i. e. the way things are, is independent of us. The truth of the sentence ‘Mount Everest is higher than Mont Blanc’ is independent of us, because the fact that Mount Everest is higher than Mont Blanc does not depend on our beliefs, fears, desires, etc. This is but the common sense view, and it is both vague and trivial. It provides something like the data for philosophical accounts. The adequacy of a philosophical account of these issues is measured by its success in meeting three requirements. The first is the explanation of the truth of the common sense view. Since the common sense view in this particular domain is undoubtedly true, the philosophical account should not contradict it. Rather, it has to develop a larger picture within which the common sense truths can be accommodated. The second requirement is clarity: the account should clear up at least some of the ambiguities of the common sense view. The third requirement is that it should not generate puzzles and paradoxes, i. e. it should be coherent in itself, it should not contradict other views we accept, it should not take for granted facts whose possibility it cannot explain, etc. Metaphysical realism and internal realism are competing philosophical accounts. In the first part of this chapter I shall describe metaphysical realism, in the second part I shall introduce internal realism, the doctrine I will try to develop and substantiate in the later chapters . 1. METAPHYSICAL REALISM As a first approximation to metaphysical realism, let us imagine that we are watching a painter painting a waterfall. We see both the waterfall and the painting. We can contrast the two and judge how faithful the painting is. We know well

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METAPHYSICAL AND INTERNAL REALISM

enough that the waterfall does not depend on the painting. It would have existed and would have had the same characteristics even if it had not been painted or no painter had ever existed. It also goes without saying that the painter’s belief that his work is faithful does not entail that it is indeed faithful. This will not change even if the painter has various techniques for checking whether his picture is faithful to the original, and he justifies his belief with these techniques. E. g. he may hold up his brush in the direction of the waterfall and move his thumb along it to estimate whether he got the proportions right. These techniques usually help to improve the painting, but do not guarantee success. The painter may have performed all his techniques to test his work and may have decided that the match is perfect, but the match may still not be perfect. The techniques may be applied badly, may be insufficient or positively wrong. So faithfulness is one thing, the set of techniques measuring it is another thing. Metaphysical realism is the view that assumes a position similar to the external observer watching the waterfall and the painting about it. On the one hand, there is the world. On the other hand, there are our representations and descriptions of it. These may be thoughts, sentences, mental pictures – for our purposes it does not matter. The world is independent of the representations. It would have existed and would have had the same characteristics even if no representations had ever been prepared. A representation is true if it matches the segment of the world it is a representation of. Whether a representation is true is completely independent of what its maker believes about it. It is also independent of the techniques the maker of the representation uses to check how good the representation is, i. e. it is independent of the verification procedures. The verification procedures are useful, but they are linked to truth only contingently. So truth is one thing, verification is another. I must warn, however, that the waterfall-painting analogy may suggest too much. It may be taken to indicate that we can judge a representation by comparing it directly with the relevant piece of the world. As if we had direct access to reality, a kind of access which is not mediated by representations, a kind of intellectual intuition. This idea of direct access to reality is pretty much dead (even though some people occasionally seem to forget this), so I do not want to build it into the metaphysical realist picture. Thus the metaphysical realist may claim that our knowledge of the world is always mediated. If you wish, we are imprisoned in an art gallery which has many pictures depicting the waterfall. We have techniques for measuring the faithfulness of the pictures, e.g. we can screen out the characteristic mistakes a particular painter makes by comparative analysis, we can use geometry to check whether the length and the direction of shadows is acceptable, etc. But we cannot go outside to see the original. Nevertheless, the original does not depend on the pictures for its characteristics or existence, and the techniques for the evaluation of the pictures do not define what faithfulness is. So the assumption of an external point of view makes sense, even if we cannot occupy that position ourselves. This is why Putnam calls this perspective ‘God’s Eye point of view’ (Reason, 49-50). However, this intuitive characterization of metaphysical realism is not enough. Stated more formally, the doctrine comprises three theses:

METAPHYSICAL AND INTERNAL REALISM

(MR1) (MR2) (MR3)

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The structure of the world is ontologically independent of the human mind. Truth is radically non-epistemic. If there are more than one adequate conceptual schemes of any given domain, they can type-reduce one another.vi

I shall comment on these theses one by one. In (MR1) ‘independent’ is to be taken in the sense in which it is normally taken in ontological discussion. ‘Independence’ means ontological and not causal independence. x is causally independent of y, if it has not been brought about by y. x is ontologically independent of y, if it does not depend on it for its existence, i. e. it could exist even in the absence of y. (Sacks, The World, 6-11). For example, my umbrella is causally dependent on the mind of its designer. It has come about partly because someone has designed it. At the same time, it is ontologically independent of the mind of its designer. It may continue to exist even after its designer’s death. Moreover, it could have been designed by someone else. On the other hand, the color of my umbrella is ontologically dependent on its being extended. Were it not extended, it could not have color. But its color is not causally dependent on its being extended. The fact that it is extended does not cause it to be black. ‘Mind’ has to be taken here in a fairly broad sense: it involves all human minds, present, past, and future, and all mental states and mental powers these minds can have. The ‘world’ stands here for the external world, i. e. for those things which are commonly regarded as non-mental. If ‘world’ were to mean here all things, (MR1) would be trivially false, since mind-independence does not hold for mental states. Joe’s fear of spiders is obviously ontologically dependent on Joe’s mind. If metaphysical realism claimed that the mental world is ontologically mind-independent, it would not deserve to be taken seriously. I included ‘structure’ to indicate that (MR1) is not merely the expression of what Devitt calls fig-leaf realism, the doctrine that ‘something objectively exists independently of the mental’ (Realism and Truth, 23). What I mean by structure is basically individuation and classification. So the ontological mind-independence of structure means that the principles of individuation and classification are intrinsic features of reality. Let us take individuation first. According to metaphysical realism, it is not the case that reality is an amorphous lump which is only carved up into objects by the human mind. On the contrary, reality comes in natural units. It is not for us to determine whether this thing is the same as that one, or whether these things are both self-contained objects, or one is a part of the other one, or where the boundary between two objects lies. Take, for example, an orchid hanging down from a tree. (Orchids are parasites.) Someone might argue that the orchid is but part of the tree, since it depends on the tree for support and nourishment. According to the metaphysical realist, this person is wrong, and not because his principles of individuation, applied across the board, would lead to an incoherent, or predictively unsuccessful, or very complicated theory of plant life, or a theory that cannot be integrated with other extant theories. He is wrong, because his criteria of identity do not reflect the criteria of identity inherent in nature. His criteria simply do not carve the beast of reality at the joints. On the metaphysical realist view there are joints,

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and they are where they are independently of the human mind. The same goes for classification. Take any two objects. Are they the same kind? This may not be the best way to put the question, since each object belongs to several kinds. The orchid we talked about is an orchid and a plant, it is organic and alive, etc. So it is better to phrase the question in this way. Which classes include both objects, and which classes include only one of them? The principles of classification are also inherent in nature, which means that each class comes with its own criteria of membership. Given the properties the objects have, they either satisfy the membership criteria of a particular class or they do not.vii It is not for us to decide. Of course, the metaphysical realist does not say that objects come with labels specifying their class memberships. He acknowledges that it is we who classify things. We make the decisions whether it is worth treating various objects as identical from some aspect. We introduce concepts for classes. But these classes should match the natural classes. Whether a class-concept is adequate or not, does not depend on our convenience. If a class-concept is good for practical purposes, but does not mirror any natural class (e. g. ‘good student’), then it does not capture anything ‘real’ in the serious sense of the word. It may be useful, but it cannot be fully adequate. Nevertheless, cashing out ‘structure’ in terms of individuation and classification is not sufficiently general. The very terms indicate an ontology of objects and classes, and I do not want to commit the metaphysical realist to this specific view. Metaphysical realism in itself is neutral about ontological categories. A metaphysical realist may have substances and accidents, properties, facts, events, essences etc. But whatever set of ontological categories he cherishes, he claims that these are not imposed by the human mind, but are inherent features of reality. If his ontology contains properties, he holds that there is a fixed set of properties, and it is also fixed what it takes to instantiate a property. Pinehood and firhood are different properties, not because botanists find it convenient to distinguish them, but because the distinction between them is a feature of reality. The same goes for events. If the metaphysical realist’s ontology includes events, he not only claims that events happen independently of the human mind, but also that whether an event is part of or identical with or different from another one is independent of what we think about it. So let structure stand for any ontological category. In what follows I will keep talking mainly about objects, classes and properties, but do not take this as a part of metaphysical realism. I do not want to include in the notion of ‘structure’ the way how things actually are, i. e. the facts that actually obtain. Of course, the metaphysical realist maintains that the fact that Mount Everest is higher than Mont Blanc is ontologically independent of the human mind. Mount Everest were higher than Mont Blanc even if no human being existed, not to mention geographers. But this sort of claim is not unique to metaphysical realism. As I said, it is a common sense view, to which the opponent of metaphysical realism, the internal realist also subscribes. If I built this into the notion of structure, it would be more difficult to bring out the contrast with internal realism. I would have to distinguish between two sorts of structures, and would have to say that whereas the metaphysical realist insists on the mindindependence of both sorts of structures, the internal realist holds that only one of them is independent of the human mind. The two doctrines would agree in the mind-

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independence of the fact that my desk is brown. They would disagree about the status of the object desk, and the property brown. To avoid such complexities, I stipulate that ‘structure’ has to do with the boundaries, and not with how things, with their boundaries drawn, are related to one another. Understood in this way, (MR1) is a realist thesis in the sense in which realism is opposed to idealism. It contradicts not only the Berkeley-style paradigmatic idealism, but also Kant’s transcendental idealism and Peirce’s pragmatism. Kant could not accept (MR1), since in his view objects are individuated by their location in the spatio-temporal framework, which is based on the forms of human sensibility, which create a manifold that is unified into a framework by the application of the pure concepts of understanding, i. e. the categories. Since the forms of sensibility – space and time – and the categories, which are necessary for the individuation, are contributed by the mind, Kant would not accept that individuation is an inherent feature of reality. Nor could Peirce accept (MR1), since in his view to be real is to be represented in the outcome of the finished scientific research. The outcome of scientific research is certainly not independent of the human mind, even though it is independent of personal idiosyncrasies. As it should be clear by now, (MR1) is neutral with regard to the realismnominalism controversy about universals. That controversy is about what belongs to the structure of reality. According to realists, universals are real; according to nominalists, they are merely projections of the human mind. (MR1), however, concerns only what has been accepted as real. It says that reality (whether or not it includes universals) is ontologically independent of the human mind. There are metaphysical realists who are biased against universals – such as Devitt (“Ostrich Nominalism”) – or abstract entities – such as Hartry Field (Realism, Mathematics, and Modality) –, and consider them creatures of the mind, but insist that real things, i. e. the individuals, do not in the least depend on the human mind for their existence. (MR2) is a categorical rejection of any form of verificationism. It holds that truth is conceptually independent of verification. It cannot be defined in terms of our current verification procedures. It cannot even be defined in terms of ideal verification procedures (if ‘ideal verification procedure’ makes any sense, which the metaphysical realist might deny). It does not even allow that verification constitutes at least part of the content of ‘truth’. ‘Being true’ and ‘being justified’ are just completely different properties. Therefore, it is logically possible that truth outruns not only our current verification procedures, but all verification procedures we will ever be able to come up with. Of course, metaphysical realists typically do not believe that this is the case. They are not skeptics. They hold that, as a matter of fact, being justified is usually a good indication of being true. But this has nothing to do with the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘justification’. It has the same standing as the claim that most bisons live in North America: it is true, but perfectly contingent. It may be worth seeing how (MR2) fits various conceptions of truth. It is incompatible with the pragmatist view, both with the Peircian and the Jamesian variety. According to the pragmatists, truth has practical significance. The fact that a belief is true is bound to have noticeable consequences. Moreover, it is the noticeable consequences which give the content of ‘truth’. In Peirce’s view, a true

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belief stays ‘fixed’ and provides us with a permanent rule for action. In James’ view, true beliefs help us to get what we want. It is exactly because of these noticeable consequences that truth is a property we value. But if truth is bound up with noticeable consequences, it cannot outrun all possible verifications. It has to be revealed sooner or later. In the pragmatists’ view this is a conceptual issue. Therefore, contrary to (MR2), the pragmatist conception is epistemic. The coherence theory is also incompatible with (MR2). ‘Coherence’ itself is an epistemic is notion, and the concepts in terms of which it is usually explained, like mutual support, rich explanatory connections, consistency are also epistemic.viii What about the Tarskian definition of truth? It depends on how Tarski’s definition is understood. Some people believe that Tarski’s definition is just the rigorous formulation of the correspondence theory (Popper, “Truth”, 223; Davidson, “True to the Facts”, 48). I think the advocates of this view either read too much into Tarski (Popper) or have a very thin notion of correspondence theory (Davidson).ix However, at this point I would rather not enter into controversy about interpretation or terminology. So let me stipulate what I mean by Tarski’s definition and see whether the definition understood in this way fits (MR2). Following Field (“Tarski’s Theory”), I take that what Tarski did was to define truth in terms of the unanalyzed semantic concept of ‘reference’x and a set of recursive rules in such a way that all Tequivalences can be derived from the definition. Construed in this fashion, the Tarskian definition is compatible both with (MR2) and its negation. It all depends on one’s view of reference. If reference is spelled out in non-epistemic terms, e. g. in terms of causal relations, the resulting theory fits (MR2). In contrast, if reference is explained in epistemic terms, we get a theory which contradicts (MR2). Since the notion of reference is not analyzed in the definition, the definition itself does not touch the issue (MR2) is concerned with. The correspondence theory presents similar difficulties. Therefore, once again, I opt for stipulation. I take that the correspondence theory is a Tarskian theory with reference understood as a non-epistemic relation to entities which are mindindependent in the sense of (MR1). This stipulation has the advantage of capturing Tarski’s intention (“The Concept of Truth”, 71) and the widespread view (Haack, Philosophy of Logics, 110-14; Grayling, Introduction, 164-68) that the correspondence theory involves more than Tarski’s definition. It has the disadvantage of excluding some views which are normally – and rightly – described as correspondence theories, such as the picture theory of the Tractatus and Austin’s view (“Truth”), because they do not make use of the Tarskian apparatus. I trust that this defect can be ignored, since most recent correspondence theories rely on Tarski and satisfy the rest of the stipulative definition as well. Once the stipulation is accepted, the answer to the question is clear: the correspondence theory is committed to (MR2). The last approach to truth to be considered is deflationism. According to deflationism, truth is not a real property, so it makes no sense to have a theory about it. What makes sense is a linguistic theory about the role which the word ‘true’ plays in our language. The common denominator of the various deflationist approaches is the negative view that truth cannot do any philosophically interesting job. It has the consequence that the philosophical debates about truth have to be recast in different

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terms. This can be thought of on the analogy of getting rid of truth by shifting over to that side of the T-equivalence in which the word ‘true’ does not occur. Of course we cannot literally transform (MR2) in this way, since it is not a T-equivalence. But we may perform a related transformation by treating the relationship of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ as analogous to that of ‘ »p« is true’ and ‘p’. Rephrased in this way, (MR2) becomes something like this: reality is independent of anything epistemic. This is ambiguous between two readings, which were briefly touched upon when I explained the notion of ‘structure’ occurring in (MR1). On one reading it concerns the way things are, i. e. how the pieces of reality, objects and properties are related to one another. As I mentioned, it is a common sense view that this does not depend on the human mind. Given the entities Mount Everest and Mont Blanc, and the relation ‘higher than’, it does not depend on the human mind that Mount Everest is higher than Mont Blanc. Then, a fortiori, it is independent of anything epistemic. More interesting is the other reading, which concerns the structure of reality, i. e. individuation and classification. On this reading the deflationarily rephrased (MR2) becomes a special version of (MR1), which speaks of independence of ‘the epistemic’ rather than the human mind. This is a nice result, because it brings out the connection between (MR1) and (MR2). So the question of how deflationism stands with respect to (MR2) becomes identical with how it stands with respect to a version of (MR1). It is clear that deflationism as a doctrine is not concerned with that issue at all. Consequently, deflationism is compatible both with (MR2) and its negation. I tend to believe, however, that most deflationists would accept (MR2), rather than its negation. For example, Horwich (“Three Forms of Realism”) promotes deflationism as way to preserve realism in spite of the failure of the correspondence theory and as a way to resist any form of verificationism. The explanation of (MR3) requires more care. Whereas the advocates of the views the term ’metaphysical realism’ is intended to capture would readily accept (MR1) and (MR2), they would not do so with (MR3). The reason is that they would be wary of the notion ’conceptual scheme’, which is often associated with relativism and idealism. So first we need a notion of conceptual scheme which does not contain anything that a metaphysical realist would object to. The notion I propose is fairly minimal: a conceptual scheme is a set of closely related concepts, which serve similar purposes, occur in similar contexts, and fit one another. Some examples may help. The special terminology of a particular trade is a conceptual scheme. Consider the words interior decorators use: they talk of various sorts of furniture, curtains, wallpapers, lamps, etc. Then consider the words construction workers use, brick, mortar, concrete, the names of various tools, etc. Each set has a loose kind of unity. That is true of theoretical enterprises as well. High-energy physicists have their own special vocabulary which is different from that of organic chemistry. So it is often the characteristic activity within which certain concepts are typically applied which unites various concepts into a scheme. But this is not always the case. Some sets of concepts have enough unity to be regarded as a conceptual scheme, but there is just no characteristic activity within which they are typically applied. For example, color concepts and number concepts are used for completely different sorts of purposes, and they do not have a characteristic use. A further feature which may join concepts into a single scheme is that they can only be understood holistically, i.

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e. one cannot understand one concept without understanding some others. One may possibly argue that this holds for color concepts and number concepts. But there are clearer examples, like the fundamental concepts of Newtonian mechanics. You cannot have the concept of Newtonian mass without understanding what acceleration is, and you cannot understand that without knowing what velocity is, which, in turn, presupposes distance and time. Whereas holism is not a requirement, it is requirement that the concepts should fit one another. Fitting is better explained by negative cases. The simplest case of lack of fit is when certain concepts cannot be put to use together with other concepts, because they are alien to one another. Suppose carpenters are also trained as philosophers. The philosophical concepts they have acquired do not help them with the carpentry, and the vocabulary of carpentry does not make their philosophical thought more sophisticated. The carpenterphilosophers will end up using only one of the two sets at a given time, because the two sorts of concepts just do not mix well. Of course, it would be strange trying to use them together, since the two serve rather different purposes. But it also happens that two sets of concepts are introduced for similar purposes, but they do not fit. Consider the conceptual apparatus of Newtonian mechanics and Aristotelian physics. Even though the latter was designed to deal with a broader range of phenomena, they were both concerned with locomotion. But applying both sorts of concepts at the same time results in incoherence. The definition allows that concepts belonging to different conceptual schemes may be used together. Considered the conceptual schemes of meteorology and agriculture. Meteorological concepts are more much closely related to one another than to agricultural concepts. So they do not belong to the conceptual scheme of agriculture. But they can be used together with agricultural concepts. One does not have to be a farmer to know that weather has an enormous influence on the crop. Fitting together is a matter of degree. The fact that two concepts are sometimes used together does not show that they belong to the same scheme. They may be used together without fitting each other very closely. Belonging to the same conceptual scheme requires a closer fit than there is between meteorological and agricultural concepts. Also, the definition does not imply that every concept must be a member of a conceptual scheme. There are some concepts which occur in very different contexts and which fit together with different sets of concepts without being more closely connected with one particular set. ‘Human being’ is one of these concepts. It is equally at home in political, ethical, biological, psychological, and anthropological discourse, not to mention a whole lot of non-scientific discourses. I take it that the notion of conceptual scheme, as just described, is not biased against metaphysical realism in any way. In fact, it is a very weak notion, which does not carry any of the implications which make it suspicious for many people. First, it does not imply anything about the relation between the structure of the world and conceptual structures. In particular, it does not imply that the former is constituted by the latter. Second, it is left open what sort of control conceptual schemes have over our thoughts. A conceptual scheme does not have to be conceived as a conceptual prison of which there is no escape. It may be easy to get rid of conceptual schemes and acquire new ones. Third, conceptual schemes are not all-encompassing global world-views. They are smaller units. It makes no sense to

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speak of someone’s conceptual scheme, since each person has many of them. They are not ‘views’ either. Concepts are just the materials out of which views are built. In this way, they have an effect on the views we have, but they are less than views. Fourth, conceptual schemes are not mutually unintelligible or ‘untranslatable’. Between certain conceptual schemes intelligibility or translatability does not make any sense. Why would you try to make quantum mechanics intelligible in the language of carpentry? On the other hand, there are cases, like that of the Newtonian and the Aristotelian conceptual scheme, in which the issue of intelligibility may arise. But I deny that mutual unintelligibility is an essential or constitutive feature of conceptual schemes. To sum it up, the notion as defined here is not tied up with conceptual relativism. In fact, I shall later argue that the idea of untranslatability and the relativistic claims based on it are misguided (3.2.). It is not the notion of conceptual scheme Davidson attacks, as it will be shown later (5.2.). Nevertheless, it may be rightly accused of vagueness. It is vague at least in two respects. There is no clear way to determine how large a conceptual scheme is. Should we talk about the conceptual scheme of quantum mechanics or about the conceptual scheme of physics? Also, there is no criterion as to how many conceptual differences add up to a difference in conceptual scheme. Surely, we sometimes revise our concepts. But how much revision is necessarily if we are to say that now we have a new conceptual scheme? I do not think this is a problem. The notion of conceptual scheme is one of those notions whose content can be clarified on an abstract level, but which can be applied in particular cases in different ways. There are many notions which share the same kinds of ambiguity. ‘Theory’ is another example. We know pretty well what a theory is. But how large should a theory be? A theory may have different versions. How different can the versions be so that they would still count as versions of the same theory? The abstract notion of theory does not provide an answer. It depends on the context and on our interests how we employ it. But this does not mean that it is deficient. Or consider ‘social group’. How large is a social group? It should have more than one members, and less members than the population of Earth. Between these extremes it can vary. How much should it change to turn into a different group? Again, there is no sensible precise reply. Any qualification to make the notion more precise would make it arbitrary and would constrain its generality. There are many examples like these, and ’conceptual scheme’ is not worse than any of them. The notion of domain is easier. It means a particular segment of reality. The idea is intuitively clear. Everyone understands that the conceptual scheme of microeconomics and analytic chemistry deal with different domains. The domains of paleontology and evolutionary theory partly intersect. The two disciplines sometimes talk about the same things. There are also cases when the domains of different conceptual schemes are virtually identical. Let us take an athlete who is well supplied with experts. Her trainer describes her how to move better, which muscles must be strengthened, and in doing so he uses a sophisticated variety of the vocabulary we all use for describing bodily movements. A physicist specializing in the mechanics of bodily movements can calculate which movements are more economical in terms of energy spent, which require more force, etc. A medical expert can tell how the various muscles behave, how the movements affect the size

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and shape of muscles on the long run, and similar things. Now, in a sense they are all dealing with the same things: they are talking about the same domain. They can all advise the athlete how to improve her performance, but they do this in different terms. Another example is the description of what goes on in one’s mind, if one is a materialist. ‘Folk psychology’ speaks of beliefs, desires, pains, etc. Neurophysiologists talk about neurons, neurotransmitters, corpus callosum, and the like. Nevertheless, mental phenomena, as described in the ordinary mentalistic idiom, are not something over and above the sorts of things neurophysiologists describe. Mental phenomena are nothing but the activities of neuronal structures. Again, the two conceptual schemes are concerned with the same domain. When a new conceptual scheme is introduced it is often obvious that it shares a domain with an earlier conceptual scheme. This happens, for example, when a deeper, scientific account is proposed concerning certain phenomena which could be described earlier only in non-scientific terms. Another case is when a scientific theory is challenged by a rather different new competitor. In these cases the intersection of the domain is not something to be discovered. Rather, the new conceptual scheme is consciously devised to deal with the same things as the earlier one. The ‘adequacy’ of a conceptual scheme means whether it is good or not. It is the quality of drawing the boundaries at the right places. A conceptual scheme may be inadequate in various ways. It may simply get the similarity relations wrong, in which case it puts in the same class quite different things and/or puts quite similar things in different classes. This may be just a brute failure, like thinking that whales are fish, because they live in water, whereas mammals live on land. In this case the criteria associated with the class ‘fish’ and ‘mammal’ are not appropriate, they include a criterion – the place of living – which is irrelevant with respect to the fundamental biological order. Other mistakes may result from the paucity resources. Compare, for example, ordinary people and chemists working for the perfume industry. The latter have a vocabulary for smells which is far more developed than that of the layman. This is due partly to the fact that, having spent several years in this industry, the chemists developed a sense of smell which is capable of much finer discriminations than that of the layman. Lack of theoretical knowledge may have similar effect. A naive zoologist may think that zebra is a single species, because his understanding of ‘species’ is uninformed by evolutionary theory. Or it might also happen that the people using a particular conceptual scheme were just not exposed to enough specimen to be able to pick out all the relevant similarities and differences. If adequacy is understood in this way, (MR3) is a straightforward consequence of (MR1). It takes two steps to see this. First, according to (MR1), boundaries are inherent features of reality. Criteria of individuation and classification are simply facts about the world. If someone accepts this, it is natural for him to say that the adequacy of a conceptual schemes consists in mirroring the real boundaries, i. e. the joints of reality. In other words: if adequacy has to do with the right divisions, and one believes that there are real divisions out there, it is difficult to refrain from concluding that the right divisions are those which match the real divisions. Notice also that this connection stands from the other way around as well. If someone believes that the right boundaries are the real boundaries, he is likely to believe that

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the real boundaries must be independent of the human mind. Otherwise the claim reduces to the triviality that the right boundaries are the right boundaries. If, however, someone refuses to explain adequacy in terms of mind-independent distinctions, she will have no use for mind-independent distinctions, so she will just throw them out. The connection between the real distinctions and the adequacy of conceptual schemes may also be expressed in a softer way. Instead of simply denying the adequacy of schemes which do not mirror the mind-independent structure of reality, one may say that such a conceptual may be ‘practically’ adequate or adequate ‘for all intents and purposes’. But whatever qualification one uses, one is likely to acknowledge that unqualified adequacy, or adequacy ‘in the strict sense’ means capturing the real structure. Now suppose that there are more than one conceptual schemes of a given domain, as it is often the case. Reality has a given structure. If adequacy means mirroring that structure, all adequate schemes must mirror it. If a scheme fails to do that, it is inadequate (or adequate in a qualified sense only). The fact that all adequate schemes match the same structure seriously constrains the way they can be related to one another. They must express the same distinctions. They must draw the boundaries of individuals and of classes in exactly the same way. If something is recognized as an individual in one conceptual scheme, it should be recognized as an individual in the other scheme. If the criteria of membership in a particular class in one scheme pick out certain individuals as members, the other scheme must have a corresponding class-concept whose criteria pick out exactly the same individuals. In other words, there should be token-token and type-type correspondences between the different schemes. Type-type correspondence implies token-token correspondence. This is why I included it only the former in (MR3). It should be clear now why there is a natural path from (MR1) to (MR3). Before considering how various philosophical positions stand with respect to the latter thesis, I must add two comments. The first is about type-reduction. When I speak of a conceptual scheme what I have in mind is rather the divisions that can be formulated in its terms rather than the distinctions that have actually been formulated. Let me give an example. My favorite English word is the ancient legal term ‘deodand’, which means roughly this: an object or animal involved in a lethal accident, which then becomes the property of the treasury to be used for charitable purposes. Hungarian legal terminology has no word expressing this very concept. In fact, I do not think there were many Hungarians who ever entertained this concept. Nonetheless, the set of things captured by ‘deodand’ can be captured in Hungarian. So I will say that ‘deodand’ does not show that the English legal concepts are not type-reducible to Hungarian ones. More explicitly, it is legitimate to achieve typereduction through producing new concepts by the combination of other concepts. Allowing, this, however, raises an important question. What sorts of combinations are admissible? If we are too strict, reduction will be too difficult. If we are too liberal, it becomes too easy. Say, if we required that the combinations must not be complicated or ‘artificial’, that would rule out the Hungarian equivalent of ‘deodand’. On the other hand, if we did not constrain the combinations, we would get such monsters as the following one: Reference is a relation between x and y, where x and y are ‘dog’ and the set of dogs, or ‘cat’ and the set of cats, or … This is

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just a summary of the cases, not a reduction. Even though the intuitive point is obvious to anyone, I am not sure that the question received a completely satisfactory answer. My recommendation is this. We should require that the sentence effecting the reduction should be naturally (i.e. physically) necessary. This rules out any reduction sentences that rely either on the contingent membership of a type, or on some properties the members happen to have quite independently of belonging to the type figuring in the reduction. However, the exact nature of the requirement is not an integral part of my project. Secondly, the picture behind (MR3) has implications for the cases in which there is only one adequate conceptual scheme in the given domain but there is another one which is quite close. Suppose, for example, that something like a Fodorian representational theory of the mind turns out to be true. Suppose further that the types of folk psychology do not match perfectly the types of the true representational theory, but they are not wide off the mark. There are couple of perfect matches, and in most cases the members of the representational and the folk psychological types mainly overlap. In this case one might say the scheme of folk psychology is partially adequate.xi It follows from what has been said before that partial adequacy hinges on the closeness of the fit between the structure presented in the conceptual scheme and the real structure. It also follows that a conceptual scheme that is partially adequate should be nearly reducible to the completely adequate scheme (if there is one). Perhaps it helps to come to grips with this picture if we have a look at how some extant philosophical positions are related to it. It might seem that functionalism is at odds with (MR3), since it rejects type-reduction. It allows that mental states are token-reducible to physical, i. e. neurophysiological states, but denies that the former are type-reducible to the latter. If that is right, no functionalist can be a metaphysical realist. But that is not right. The domain of mental states which are not type-reducible to neurophysiological states seems to be broader than the domain of neurophysiology. Think of the standard example against type-reducibility, Martian pain. This example works because Martians have pains, but they are not supposed to have neurophysiology, so they do not have neurophysiological states either. (MR3) demands type-reducibility only if we have identical domains. So far, the functionalist rejection of type-reducibility does not clash to with (MR3). To see if there is a clash, we have to consider the cases when the domains of the two conceptual schemes, those of the mentalistic and the neurophysiological schemes, coincide. There are two such cases. The first one is when the mentalistic scheme is restricted to human mental states. Most functionalists believe that human mental states are pretty well reducible to neurophysiology, so there is no clash here. The second case is when neurophysiology is reconstructed as a universal theory to hold for all species, Martians included. Human neurophysiology would be just a specialty within this larger field. Should we have a cross-species neurophysiology, it might well turn out that the ways in which different species realize particular mental states are fundamentally similar. So we might end up with type-reducibility.xii This shows that the functionalist rejection of type-reducibility does not automatically rule out (MR3). So functionalists can be – and some of them, no doubt are – metaphysical realists.

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What about naturalism? The sort of naturalism which is relevant here is the enterprise to develop naturalistic counterparts for non-naturalistic concepts, like semantic or ethical concepts. The relation of naturalism to (MR3), and more broadly, to metaphysical realism, depends on the motivations behind the enterprise. Suppose one’s motivation is this. ‘It is worth seeing how much of human thought can be accommodated in the framework provided by the natural sciences, and which aspects of it are completely alien to the scientific picture of the world. The best way to see this is to try to push the scientific approach as far as possible. Perhaps it can be pushed all the way, perhaps it cannot. Perhaps it works in some fields, and does not work in others. In the end we will learn how much science can tell us about ourselves, and which aspects of our life will be left over to be portrayed in literature.’ Someone with this sort of motivation does not think that naturalizability is necessary for legitimacy. To find that a concept does not have a naturalistic counterpart would not diminish its value. It would merely show its place in the order of things. This sort of naturalist has no reason to demand type-reducibility, so she would probably reject (MR3). But there is another sort of motivation as well. ‘Natural science uncovers the truth about everything. It tells us what the world is really like. This is not just that if there is a clash between science and a nonscientific venture, it is the non-scientific venture that must give. Non-scientific ventures should not merely refrain from contradicting science. Their value consists wholly in their conformity with the scientific results. Similarly, concepts are respectable to the extent that they match the scientific concepts. The non-respectable ones must be eliminated or replaced. At best, they may be preserved for special or practical purposes.’ A naturalist with this sort of motivation is much more likely to be committed to (MR3). However, he does not have to be so committed, because he may not require that the match between scientific concepts and respectable nonscientific concepts be as tight as type-reducibility. My impression is that the second sort of motivation is more frequent among naturalists than the first one. If this is true, we are likely to find quite a few metaphysical realists among them. I shall return to this later (5.3). The final position to be considered is physicalism. It has several versions, so let me discuss only two important ones. The first is physicalism as a supervenience claim, which holds that everything supervenes on the physical. If two things differ in some respect, they must be physically different as well. This sort of physicalism puts some constraint on the relationship between different conceptual schemes. If two things are described differently in the non-physical idiom, they should be described differently in the physical idiom as well. But this constraint is much weaker than (MR3). So physicalism as a supervenience claim does not involve commitment to (MR3) or to metaphysical realism. (In fact, I shall argue that supervenience physicalism is compatible with internal realism (5.3).) The situation is different with physicalism as an ‘exclusive purchase’ claim. This holds that fundamental physics is different from everything else not only because of its universal applicability. Whereas all other enterprises (like ethics or biology) are restricted to some specific domain, everything can be described in physical terms. What is more, it is also different in a qualitative sense. Other enterprises grasp only the superficial layers of reality. Physics works on the fundamental level. In the strict

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sense of the word, it is physics which describes everything there is. The objects described by other enterprises, such as hills and hippopotami, do not really exist, if ‘really’ is taken really seriously. In the final analysis there is nothing but elementary particles, fields, and the like. Of course, normally we are not really serious. But that is just because it is wise speak with the vulgar. So physics is indeed special. This sort of physicalism is clearly committed to (MR3). What it claims is that only the conceptual scheme of physics – probably that of a future physics – is adequate in the unqualified sense. I am not sure how widespread this sort of physicalism is. I suspect that more people are committed to it than who are willing to concede this, because some are so accustomed to talk with the vulgar that they forget how to speak to the wise. 2. INTERNAL REALISM Internal realism is best formulated in direct opposition to metaphysical realism: (IR1) (IR2) (IR3)

The structure of the world is ontologically dependent on the human mind. Truth is not radically non-epistemic. There may be more than one adequate conceptual schemes of a given domain such that none of them can type-reduce the others.xiii

Like in the previous section, I will take the theses one by one. The ‘ontological’ dependence mentioned in (IR1) should be distinguished from ‘causal’ dependence. It goes without saying that Mount Everest, the peak itself, is causally independent of the human mind. It is not our concept that caused the peak to exist. So we need to explain how ontological dependence is compatible with causal independence. The crucial idea is that those things between which causal relations may or may not hold presuppose the human mind: it is in virtue of the human mind that they exist as separate entities, i. e. entities with boundaries, entities as distinguished from other entities. It makes no sense to speak as if the world had an inherent structure, as if objects, properties, facts, events etc. were simply out there, waiting for the mind to recognize them. Objects and kinds do not identify themselves; we do. It is not a brute metaphysical fact that the orchid is a separate plant, and not a part of the tree. It is not a brute metaphysical fact either that certain plants belong to the same species. All the organization in the world we can discern is not inherent, but imposed by us. It is we, who draw the boundaries of objects and arrange the objects into classes. Organization, classification, division, selection all come from the human mind. I shall call this the organization picture.xiv This picture can indeed make clear why ontological dependence is compatible with causal independence. The idea is that ontological dependence operates on a deeper level. Let us assume that causal relations obtain between events. Take the event that it was raining in Amsterdam on January 10th, 1993 and the event of my thinking about that event. It is clear that my thinking about the event of the rain did not bring about the rain. The event of the rain is causally independent of the event of

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my thinking about it. As it turns out, the rain is causally independent not only of my own thinking about it, but also from everybody else’s thinking about it. Therefore, we may say that the event is causally independent of human thinking in general. But – given the organization picture – there is a deeper sense in which it does depend on thinking. Talk of causal relations makes sense only if there are events among which they may obtain. Events, however, presuppose concepts. In the organization picture, reality does not come nicely carved up into events. The carving up is done by us through conceptual schemes. For the event of rain in Amsterdam on January 10th, 1993 to make any sense there must be several concepts available. There must be the concept of rain, the concept of space carved up in a certain way so that Amsterdam is one of its units, the concept of time divided up in a way so that January 10th, 1993 is a division. The event of my thinking of the rain in Amsterdam presupposes even further concepts. The event talk does not make sense unless there are criteria of identity for the events, and the criteria of identity presuppose concepts. To put it differently, the idea of causality can be applied only to a structured universe, but all structure that there is is imposed by the human mind. On the other hand, if an appropriate conceptual scheme is already in place, we may assert that certain events are causally independent of the human mind. Causal independence is thus a ‘surface’ phenomenon, which is parasitic upon ontological dependence. But the idea of ontological dependence may raise a serious worry. If individuation and classification depend solely on us, it might seem that we can never get these things wrong. If there are no constraints, if we can draw the boundaries wherever we want, so we cannot draw them at the wrong places. This does not seem right. We can make genuine mistakes. An example could be the way affinity theory distinguished between chemical compounds and physical mixtures (Kuhn, Structure, 131). Affinity theory held that the cases in which mixing does not produce heat, light, or something like that, but the particles in the mixture cannot be distinguished from one another – salt in water, alloys, oxygen in the atmosphere – belong to the chemical compounds. If internal realism does not want to degenerate into a kind of cheap relativism, it has to recognize ‘objective’ wrongness, a kind of wrongness which does not derive solely from our preferences. Conceptual schemes should not be allowed to dictate the criteria of their own adequacy: there must be ‘objective’ constraints. At first sight, this poses a fatal dilemma for internal realism.xv On the first horn of the dilemma we face organizational metaphysical realism. It claims that there are numerous conceptual schemes and they do not simply copy the structure of reality. Such copying would not even be possible, since we do not have direct access to that inherent structure. Rather, the human mind actively projects structures into reality: it introduces distinctions, sets up similarity relations, etc. However, there are external constraints on the construction of conceptual schemes, and these constraints are afforded by the inherent structure of reality. Some schemes cut at the joints more often than the others. Failures to cut at the joints are manifested in bad or inaccurate predictions, lack of explanatory power, repeated failures, etc. This view does provide the external constraints necessary for the objectivity of knowledge, and also makes room for the active organizing role of the intellect. But the price is

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abandoning internal realism for the sake of metaphysical realism, for allowing constraints deriving from the inherent structure of reality is surrendering to (MR1). On the second horn we have blob realism. According to this view, there is indeed something which is ontologically independent of the human mind, but it has no significant structure. It is perfectly continuous, like the color spectrum. There are qualitative differences between various regions, but the regions merge into one another without boundaries. All aspects of reality are like that. Even the various aspects merge into each other, like when eating a delicious meal you cannot tell the taste from the smell. If reality is like that, it is in a way structured, but it has no prominent or conspicuous structure. If you impose distinctions in order to describe it, every distinction is as good as any other one. In this sense it is an amorphous blob. If you like, it is a brute metaphysical fact that reality in itself lacks a definite structure. Blob realism gives ample room for the organization picture, for the blob can be organized in various ways. However, it cannot guarantee the necessary external constraints. Worse, it actually undercuts the possibility of any such constraints. This may not be evident at first sight. Let us consider the obviously absurd conceptual scheme which does not treat people and footwear as separate entities, but has person+footwear combinations as objects. So instead of Joe and his sneakers it would have Joesneakers, which is different both from Tomsneakers and Joesandals. Let us call this the shoe scheme. Someone might say that blob realism has resources to rule out this scheme as absurd. It is obviously incompatible with blob realism to maintain that the shoe scheme is inadequate because it does not reflect the intrinsic structure of reality. But perhaps there is another set of constraints, constraints provided by our way of life. We, human beings, have certain biological characteristics and live in a certain society. For us, wearing a certain kind of footwear is far less significant than being a certain person. The shoe scheme runs counter to this consideration of relevance and, consequently, does not fit our way of life. This proposal, however, will not do. Consider the sentence ‘For us, human beings, wearing a certain kind of footwear is far less relevant than being a certain person’. This sentence itself presupposes certain structures: human beings, footwear, relevance considerations. If these structures are taken to be inherent in the mindindependent reality, this would amount to abandoning blob realism. But if the structures are merely imposed by our conceptual scheme, they do not give us the necessary external constraints. Within the shoe scheme one may formulate an analogous argument to show the absurdity of the normal scheme. ‘For us, peopleshoe, wearing a particular kind of footwear is just as important as being a certain person. If you destroy my shoes, you destroy me just as much as when you destroy my person’. To sum it up, the proposal can be taken in two senses: as implying that there is some mind-independent structure and as not implying that. In the first sense it contradicts blob realism; in the second sense it fails to furnish the external constraints. It might seem there is an easy way to escape the dilemma. Instead of saying with blob realism that there is no inherent structure, we might say that there are infinitely many structures. Organization consists in selecting from these structures, and codifying the selected structures conceptually and linguistically. Since there are structures in reality one can select from, there are constraints. So we have freedom

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to organize, but there are limits to our freedom. I think this view is confused. The idea of ‘infinitely many structures’ can be taken in two ways. Firstly, in such a way that over and above the infinitely many real structures there are theoretically possible structures which are not real. (It is like saying that there are infinitely many natural numbers, yet not all numbers are natural.) In this case the real structures do have the power to constrain the choice of conceptual schemes. But then this view does not really differ from organizational metaphysical realism. It just makes an extra claim about the number of the mind-independent structures. Secondly, we may take ‘infinitely’ in such a way that there is no possible structure which would not be real. The world is ‘continuous’: you cannot draw a boundary which does not coincide with a real boundary. But on this reading, ‘infinitely many structures’ becomes equivalent to ‘no structure at all’. So the view reduces to blob realism, and remains incapable of providing constraints. To recapitulate, the organization picture leads to a dilemma. What our conceptual schemes organize either has inherent structure, or has no inherent structure. The first horn – organizational metaphysical realism – provides external constraints but sacrifices internal realism. The second horn – blob realism – saves us from metaphysical realism, but has no defense against relativism. Perhaps, however, there is a way to break out of the dilemma: to treat what we organize as something like the Kantian thing in itself. Kant arrives at the notion of the thing in itself through abstraction. Our knowledge of the world presupposes sense perception. In every act of sense perception the perceived object conforms to the forms of human sensibility, space and time. These forms of sensibility are thus present in every perception, there is no way to get rid of them in practice. Nonetheless, we may remove them in thought. What we get in this way is the notion of a thing in itself, untouched by the forms of human sensibility. Being untouched by the forms of sensibility, it is not a sensible object, a phenomenon, but a merely intelligible object, i. e. noumenon. The notion of a thing in itself does two things for Kant. First, it serves as a limiting concept: it limits from outside the domain of knowledge we can attain. Not falling under the conditions set by the forms of sensibility, the things in themselves cannot be perceived. Since they cannot be perceived in principle – they lie outside all possible experience –, they cannot be known. To put it somewhat differently, given the way our cognitive apparatus works, there are built-in limits on what we can know. The things in themselves can thus be viewed as something the intellect can construct to reveal the limits of our knowledge. It follows from this that we can have no positive and specific knowledge of the thing in itself. All what we can say about it is negative and general. The negativity derives from the fact that all we can know about it is that it is different from the customary objects of knowledge: it is not spatio-temporal, it is not subject to the categories, etc. The generality is unavoidable, because the thing in itself is not individuated. Individuation presupposes location in the spatio-temporal order, and the thing in itself does not belong to that order. Therefore, strictly speaking, there is no justification for using either the singular or the plural in connection with it (or them). The second function of the thing in itself is to explain the facticity of knowledge in the sense that the objects of knowledge are not simply our creations. There is a

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given element in our experience. What we experience is in some sense forced on us. We cannot choose what we see. Our knowledge is about the phenomena, the appearances, things as they appear to us conforming to the forms of sensibility. But – Kant says – the appearances are appearances of something, and are not merely figments of our imagination. There is something which appears, and it is this which accounts for the fact that the appearances are given to or forced on us. The something which appears is the thing in itself. Thus the thing in itself also functions as the external factor causing the phenomena.xvi The following diagram may help to see how we can use this Kantian picture (Figure 1.). thing in itself stuff to be organized

forms of sensibility conceptual schemes

(quasi-noumenal)

appearances world (quasi-phenomenal)

Figure 1.

The world, which is the object of our knowledge, is ontologically dependent on the human mind, because it is organized by conceptual schemes. We may abstract from the conceptual schemes in thought and arrive at the idea of some ‘stuff’ waiting to be organized – the thing in itself. Just like Kant’s notion, the internal realist’s thing in itself has two functions. First, it serves as a limiting concept, which shows what kind of knowledge we can never possess. We cannot know anything without conceptual schemes, we cannot know the thing in itself, the stuff which is yet to be organized. Knowledge begins when we have entities with criteria of identity or of membership. Second, it explains the objectivity of knowledge. We believe that the world as we know it is not simply conceptual schemes all the way down. Conceptual schemes do not literally create the world. There is something outside shaping our experience. As a result, experience is in a way forced on us. So we have to cope with something given. And the fact that something is given, i. e. something is out of our control, imposes constraints on the adequacy of conceptual schemes. Things we believe to be similar in all important respects may turn out to behave differently. Things considered to be quite different may display surprisingly similar behavior. These are brute facts, which, so to speak, just hit us. They have to be accommodated some way. We need concepts which make that possible. This is an objective constraint on the adequacy of conceptual schemes. Notice that this constraint does neither affirm nor deny the existence of some definite mindindependent structure. If we think along Kantian lines, the stuff to be organized is not considered as possible object of knowledge for us: we cannot know whether it has inherent structure or has not. From this perspective both organizational metaphysical realism and blob realism turn out to be dogmatic positions, guilty of claiming knowledge where no knowledge is possible. They both assert something about the inherent structure of the world. It looks as though this Kantian solution can help to break out of the dilemma!xvii

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To put the internal picture in terms which bring out its Kantian character, we may say that the world we know about is quasi-phenomenal. It is constituted through concepts. When we abstract from the concepts, we can arrive at the idea of the quasi-noumenal world, the world as not structured through concepts, of which no knowledge is possible. The world which is ontologically dependent on the human mind is the quasi-phenomenal world. Our problem was to show how it is possible that the quasi-phenomenal world is not just a fiction. It cannot be made up at will. There are objective constraints which our concepts must satisfy. The solution was to invoke the idea of experience as something given. Concepts must enable us to deal with what we experience. And what we experience is shaped by the quasi-noumenal, which is ontologically independent of the mind. So there is an objective constraint on conceptual schemes. The point is that this constraint makes no reference to any ontologically mind-independent structure. The quasi-noumenal is cited merely to account for the given character of experience. And it is the given character of experience, rather than some quasi-noumenal structure, which imposes constraints on conceptual schemes. This is quite different from the metaphysical realist view which holds that the constraints are provided by the ontologically mind-independent (i. e. quasi-noumenal) structure of the world. However, this Kantian analogy does not tell us about the way the mind imposes structure on reality. How is this accomplished? This issue will be discussed in much more detail later (3.1.), but I need to say something about it now, because it sheds some light on (IR2) as well. Let us take the class of dogs. How has this class been introduced? What is the mechanism by which it has become part of the structure of the (quasi-phenomenal) world? Well, we have done it through the introduction of the concept ‘dog’ and of the corresponding word. Possessing a concept is not just possessing a mental object. It is better thought of as a capacity (Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, 17-21). We do not possess a concept unless we are able to use it in a characteristic way. In a ‘characteristic’ way, because we can also use concepts we do not possess, i.e. concepts we do not understand. For example, we can use them in deductive inferences. This is not a characteristic use, because it does not distinguish the concept from other concepts belonging to the same syntactic category. The central kind of characteristic use of a concept is the application to things. In the case of class-concepts this means being able to determine whether a thing belongs to the class. So if you possess the concept ‘dog’, you must be able to determine whether a particular thing is a dog or not. To put it simply, you have to be capable of recognizing dogs. It is this ability to recognize which marks out the class of dogs. So the existence of the class of dogs as a class which is distinguished from all other collections of individuals is due to a recognitional ability. Dogs belong to the structure of reality, i. e. they constitute a particular kind of objects in virtue of a capacity we developed. Like the principles of classification, the criteria of identity are also rooted in abilities. To have a concept of a particular, i. e. an individual, you should be able to identify it. This means knowing where it starts and where it ends, being able to distinguish it from other things that are similar to it, etc. So criteria of identity and principles of classification are fundamentally abilities, and, as such, they are features of the human mind.

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In the previous paragraph I talked about ‘concepts’. The distinction between concepts and words is not really important for my present purposes. Concepts and words usually go hand in hand. Concepts which prove worthwhile normally get encoded linguistically. Those which do not get so encoded typically disappear. (I shall briefly return to this issue in 3.1.) So let me repeat the story in linguistic terms. The structure of the world, objects, classes and similar things are constituted by the use of language.xviii Their existence is due to the fact that we speak about them, i. e. that we have words that refer to them. Words, as physical types, do not have reference intrinsically. You may be able to decide reliably whether a particular word token belongs to a certain type without being able to use the word to refer to things. What does the ability to refer involve? It involves the ability to use the word in a characteristic way, in a way that differs from the use of other words. The fundamental type of characteristic use is the application to things. You have not really mastered the use of the word ‘dog’ if you cannot decide if a thing is a dog. So you must have a procedure for deciding whether the application of the word is appropriate in particular situations. In other words, you must know the ‘justification conditions’ or ‘assertibility conditions’ of some simple sentences in which the word ‘dog’ appears, like ‘This is a dog’ or, simply, ‘Dog’. The justification conditions are just the criteria of identity for the things the word refers to. There is a set of conditions which specify in which situations the use of the word ‘dog’ is appropriate, and it is these conditions which serve as the principle of classification which sets dogs apart from all other things. It is these conditions which give the kind ‘dog’ its identity. It is in virtue of them that there is such a kind. The following figure might help to understand the picture better. govern use justification conditions

word reference

criteria of identity

thing constitute Figure 2.

Comparing this figure with the metaphysical realist view helps to see why internal realism is committed to (IR2). According to the metaphysical realist, the structure of reality is independent of recognition abilities and justification conditions. She may accept perhaps that the way words are actually used can be described in terms of justification conditions. But there is no guarantee that the entities picked out by the justification conditions are indeed the real entities. Suppose there is real kind, DOG. We have the word ‘dog’, and its use is governed by justification conditions. In virtue of these conditions we identify certain things as dogs. These things may or may not belong to the kind DOG. If she is not a skeptic, she holds that we get things more or less right. There is a huge or nearly perfect

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overlap between the things we identify as dogs and the membership of the kind DOG. But it is not necessarily so. We might have been completely wrong. Truth presupposes agreement between the entities we identify and the real entities. Since the entities are independent of our means of identifying them – their own criteria of identity do not depend on our means of identification – there may even be a disastrous mismatch between the two. There is no conceptual safeguard against this. There are, at best, only contingent epistemological reasons why this is not the case. On the internal realist view there cannot be a mismatch. The real structures are the structures our recognition abilities and justification conditions identify. The real boundaries coincide with the boundaries we draw, since the former are identical with the latter. Something is a dog, if the sentence ‘This is a dog’ is justified when it is applied to it, for the very kind DOG owes its existence to the justification conditions. As a result, at least some of our sentences are bound to be true, namely, those simple sentences whose justification conditions are responsible for drawing the boundaries.xix So truth cannot completely diverge from justification. There are sentences for which to be true is to be justified. Consequently, there is a conceptual connection between truth and justification. The connection is not purely contingent. Truth is then not completely non-epistemic. But how tight is the connection between truth and justification? This question has two parts. Can all true statements be justified? Are all justified statements true? The answer to the first question is ‘No’. Words have reference in virtue of the fact that there are justification conditions associated with some simple sentences in which they occur. Words can be combined in various ways to form sentences. These sentences have truth conditions which are built up of the referents of words in accordance with the rules of some compositional semantics. These truth conditions are genuine truth conditions rather than verification conditions. Even though the referents of words are fixed by the justification conditions of some other simple sentences, this does not affect the truth conditions of the sentence. Once the reference is fixed, the mechanism which fixed it has discharged its duty. It has no more role to play in shaping the truth conditions of the sentences built of the words. That is done by the rules of semantic composition. So there is no reason to expect that the compositionally produced truth conditions will be verification conditions. There are cases in which they are. The truth condition of the sentence ‘This is a brown table’ is composed of the truth conditions of ‘This is a table’ and ‘This is brown’ with the same token of ‘this’ occurring in both sentences. The truth conditions of these latter two sentences are verification conditions. So the truth condition of the composite sentence is also a verification condition. But this is usually not the case. Consider this example. ‘There was a ferocious wolf in this very place exactly three hundred years ago’. Every word in it has reference, but its truth condition is such that we do not know whether it is satisfied, unless we are extremely lucky. There are sentences such that no amount of good luck can help. For example, according to the theory of relativity, here and now we cannot determine the truth values of sentences describing events outside our light cone. (I will say more of this in 4.1.) The answer to the second question is also ‘No’: not all justified statements are true. Notice first that not all justification procedures are relevant for fixing the

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reference of some word or another. Think of a historian who seeks to reconstruct what happened long ago on the basis of scarce and not completely reliable resources. If he knows his trade, he will have some justification for the view he eventually arrives at. But his justification procedures are unlikely to affect the reference of any word. Or think about an experimenter who sets out to measure some physical magnitude, and designs extremely complicated devices for that purpose. If he has made the measurement, he will have justification for his claim. But this justification procedure is again unlikely to determine the reference of any word. It is only a small subset of the available justification procedures that have a role in the fixation of reference. Internal realism has little to say about the procedures outside this subset. Justifications are typically fallible, so there may well be – and probably there are – many justified statements which are false. The interesting question concerns the justifications within the subset, the justifications of simple sentences which fix the reference of words and thereby constitute the structure of reality. Can sentences like ‘This is a dog’ be justified and yet false? Yes, in two different ways. The first way is when the justification procedure is not executed properly. I may fall victim to an illusion, or I may be too careless. I may then believe that the justification conditions are satisfied, but they are not. In a weak sense, I have justification, but my justified view is wrong. This does not present a difficulty for the view summarized in Figure 2, which maintains that the criteria of identity of entities are identical with justification conditions. One may misjudge whether a justification condition is satisfied. But this does not change the justification condition. Of course, a justification condition should be such that it can be easily and uncontroversially settled whether it is satisfied. (Otherwise it would not be a justification condition.) But it would be far too much to demand that no mistake should be possible about it. If the justification conditions are not affected by the occasional mistakes, they may fix the reference of words and provide criteria of identity. The occasional mistakes just do not matter. The second way in which a justified sentence can be false is when the justification condition itself is inadequate. This is the case with the justification conditions affinity theory associated with the sentences ‘This is a chemical compound’ and ‘This is a physical mixture’. This seriously endangers the view represented in Figure 2. If it is the justification condition which fixes reference and provides criteria of identity for the entities mentioned, then how is it possible that the justification condition is satisfied and the sentence is still false? The problem is this. Take the sentence ‘This is a chemical compound’. The sentence would be false if ‘this’ referred to something that does not belong to the reference of ‘chemical compound’. But the reference of ‘chemical compound’ is determined as follows. Something belongs to the reference of ‘chemical compound’ if and only if the justification condition associated with the sentence is satisfied, i. e. when the sentence is justified. The justification of the sentence ties the referents of ‘this’ and ‘chemical compound’ together. ‘Chemical compound’ is bound to refer to what ‘this’ refers to. So the reference of ‘this’ cannot fail to be the same as the reference of ‘chemical compound’. Therefore, the sentence cannot be false. Let me put the same point in terms of criteria of identity. The sentence would be false if the thing picked out by ‘this’ failed to satisfy the criteria of identity of the kind ‘chemical

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compound’. But the criteria of identity of the kind ‘chemical compound’ are laid down by the justification conditions of the sentence. Consequently, if those conditions are satisfied, the thing picked out by ‘this’ must meet the criteria of identity of ‘chemical compound’. So the sentence cannot be false. It is clear then that the my view implies that reference-fixing simple sentences cannot be false (if the justification procedure is executed properly). But there are clear examples to the contrary. My response is this. The sentences ‘This is a chemical compound’ and ‘This is a physical mixture’ as used in the affinity theory are false (when applied cases like salt in water, etc.). I stand by what I said: for reference-fixing sentences to be true is to be justified. It follows then the sentences as used in the affinity theory are not reference-fixing. They are not reference-fixing because inadequate justification conditions do not fix reference. (This will be taken up in greater detail in 3.2.) The view represented in Figure 2. holds only for adequate conceptual schemes. The referents of ‘chemical compound’ and ‘physical mixture’ are different from what could be inferred from the justification conditions endorsed by affinity theory, for the conceptual scheme of affinity theory was inadequate. So once again we bumped into the question of the adequacy of a conceptual scheme. This question has already surfaced in this section in connection with the external constraints. I explained that neither organizational metaphysical realism nor blob realism is acceptable for internal realism, and claimed that reality outside our conceptual schemes, the stuff to be organized, has a status akin to that of Kant’s noumenal realm. But that was not a positive account of adequacy. The issue will be taken up in greater detail later (4.2.), but I say must now a few words about it, especially because this will also help to explain (IR3). The crucial idea is that conceptual schemes are devices for coping with the world and with one another. We are engaged in lots of different activities, and these require knowledge. Much of our knowledge is propositional, and propositional knowledge requires concepts. It is the activities we are engaged in which put constraints on conceptual schemes. Our activities will be successful only if we have appropriate knowledge. And we cannot have appropriate knowledge without adequate concepts. Here is a trivial example. We have to eat and we like to eat, so we have to distinguish between what is edible and what is inedible, what is nutritious and what is not, what is healthy and what is not, what is tasty and what is not. This system of distinctions cannot be maintained without an elaborate system of concepts, like ‘meat’, ‘vegetable’, ‘fruit’, ‘raw’, ‘ripe’, ‘sweet’, ‘spicy’, etc. A conceptual scheme is adequate if it enables us to have the knowledge appropriate to a particular activity or activities. This is an external constraint on conceptual schemes, since activities are clearly different from concepts. Before moving on to (IR3), it is useful to contrast the ideas behind (IR2) with related approaches, the logical positivists’ and Dummett’s verificationism. According to logical positivism, all synthetic sentences should be verifiable, at least in principle, on the basis of experience; unverifiable sentences are meaningless. The view developed above differs from this in two respects. First, it is not committed empiricism, so it does not constrain admissible verifications in the way logical positivism does. If it turns out that mathematics is synthetic a priori, as Kant believed, that is perfectly acceptable. The justification conditions which determine

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the reference of mathematical expressions do not have to have empirical character. Second, it is not committed to the claim that sentences which are unverifiable in principle are meaningless. As it was explained earlier, once the referents of words have been fixed by the justification conditions of simple sentences, we can construct sentences which are currently unverifiable. It does allow that there can be sentences that are unverifiable in principle, especially if ‘in principle’ is not taken in a very liberal sense. Dummett holds that a theory of meaning is a theory of understanding, i. e. a theory of what one has to know to be able to use the language. To be able to use a sentence one has to be able to recognize whether it is true or false, i. e. one has to know its verification conditions. So the semantics of sentences has to be given in terms of verification conditions, rather than verification-transcendent truth conditions. Dummett also holds that the notion of verification-transcendent truth makes no sense, and identifies truth with justification. As a result, undecidable sentences lack truth value, so the principle of bivalence and classical logic has to be abandoned. I agree with Dummett, but only up to a certain point. The determination of reference happens roughly in the way Dummett suggests. Reference falls out of the truth conditions of simple sentences, and for these simple sentences truth is indeed justification. But from this point on the agreement ceases. Whereas Dummett believes that if the rules for composing sentence use the full set of resources of classical logic, they will produce sentences we do not understand. So we should constrain these resources so that they will not produce undecidable sentences. I believe that the connection between justification and intelligibility is looser. We can understand sentences which are currently undecidable, and we may understand sentences which are undecidable in principle (if there are such sentences). Therefore, the semantics of sentences other than the reference-fixing simple sentences is given in terms of genuine truth conditions. Since verification-transcendent truth makes sense, bivalence and classical logic may remain in place. (IR3) is the thesis which distinguishes internal realism from the doctrines it is most closely related to. Kant would have endorsed some version of (IR1). Peirce would have accepted (IR2) as well. But the sort of conceptual pluralism (IR3) represents has not traditionally been part of the picture that reality and truth are not independent of the human mind. We must start approaching this thesis from a distance. We already know that a conceptual scheme is a relatively self-contained group of words or concepts. The referents of the words that make up conceptual schemes are determined by the justification conditions of some simple sentences in which they occur. So we may also say that a conceptual scheme is the set of justification conditions for a set of sentences. The determination of reference is the same as the constitution of the structure of reality, because the entities – individuals, kinds, etc. – are carved out by justification conditions which provide criteria of identity for them. So the structure of reality is constituted by conceptual schemes. We have also seen that there can be more than one conceptual schemes in a domain. Let us see a case when they are apparently in conflict (Putnam, Many Faces, 18-20). Suppose that the world is a small and boring place, but there are two competing accounts of it. According to one account, there are three objects, x1, x2, x3. According to another account, there are seven objects, x1, x2, x3, x1+x2, x2+x3,

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x1+x3, x1+x2+x3. The contradiction between the two accounts can be traced to a conceptual difference. The conceptual schemes of the two accounts use the concept ‘object’ differently. In the first one ‘object’ is a primitive category, and its members can only be given by enumeration. In the second one ‘object’ is defined: certain things are primitive objects (these have to be enumerated), and their sums are also objects. Now suppose somebody asks: ‘How many objects are there?’ The answer is that the question makes sense only with respect to a particular conceptual scheme. If we are using the first conceptual scheme, the answer is three, if we are using the second one, the answer is seven. So truth is inescapably relative to conceptual schemes. A sentence that is true in one conceptual scheme may be false in another one. Someone might say that this is just a triviality dressed up in a fancy way. Instead of ‘conceptual schemes’ cannot we simply talk about ‘meanings’? The word ‘object’ has different meanings in the two accounts. Likewise, instead of saying that truth is relative to conceptual schemes, cannot we simply say that the truth value of a sentence also depends on what the words it contains mean? This objection has a point: some of the talk about conceptual schemes can be replaced by talk about meaning without any serious loss. But this not true for every context in which conceptual schemes are mentioned. First, the metaphysical claim that the structure of the world is constituted by conceptual schemes cannot be put in terms of meanings. Or if it is put in such terms, what we get will not be a truism about words and meanings. Second, as I said, not all conceptual schemes are adequate. This is again difficult to translate into meaning talk, and if it is translated, the result will not be trivial. However, by answering the charge of triviality in this way, the stage is set for another objection. I said that conceptual schemes have two features which are normally not attributed to meanings: they constitute the structure of reality, and they may be inadequate. But how can these two features be reconciled? A conceptual scheme is inadequate if it does not match the structure of reality, if it does not draw the right distinctions. But if the structure of reality is constituted by the conceptual scheme, there can be no mismatch between the two. Notice that this question was raised and answered earlier, in the following form: how can justified referencefixing sentences be false? This is the same question, since the constitution of the structure of reality is but the other side of the determination of reference, and a conceptual scheme is but the justification conditions for the set of reference-fixing sentences. I replied that only adequate justification conditions fix reference. Adjusted to the current form of the question, the reply is that the structure of reality is constituted by adequate conceptual schemes. Consider again our previous example, the way affinity theory distinguished between chemical compounds and physical mixtures. The distinction was drawn at the wrong place, so the conceptual scheme of affinity theory was inadequate. And the structure of reality is not constituted by this scheme. The identity conditions of the general kinds ‘chemical compound’ and ‘physical mixture’ are different from the ones affinity theory endorsed. So the structure of the world is not constituted by affinity theory. Nonetheless, it should be kept in mind that our conception of the structure of the world changes as our conceptual schemes improve. The world now seems different

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to us then it seemed in the heyday of affinity theory. Of course, the world itself has not changed. To say that our ancestors lived in a different world is to speak rather metaphorically. The way we think the world is structured is always determined by the conceptual schemes we consider the most adequate. But, of course, it may turn out that that our conceptual schemes are inadequate, and the structure of the world is not what we believe. (I shall return to this issue in 3.2.) The qualification that only adequate conceptual schemes constitute the structure of reality and the reflection on the historical changes in conceptual schemes together may call into question the appropriateness of speaking about the structure of reality being constituted by conceptual schemes. One may argue in this fashion. History has taught us to be modest. We do not really know which, if any, of our conceptual schemes is adequate. Our current beliefs are not reliable guides to the future developments. So we had better not rely too heavily on adequacy. By the same token, the constitution of the structure of reality by conceptual schemes loses its significance, since it is supposed to be done only by adequate conceptual schemes. Perhaps, we should simply say that the structure of the world is independent of all conceptual schemes, hence, we may (and often do) get things wrong. That is indeed an option. But it has it has a serious disadvantage: it empties the notion of reality. Reality will become something very distant, something so much bellow the level of conceptual resources that our descriptions will be unable to reach down and grasp it. The reason is this. Our descriptions use concepts. Concepts are conventional devices. (That is why we can have several conceptual schemes in the same domain.) So nothing describes the world as it is. Each description is relative to conceptual choices. The world they all target thus becomes inaccessible and superfluous. Nelson Goodman has expressed this point very vividly. While we may speak of determining what versions are right as ‘learning about the world’, the ‘world’ supposedly being that which all right versions describe, all we learn about the world is contained in right versions of it, and while the underlying world bereft of these, need not be denied to those who love it, it is perhaps on the whole a world well lost. (Ways of World-Making, 4) Shouldn’t we now return to sanity from all this mad proliferation of worlds? Shouldn’t we stop speaking of right versions as if each were, or had, its own world, and recognize all as versions of one and the same neutral and underlying world? The world thus regained, as remarked earlier, is a world without kinds or order or motion or rest or pattern – a world not worth fighting for or against. (ibid., 20) When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core. (ibid., 118)

Goodman’s point is that if we want to go on speaking about the world as being in a certain way, we should think of it as sharing the structure of our conceptual schemes. Removing the conceptual structure, as a mere addition, would leave a neutral mind-independent world, which cannot be said to be in a certain way any more, since the means of saying that have been removed. We would be left with an underlying world, unstructured by concepts. This cannot be described as it is, but can only show up in our descriptions in various disguises, the disguises provided by conceptual schemes. Notice that I do not deny this neutral underlying world: it

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shows up in Figure 1. as stuff to be organized, as the quasi-noumenal realm. But that is not the world of our knowledge, the world with structure, the world we talk about, i. e. the quasi-phenomenal world. However, there is a line of resisting Goodman’s point, which has to be dealt with. It goes as follows. Imagine someone arguing in this fashion. ‘The notion of the world as it is independently of all languages is a useless notion. We are interested in the world we describe, and all descriptions are in one language or another. So we should give up the idea that there is a neutral underlying world which is the target of all descriptions. We had better say that French and English describe different worlds.’ Obviously, this a ridiculous argument. Even though there is no ‘languageneutral’ way of describing the world (how could there be?), we know that the English and French descriptions describe the same thing, since they can be translated into each other. Translatability guarantees that the descriptions are indeed identical in spite of the differences in their shape. Goodman’s argument can be rejected for the same reason as this ridiculous argument. If the descriptions utilizing different conceptual schemes can be translated to one another, that guarantees that the different descriptions are equivalent, and the differences are superficial and irrelevant. Of course, ‘translatability’ is not the right word here. The different conceptual schemes are encoded in the same language. So moving between descriptions relying on different conceptual schemes cannot be by translation. It must be by reduction. What sort of reduction, token or type? It is easy to see that token-token reduction is not suitable. Suppose A and B are types in a conceptual scheme. Suppose further that A and B are token-reducible to entities described in another conceptual scheme, but there is no type-reducibility. Now consider the claim that ‘Every A is B’. This claim simply cannot be captured in the other conceptual scheme. Suppose there are two tokens that belong under A, and these are described in the other scheme as c and d. Suppose also that B has three members, c and d – in keeping with the sentence –, and e. The best approximation to ‘Every A is B’ we can get in the other scheme goes follows: (c=c v c=d v c=e) & (d=c v d=d v d=e). The latter fails to express the same thing as the former. The former is a universal generalization which holds for an open class of objects; the latter is concerned with particular objects. The former is an informative claim, the second is a triviality, for it is but trivial consequence of a couple of logical truth. So the two are not similar at all to an English sentence and its French translation. Hence, it is type-reduction that is needed. The objection raised against Goodman should then go as follows. If different conceptual schemes are type-reducible, they allow equivalent descriptions. Hence, we may maintain that the different conceptual schemes enable us to describe the same conceptually unstructured world without thereby making the notion of a neutral underlying world an empty notion. So the talk of the structure of the world being constituted by conceptual schemes becomes an inappropriate and unnecessary idiom. That is one reason why internal realism needs (IR3), the thesis that there can be more than one adequate conceptual schemes in the same domain which do not typereduce to one another. Without it, much that was said in connection with (IR1) and (IR2) would turn out to have been said in an unnecessary and odd way. To put this

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slightly differently, without (IR3) much of the disagreement between metaphysical realism and would reduce to verbal differences. But is there a positive reason to accept (IR3)? I think there is, and it stems from the conception of adequacy adumbrated a few pages earlier. Conceptual schemes are devices for coping. Their job is to provide resources for the formulation of the knowledge needed to get by. It follows than that adequacy is relative to our aims and the activities we engage in. Take a cook, a gardener, a herbalist, and a botanist. They all deal with plants, frequently with the very same plants. But what they have to know to perform well is different. So they need different concepts. Probably there is a good deal of overlap between their conceptual resources. But they also need distinctions which are specific to their own trade, which are not called for by the others, and would merely cause superfluous complexities there. So the conceptual schemes which are adequate for these various enterprises are different. This situation is typical. We are versatile creatures who interact with the same piece of reality within various enterprises pursuing quite different aims. So we need different conceptual schemes which must carve reality differently in order to be adequate. So there may be equally adequate conceptual schemes in any given domain which do not type-reduce to one another. This is a straightforward consequence of the instrumental-pragmatist approach to our conceptual resources. Nevertheless (IR3) should not be understood as a categorical rejection of all type-reductions. There are conceptual schemes whose entities are type-reducible. Moreover, it may also turn out that such relations obtain between entities introduced by conceptual schemes which serve wildly different enterprises. So type-reduction is possible. What is denied is that it is compulsory. There is one question which still needs to be answered. (IR3) mentions different conceptual scheme with the ‘same domain’. One might fear that this notion cannot be legitimately invoked by the internal realist. The problem is not that the notion in itself is suspicious. On the contrary, it seems intuitively clear, and the examples I gave are unlikely to cause eyebrows to be raised. The worry is that the internal realist might have maneuvered herself into a position from which the notion is unavailable. She maintains that different conceptual schemes constitute different structures. So how could she say that they are the same? The word ’same’ seems to suggest identity. But conceptual schemes differ exactly in the way in which they individuate and classify, i. e. in the way they draw the boundaries of entities. So how could there be identity between entities constituted in different conceptual schemes? It seems that the very idea of different conceptual schemes precludes the sameness of domain. So even conceptual schemes which we tend to regard as dealing with the same area – like folk psychology and neurophysiology, viewed from a materialist perspective – treat phenomena which are as different social mobility and the destruction of furniture by worms. One might think that this absurd conclusion can be easily avoided. The internal realist may simply reply that two conceptual schemes have the same domain if they organize the same part of reality. The entities resulting from the organization are indeed different, but the stuff to be organized is the same. But this answer does not fit in with the status of the stuff to be organized. Internal realism understands the stuff to be organized as quasi-noumenal. We cannot avoid postulating it, but it is

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beyond our knowledge. It is a limiting concept, which signals the point where understanding gives out. So asserting that two conceptual schemes organize the same stuff would be going beyond the boundaries of what we can sensibly talk of. This is really a version of the ‘many worlds’ problem pointed out in the Introduction, which the hermeneutic and the Kuhnian notion of conceptual schemes had to face. If the world of our knowledge is constituted by conceptual schemes, and we cannot talk about the world as it is in itself, it becomes difficult to maintain that there is a single underlying world. Fortunately, there is a solution. Consider once more the case of folk psychology and neurophysiology. How can the materialist spell out the claim that these are concerned with the same domain? One thing he could say would be similar to the internal realists first unsuccessful way of coping with this problem: he might say that the entities identified within folk psychology are identical with entities identified within neurophysiology. Some materialists would accept this, but many would resist. The second thing a materialist could say is analogous to the second unsuccessful solution which might occur to the internal realist. This would be to say that there is some third sort of thing, something on a deeper level, which underlies both the folk psychological and the neurophysiological phenomena. Most materialist would accept this. The third, deeper level would be basic physics. Yet, this would not be a promising way of spelling out materialism, for it would replace a mystery with a deeper mystery. It is generally agreed that if we want to understand how the entities described in basic physics can produce the mind, we have to understand first how neurophysiological phenomena can produce mental phenomena. Therefore, few materialist would choose this as a way of stating their doctrine. We have thus seen that faced with a similar kind of problem the internal realist has to face, there are materialists who do not try either solutions which failed in the internal realist’s case. It follows than there must be some other solution. The materialists’ favorite solution these days is supervenience. The mental supervenes on the physical, i. e. there cannot be mental differences without physical differences. There is no reason why the internal realist could not help herself to the notion of supervenience. It requires no match between entities carved out in different conceptual schemes, as the first attempted reply. It does not call for stepping outside all conceptual schemes into the quasi-noumenal realm of stuff to be organized, as the second attempted solution. So the answer to the question is roughly this. Two conceptual schemes share the same domain if the entities described in one of them supervene on the entities described in the other one. There is only one thing that might be cause for concern. How do we know that the supervenience relation actually obtains? The problem is exacerbated by the fact that supervenience claims are modal claims. (If there is a mental difference, there must be some physical difference.) This question has not received much attention. Fortunately, I will not have to attempt to solve it now, for it is not a special problem for internal realism. It is a problem for all positions which employ the notion of (modal) supervenience. I trust that if it is solved, the solution can be accepted by the internal realist as well. (The issue of sharing a domain will be discussed in more detail in 5.1.)

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CHAPTER 3 REFERENCE

This chapter has two main purposes. One is to spell out in more detail the internal realist account of reference, which was already outlined in the previous chapter. The second one is to put this account in broader perspective through an examination of how it relates to some current controversies surrounding the notion of reference. In doing so, I shall try to show that it can be maintained in the face of various metaphysical realist approaches. From the metaphysical realist point of view the problem of reference appears in this form. The structure of reality is ontologically independent of the human mind (MR1). Reference is a relation between words and elements of this mind-independent structure, individuals, classes, etc. The problem is to explain how words get hooked up to these things. For example, there is the class of dogs, a natural class, given independently of the human mind. People introduce the word ‘dog’, and this word somehow gets attached to the class of dogs. The question is how this happens. The aim of Putnam’s model-theoretic argument (“Realism and Reason”; Reason, Truth and History, chapter 2; “Introduction”; “Models and Reality”; “Model Theory”) is to show that once the question has been put in this form, it cannot be answered. Therefore, metaphysical realism is bound to fail. Roughly put, the argument goes like this. There are many things out there which words may get attached to. Each word gets hooked up to a particular entity rather than other entities. ‘Dog’ is hooked up to dogs rather than cats, even though the class of cats, being part of the mind-independent structure of reality, is a candidate for reference. So why does ‘dog’ refer to dogs rather than cats? There must be some constraints on reference which the ‘dog’-cats connection does not satisfy. So the metaphysical realist proposes some constraint. This is expressed in words. Then Putnam asks how the reference of the words occurring in the constraint gets fixed (the ‘just more theory’ move), and thereby forcing his opponent into an infinite regress. The upshot is that no constraint can fix reference, so the metaphysical realist is unable to explain why a word refers to one thing rather than another one, i. e. it cannot account for the fact that reference is determinate. It has been shown by many that the argument cannot be sustained (see esp. Merril, “The Model-Theoretic Argument”; Lewis, “Putnam’s Paradox”; Resnik, “You Can’t Trust”). In fact, it begs the question against metaphysical realism, for the metaphysical realist can easily reply this. Saying that it is the sentence expressing the constraint which fixes reference would indeed lead to infinite regress. But what fixes reference is not the sentence, but the constraint itself. The constraint is a fact, and facts, as opposed to sentences, do not

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require interpretation. They do not consists of things which refer to something. They consist of things which are referred to. So the regress stops. However, Putnam’s diagnosis of why the metaphysical realist is supposed to go wrong helps to bring out clearly how the internalist realist view differs from the metaphysical realist one. In his view, it is (MR1) which is the source of the problem, and it can be solved if we deny that the entities words refer to are independent of the mind. He suggests that things are, in a way, the functions of words. Since words and things, as it were, come together, there is no problem about how the one is attached to the other. As he puts it: ‘Objects’ do not exist independently of conceptual schemes. We cut up the world into objects when we introduce one or another scheme of description. Since the objects and the signs are alike internal to the scheme of description, it is possible to say what matches what. (Reason, Truth and History, 52)

In the first section I shall add more details to the internal realist account. In the following one I shall deal with two objections, one posed by Quine’s indeterminacy thesis and one stemming from the fact that we sometimes misclassify things. In the final section I discuss the Twin Earth argument and the causal and teleological accounts of reference. 1. AN INTERNAL REALIST ACCOUNT OF REFERENCE The recipe for the fixation of reference is this. Step 1: Step 2: Step 3:

Select the sentence or sentences which fix the reference of the word. Identify the truth conditions of these sentences with their justification conditions. From the truth of these sentences you get the reference of the word by a disquotational schema.

Let me run through an example. Suppose the word we are concerned with is ‘dog’. Step 1: the sentence ‘This is a dog’ will be one that plays a part in the fixation of reference. Step 2: the truth conditions of this sentence are identical with the justification conditions, so it is decidable whether it is true on a given occasion. Step 3: ‘dog’ refers just to those things which are demonstrated by the tokens of ‘this’ on those occasions when the sentence is true. Let me comment on these steps in reverse order. The disquotational schemas mentioned in Step 3 are of the following form: (singular terms) (1-place predicates) (2-place predicates)

‘a’ refers to x if and only if a=x (i. e. ‘a=x’ is true) ‘P’ refers to x if and only if Px (i. e. ‘Px’ is true) ‘P’ refers to <x, y> if and only if Pxy (i. e. ‘Pxy’ is true).

Someone might worry about this formulae for the following reason. If we put in the first formula ‘Clinton’ both for ‘a’ and ‘x’, we get: ‘Clinton’ refers to Clinton if

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and only if Clinton=Clinton. On the right hand side of the biconditional we have a necessary truth. The left side, on the other hand, is contingent, since linguistic signs are conventional, and Clinton might have received another name. This does not matter, because the formulae has to be only true, not necessarily true. The sentence ‘“Clinton” refers to Clinton if and only if Clinton=Clinton’ is true, even though not necessarily true. The same goes for the rest of the formulae. Step 2 implies that the reference-fixing sentences are special. Ordinarily, we proceed as follows. We take the words of a sentence. If we understand these words, we know what they refer to. From the referents of the words and the syntactic structure of the sentence we can construct its truth condition. The truth conditions are typically not verification conditions. So the knowledge of the truth condition alone does not yield a procedure to decide whether the sentence is true. As a result, we have to rely on our background knowledge and try to construct the justification conditions for the sentence. This is sometimes very difficult, especially in the case of theoretical claims in science. Then we create a situation in which it can be decided whether the justification condition is satisfied. Again, this may be very difficult. Finally, we check whether the justification condition is satisfied and infer to the truth or falsity of the sentence. With reference-fixing sentences the case is very different. We can decide whether they are true much more simply. Their truth conditions are identical with their justification conditions, and it is typically easy to check whether they are satisfied. So we do not have to go through the reference of the words, we have no problem in getting to the justification conditions, and it is not difficult to determine whether they are satisfied. But we need to say a bit more about both what counts as a justification condition and what justification conditions look like. First of all, the justification conditions I am talking about are different from the customary justification conditions. The crucial difference is that they are infallible guides to truth. If they are satisfied, the sentence must be true. Their satisfaction is sufficient for truth. Customary justification conditions are usually only necessary conditions of truth. Consider the case when a scientific theory is tested through a prediction. The failure of the prediction refutes the theory. So the success of the prediction is necessary for the truth of the theory. But a successful prediction does not provide full justification. The theory may still prove false if its other predictions fail. In other cases the satisfaction of the justification condition is not even necessary for the truth of the sentence. Lots of justification procedures rely on a high correlation between two properties, say A and B. They check for A and infer to B. Having A is then a justification condition for having B. Since the correlation is not perfect, an object may have B even if it tests negative for A. Infallibilism is not particularly popular these days. It is important to warn therefore that this infallibilism is very restricted. First, it holds only for the reference-fixing sentences, which is a very narrow class. Second, it is formulated with respect to justification conditions rather than justifications. As I noted in the previous chapter, the justification procedures may be improperly executed. As a result, our judgements whether an infallible justification condition is satisfied are themselves fallible. A daltonian knows very well what procedures he has to use decide whether something is red or green. But his condition prevents him from

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executing the procedure properly. What his cognitive mechanism checks is not identical with the justification condition, even though the daltonian is normally not aware of this. There are social and biological standards which decide what counts as proper execution. Their nature is an epistemological issue which I cannot discuss. A second, closely related question is this: how operational should the justification conditions be? In other words, how easy should it be to find or create a situation in which we can decide whether they are satisfied. Customary justification conditions are often not operational. Sometimes physicists know pretty well what sort of experimental outcome could decide the fate of a theoretical claim, but they have difficulties in designing the equipment that produces the right sort of outcome. Can the reference-fixing justification conditions be so unoperational? Most of them are probably quite operational, but there might be some which are not. A plausible initial guiding principle seems to be this. The more operational the reference-fixing justification conditions of a concepts are, the wider its range of application is. If we cannot decide whether something falls under a concept, we cannot apply the concept to it. The more frequently we are incapable of deciding it, the more limited application the concept has. Even though I cannot think of a good example, there might be concepts which have many instances, but which can only be applied rather infrequently. These would not be exceptions to the guiding principle. But there are exceptions. Consider, for example, the concept ‘married’. The reference-fixing justification condition for this concept mentions a historical event, namely, the wedding ceremony. People may live together and behave in every way like married couples do, but if the ceremony has not taken place, they are not married. But this justification condition is not very operational. Only those had the chance to see that it is satisfied who actually attended the ceremony. However, we obviously apply ‘married’ to far more people than whose wedding we attended. Is this illegitimate? Certainly not. It actually shows something important. The practical criteria which actually guide our use of words do not have to be identical with the reference-fixing justification conditions. It is enough if they are reliable indirect criteria for the satisfaction of the reference-fixing justification condition. The possession of a marriage certificate is much easier to check, but it is certainly not an infallible guide to being married, for marriage certificates can be forged or destroyed. But most people with marriage certificates are married, and most married people have marriage certificates. There are other practical criteria, which are even more operational, but which are possibly less reliable indicators of being married. Many of the mistakes we make is due to the fact that we go by the practical criteria, which are easy to check, although they are only modestly reliable, rather than by the not very operational but foolproof reference-fixing justification condition. In light of this, the claim made in the previous chapter (e. g. in Figure 2) that reference-fixing justification conditions ‘govern the use’ of words, has to be understood in a special way: they govern the use of words as standards, rather than by directly participating in our actual practices. They are related to the practical criteria as the meter rod in Paris is related to the measuring devices we use. We do not have to take the meter rod in Paris in our hands, but it still governs our measurements. So the answer to our initial question is this. Reference-fixing justification conditions do not have to be operational; but if a particular justification condition is unoperational, there must be

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operational practical criteria which indicate its satisfaction reliably. It often happens that science supplies the standards, whereas laymen get by the operational criteria. Thirdly, we have been concerned so far only with cases when a concept applies or does not apply, i. e. the satisfaction condition is either satisfied or is not satisfied, resulting in a clear ‘yes’, or a clear ‘no’. Are there other sorts of cases? Yes, there are. There are concepts which allow degrees, like ‘dark’ or ‘tall’. Here the justification condition assign values ranging from definite ‘yes’ to definite ‘no’. In between there is an indeterminate region. The justification conditions are not precise enough to draw a sharp line.xx There is a related but different case. Consider ‘competitiveness’ in the sense in which it is applied to the economy of a country. Competitiveness is an amalgam of many features like the weight and extent of intervention by the state, financial situation, level of education in the population, infrastructure, etc. In some respects an economy may do well, in other respects it may not. Here we have not only indeterminate cases, but also clear but qualified cases, like ‘on the whole very competitive, but the financial situation is shaky’. A third case is when the concept is open-ended in the sense that it is just not specified for the full range of conceivable cases. Is a computer virus alive? Probably we want to retain ‘life’ as a yes-or-no concept, so we do not answer ‘partly’ or ‘to some extent’. But the concept of ‘life’ is just not defined clearly enough to be definitely applicable or inapplicable to this case. The issue will be decided by further specification of the concept, but we have to wait until then. Many efforts in philosophy are devoted to the further specification of concepts. The justification conditions we actually possess enable us to get by in everyday situations. Philosophers aim at a greater depth: to identify the thing (or the members of the class) in all possible situations. Consider the issue of personal identity. With the justification conditions we possess we have no problem in deciding whether the person we are talking to now is the same as the one we talked to yesterday. But what if a surgeon removes Tom’s brain and replaces it with Bill’s brain and the other way round. What determines identity? The body or the brain (together with the memories, character traits etc. which go with it)? The actual criteria do not give us guidance this far from the everyday situations. Here we would need philosophical criteria. Fourthly, some of the justification conditions can be stated verbally, some of them cannot. On the one extreme we have technical terms which have been introduced into language by explicit definition. An example could be ‘linear ordering’. It can be said explicitly and absolutely precisely what properties a relation has to have to qualify as a linear ordering over a set. On the other extreme, we have concepts such that the justification conditions which govern their application cannot be verbalized. Take ‘red’. It is a color, but there is not much more we can say. You may try something like this: ‘of the same color as the pillar boxes in Britain’. But this will not do. It is certainly not criterial for ‘red’ that it is the color of pillar boxes in Britain. You may use this to teach someone the meaning of ‘red’, but this is not how the word attaches to the color. Most words are situated somewhere along this continuum. We have no problem with identifying dogs, but we would be in trouble if we were asked to state the relevant justification condition explicitly. Perhaps it is fully verbalizable, but it is also possible that at some point we would have to point at

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particular dogs or prepare schematic drawings. The idea is that we should not think that explicit verbal definitions can go all the way. Very often we come to possess a concept by acquiring some practical ability. It is a major topic in cognitive science to identify the underlying psychological mechanism which enables us to do that. It is at this point that I have to say something about the relationship between words and concepts. So far I used the two expressions as if they were synonyms. This is not perfectly justified. Even though the notion ‘concept’ is not defined sharply, and any definition of it is bound to be stipulative to some extent, there tends to be an agreement that concepts do not have to be verbal or verbalizable. For example, there are certain shades of color for which we do not have a name, but we seem to have standing mental representations of them. We can recognize them reliably, we can recall them in imagination, and we can use them to build standing representations of other colors. The same goes for many other things. We do have non-linguistic representational capacities, which are either parts of our genetic heritage or are acquired in early childhood when we start to move around and manipulate objects. Or consider non-verbal creatures, small children or animals. A baby can distinguish between various toys: the yellow rubber duck can comfort her, the red and furry fox cannot. Animals also seem to identify things in their environments as falling under various categories and display characteristic behavior when they see them. An antelope knows pretty well that it has to flee from lions and does not have to flee from giraffes. It even knows that it has nothing to fear from lions which are relaxing after a substantial meal. So it can be credited with conceptual distinctions. If we allow to use ‘concept’ in this broader sense, what we mean by it is roughly this: a stored representation the instance or instances falling under which can be recognized in various situations and which can be used in governing behavior. Since non-verbal creatures do not have sentences, one cannot say that they acquire a concept by learning the justification conditions of the reference-fixing sentences associated with it. Yet, we find here something which is analogous to reference-fixing justification conditions. Animals tend to be sensitive to particular properties of the objects. It is by these properties that they recognize them as falling under a concept. This has been studied experimentally in the case of various concepts and various species. Here is a classic example (Tinbergen, “Social Releasers”). The male three-spined stickleback exhibits antagonistic behavior towards other males if they approach his territory during the mating season. So the researchers made various models to identify those features which warn the sticklebacks that there is a rival to be dealt with. It turned out that it is the red belly that matters. Very realistic models without a red belly were ignored by the sticklebacks, whereas even very crude models immediately precipitated the hostile behavior if they had a red belly. Pompously put, it is the sight of the red belly which fixes the reference of the concept ‘rival male on my territory’ for the stickleback.xxi Pompousness aside, it looks that the present account might be extended to cover non-verbal concepts. This raises the question whether the whole internal realist picture should be extended in a similar way. I do not want to rule out this possibility, but I will not pursue it. Primarily, because this would involve us in several complexities, both empirical and conceptual. The empirical complexities have to do

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with the similarities and differences between verbal concepts and the various kinds of non-verbal representations. We should understand these issues reasonably well in order to see how the account developed for verbal concepts needs to be modified when it is extended to non-verbal ones. The conceptual difficulty would consist in showing that, in spite of the changes which would probably be necessary if the account is extended, the new account is still internal realism. So I will continue to ignore the distinction between words and concepts, and pretend as if there were no representational level below that of verbalized concepts. After this brief digression let me return to justification conditions. The fifth and last observation is that certain concepts form a holistic net, in the sense that the mechanism which fixes the reference of one of them involves one or more of the others. An example is folk psychology, if one of the standard criticisms of logical behaviorism is to be trusted. Logical behaviorism, in its textbook form, maintained that the words for mental states stand for behavioral dispositions, which can be spelled out by long lists of if-then statements, where the if- and the then-clauses describe the stimulus and the response, respectively. Say, ‘is in love with x’ would involve things like ‘if asked by x to join him/her for dinner, accepts it without hesitation’. The problem with these conditionals is that they are not always true if someone is in the right mental state. A person in love may refuse the dinner invitation by the beloved one. He may be shy, may be afraid that x draws the wrong inferences from the fast acceptance, or he may be worried about his weight, etc. So the conditional must include that nothing like these conditions obtains. But these conditions involve mental terms – ‘shy’, ‘afraid’, ‘worried’ –, so the attempted reduction of mental terms to behavioral terms brings in new mental terms. The upshot which is relevant for us is that mental terms form a holistic group: you cannot understand a mental term without understanding other ones as well. Put in my own idiom, the justification conditions which govern the use of mental terms mention other mental terms. Holism is a controversial issue. Some holists maintain that the smallest unit which can be understood in itself is a comprehensive theory or the whole language. Some of their adversaries allege that all concepts can be understood on their own. My position is in between. And it is not part of it which party is more right than the other one. We have finally arrived at Step 1, the selection of the reference-fixing sentences. Two quick remarks before we face the main question. One, all of these remarks are about sentence types, not about tokens. The properties of sentence tokens which do not result from belonging to a particular type have no bearing on reference. Two, we should not make much of the distinction between sentence and sentences. If reference is fixed by a complicated conjunctive justification condition, we are free to treat it either as the justification condition of one long conjunctive reference-fixing sentence, or the conjunction of the justification conditions of several separate sentences. And now to the main issue. A word occurs in many sentences. Which sentences have a role in the fixation of its reference? If we speak the language, we can tell that by reflecting on our speech habits and asking ourselves diagnostic questions like ‘would I still call that … if it were … (or had …)?’, ‘would a thing which were just

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like … but were not … still be a …?’, or ‘if it were changed in such and such a way, would it cease to be …?’, etc. If we do not speak the language, we have to observe the speaker’s behavior and elicit answers to the diagnostic questions. Both procedures are familiar. The question is then this. Would these procedures select a clearly delineated set of sentences for each word, or would the set of referencefixing sentences be fuzzy? In other words, can it always be decided unequivocally whether a particular sentence is reference-fixing for a certain word? There are words in whose cases it is clear how exactly their reference is fixed. Take ‘bachelor’, for example. The justification condition of ‘x is a bachelor’ can be stated verbally, perfectly explicitly: x is an unmarried male. This simple justification condition is enough. But there are also cases in which the reference-fixing sentence is easy to identify even though its justification condition cannot be verbalized. For ‘red’ the reference-fixing sentence is of the form ‘x is red’. The justification condition for this sentence has to do with a practical ability. We have an innate non-linguistic capacity to discriminate between colors, and we are trained to link these capacities to the color terminology of public language. But sometimes these procedures do not result in clear justification conditions. If we survey the community, we may get contradictory answers to the diagnostic questions. The domain of agreement may be so limited that it does not suffice for demarcating the concept from other concepts. We may also find that members of the community are uncertain and would refrain from answering if they were not urged. Or the answers we get tend to be qualified: ‘normally yes, but there are exceptions’ or ‘usually no, except when …’. It may also turn out that the speakers distinguish between central or paradigmatic cases and cases to which the word can be applied only in a loose or even figurative sense. Still worse, speakers may not agree as to which cases are paradigmatic. Many of these symptoms may show up if we reflect on our own speech habits rather than those of the community. We may find that diagnostic questions are difficult to answer, that our answers are inconsistent and contain many qualifications. These symptoms indicate that there is no clear reference-fixing mechanism. This situation is different from the one mentioned in the third comment on Step 2 (‘tall’, ‘competitive’, ‘alive’). In those cases there is a quite definite reference-fixing mechanism which, however, fails to yield a definite answer. However, the unclarity of the reference-fixing mechanism does not necessarily result in unclear cases. Wittgenstein’s main example for a family resemblance concept, the concept ‘game’ seems to be like this. Even though we are unable to come up with a comprehensible set of conditions whose satisfaction is sufficient for being a game, we are in perfect agreement as to particular things are games or not. Thus the fact that a concept has sharp boundaries is compatible with vagueness of the reference-fixing mechanism. Of course, the vagueness in application is often the result of the vagueness of the reference-fixing conditions. The unclarity of the reference-fixing mechanism of some concepts is probably an unavoidable consequence of the way conceptual systems develop. We often encounter new things for which the current system has no nice niche. It would be uneconomical to completely redesign the system whenever this happens. So we just tinker a bit. We decide which concept to apply, ignoring that this will complicate the reference-fixing mechanism. After a long series of ad hoc decisions we get patched-

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up and virtually inscrutable mechanisms. This usually does not cause any problems. If the unclear mechanism consistently yields the same answer for the most frequent and most important cases, the concept does its job, and the obscurity of the rules that guide its application does not matter. Some of the disagreements which result from the patched-up character of the mechanism can be settled by ad hoc clarifications or stipulations. It may also happen that the ad hoc clarifications and stipulations get consolidated and the system is gradually redesigned. The fact that the reference-fixing mechanisms are sometimes unclear has important consequences for the analytic-synthetic distinction. I am thinking about the analytic sentences that are not logical truths. (I have nothing to say about logical truth or any ‘formal’ concepts.) It seems that analytic sentences can be conceived as follows. The reference-fixing sentences of some expressions have completely clear justification conditions. We have already seen an example, ‘bachelor’. The justification condition for ‘x is a bachelor’ is that x is an unmarried male. Analytic sentences are built by connecting reference-fixing sentences with clear and verbal justification conditions, like ‘A bachelor is an unmarried male’. In this case the justification condition is not only completely clear, but also completely verbal. We can get analytic sentences only in so far as the justification conditions are verbal. Take ‘red’ again. The reference-fixing sentence for ‘red’ may be rewritten more explicitly in this way. ‘Something is red if it is this color’. The ‘this’ here cannot be explicated verbally. One has to have the necessary practical abilities. The nature of the connection to verbal and non-verbal justification conditions is the same. If someone denies that someone is a bachelor even though she knows that he is an unmarried male, we would say that she does not know what ‘bachelor’ means. Similarly, if someone denies that certain objects (e. g. British pillar boxes) are red, even though he sees them quite clearly under standard lightening conditions and has no perceptual defects (like daltonism), we would say that he does not know what ‘red’ means. The reason is that understanding the word or possessing the concept requires knowledge of the justification condition, be it verbal or non-verbal. But linking expressions to non-verbal justification conditions like practical abilities does not result in a sentence. As a result, we can get analytic sentences only to the extent to which the justification conditions are verbal. The verbal part of the referencefixing justification condition of ‘red’ includes only ‘color’. If we link this to ‘red’ we indeed get the analytic sentence ‘Red is a color’ (or: ‘Red things are colored’). So the internal realist view on reference seems to offer at least a rudimentary account of analyticity. It follows from this rudimentary account that we can have analytic sentences only in so far as the reference-fixing justification conditions are clear. If there are many sentences in which a word occurs, but it is unclear the justification conditions of which sentences bear on the reference of a word, we cannot say any more which sentences containing the word are analytic. Consider ‘electron’. This word occurs in a vast number of sentences. Some of them have to do with the experimental techniques which make electrons observable, like cloud-chambers. Most of them are highly theoretical sentences, some of which contradict one another – for physicists have said contradictory things about electrons. It is difficult to pinpoint the sentences whose justification conditions play a part in the fixation of the reference

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of ‘electron’. So there are very few sentences about electrons which are analytic. However, if one selects a coherent set of claims made about electrons, and fixes the reference of ‘electron’ by them, the situation changes. Suppose that a Bohr electron is defined as an entity that satisfies a Bohr’s equations. Then we can get a set of analytic sentences, which declare that certain equations are true of the Bohr electron.xxii We may now compare this account with the accounts of reference implicit in the major theories of truth. First of all, this account is verificationist. As far as the fixation of reference is concerned, it does not really differ from a verificationist view like Dummett’s. Dummett would probably require though that the reference-fixing justification conditions be fully operational. The major difference concerns what happens after the fixation of reference. Whereas I will use reference to construct genuine, i.e. possibly verification-transcendent truth conditions, a fully-fledged verificationist semantics would construct verification conditions, instead. The deflationist would find some points objectionable, but the account can be easily adapted to her needs. The first point is that Step 2 accepts a substantial notion of truth for certain sentences. But this step may be reformulated in this way: ‘take the justification conditions of the reference-fixing sentences’. In this way the notion of truth can be kept as a thin notion. The second point is that in the disquotation formulae of Step 3 the notion of truth shows up in the parentheses, so truth seems to play an explanatory role in the fixation of reference. A deflationist would refuse that truth can explain anything. Notice, however, that the disquotation formulae do their job even if the parentheses, in which ‘truth’ is mentioned, are cut off. So the machinery works even if one does not accept a verificationist conception of truth for these sentences and refuses to attribute any role to truth in the determination of reference. If you wish, the internal realist has a choice to be deflationist about truth. Naturally, this does not mean that after these changes the deflationists will automatically subscribe to the present account. They may reject the idea of ‘reference-fixing’ sentences, or they may reject that for these sentences truth coincides with justification, or they may favor an account of our linguistic ability that does not mention justification at all. The correspondence theory of truth in the stipulated sense of the previous chapter is incompatible with this account on two counts. The correspondence theory in the stipulated sense is a Tarskian theory with reference understood as a nonepistemic relation to entities that are mind-independent in the sense of (MR1). The present account considers reference an epistemic relation, since it hinges on justification conditions, which are clearly epistemic. It also fits badly with the idea that the entities words refer to are ontologically independent of the human mind. The disagreement concerns both the nature of the reference relation but also one of the relata. This latter point may be less clear, since the three-step recipe does not say anything about the ontological status of the entities we refer to. So why does it naturally tie in with (IR1) rather than with (MR1)? To understand this, we must first see in more detail how the reference-fixing justification conditions depend on the features of the human mind. Remember the operationality constraint mentioned couple of pages back: a reference-fixing justification condition is either operational, or if it is not, there must be operational

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practical criteria which indicate its satisfaction reliably. It depends on our cognitive resources what kinds of criteria are operational. If we did not posses the notion of size, we could not distinguish between rivers and creeks. If we had no concept of vegetation and climate, we could not distinguish between desert and forest. If we were unable to discriminate colors, we could not tell the difference between red and green. Without the tactile sensitivity we have we could not distinguish between rough and smooth surfaces. These cognitive resources, whether conceptual or not, induce aspects in which things can be similar or dissimilar, and actual similarity and dissimilarity relations within these aspects. Given the concepts of hair and color, there is an aspect in which people can be similar and different: the color of hair. Given the concept of hair, length and shape and various perceptual abilities, there is another aspect in which people may or may not be alike: hairstyle. What matters is that from the distinctions our resources enable us to make we select a very few only to figure in the justification conditions. We could structure the huge array of similarities and dissimilarities in several different ways. We could thereby have several different concepts. Since we can distinguish between colors and we have the notions hair and nail, we could have a concept standing for brunettes with red nails. Or we might have a kind which includes buildings and shoelaces. Or we might have a single individual which consists of the secretary and the computer, which has discontinuous existence: it ceases to exist whenever the secretary leaves the computer or the computer is taken to service. There are choices like these. The decision is ours. So the human mind enters at two points. It determines the resources and their selective utilization. That is how concepts originate and how their reference is fixed. But how does it follow from this that entities we refer to are ontologically dependent on the mind? Suppose that they are independent, as (MR1) alleges. Then it would be something like a miracle if concepts would map onto them. The idea is this. We introduce criteria for the application of concepts. It is these criteria which fix their reference. The way criteria are introduced depends crucially on two parameters provided by the mind, the resources and their selective utilization. So the criteria of identity of the ‘real’ term of the reference relation depend on the human mind. Now suppose with (MR1) that the criteria of identity of entities that make up the world are independent of the human mind. The question is then why two sets of entities should coincide. Why should the entities which are at the ‘real’ end of the reference relation be identical with the entities that make up the mind-independent world? In other words, if there is a set of entities which are created through the mechanism of conceptualization, and there is a set of entities which are just out there, it would be a miracle if the two coincided. Let me apply an analogy. Suppose there is cake consisting of two layers. The bottom layer has been divided into slices (the ontological mind-independent structure). But we cannot see it from above (we do not have ‘intellectual intuition’, i. e. direct, non-conceptual access to reality). We slice it from above (conceptualization through the selective use of cognitive resources). Why should the slices on top coincide with the slices on the bottom? Of course, it is logically possible that they coincide. But it is highly improbable.xxiii To

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unite the reference-fixing mechanism I offered with (MR1) would imply exactly this rather improbable case. This tacit commitment to (IR1) shows that the internal realist account of reference is indeed a species of the anti-realist answer to the skeptical challenge. The challenge, posed by Putnam’s model-theoretic argument was this. If the structure of the world were independent of the human mind, how could concepts and words, which are human inventions, refer to the elements of the structure? The answer provided here is that the structure of the world is not independent of the mind. The criteria of identity for entities derive from the justification conditions which govern the use of concepts. So the entities ‘out there’ and the entities our words are intended to apply to are bound to be the same. We should not be surprised that the top slices meet the bottom slices. We just slice from the top and reach the bottom. 2. QUINEAN INDETERMINACY AND MISCLASSIFICATION Putnam’s model-theoretic argument charged that metaphysical realism cannot explain why reference is a determinate relation. His argument was a distant relative of Quine’s indeterminacy thesis. So it is natural to ask how the present account stands with respect to Quine’s thesis. Briefly put, the answer is that it does not preclude Quinean indeterminacy. The core of Quine’s indeterminacy argument (Word and Object, Chapter 2; “Ontological Relativity”) is that the truth conditions of sentences are insufficient for identifying the referents of words. Suppose you know under what conditions the sentence ‘This is a dog’ is true. Then there are several ways of construing the reference of ‘dog’ so that it is compatible with the truth conditions of the sentence. ‘Dog’ may refer to an undetached dog part, a dog stage, dog fusion, a manifestation of doghood, what have you, as long as the individuative apparatus of the language is construed appropriately. In my account the referents of expressions are fixed via the truth conditions of certain sentences containing the expressions. It does not make any difference that the truth conditions are understood in a verificationist way, i. e. as justification conditions – Quine’s argument applies quite generally. So my account does not contain anything that would block Quine’s argument. Is that a problem? Not necessarily. First of all, it is all too easily taken for granted that Quine’s thesis is false. Even though it has far more adversaries than advocates, it has not received yet a generally accepted refutation. True as it is that many of Quine’s tenets may be out of fashion for good reasons, it is not really clear whether and to what extent Quine’s arguments for indeterminacy hinge on these tenets. I have a suspicion that the general attitude is motivated in part by the fact that Quine’s thesis can be easily saddled with blatantly absurd consequences, which, in fact, do not follow from it. Here are two examples. ‘If Quine is right, I do not know what I am talking about. When I say “dog”, I may be referring to dogs, undetached dog parts, etc., and I do not know which of these I am referring to.’ To be sure, dogs, undetached dog parts, etc. are different things. It would indeed be paradoxical if we could not distinguish between them. But Quinean indeterminacy does not imply that we cannot. Once we have a

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language in place, i. e. when we acquiesce into a language, which contains the expressions ‘dog’, ‘undetached dog parts’, etc. plus an apparatus of individuation – and English is a language of this kind – we can easily distinguish between these things. We also know what we are referring to. But in order to speak about reference we have to use a metalanguage. If the metalanguage is homophonic with the object language, we may say that ‘dog’ refers to dogs, ‘undetached dog part’ to undetached dog parts, etc. Or you may adopt the same metalanguage but use different analytical hypotheses. In that case you will perhaps say that ‘dog’ refers to ‘undetached dog parts’ and ‘undetached dog part’ to dogs. However, even in this case you can draw the necessary distinctions, even though your metalinguistic sentences would be different from mine. The same thing happens if you use a metalanguage which is not homophonic with English. Again, your metalinguistic sentences would be different, but you could still distinguish between the referents of ‘dog’ and ‘undetached dog part’. A second alleged paradox is this. ‘If Quine is right, we might be misunderstanding one another all the time. When you say “dog”, you might be referring to undetached dog parts and not dogs like me.’ The point is then that each person’s words have determinate referents, but these referents may vary from person to person. But Quine does not say this. What he says is exactly that no one’s words have determinate reference. Of course, if you use a different metalanguage/analytical hypotheses which is/are different from mine, you would describe the referents of the object language words in a way that differs from mine. But this does not entail that the referents of the object language words as I understand them differ from the referents of these words as you understand them. The situation is analogous to the following case. We both speak German. You describe German in English, I do the same in Hungarian. Does it follow that we misunderstand each other in German? Certainly not. But suppose that Quine’s thesis is false. In that case we should prefer an account which disallows the thesis. This speaks against my account. But do the metaphysical realist accounts fair any better? It may seem so. Metaphysical realists claim that the structure of the world is ontologically independent of the human mind, and it is to the elements of this structure that words refer. It follows that things which are not elements of this structure are not suitable candidates for words to refer to. The elimination of rival candidates may eliminate indeterminacy. So if the metaphysical realist maintains that dogs belong to the structure of the world, but undetached dog parts, dog stages, dog fusion, manifestations of doghood, etc. do not, the class of dogs remains the sole can candidate for being the reference of ‘dog’. But this possibility alone does not disqualify Quine’s thesis. The metaphysical realist actually has to show that undetached dog parts and the like do not belong to the structure of the world. Asserting bluntly that it is just a brute metaphysical fact that there are really no such things would not do, for it would result in a vicious circle: Quine cannot be right, for his weird entities are not parts of the real structure of the world, because if they were, Quine would be right. The obvious solution to rule out such entities would be to show that we cannot give a good account of the world in terms of such entities. But this cannot work against Quine. What Quine has shown is exactly that our language can be understood as referring to weird entities without

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incurring any loss. So it remains a question how the metaphysical realist can rule out Quine’s alternative candidates. All in all, it is not clear that it is a drawback of the internal realist account that it cannot defuse Quine’s argument, and if it is, it is not clear that it is worse off in this respect than metaphysical realism.xxiv There is another objection which it will take longer to answer. It goes as follows. Obviously, we sometimes misclassify things. We impose a conceptual structure on reality which just does not get things right. But how could there be a mismatch between the real structure of the world and the structure we impose if the former ontologically depends on the latter? Suppose, for example, that certain animals we classify as zebras are actually antelopes. Let us call them zebralopes. For us, zebralopes are visually indistinguishable from zebras, because their appearance differs from that of zebras only in a pattern of stripes which we cannot discern. Suppose also that there are genuine differences between the zebras’ and the zebralopes’ way of life: they have different diets, different social behavior, different patterns of migration, etc. Moreover, lions, who can tell zebralopes from zebras, do not eat the former because they are unpalatable. For this reason, zebralopes do not flee from lions. We, who are less fortunate than the lions, notice only that the behavior of zebras is not uniform. Some zebras prefer different kinds of grass than others. Some groom, some do not. There may be cases when these differences even raise our curiosity, e. g. that zebras are sometimes indifferent to lions. The proper judgment about this scenario is that we did not get the structure of reality right. Our conceptual scheme is inadequate, because it does not distinguish between zebras and zebralopes. There is an objective, mind-independent distinction we failed to capture. So not only is the idea of the mind-independent structure of reality is perfectly intelligible, it is also inevitable if we want to allow for misclassification. The objection does establish something, but not what it claims to establish; and what it does establish can be accommodated within the internal realist framework. First, it does not establish that the idea of a completely mind-independent reality makes any sense. It does not show that the conceptual scheme which fails to distinguish between zebras and zebralopes does not match the inherent structure of reality. What it shows is that it does not match another, better, conceptual scheme.xxv ‘Another’ and ‘better’ both need to be explained. As for the former, notice that the presentation of the argument makes use of the ‘picture in the picture’ idea. First, it presents a picture of the world, in which zebras and zebralopes are two species. Second, it describes the picture possessed by fictitious people within the first picture. Third, it contrasts the two pictures. The two pictures have the same status. The picture within is a conceptual scheme, and so must be the picture without. The ‘structure of the world as it is in itself’ did not figure in the argument at all. As far as ‘better’ is concerned, the picture without was stipulated to be better. But its superiority does not have to be stipulated. It has features which make it more desirable than the one within. It can explain the conspicuous differences between animals which according to the picture within belong to the same species. The picture within treats these differences as curiosities which do not call for an explanation. One may feel uneasy about this reply because it may seem too powerful. It appears to use a recipe by which one can disarm a wide range of metaphysical realist

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objections all too easily. The recipe is this. If the metaphysical realist appeals to something which he alleges to be ontologically independent of the mind, just point out that he uses concepts, and claim that the things he talks about are ontologically dependent on concepts. I shall use this recipe later as well. However, this is very much like the strategy Berkeley used to dismiss anything material. When Hylas tries to point out something material, Philonous comes back saying that it is just a collection of ideas. So one may fear that by applying this recipe the internal realist will end up with some sort of immaterialism. This fear is ungrounded: I will show later that internal realism is compatible with a quite common form of physicalism (5.3.). One may also find this recipe too cheap to be convincing. In response to that I cannot do better than show that it is not an ad hoc move but part of a more sophisticated picture. So let me restate the reply in terms of the previous chapter. I distinguished there between the quasi-noumenal, the stuff to be organized, and the quasi-phenomenal, what has been organized into individuals and classes. Different conceptual schemes organize differently, so we have different quasi-phenomenal realms. These realms should be distinguished from the world, for two reasons. First, conceptual schemes are not global. They deal with limited segments. There are far more things in the world than which can be captured within, say, the conceptual scheme of carpentry. (Since it would be complicated to speak of ‘parts of the world’ all the time, in what follows I shall often ignore this point and speak of the ‘world’.) Second, as I said, the structure of the world is constituted only by adequate conceptual schemes. The quasi-phenomenal realms constituted by inadequate schemes are not parts of the real world. The structures imposed by inadequate conceptual schemes are not the real structures. Or, more precisely, only those distinctions are real which coincide with the distinctions drawn by some adequate conceptual scheme. We may now put the answer as follows. The objection presupposes a superior and an inferior scheme. The superior scheme is tacitly assumed to be adequate. So the quasi-phenomenal world constituted by the superior scheme is simply taken to be the world. It is with this world that the inferior scheme is contrasted when it is found defective. But this world, the world, is also quasi-phenomenal, so it is not ontologically independent of the human mind. In this way, the internal realist can explain both why the objection goes wrong and why it may sound plausible. It sounds plausible because there is indeed a mismatch between the inferior conceptual scheme and the real world. And it goes wrong because it gets wrong the ontological status of the real world. This reply, however, raises a further question. It talks about the superior and the inferior scheme, which suggests that the conceptual schemes are in competition. The idea of competition has to be explained. If there could be only one adequate conceptual scheme in a given domain, there would be no problem. All schemes in the same domain would be competitors. But internal realism allows that there can be more than one adequate conceptual schemes (IR3). The adequate conceptual schemes are not in competition. It follows than that being concerned with the same domain is not sufficient for competition. Indeed, we have already seen an example in which competition is missing, namely the athlete advised by a trainer, a doctor and a physicist specializing in the mechanics of bodily movement (2.1.). We would not say that only one of these experts can be right. Rather, they talk about somewhat

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different features or aspects of the same world, or describe the world from different perspectives. This shows that the quasi-noumenal worlds constituted by the three conceptual schemes can be combined, i. e. they may be parts or aspects of one and the same world. The situation is different in the zebras vs. zebras and zebralopes case, just as in the case of affinity theory vs. current classification into compounds and mixtures. The striped horse-like beasts either belong to the same species, or they do not. Salt and water in salty water are either related in the same way as hydrogen and oxygen are related in water, or as oil and water are related when we pour them together. In these cases only one of the conceptual schemes can be adequate. If the one is right, the other one is wrong. So when do we have competition, and when peaceful co-existence between conceptual schemes? In other words, how can we tell disagreement from simple difference? Competition seems to require two things. First, doing the same job. Only those conceptual schemes can compete which serve roughly the same or closely related purposes. The trainer, the doctor and the physicist do not compete, because they pursue quite different enterprises. Each of them can say many things which do not concern the other two at all. In this case, however, their interests coincide: each of them can advise the athlete. On the other hand, the single species and two species accounts of the striped beasts are both biological taxonomies and, therefore, serve the same purpose. The second requirement is that competing conceptual schemes must be sufficiently close. They must be similar enough to allow point by point comparison, at least in certain areas. This requirement can be backed up by two considerations. First, disagreement is disagreement somewhere. There is no such thing as global disagreement without disagreeing parts. To find local disagreements we have to be able to say what is supposed to match what. If we have a conceptual distinction within one scheme, and we wonder whether another conceptual scheme makes the same distinction, we must pick out the part of the other scheme in which this distinction may or may not be found. This cannot be done if the two conceptual scheme cannot be mapped onto each other fairly closely. So there must be a good deal of similarity. The second consideration comes from Davidson’s ideas about radical interpretation (“Radical Interpretation”, “On the Very Idea”). Interpretation means attributing someone beliefs, desires, etc. and translating his language. He argues that interpretation cannot get off the ground without the assumption that the person we interpret shares many of our beliefs and desires. In the course of the interpretation we may discover that his views often clash with ours, but the points of disagreements are seen against a background of massive agreement. To apply this idea to the present case, remember that we have defined a conceptual scheme as a relatively self-contained set of words, which serve the same sort of purpose, occur in the same contexts and fit one another. So a conceptual scheme is really a part of the vocabulary of a language. Now suppose two speakers whose respective descriptive vocabulary is limited to a single conceptual scheme and set them the task of interpreting each other. If they succeed, that means that they agree on many things. That cannot happen unless their concepts overlap to a large extent, i. e. unless their conceptual schemes are fairly close. It may turn out that they also disagree on many

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points; still their conceptual schemes must be similar. So disagreement implies similarity.xxvi After this short digression let us now return to the zebralopes, for we are not yet done with them. In its first form, the objection had nothing to do with reference. But it might also create a problem for the theory of reference, in the following way. Suppose people used the inferior scheme for a while, the one which did not distinguish between zebras and zebralopes, then they realized its deficiency and adopted the superior scheme instead. Both schemes apply the term ‘zebra’. What happens to the reference of this word, when the old scheme is replaced by the new one? Does it change, or does it remain the same? This is a question for all accounts of reference, not only for the internal realist view. It is a serious question, because neither answer seems completely satisfactory. Suppose one says that there is no change in reference. But then how can we account for the change in linguistic behavior after the adoption of the new scheme? Some of the animals which used to be called ‘zebras’ are now called ‘zebralopes’. Some of the sentences which used to be endorsed are now rejected. How could this be explained if not by a change in reference? On the other hand, suppose that reference does change. If it does, after the change we actually talk about different things. So change in reference seems to imply a change in the topic of discourse. But then how could we criticize the claims formulated in terms of the earlier scheme? Think of it in this way. The truth conditions of sentences are determined by the reference of the words in the sentences. So changes in reference result in changes in truth conditions. For instance, suppose someone keeps two animals and believes that both of them are zebras. Then adopts the new scheme, and comes to believe that only one is a zebra, and the other one is a zebralope. If there were a change in reference, he could claim that her earlier belief was just as true as the more recent one. The reference of ‘zebra’ has shifted, so the truth conditions of his earlier and her current beliefs are both satisfied. So he was not wrong after all. Surely, we would find this attitude dubious. Let us try to restate the dilemma in the terms introduced earlier. Reference is a relation between words and things in the world. But what world? On the present view, the world with structure is quasi-phenomenal. Each conceptual scheme comes with its own quasi-phenomenal world. What we normally call the world, if you wish, the world simpliciter, is just the combination of the quasi-phenomenal worlds of adequate conceptual schemes. In so far as we are dealing with adequate conceptual schemes, the distinction between quasi-phenomenal worlds and the world simpliciter is inconsequential. The world is quasi-phenomenal, so the question whether words refer to things in a quasi-phenomenal world or to things in the world simpliciter makes little sense. But in the zebralope case one of the schemes is inadequate. Therefore, its quasi-phenomenal world is not part of the world, i. e. the world simpliciter. So it matters whether reference is a relation to a fictitious quasiphenomenal world or to the world simpliciter. Thus we have two options: to take reference as a relation to a fictitious quasi-phenomenal world, or to take it as a relation to the world simpliciter, i. e. to the world constituted by adequate conceptual schemes. Suppose we choose the first option. A change in a conceptual scheme then

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results in a change in the quasi-phenomenal world. Consequently, conceptual change leads to change in reference. If we take the second option, reference does not change. The fact that we adopt a different conceptual scheme does not change the adequacy of conceptual schemes. If it is the new scheme which is adequate, the world simpliciter includes the quasi-phenomenal world of the new scheme. If reference is a relation to the world simpliciter, a change in the conceptual scheme does not change it. We have referred to the same things all along. Let us call the notion of reference used in the first option ‘relative reference’, and the notion of reference mentioned in the second option ‘reference simpliciter’. Relative reference is a relation between a word within a conceptual scheme to some entity in the quasi-phenomenal world constituted by that scheme. Reference simpliciter is a relation between a word within a conceptual scheme and some entity in the quasi-phenomenal world constituted by the adequate conceptual scheme. Defined in this way, reference simpliciter is also relative reference. It is just a distinguished member of the class of relative reference relations, just as the world simpliciter is just a distinguished member of the class of quasi-phenomenal worlds, and just as an adequate conceptual scheme is just a distinguished member of the class of conceptual schemes. So the dilemma is this. We can identify the ordinary notion of reference with two different relations, relative reference and reference simpliciter. If we identify it with relative reference we lose the continuity of discourse. Adopting a new conceptual scheme would amount to changing the subject. Competition would be replaced by ‘different but equal truths’. If we identify the ordinary notion of reference with reference simpliciter, we lose the ability to explain changes in linguistic behavior in terms of referential change. What shall we do? I suggest we need both notions of reference, but the notion of reference simpliciter is more basic. To see this, let us have a closer look at the contexts in which the notion of relative reference seems inescapable. It was suggested that relative reference is necessary if we want to explain linguistic behavior of people whose conceptual scheme is inadequate.xxvii The first argument for this claim goes as follows. If we want to explain why somebody said something, we look for a causal explanation. Causal explanation cannot be given in terms of things which are not present when the event to be explained takes place. Reference simpliciter assumes the adequate conceptual scheme. The person whose linguistic act we want to explain may not have any idea about the adequate conceptual scheme, i. e. the adequate conceptual scheme may be spatiotemporally distant from his linguistic act. So reference simpliciter cannot be a causal factor. In case you have doubts concerning the causal character of these explanations, and believe that these explanations work by rationalizing the behavior, the same point can still be made. To rationalize one’s behavior we have to show that he uses the resources available to him in a rational way. But if someone has an inadequate conceptual scheme, the concepts of the adequate scheme are not available to him. So it is illegitimate to mention them in the explanation. Suppose that a person with the conceptual scheme which does not distinguish between zebras and zebralopes calls a zebra ‘zebra’. Why does he do that? We cannot answer that the word ‘zebra’, as he understands it, refers to the class

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of zebras, for he does not understand the word ‘zebra’ as standing for zebras. He understands it as standing for zebras and zebralopes. There is a second argument which presupposes that such explanations, whether causal or not, are supposed to rationalize. It relies on cases in which we want to explain something which seems to be a mistake from the point of view of the adequate scheme. Appealing to the resources of the adequate scheme in such cases would not just result in bad explanation: it would produce no explanation at all. Imagine that our earlier hero calls out ‘zebra’ when he sees a zebralope. Why does he do that? Saying that his word ‘zebra’ refers to zebras and does not refer to zebralopes just would not answer the question. It would fail to show that what is said is rational. These arguments indeed show that in cases like these we need the notion of relative reference. But relative reference is only needed when we talk of the reference the words quoted from the speaker. The rest of the words are understood as having reference simpliciter. Consider: ‘Why did he call out “zebra” upon seeing a zebralope?’ ‘Because his word “zebra” refers to zebralopes as well.’ The word in double quotes is quoted from the speaker and we clearly attribute relative reference to it. But in describing the relative reference of this word we use our words in the usual sense. The speaker’s conceptual scheme does not contain the zebra-zebralope distinction. That distinction does not exist in his quasi-phenomenal world. So when we say that his word refers both to zebras and zebralopes, we ourselves refer to entities in the world simpliciter, rather than to entities within the speaker’s quasiphenomenal world. In other words, the description of the speaker’s relative reference presupposes reference simpliciter. Reference simpliciter thus figures as unavoidable background even in the contexts when we need the notion of relative reference. As it were, relative reference cannot stand on its own. In contrast, reference simpliciter can stand on its own. If we are not interested in why people say what they do, and we simply want to get the facts right, we only need reference simpliciter. Someone calls a zebralope ‘zebra’. Is he right? No. ‘Zebra’ refers to zebras; it does not refer to zebralopes. If we are looking for the truth rather than an understanding of other people, we do not hesitate to take others to refer to the same things we ourselves refer to. This asymmetry shows that reference simpliciter is more basic. So if we want to identify the ordinary notion of reference with one of the recently defined notions, it is better to identify it with reference simpliciter. This justifies what we said earlier (2.2.), namely, that only adequate conceptual schemes have the power to fix reference. It may be said that each conceptual scheme fixes relative reference. But if we talk about reference in the ordinary way, the notion we employ is reference simpliciter; and reference simpliciter is fixed by adequate conceptual schemes. (Given that the ordinary notion of reference is reference simpliciter, in what follows I shall often drop the qualifier ‘simpliciter’. ‘Reference’ will stand for reference simpliciter, if it is not indicated otherwise.) However, there is a worry which may arise at this point. In scrutinizing what happens in the explanations of why speakers using other conceptual schemes speak as they do, we drew attention to a contrast between the reference attributed to their words and the way our own words are understood. One may say that the contrast is

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between two sorts of relative reference rather than between relative reference and reference simpliciter. In a sense this is right, since reference simpliciter is just a special kind of relative reference. But then one may worry that our own relative reference may not be reference simpliciter either, for our own conceptual scheme may turn out to be inadequate. Indeed, this may happen. But this should not worry us here. After all, we have to trust that our conceptual schemes are adequate. And in so far as we believe them adequate, we must believe that our relative reference is reference simpliciter. So this is not really a worry about the present account of reference. It is a worry about being wrong. Such worries will be taken up in the following chapter. Before going on to address further challenges to the present account of reference, I would like to apply some of the points just made to the issue of incommensurability and relativism. As it has been written in the Introduction, the notion of conceptual scheme is sometimes deployed for hermeneutic purposes. It has also been noted that the hermeneutic use of the notion often comes hand in hand with relativism. We can now explain how this association comes about and why it is misguided. We have just seen an example (actually, a toy example) in which the notion of conceptual scheme is employed for hermeneutic purposes, i. e. to understand an alien way of thinking. Calling a zebralope ‘zebra’ is to say something weird, something which is obviously wrong by our lights. Some mistakes are easy to understand in terms of perceptual mistakes, logical errors, reliance on false information, etc. But sometimes none of these sorts of explanations seem to work. In such cases we may suspect that the person whose behavior we try to understand does not share our concepts, i. e. his words do not refer to the same things. So we try to construct a different reference relation which would make what he says come out right. This is roughly what the hermeneutic use of the notion of conceptual scheme means. There is nothing wrong with it so far. But if someone ignores the distinction between relative reference and reference simpliciter, he may be tempted to argue as follows. (1)

The reference of the alien’s words is not the same as that of our own words.

Since the things we talk about are the things which we refer to, (2)

The alien talks about other things than we do.

Claims about different things cannot be compared with respect to truth. Views about apples can be compared with other views about apples, but not with views about pears. Therefore, (3)

The alien’s views cannot be compared with our own views.

From (2) one may arrive at a different conclusion as well. If we identify the world with the sorts of things we talk about, we also get

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The alien and we live in different worlds.

The truths about different worlds are different. Since (4) can be traced back to the fact that the alien and we use different conceptual schemes, we can conclude (5)

Truth is relative to conceptual schemes.

The same conclusion be reached from (3) as well. If no comparison is possible, we aim at different truths. (3) is but a consequence of the conceptual difference between the alien and us. Therefore, (5). I neglected some details because I want to focus on the numbered statements. (1) is true, but it is likely to mislead. It is true, because in explaining what the alien says we indeed construe the reference of his words differently from that of our own words (i. e. we endow his words with relative reference). But it is also misleading, because it is silent about the rest of the story. The story starts as follows. We first understand the alien with his words referring to the same thing as ours. But then what he says sounds weird. This does not have to disturb us. We may note that the alien has weird ideas. We often do that. It is not always obligatory to explain why somebody says something. And even after we have given an explanation, we may still say that alien was just dead wrong. In other words, it is always an option to attribute reference simpliciter. But suppose we decide to offer an explanation. Then we have to construct a new relation of reference indeed. So within the context of explanation (1) is true. But the very question of explanation emerges only if we note that on the usual understanding what the alien says is false. The usual understanding does not assign different reference to the alien’s words. So we must first regard (1) as false. To put the point more simply, (1) is ambiguous. If ‘reference’ stands for relative reference, it is true. If it stands for reference simpliciter, it is false. So if we accept (1) we are still on solid ground. But if we are unaware of what surrounds us, namely, that ‘reference’ is ambiguous, the next step takes us into the morass. With (2) one steps into the morass and starts to sink, even though he can still be saved. If one construes it as equivalent to (1), it is still true. After all, when the alien says ‘zebra’ he talks about zebras and zebralopes, and when we say ‘zebra’ we talk about zebras only. Zebras plus zebralopes is just not the same class of animals as the class of zebras. Understood in this way, (2) would not lead further, into the morass. But (2) tends to be construed differently, as asserting that the alien and we just talk about absolutely different things, like apples and pears. Read in this way, it is clearly false. The alien talks about zebras and zebralopes. We also talk about zebras and zebralopes. Our words attach differently to these things. That is what is right in (1). But what our words are attached to are the same things. This is why (2) is false if it is taken to be more than a reformulation of (1). With (3) one is already deep in the morass and beyond help. It is plainly false. The whole explanation of why the alien says what he says proceeds by comparison. We know that the alien is wrong. What he calls ‘zebra’ is in fact a zebralope. So we have already compared his views and ours before we decided to explain his behavior. In fact, we would have never decided to offer an explanation had we not

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compared his views with ours. As a result, (3) is not just false. It renders the whole argument incoherent. For if it were true, the context of explanation within which (1) is regarded as true would have never been created.xxviii (4) is false for similar reasons. We may say that the alien’s quasi-phenomenal world is different from ours. But the world simpliciter is our quasi-phenomenal world. We do not have two worlds on the same level. In fact, the alien’s quasiphenomenal world is reconstructed in terms of the entities within our world. For example, we use the union operation to create from the class of zebras and the class of zebralopes the class which constitutes the relative reference of the alien’s word ‘zebra’, and which is an entity within his quasi-phenomenal world. Of course, we could not do that if we lived in two different worlds. But if we could not do that, we could not provide an explanation for the alien’s behavior. So (4), just like (3), renders the argument incoherent. If it were true, we would never accept (1), the starting point of the argument. The upshot is this. The argument from the hermeneutic use of the notion of conceptual scheme to relativism is wrong. The hermeneutic use of the notion in itself is completely innocuous. But it does have an element which may be misunderstood in a way that leads to relativistic conclusions. So the historical association of relativism and the hermeneutic use of the notion is not accidental. But it is grounded in serious mistakes.

3. TWIN EARTH AND MENTAL CONTENT Nevertheless, it might seem that the present account is refuted by Putnam’s famous Twin Earth argument (“The Meaning of Meaning”, “Philosophers”). According to the argument the following two claims cannot be simultaneously true: (1) (2)

Knowing the sense of an expression is being in a narrow psychological state. Sense determines reference.

By ‘narrow psychological states’ Putnam means those states which make no reference to anything outside the mind. They may be small pictures flashing, mental symbols being shuffled around, depending on how you think the mind works. They may also be called solipsistic states because they are compatible with the assumption that nothing exists outside the mind. The argument goes as follows. Imagine that there is a planet, Twin Earth, which – true to her name – is pretty much like our own planet. It is the same size, has the same climate, it is populated by the same species. It also has people living on it, whose history is parallel to our own. What is more, every earthdweller has his or her Twin Earth counterpart, who does exactly the same things. There is one crucial difference only. The most common liquid on Twin Earth, which is transparent, has no taste or smell, which falls from the skies as rain, forms rivers, lakes and seas, etc. is not H2O, but has a different composition, say, XYZ. Of course, it is also called ‘water’. However, since natural kinds are identified

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on the basis of their composition, this liquid is not water. Now go back to the time before Dalton’s theory of atoms, and you will find that the narrow psychological states of earthdwellers and their twins agree. When they are thirsty, they call out ‘Water!’. There is absolutely nothing within their minds that would differ. If reference were determined by narrow psychological states, their word ‘water’ and ours would refer to the same thing. But they do not, since the word on Earth refers to water and the one on Twin-Earth to XYZ. Therefore, (1) and (2) cannot both be true. Since ‘sense’ is generally held to be whatever determines reference, (2) should stand. So (1) must go. The reason why the argument might seem to clash with my account is this. I claimed that what determines the reference of an expression is the justification conditions of certain sentences. So the knowledge of sense is naturally identified with the knowledge of the justification conditions of certain sentences. The knowledge of the justification conditions can be manifested either in a verbal form or as a practical skill. In either case, it can plausibly be taken as a narrow psychological state. But then the premises of the argument appear to be endorsed by the account. Therefore, the argument applies to it. So it seems. Let us grant for the sake of argument that knowing the justification conditions of certain sentences is being in a narrow psychological state. If reference were fixed by narrow psychological states, certain changes in the narrow psychological states would result in referential change. The argument of the previous section has shown that this is not quite right. Those who do not distinguish between zebras and zebralopes and those who distinguish between them associate different justification conditions with ‘zebra’. When new justification conditions are adopted, there is a sense in which reference changes. The relative reference attributed to the users of the inferior scheme is indeed different from reference simpliciter in terms of which users of the superior scheme understand themselves. But there is also a sense in which reference does not change. Outside of the context of explanation, the users of the superior scheme can quite legitimately treat their predecessors as sharing their reference relation. And in so far as reference simpliciter is more basic than relative reference, it is closer to the truth to say that reference does not change. The Twin Earth case is slightly more complicated than this. Here we have two conceptual schemes, the pre-Daltonian (Pre) and the post-Daltonian (Post).xxix It might not be obvious at first sight, but on reflection it is clear that the argument cannot be formulated but from a post-Daltonian perspective. Users of the two schemes agree that the criterion of identity for water is having a certain structure, i. e. what makes water water is that it has a certain structure. Therefore, the justification conditions for ‘water’ are the same as the justification conditions for having the kind of structure water is alleged to have. What the users of Pre and Post disagree about is the structure of water. For the former, water is a simple element which cannot be analyzed further. For the latter, water is H2O. As a result, the two groups give different justification conditions. In Pre the justification conditions are just the practical criteria laymen use to identify water, and these are formulated in terms of phenomenological properties, e. g. tasteless, colorless, thirst-quenching. In Post the justification criteria are quite removed from the practical criteria, and they are formulated in terms of chemical tests. The justification conditions of Pre are

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satisfied by the Twin Earth liquid XYZ as well, whereas the justification conditions in Post are satisfied only by the liquid whose chemical structure is H2O. Since the adequate scheme is Post, the justification conditions in Post are the ones which fix reference simpliciter. So if we are not interested in the explanation of our misguided predecessors’ speech, and identify reference with reference simpliciter, the reference of ‘water’ does not change after Dalton. Therefore, ‘water’ in Pre refers to the liquid H2O, just as in Post. And this is exactly what the Twin Earth argument asserts. So far, there is no clash between my account and the Twin Earth argument. The point may be put more sharply as follows. If we take sense to be whatever fixes reference simpliciter, than the users of Pre did not know the sense of ‘water’. What fixes the reference of a word is the justification condition in the adequate scheme. The adequate scheme is Post. They did not have Post, so they did not know the sense of ‘water’. Thus even if (1) is granted, the Twin Earth argument still does not work against my account, because (1) cannot be applied to our pre-Daltonian ancestors. But what about the case when it can be applied? If we keep on granting that the knowledge of justification conditions is a narrow psychological state, then knowledge of the justification conditions associated with the adequate scheme amounts to knowledge of sense, so knowing the sense is indeed being in a narrow psychological state. In this case, however, the argument in its present form does not work, because with respect to our best current scheme the narrow psychological state that counts as knowing the sense of ‘water’ and the reference of ‘water’ do not pull apart. But one may reply to this that there is nothing sacrosanct about water being H2O. One may easily construct a Twin Earth scenario to show this. For example, Twin Earth hydrogen is different from Earth hydrogen (say, because Twin Earth protons differ from their Earth twins), and the Twin Earth stuff H2O differs our H2O in many ways which are currently hidden to us. It may then be argued that the Earth word ‘water’ refers only to Earth H2O, but not to Twin Earth H2O. This argument does to H2O exactly what the original Twin Earth argument did to the tasteless, colorless etc. liquid. Nevertheless, it still does not refute my point, for in this case Post is not adequate! Reference once again is identified with what the justification conditions provided by the adequate scheme pick out. To put the point somewhat differently, the argument presupposes that we know the reference of the word. But in the internal realist account, reference is determined by the justification conditions provided by the adequate scheme. By formulating a version of the Twin Earth argument, the opponent automatically shifts the reference yielded by the internal realist account in such a way that it becomes identical with what the argument takes the reference to be. So the reference presupposed by the argument goes hand in hand by the reference resulting from the internal realist account. Whatever ingenious Twin Earth scenario is constructed, the argument just will not go through. If someone is still out to use Twin Earth against my account, there is one more desperate move he may try. He may say that the argument is a completely general refutation of (1), and since I did not repudiate it, my account is refuted by the argument. But what I did was exactly to challenge the complete generality of the argument. I claimed that the argument goes through only if we look upon people

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who, in contrast with us, are wrong about what their words refer to. To make this move would be to endorse the conclusion of the argument even in those cases in which it does not work. And that is indeed a desperate move. This reply, however, does not make clear where internal realism stands with regard to the internalism-externalism controversy. The controversy is about this. Does the identity of mental states, in particular, of propositional attitudes, depend on factors outside the human mind? Internalism answers no, and asserts that these mental states are narrow. Externalism holds the contrary view. The Twin Earth argument is normally taken as one of the central arguments for externalism. It works as follows. Reference figures in the identity of propositional attitudes. So the qualitatively identical thoughts of people on Earth and Twin Earth are in fact different, for the former thoughts are about water, and the latter ones are about XZY. I had to defend the internal realist account against the argument. Does this mean that it is committed to internalism? It is not. In fact, in so far as one accepts the premise that ‘reference figures in the identity of propositional attitudes’, one can use the internal realist position to argue for externalism. The account includes at least two factors which make reference depend on things outside the mind. First, reference is fixed by adequate conceptual schemes, and adequacy is not simply a matter of the mind, as we shall see in the following chapter (4.2.). Second, remember that the practical criteria which actually guide our use of concepts do not have to be identical with the reference-fixing justification conditions. It is enough if they are reliable indirect criteria for the satisfaction of the reference-fixing justification condition. The reference-fixing justification condition serves as a standard rather than as the factor which causally determines our use of a concept. It might even happen that most members of the community are unable to decide whether the reference-fixing justification conditions are satisfied. Such is the case with most scientific concepts. If asked what it takes to be an electron, I cannot answer. I leave the answer to experts, who can tell. Nevertheless, in using the word ‘electron’ I intend to refer to the same thing which experts call ‘electron’. For example, if I say something about electrons, and I am corrected by an expert, I will not defend what I said in this way. ‘I was thinking of a different entity than you. With respect to the entity I thought of, my claim stands. I only acknowledge that my concept is somewhat idiosyncratic.’ I rather say that I was thinking about electrons and was wrong. This looks like social externalism, which shows up in Putnam’s work (“The Meaning of Meaning”) and is advocated vehemently by Burge (“Individualism”). Of course, internalists are not likely to grant that reference figures in the identity of propositional attitudes. However, internal realism is neutral with respect to the premise that reference figures in the identity of propositional attitudes. So taken by itself, it does not provide an argument against internalism. The conclusion is than this. Even though internal realism can be easily integrated into externalist arguments, it is neutral. Before I go on to examine how the present view is related to some current theories of mental content, I must first comment on an issue which arises both in connection with the zebralope objection and the treatment of the Twin Earth argument. Both cases concern linguistic or conceptual change. I argued that if we are not engaged in a hermeneutic exercise, they should not be thought of as involving referential change. (There is a change in relative reference, but that does not concern

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us here.) But which word in the new scheme has the same reference as the word in the old scheme? Consider the zebralope case. Let us call the word ‘zebra’ as it was used in the older and inferior scheme ‘zebraold’. Which word in the new scheme has the same reference as ‘zebraold’, ‘zebra’ or ‘zebralope’? Which of the two new words is the successor of the old one? Earlier we simply stipulated that ‘zebra’ is the successor. This was all right, since in the construction of philosophical examples we are bound to make stipulations. We could have stipulated that the successor is ‘zebralope’ – it would not have made any difference. The question is what happens in real life situations? How do we know how our new vocabulary is related to the old one? Homophony, having the same phonological shape, is certainly no criterion. The phonological shapes of the new words are accidental. In fact, in order to avoid possible misunderstanding, zoologists may decide to create new words neither of which is homophonic to the old one, e. g. ‘zebralope’ and ‘zebranonlope’. But then what is the criterion? The crucial idea, as Davidson has pointed out, is charity. We identify the successor word in such a way which makes most of our predecessors’ claims come out true. ‘Zebraold’ must refer either to zebras or to zebralopes. We choose that construal which renders our predecessors’ views as true as possible. In practice, this general rule is applied with a view to the particular situation. The sheer number of sentences made true by an interpretation is probably less important than which truths are preserved. It may be worth opting for an interpretation which saves the general theoretical truths at the price of construing several particular claims as false. In this case we may be said to choose that word as the successor whose overall conceptual role is closer to that of the old word. The ranking of claims according to generality and theoreticity depends on the nature of the domain. In the domain of zoology those statements belong to this group which locate the species within the taxonomy of animals. In another domain the theoretical claims are picked out differently. But looking for the word with the conceptual role most similar to that of the old world is but one particular way of applying the principle of charity. Under certain conditions the principle is applied in a different way. Imagine, for example, that we find out that 99% of the animals we used to call ‘zebras’ are antelopes, which are now called ‘zebralopes’ (whereas the non-antelope zebras of the old idiom continue to be called the ‘zebras’). In these circumstances it may be a good idea to forget about the conceptual role and go for the numbers. After all, the overwhelming majority of the animals to which ‘zebraold’ was applied are zebralopes. The two strategies for the application of charity I mentioned, most probably, do not exhaust all the possibilities. Perhaps there are other strategies as well. We may even use different strategies in the same situation, especially in cases of fundamental conceptual and linguistic changes, which affect a vast number of concepts and words. It may also turn out that there is no single best answer to the question about the successor of a particular word, but there are several acceptable options.xxx In recent years there have been much discussion about mental content. The issue is this. How do mental items, like beliefs, desires and their constituents, concepts, come to refer to things outside the mind. This is obviously relevant for our concerns. Moreover, practically all parties to the discussion tacitly or explicitly endorse (MR1). It would be hopeless to do justice to the complexities of the discussion here.

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I shall only discuss two major approaches rather briefly, the causal-informational and the teleological account. I shall argue that what is right in them is captured by the internal realist account. According to the causal-informational view (Fodor, A Theory of Content, chapters 3 and 4; Dretske, Knowledge, ”Misrepresentation”), mental items acquire reference through a nomological connection. To put it very simply, it asserts that the concept ‘dog’ refers to dogs, because there is a law which links the appearance of a dog to the appearance of a token of the concept ‘dog’ in the mind. The internal realist has nothing against the idea that there is a nomological connection between the appearances of dogs and appearances of tokens of the concept ‘dog’. Of course, nomological connections are understood differently. According to the causal view, the entities which are nomologically connected are independent of the human mind. The internal realist believes that they are ontologically dependent on the human mind. As a result, the nomological connection, in a way, is also dependent on the mind. Of course, it does not mean that once we introduced the event types A and B, we are free to decide whether they should be nomologically connected. Once we have the event types, nomological connections are discovered and not invented. (We shall come back to this in 4.1.) If we disregard this metaphysical disagreement, the real issue is whether it is the nomological connection or the justification condition which fixes reference. This cannot be decided by considering examples and counterexamples. After all, if an account fails to yield the right reference for our concepts, it fails on its own terms. So let us suppose that the two views will agree on the referents of concepts. But let me note here that the two accounts face different difficulties in producing the right reference. The internal realist has to face practical difficulties which are different for each concept. It is hard to figure out the reference-fixing justification conditions for ‘electron’. It is also hard to figure them out for ‘table’. But they are hard for different reasons. In the case of ‘electron’, the sources of the problem include the following: the identification of the experts who give the standards for the laymen; the experts may differ about the crucial features of the electron; the historical uses of the term are even more diverse. In the case of ‘table’ the problems are these: to what extent is it a functional concept and to what extent does it include inherent properties like shape and size?; if it is partly functional, does that mean that it is manufactured for a purpose, or that it is used in a particular way?; etc. In the causal-theoretical account the problems are general. The most notorious problem is that of misrepresentation, or the disjunction problem, as it is also called. Given that large cats may also cause the appearance of a token of the concept ‘dog’, why does ‘dog’ refer to dogs rather than dogs or cats? There is also a problem about the concepts referring to unobservable entities. The simple model which applies to ‘dog’ might be difficult to extend to these cases. I am not suggesting that the causal-informational theory cannot overcome these problems.xxxi But it looks that this theory is in a more precarious position. It has to face problems which endanger the theory itself rather than its applications. But there are two other problems as well. The first is this. There are quite many nomological connections which result in the tokening of concepts. It is not only the appearance of a dog that makes me think of a dog, but someone mentioning a dog,

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or a movie showing a dog, someone describing an animal having the characteristics of a dog, etc. In the causal theorist’s view not all of these connections are relevant for the semantics of the concept. So she has to narrow down the range of nomological connections which endow concepts with semantics. At the same time, she is under pressure to keep this range broad, for there are lots of different kinds of concepts whose tokens appear in virtue of quite different kinds of causal connections. (Compare ‘dog’, ‘tact’, and ‘electron’.) But picking out the right range of nomological connections is still not enough. The account has to explain why it is exactly the given range of nomological connections which is reference-fixing. To put it differently, it has to make clear what is special about these nomological relationships which enable them to do the what other nomological relations cannot do. If this is not made clear, one may worry that what we have is but an ad hoc construction, which ‘saves the phenomena’, but does not explain them. Let me illustrate this difficulty on Fodor’s account. Fodor does not address the general issue of picking out the right range of nomological connections. He wants to solve the problem of misrepresentation. It is presumably this solution which he would apply to the general problem. The solution operates with the notion of asymmetric dependence. This is a relation between causal connections. A causal connection C1 is said to be asymmetrically dependent on C2 if and only if C1 would not obtain if C2 did not, but C2 would obtain even if C1 did not. To put it differently, in all possible worlds in which C1 holds, so does C2, but not the other way around. This is supposed to solve the problem of misrepresentation in the following way. It seems clear that the nomological connection which results in misrepresentation asymmetrically depends on the nomological connection which does not. Cats would cause the tokening of the concept ‘dog’ only if dogs did. However, dogs would cause the tokening of the concept even if cats did not. So the dog–’dog’ nomological connection does not depend on the cat–’dog’ connection, but the latter connection holds only if the former does. Therefore, Fodor puts the following constraint on the reference-fixing connection: it should not asymmetrically depend on any other nomological connection. The dog–’dog’ connection satisfies this constraint, but the cat–’dog’ connection does not. So the latter is irrelevant for the reference ‘dog’. The same idea can be deployed to screen out all nomological connections pertaining to the tokening of a concept, which are irrelevant for semantics. Let us suppose that this works in the sense that we find no example in which the constraint is violated. But then we may ask this. Why does satisfying this constraint make a nomological connection reference-fixing? Why does this feature make a causal connection significant from the semantic point of view? Fodor does not offer an answer. This is problem, because one can argue in the following way. Perceptual concepts, like ‘dog’, must be possible to use in perceptual situations. Perception involves causal laws. So there must be a nomological connection between the appearance of a dog and the tokening of the concept. This argument seems to show that it follows from the semantics of the concept that the asymmetric dependence constraint is satisfied, rather than the other way round. So it is the semantics of the concept which explains why the constraint is satisfied. The satisfaction of the constraint is, so to speak, but a side effect of the semantics of the concept.

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Therefore, Fodor’s account does not explain the semantics of the concept. It gets the reference right, but it does not reveal the mechanism by which reference is fixed. The claim is that it is our intuitions about the semantics of concepts which explains our intuitions about Fodor’s account. To see this let us suppose that we have different intuitions about the semantics of concepts. Imagine, for example, that we believe that it is an essential feature of the concept ‘dog’ that it comes to our mind when we hear the corresponding word, i. e. one cannot possess the concept without having mastered the word. If we were to believe this, we would also hold that the word–concept causal connection is not asymmetrically dependent on the thing–concept causal connection. So the former would be just as much constitutive in the semantics of the concept as the latter. We would then revise our judgments about asymmetric dependence. So the constraint is secondary. Its satisfaction is a consequence rather than the explanation of the semantics. The charge is not that Fodor gets the reference wrong. It is that he has failed to show that the nomological connections which satisfy his constraint are really responsible for semantics. Let me raise a second objection. Suppose that half of the dogs are not really dogs, but Martians who spy on the human race. The Martians are not like dogs at all, but they have high tech devices by which they evoke a perfect illusion. As a result, they always look like dogs to us and seem to behave as dogs do. What would Fodor say in such a case about the concept ‘dog’? The idea of asymmetric dependence does not help here, since we can work out the scenario in various ways so that neither the dog–’dog’ nor the Martian–’dog’ will depend asymmetrically on the other causal connection. (Perhaps the Martians foresaw that our ancestors will domesticate certain wild animals and came here at the same time when the process started. In the beginning they looked and behaved more like wolves do and changed their appearance and behavior as domestication went on.) What should we say under these circumstances? There are two options. The first one is that the concept ‘dog’ is, in fact, not a single concept, but two different concepts. As it were, the Mentalese sign is a homonym. This is what one should say who takes the causal theory completely seriously. We have here two different sorts of entities and two different sorts causal processes. If reference is fixed by specific nomological connections linking mental items to metaphysically real, i. e. ontologically mind-independent entities, then there must be here two different reference relations. It is by accident that the two sorts of entities and two sorts of nomological connections are attached to the same mental item. This is perfectly coherent. The problem is that if ‘reference’ is understood in this way, it may be incapable of doing the job we want it to do. In particular, it does not seem the right notion in terms of which mental items have to be individuated with a view to the explanation of behavior. We would have here two mental items which are identical with respect to their explanatory potential. This is really an aggravated Twin Earth case. However, in the Twin Earth case one can argue that earthly behavior has to be explained in terms of different mental states than behavior on Twin Earth. It is no problem of psychological theory if it fails to capture the apparent similarity of earthly and twin earthly behavior. We miss a generalization, but only a generalization which is not worth capturing. (Indeed, that is what Fodor answers to the Twin Earth problem raised against the causal-

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informational theory (Fodor, The Elm and the Expert, 28-33).) In the present case it is less plausible to argue in this fashion. The second option is to say that the concept ‘dog’ is not a homonym, and it refers to the union of dogs and Martians in disguise. But if we choose this option, the causal theory ceases to be explanatory. If nomological connections are individuated on the basis of their intrinsic features, here we would have two different connections. If we say that there is only one, we start individuating nomological connections on the basis of our semantics, as a result of which the explanation of semantics on the basis of nomological connections becomes circular. This is the same sort of worry I raised earlier. (Notice, however, that this case can be accommodated within the internal realist account. In explaining behavior we would appeal to relative reference, in evaluating performance we would use reference simpliciter. In the former case we would use the second option, the latter case the first one.) And now let us turn to the teleological view (Millikan, Language; White Queen; Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism, chapter 3). This view puts the emphasis on the utilization of mental items rather than on the way they come to appear in the mind. Its central idea is this. If a mental item occurs, it comes to guide our behavior in some way. Under certain conditions the behavior it facilitates is appropriate, under other conditions it is not. The semantics of the mental item can be abstracted from the conditions under which the behavior facilitated by the mental item is appropriate. Recall the male three-spined stickleback mentioned earlier, which attacks all stickleback-sized objects with a red belly. What happens is this. A small red-bellied thing shows up in the stickleback’s territory during the mating season. This leads to the appearance of some mental item in the stickleback’s mind. This mental item makes the bird attack. So what does the mental item refer to? According to the present theory it refers to those things in the presence of which the behavior induced by the mental item is appropriate. Now the antagonistic behavior displayed by the stickleback is appropriate if there is a rival male. It is clearly advantageous for the stickleback to eliminate competition. So the mental item refers to something like male stickleback. It does not matter that the mental item may also occur when no rival male is present, for instance, if a tricky ethologist puts a small piece of wood there whose lower part is painted red. The conditions under which the behavior is inappropriate are irrelevant for semantics. The story is then continued in this way. The behavior is appropriate if it serves its biological function, and biological function is explained in terms selection history. Put very roughly: something S has a function F, when S is a reproduction of earlier such things and the reason why it is reproduced is that the earlier things did F. The selection process which results in reproduction includes both evolution and learning. This approach can be called teleological, because it explains the semantics of an item in terms of its biological function. I am not altogether sure how this approach is related to my own. First of all, the terms in which the two account are cast are difficult to compare. The teleological account is illustrated nearly exclusively by biological examples having to do with rather simple-minded animals. This is quite natural, for we do not understand much of the human mind in terms of biological functions. Conversely, my account is

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specially geared to deal with human accomplishments couched in linguistic form. The idea of justification, which I relied on quite heavily, sounds rather silly or unclear when applied to animals. After all, animals are not members of our epistemological community. So it is just difficult to decide whether ‘condition under which the behavior induced by the mental representation serves its biological purpose’ and ‘adequate justification condition for the application of the concept’ pick out the same thing. If internal realism held that any justification condition has the power to fix reference, the two accounts would clearly pull apart. The ‘justification condition’ the male stickleback uses involves red belly and small size. If this were sufficient to fix reference, we would have to say that the stickleback’s mental item stands not only for rival males but for all small things with a red belly. But the justification condition the male stickleback uses is clearly inadequate.xxxii Moreover, the notion of adequacy has some affinities with that of function. Justification conditions are adequate if they help us to get what we want, i. e. if they serve their purpose well. When the teleological view focuses on those conditions under which the behavior serves its function, this is not at all unlike to the internal realist view that reference is fixed by adequate conceptual schemes. If we compare the details, in so far as they can be compared, we find no evident conflict. The teleological theory holds that it is not the conditions under which the concept comes to mind which determine its reference. The internal realist view holds that many concepts are routinely used without checking whether their justification conditions are satisfied. In fact, many speakers do not even know the justification conditions. The teleological view insists that concept-users may fail to know what their concepts refer to. Sticklebacks do not seem to distinguish between rival sticklebacks and various redbellied items. The internal realist account also holds that people with inadequate conceptual schemes may fail to know what they refer to (simpliciter). There is minor difference though. The internal realist account uses the idea of relative reference to explain behavior. Someone (without the zebra-zebralope distinction) calls a zebralope ‘zebra’, because ‘zebra’ refers to zebras and zebralopes. The teleological view has none of that. The stickleback’s mental item does not stand for rival male and other red-bellied things. To say anything like that would be to reject the account. But this difference can be traced back to the difference in favorite examples. When we explain the behavior of human beings, we rationalize it. And one way of rationalizing some behavior which, in the final analysis, is found irrational is to adjust the reference relation. That is why the notion of relative reference is necessary. We usually treat the animals differently. We do not rationalize their behavior.xxxiii If an animal does something stupid, we do not normally seek reasons for this stupidity. So we do not need relative reference. Nevertheless, the commitments behind the two accounts are different. The advocates of the teleological view are devout naturalists. Their rhetoric seems to suggest that they endorse the sort of naturalism which is at odds internal realism. They are also committed to metaphysical realism. In fact, the principal advocate of this approach, Ruth Millikan has actually argued against Putnam’s internal realism (“Metaphysical Antirealism?”). I understand the motivation behind this commitment, even though I do not think it is justified. The theory presupposes that

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there are things concept-users have no inkling about, which influence the semantics of their language. Such is the case with sticklebacks and all those animals which occur in the examples. The world is richer than what the animals understand of it. Being devout naturalists, the advocates of the teleological view believe that the human situation is not really different from that of the animals. This is why Millikan finds the idea that the world is ontologically dependent on the mind repulsive. But this attitude does not seem to be justified. When we come to the explanation of our own semantics, we cannot have the sort of external point of view we can assume when we discuss animals. Probably we are not really different from animals. But we cannot study our semantics in the same way as we study the semantics of other animals, simply because in studying the human animal we study ourselves. We can get outside other people’s limited point of view, and we can also acknowledge that our own point of view may turn out to be limited. What we cannot do is to see our point of view as limited. This is why we cannot do without an internalist account. If we keep in mind that we cannot get an external perspective of ourselves, i. e. if we forget about some of the motivations behind the teleological account, it is not clear that the teleological view and the internal realist view are incompatible. Perhaps the teleological view is the naturalistic counterpart of the internal realist semantics.

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CHAPTER 4 TRUTH

In the previous chapter I described in some detail how reference is fixed. There are simple sentences associated with each word which are responsible for its reference. Once we know the truth conditions of these sentences, the reference of a word is given by disquotational schemas. The truth conditions of these sentences are identical with their justification conditions. In the final analysis, reference is fixed by justification conditions. However, some justification conditions are inadequate, they are not conducive to truth; in other words, they fail as truth conditions. What these inadequate justification conditions determine is relative reference; the sort of reference we attribute to users of inadequate conceptual schemes when we give rationalizing explanation of their behavior. As to adequate justification conditions, we cannot do better than to identify them with our current justification conditions. Our current justification conditions may turn out to be inadequate. But we must take what we have. The central claim of the previous chapter as well as of the whole book is that the constitution of things and the fixation of reference go hand in hand. The mechanism which links words and things is the same as the one which produces things as determinate entities, entities which are not mere ‘something’, but have criteria of identity. This is how we spelled out (IR1), the claim that the structure of the world is ontologically dependent on the human mind. Since the fixation of reference depends on the human mind, so are entities with identity, which make up the structure of the world. But the world is obviously more than entities with identity. If we know only what it takes to be brown, or what it takes to be a table, etc., we still do not know too much. Things are related to one another. The table is or is not brown. It is a fact that the table is brown, or it is not a fact. The world has features like these, which were not mentioned so far. To put it differently, criteria of identity produce merely a system of pigeonholes, but do not determine how many things are to be found in a particular pigeonhole or in which pigeonholes a particular thing can be found. The same point can also be put in linguistic terms. Language is not simply a set of words. It contains sentences as well. Whereas the relationship between words and things is reference, the relationship between sentences and reality, which most concerns us, is truth. So the question we must turn to is how we get from reference to truth. In 2.2. I have already outlined how we do that. Once reference is fixed, the truth conditions of the sentences which do not participate in the fixation of reference are generated by Tarskian sort of rules. The account as it stands is incomplete in at least two respects. It needs to be shown that the mixture of verificationist account of reference and the Tarskian approach is defensible. I also have to give a much more

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detailed picture of the adequacy of conceptual schemes, since, as it was emphasized, it is the adequate conceptual schemes which fix reference. This will be accomplished in 4.1. and 4.2. In the last section I shall show that the modest verificationism of this position is sufficient to ward off an important kind of global skepticism. This provides an argument in favor of the position. In so far as safety from that kind of global skepticism is a virtue, internal realism is superior to metaphysical realism. 1. TRUTH WITHIN A CONCEPTUAL SCHEME Tarski has shown us how truth can be defined in terms of reference. Since we have an account of reference, supplementing it with a Tarskian procedure automatically yields an account of truth. In my account, reference is a relation to the quasi-phenomenal world (constituted by adequate conceptual schemes). As a result, the objects which the truth conditions assigned to sentences by the Tarskian mechanism mention are quasi-phenomenal objects. The notion of truth we get in this way can be regarded as Tarskian correspondence to the quasi-phenomenal world. If we stipulate, as we did in 2.1., that a genuine correspondence theory holds that that correspondence is a completely non-epistemic relation, than this is not a correspondence theory, since the notion of the quasi-phenomenal world is epistemic, as it makes crucial reference to justification conditions. However, we may adopt a weaker notion of correspondence theory. According to this weaker notion, a correspondence theory asserts that the truth of a sentence depends on three things: (1) the structure of the sentence; (2) reference relations between parts of the sentence and things in the world; (3) the relations between those things which the words in the sentence refer to. This weaker notion does not contain provisions concerning the nature of the world; in particular, it does not demand ontological independence. If we choose to use this weaker notion, we may say that what we get by supplementing the internal realist account of reference with a Tarskian mechanism is a correspondence theory. Even though this will be dealt with in more detail later, it is important to get clear about the nature of the ontological mind-dependence of the quasi-phenomenal world. It means only the mind-dependence of things, not the mind-dependence of the relations obtaining between them, which was mentioned in clause (3) of the correspondence theory in the previous paragraph. Take the sentence ‘The table is brown’. It is true if and only if the table is brown. The object ‘the table’ refers to must have the property ‘brown’ refers to. The object and the property are ontologically mind-dependent. But it is ontologically independent of the mind whether that object does actually have that property. This is important, because it is in virtue of this that the Tarskian mechanism yields truth conditions which may go beyond verification conditions. Let us see an example of how this happens. Suppose a physicist derives from his theory that a certain elementary particle p has a certain property Q. Suppose further that the justification condition which fixes the reference of ‘p’ includes the description of an elaborate experimental set-up. Suppose that the reference-fixing justification condition for ‘Q’ includes the description of a completely different sort of

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experimental set-up, such that the two experimental designs cannot be realized at the same time. So we either check for the presence of p or for the presence of Q. In this case, the truth condition of ‘p is Q’ is given by the Tarskian mechanism, but it is not a verification condition. Moreover, it is quite possible that there is no justification procedure available to decide whether it is true. It may require lots of theoretical work and experimental ingenuity to figure out a method for testing the claim. This means that truth can certainly go beyond our current justification procedures. This shows that the verificationism involved in the present conception is rather modest. This was merely the first step in developing an account of truth. In this section and the following one the account will be further elaborated through the consideration of a number of objections. Some of the objections will be similar to the ones raised in connection with the notion of reference and will be dealt similarly. Some will be brand new. I will first discuss two relatively simple objections, and then move to the deep and dangerous waters. First, Tarski relativizes truth to languages. His procedure yields the definition of truth in a particular language rather than truth in general. As a result, it may be argued that it fails to capture the intuitive notion of truth, which is not languagespecific. Truth is one thing, truth-in-English is another. This is right, but the verificationist account of reference and the Tarskian definition of truth in terms of reference are applicable to each particular language. Since we have a general strategy, it does not matter that each particular truth-definition is language-specific. But the objector may insist that even this would not save the Tarskian approach, for truth would still remain language-dependent, even though dependent on language in general rather than on some particular language. It may be further argued that this language-dependency is untenable for this reason: had there been no languages (or no sentient beings for that matter), there would still have been some truths; for example, it would have been true that there are no languages. I do not find this argument convincing, because it trades on a confusion of description in a world and description about a world. Once we have a language in place, we can describe a counterfactual situation in which no language exists, and our description may be true. But what is true is a description about this counterfactual world. The counterfactual world itself contains no descriptions, so there is nothing in it which could be true. So the counterexample does not work. In a world without language there is no truth. And where there is truth, i. e. in our actual world, in which the description about the counterfactual world is formulated, there is language. So truth has not been shown to be independent of language. Second, the reason why Tarski relativizes truth to language is to avoid the liar paradox. The paradox arises because we do not distinguish the object language and the metalanguage. Since we ordinarily do not make this distinction, the ordinary notion of truth is paradoxical. Tarski, on the other hand, avoids the paradox. Consequently, truth as defined by Tarski must be different from our ordinary notion. This objection allows a revolutionary and an orthodox answer, both of which are acceptable. The revolutionary answer is that we should replace the paradoxical notion with the Tarskian one. After all, paradoxes are not pleasant to live with. The orthodox answer is that it is always easier to create muddle than to clear it up. In defining truth in terms of reference we may disregard the distinction between object

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language and metalanguage and thus get a paradoxical notion of truth. The possibility of this latter answer reveals that the present account is Tarskian only in a very broad sense. It demands recursive rules that generate truth conditions of sentences out of the references of the words they contain. It is not committed to the particular features of Tarski’s account, not even to the all-important feature of distinguishing the object language and the metalanguage. More importantly, someone might worry that my account is either incoherent or circular. It may seem incoherent because it uses two different notions of truth. And if the two are not really different, it may be circular. These twin objections rely on the procedure I used. The procedure I followed comprises altogether four steps. The three steps described in 3.1., and the step taken right now. Step 1:Select the sentence or sentences which fix the reference of the word. Step 2:Identify the truth conditions of these sentences with their justification conditions. Step 3: From the truth of these sentences you get the reference of the word by a disquotational schema. Step 4: Generate the truth conditions of all sentences by broadly Tarskian recursive rules. This may seem incoherent because Step 2 and 4 involve different conceptions of truth. And it may seem circular because the truth conditions, which should come out at the end of the story, occur already at Step 2; so it may seem that truth conditions are explained in terms of truth conditions. I believe that there is neither circularity nor incoherence. The best way to explore this is to analyze what is involved in the knowledge of a language. For the purposes of the present discussion, I shall identify the knowledge of a language with the knowledge of the truth conditions of its sentences. In the present context, this rather impoverished notion seems legitimate, since the only fact about language which is important here is that it can be used for the description of the world, and what one has to know to be able to use language for this purpose is the truth conditions. How is it possible to learn the truth conditions for all sentences of the language? Associating each sentence with its truth condition, i. e. compiling something like a list, will not do. First, language use is creative: we know the truth conditions of sentences which we have never heard before. Second, language contains infinitely many sentences. How could we have learned an infinite list? So the truth conditions must be learned in a different way. This is where the notion of reference comes in. We do not learn the truth conditions of all sentences directly. Rather, we learn the references of a finite number of words and also a recursive procedure with which to generate the truth conditions for infinitely many sentences. This reference-based account of the knowledge of language requires two things. First, we should be able to learn the reference of the words, i. e. the reference relation should be epistemically accessible. (This does not require that reference should be an epistemic relation. But if someone holds that reference is not epistemic at all, but it is simply within our epistemic reach, he must have a very good

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argument to show why we must be right about the reference of our words in the overwhelming majority of cases. If we tended to get the reference wrong, our knowledge of language would be partial to the extent to which we are liable to go wrong.) This requirement is clearly satisfied by the view advocated here in the following way. We learn that ‘Bertrand is a dog’ is true, but ‘Lucy is a dog’ is false, that ‘This is a dog’ was true when uttered under certain circumstances and false on another occasion. Eventually we will have learned to decide for any x whether ‘x is a dog’ is true. If we have learned that, we know the reference of ‘dog’. The learnability of these truth conditions is guaranteed by the fact that the truth conditions of these sentences are their justification conditions. As a result, the mechanism which fixes reference is the same mechanism we master in learning our language. The method we use to determine whether a word refers to a particular thing is the same mechanism which decides whether the word refers to that thing. So adopting a verificationist conception of truth for certain sentences is a way to ensure the learnability of reference. Second, there must be a recursive procedure to generate the truth conditions for each sentence on the basis of the references of the words it contains. This is where the Tarskian definition enters the picture. Tarski has given us a recursive definition of truth in terms of reference for some simple formal languages. Even though some progress has been made, we are still very much in the dark about how it can be extended languages as rich as the natural languages. Yet, there is agreement there must be some such mechanism. The Tarskian mechanism can be seen as a procedure which computes the truth conditions for each sentence as a function of the reference of the words the sentence contains. The definition itself is neutral between rival accounts of reference. It treats reference as a primitive. It becomes clear now why my account is neither circular nor incoherent. It would be circular only if the truth conditions used in Step 2 were the same as the ones which result from Step 4, if Step 2 presupposed Step 4. But this not the case. First, because Step 2 deals with the truth conditions of a small set of sentences, the reference-fixing sentences, whereas Step 4 applies to all sentences. Second, Step 2 identifies the truth conditions it mentions with justification conditions, which renders this use of ‘truth condition’ independent of the one resulting from Step 4. Moreover, the verificationist notion is compatible with the Tarskian one, because they highlight different aspects of truth. The Tarskian notion explains how the truth condition of a sentence depends on the semantic properties of its parts. It does not tell us anything about the origins of semantic properties. What it tells us is how the connection of small pieces of language to reality determines the connection between larger pieces of language and reality. It is, as it were, and intralinguistic notion. It makes clear how the connection to reality is propagated within language, but it is not concerned with how the connection is set up. Metaphorically speaking, it shows how semantic content flows within linguistic structures, but not how it gets injected. The verificationist notion, on the other hand, explains exactly what the Tarskian notion ignores, the nature of the connection between language and reality. It is concerned with the injection of the semantic content and not with how it flows throughout the linguistic system. So the two notions supplement each other.

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Another reason why they are compatible is that there are cases when they coincide, in the sense that they can be converted into each other. Consider the sentence ‘Joe is smart’. Its Tarskian truth condition is (1)

‘Joe is smart’ is true iff ‘Joe’ refers to a member of the set ‘is smart’ refers to.

The justification conditions for the sentence are stated differently. There is a way in which we recognize Joe and a way or ways in which we recognize people who are smart. Hence, there is a justification condition associated with the claim ‘This is Joe’. Call this A. There is also a justification condition associated with the claim ‘He is smart’. Call this B. So the justification condition associated with the sentence is roughly this: (2)

‘Joe is smart’ is true iff there is something that satisfies both A and B.

The references of ‘Joe’ and ‘is smart’ are fixed by A and B respectively, i. e. ‘Joe’ refers to what satisfies A, and ‘is smart’ refers to the set whose members satisfy B.xxxiv So (1) and (2) say exactly the same thing. In order to show that the verificationist and the Tarskian ingredients present in the account are incompatible, one has to show that the two can differ in the sense that the verificationist and the Tarskian truth conditions depict different and incompatible situations. But this cannot happen, because the justification conditions which figure in the determination of reference are infallible, as it was said in 3.1. It does happen though that we know the Tarskian truth condition of a sentence, but do not know its justification condition. But this is no objection, for it is part of the account. As it was pointed out, Tarskian truth can go beyond what can be verified. This is why the present conception is only modestly verificationist. Someone may say that even this modest verificationism goes too far and eliminates all kinds of objective constraints, and thereby makes knowledge completely arbitrary and subjective. The very idea of knowledge is founded upon the distinction between the objective and the subjective, between the way things are and the way we think they are, between what is true and what is merely believed to be true. The idea of the completely mind-independent world of metaphysical realism makes sense of the distinction. The world is outside the web of beliefs, it is completely external. Truth is radically non-epistemic. Since the world is independent of our beliefs, whether or not it is the way we describe it is also independent of our beliefs. Therefore, there is a perfectly good sense in which truth is independent of what we think, and the objective-subjective distinction is vindicated. One might worry that by giving up the idea of a completely mindindependent world, everything objective is eliminated. Everything becomes mental, and thus everything becomes subjective; there will be nothing left but beliefs. But if beliefs are all there is, how could one distinguish between what is true and what is merely believed true?

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I shall argue that this worry can be put to rest. The main reason is that the world is not constituted by beliefs. It is constituted by concepts. If it were constituted by beliefs, the worry would be justified. If the fact that the table is brown depended on there being a belief that the table is brown, there would be no room for objective facts. What there is would be completely determined by the mind. Concepts, however, do not have the power to determine that much. They can determine merely what there can be, not what actually there is. So there is a gap between what the mind fixes about the world and the world. This gap is the locus of objectivity. But we should distinguish between various cases. So I shall proceed step by step. Let me begin with unjustified beliefs. A belief can be unjustified in three ways. We may not know what would justify it, i. e. there is no justification condition associated with it. For example, we may have a theory from which have not derived testable consequences yet. Or we may know what would justify it, but we do not have a justification. We know what the justification conditions are, but we do not know if they are satisfied. For instance, we have derived testable consequences, but the experiments or observations have not been performed yet. Finally, we know the justification conditions, but we also know that they do not obtain. The experiments or observations have been performed, and their outcome was negative. However, we may be so much taken with the theory that we cannot help believing in it in spite of the negative evidence. None of these cases pose problems for the internal realist. It would pose problems only for someone who insisted that whatever we believe is true. Such a view is indeed at odds with the idea of objectivity. But this view has never been accepted by anyone, and it is certainly not accepted by the internal realist. Let us take justified beliefs next. Can justified beliefs be false? Someone who denies that holds: if we believe that the justification conditions of a belief are satisfied, then the belief is true. Internal realism is not committed to this view. It allows both that there may be problems with the justification conditions and that there may be problems with the beliefs concerning their satisfaction. I begin with the former. Let us suppose that we have a belief whose justification condition is, in fact, satisfied. This, however, does not guarantee the truth of the belief. First, the justification condition may be wrong. We may make a mistake in associating a justification with the belief. This may easily happen if it is difficult to get from the belief to its justification condition. We may either commit a logical or mathematical error in the derivation, or may rely on a false auxiliary assumption. For example, one argument for the claim that dinosaurs were warm-blooded was that their bones contain tiny tubules which are characteristic of warm-blooded creatures. The tubules were indeed there, so the justification condition was satisfied. But the assumption that the tubules are characteristic of warm-blooded creatures proved wrong. It is characteristic of creatures who are very active and move around a lot. It is exercise, rather than warm blood, which the tubules indicate. Second, it happens that even though there is no logical or empirical error in the derivation of the justification condition, but the satisfaction of the justification condition does not indicate the satisfaction of the truth condition in a perfectly reliable fashion. Such is the case with most practical criteria that actually govern the everyday routine (3.1.). In our culture, not wearing a ring is a good indicator of not being married. But some who

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are married do not wear a ring. The connection between the justification condition and the truth condition just may not be tight enough. So the satisfaction of the former does not guarantee the satisfaction of the latter. What these considerations show is that the ways we link justification conditions to sentences are themselves parts of our picture of the world. We keep discussing them and revising them, hoping that they are right or getting better. The notion of objective rightness applies to these criteria just as much as to the knowledge claims themselves. But what about beliefs with impeccable justification conditions? As it has been said in 3.1., reference-fixing justification conditions are infallible. If they are satisfied, the reference-fixing sentence is bound to be true. In this case then justified belief amounts to truth. So certain beliefs are bound to be true. Does this mean that with regard to these sentences being true reduces to being believed to be true? Does the independence of the world of what we believe come to an end here? It does not. The crucial idea is that justification depends on two things: the justification conditions and their satisfaction. The former depends on the human mind, the latter does not. Consider a reference-fixing sentence, like ’This is a dog’. To supply the justification conditions for this sentence is to introduce the concept ’dog’ in our language. It is to supply the criteria for being a dog. This is accomplished by the mind. So the justification conditions in this case do, in fact, depend on the human mind. But the justification conditions themselves do not determine what particular objects satisfy them. There may be more or fewer objects satisfying them. They may be larger or smaller. In a possible world, in which the criteria of being a dog are the same, the dogs may be different from the dogs in the actual world. Or consider the case when we face a particular thing. Is that a dog? If it is a dog, it must satisfy certain criteria. It is we who fix the criteria. But it is not up to us whether the object does actually satisfy them. So it is not up to us whether the reference-fixing sentence is justified on a particular occasion. So justification is not completely determined by us. Consequently, truth is not completely determined by us. There is something we do not fix about it. Therefore, truth is objective. Let me draw an analogy to illustrate this point. In order to qualify for participation in the olympic games athletes must meet certain qualification requirements. They must achieve certain results. Do the athletic associations who set the requirements determine who the participants will be? Can we charge them with subjectivism? Well, they certainly have influence on who the participants will be. If they set higher requirements, there will be fewer participants. If they set the requirements lower, more athletes will qualify. But they do not determine the list of athletes who will participate. It is not up to them what results the athletes achieve in the years before the competition. So the selection process is objective. To accuse internal realism of subjectivism would be wrong for the same sort of reason as the charge of subjectivism raised against the athletic associations. We may put the same point in terms of facts. Truth depends on facts. The worry is this. If facts are determined by the human mind, truth becomes subjective. But determination is ambiguous here between ’being a factor’ and ’being the only factor’. The mind is indeed a factor. It fixes the criteria of individuation and classification, and thereby determines what sorts of facts there can be. As it were, it fixes the range of possible facts. But to do so is to do much less than fix the actual

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facts. The actual facts are out of the control of the mind. Therefore, mind is not the only factor. And this suffices for the objectivity of truth. To put the same point in more epistemological terms, we may say that objectivity is accounted for by the given character of experience. Our claims should be in agreement with what we experience, and what we experience is given. To say this is not to endorse the logical positivist idea of ‘the given’. Experience may well be influenced by the concepts we have. It does not have to be clean in the sense of not being contaminated by concepts. But the concepts alone do not determine what we experience. If you possess the concepts ‘thick’ and ‘book’, you may have an experience of a thick book. But the possession of these concepts is not sufficient for actually having this experience. What we actually experience is largely out of our control. What we see is what see, not what we want to see or we think we will see. This picture of objectivity may be challenged on the ground that, correct as it is, it does not dig deep enough. If it did, it would turn out that it presupposes the ontological mind-independence of the structure of reality as well. In other words, scratch the surface, and you will see that in so far as it accounts for objectivity, it is metaphysical realist. Take the sentence ‘The sun is shining’. Its justification conditions include such things that there is a bright yellow disk in the sky, the sides of objects facing the disk are significantly brighter than the opposite sides, etc. Suppose this sentence is objectively true and its justification conditions are indeed satisfied. But what explains the fact that its justification conditions are satisfied? Why is it the case that there is a bright yellow disk in the sky and the sides of objects which face the disk are significantly brighter than the opposite sides, etc.? The only possible explanation is that the sun is shining. So it is the fact which explains that the justification conditions are satisfied. This explanation would not be possible if facts were not prior the satisfaction of the justification conditions. Facts consists of objects, properties and similar things. If facts enjoy priority to the satisfaction of justification conditions, so do their constituents. This suggests that objects, properties and the like, which we called the structure of reality, are ontologically independent of us. The logic of this objection is the same as that of the ‘no miracle’ argument for scientific realism (Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences, Lecture 2; Boyd, “Current Status”). That argument suggests that the instrumental success of scientific theories (i. e. their being justified) admits only one explanation, namely that the facts are indeed what the theories say they are. But this kind of argument is problematic, because the explanation it claims to offer in terms of facts is not a genuine explanation. It resembles an explanation only in so far as it rules out certain scenarios in which the justification conditions are satisfied, but the sentence is not true. For example, that NASA had planted a huge lamp couple of hundred miles from Earth just to deceive us. The claim that the justifications are satisfied because it is a fact that the sun is shining rules out the alternative explanation of the satisfaction of justification conditions in terms of a conspiracy by NASA. But denying this sort of scenarios does not amount to more than affirming that we are right in believing that the sun is shining. It is much less than offering a genuine explanation. So saying that the justification conditions of a sentence ’s’ are satisfied because it is a fact that s is to say no more than that we are not deceived. But being

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not deceived amounts to being objectively right. And we have already given an internal realist account of objectivity. The argument does nothing to challenge that account. Nonetheless, one may still feel that the opponent has a point. There is a sense in which the fact that we see a bright yellow disk in the sky and that the sides of objects facing the disk are significantly brighter than the opposite sides can indeed be explained by the fact that the sun is shining. We can have a genuine explanation which goes as follows.xxxv There is a huge heavenly body which is currently located at a particular point relative to Earth. It emits radiations of such and such a sort. On a particular region of Earth the meteorological conditions are such that radiations of such and such wavelengths are not filtered out and thus reach the surface. The human eye works in such and such a way, and so on and so forth. This is a genuine causal explanation. It is the possibility of this causal explanation that lends support to the opponent’s claim. But this causal explanation does not establish anything like the ontological independence of the structure of reality, for it does not show that the various entities mentioned in it are not ontologically mind-dependent in the sense we have described. Telling a causal story in this respect is just like telling any other story. It utilizes the structure imposed on reality by the human mind. At this point, however, one may raise a further objection which is strictly analogous to one we considered before in connection with the internal realist account of reference. It seems a crude mistake even in the case of reference-fixing sentences to identify truth conditions with justification conditions and truth with the satisfaction of justification conditions. There is a perfectly good sense in which certain sentences are false even though they are justified. Recall the example of zebralopes (3.2.). People who fail to distinguish between zebras and zebralopes are going to say lots of false things, e. g. they will call zebralopes ’zebra’. However, the justification conditions they use are equally satisfied by zebras and zebralopes. So they would be right to regard these sentences justified. This shows that truth conditions are independent of justification conditions, and truth is independent of the satisfaction of justification conditions, even in the case of reference-fixing sentences. As it was probably expected, my reply to this objection is going to be pretty much like the one given to its counterpart about reference. In the objection we have a mismatch between justification conditions and truth conditions. Internal realism does not claim that justification conditions always agree with truth conditions. This holds only for reference-fixing justification conditions. So what the example shows is that the justification conditions used by those who fail to distinguish zebras from zebralopes are not reference-fixing. Moreover, the very example reveals that they cannot be reference-fixing. By postulating that these people fail to distinguish between two species, it postulates, in effect, that their conceptual scheme is inadequate. And we have repeated several times that inadequate conceptual schemes cannot fix reference. Of course, people with inadequate schemes do refer to something. But what they refer to can only be established if they are interpreted with the resources of an adequate conceptual scheme. What their justification conditions do fix is relative reference. But relative reference is a notion we only need in the rationalizing explanation of behavior.

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This completes our account of truth within a conceptual scheme. I tried to show that this account does not threaten the objectivity of truth, and also reconciles the reference-based Tarskian notion of truth with modest verificationism. Nonetheless, in the course of the discussion I talked quite freely about adequate and inadequate conceptual schemes, as I did in the previous chapter. So now I have to explain what it is for a conceptual scheme to be adequate. 2. THE ADEQUACY OF CONCEPTUAL SCHEMESxxxvi Adequacy is the property of drawing the right boundaries, the property of providing entities with the right criteria of identity. It first emerged right at the beginning of our discussion of internal realism in 2.2., in the following form. Obviously, one can draw better boundaries and worse boundaries. A conceptual scheme is better than its rivals if it draws the boundaries better. But what does it mean to say that a conceptual scheme draws the boundaries better? Metaphysical realism, of course, can answer this question fairly easily: the world has an intrinsic structure and the schemes which are objectively better reflect this structure more closely. I called this kind of explanation organizational metaphysical realism. Internal realism, however, cannot make sense of this kind of explanation. Consequently, one may worry that it is bound to concede that there is nothing objective about the adequacy of conceptual schemes and, therefore, it leads to subjectivism and relativism. To be sure, if one takes it for granted that objectivity can be guaranteed only by something which is completely independent of the human mind – be it world or God –, this worry is justified. I do not think, however, that this is the only possible notion of objectivity. In everyday life the objective-subjective distinction is used without an elaborate philosophical theory. This is not to say that people have no conception of this distinction – in that case they could not use it all; it means only the everyday conception is philosophically ambiguous. I regard the metaphysical notion of objectivity as but one particular philosophical interpretation of the everyday notion. We may start by making clear that adequacy is different from truth. To be sure, it is related to truth: certain sentences are false exactly because they are formulated within an inadequate conceptual scheme, but the referents of the words they contain are assigned from the viewpoint of the best current scheme, the scheme we believe to be adequate (chemical compounds and physical mixtures, zebras and zebralopes). Of course, one may formulate true sentences within inadequate schemes as well, and the adequacy of a conceptual scheme does not guarantee that all sentences belonging to it are true. Nevertheless, the rule is that the inadequacy of a conceptual scheme is a significant barrier to reaching the truth. But adequacy is another sort of property. ‘Truth’ is normally reserved for entities which have the form of a sentence: propositions, beliefs and, of course, sentences. Conceptual schemes, however, do not have sentential form. They are schemes of individuation and classification. Once there is a scheme of individuation and classification in place, we can formulate various claims. It is the various claims which can be true or false. Conceptual schemes are sets of concepts, not sets of sentences. They are vocabularies, rather

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than descriptions. To see this, suppose (highly counterfactually!) that the compoundmixture distinction was never used for anything else but the description of particular substances, and was not a part of a theory. People used the terms only in sentences like ‘water is a compound’, ‘air is a mixture’, and never said things like ‘compounds are formed according to fixed proportions, but mixtures are not’. If the distinction were used in this way, the difference between the two classifications, those of affinity theory and post-Daltonian chemistry, would not matter. They would be equally good. Or imagine that I call some people ‘ick’ and other people ‘uck’. Suppose that I use this distinction fairly consistently, even though the distinction does not match any usual twofold distinction of humanity. Furthermore, I never seek to integrate this distinction with the various other concepts we apply to people. I do not say ‘Males are normally ick’, or ‘Smoking may make one uck’, or ‘A good teacher must be sufficiently uck’. Could anyone say that I am wrong? A classification, in so far as it is a classification that is not used for formulating claims in terms of its classes, is neither right, nor wrong. Of course, conceptual schemes are always used for the formulation of claims. If they were not, they would be completely useless. What would be the whole point of distinguishing between icks and ucks, if the concepts were not put to use? If I could do nothing more than say whether a certain person is an ick or an uck, I would not be better off than without the distinction. The distinction would run idle. However, the situation changes if the distinction is used for the formulation of claims. For example, if it turns out that the icks are much more likely to contract certain infectious diseases, the distinction will have a chance of contributing to medical knowledge. But then we have more than just a distinction; we would have a description formulated in terms of the distinction. This suggests the following picture. Conceptual schemes are frameworks for the formulation of descriptions. They are resources which are used for putting forward various claims. It is the claims themselves which are true or false. A conceptual scheme is good or bad depending on whether it allows or facilitates the formulation of true claims. Good conceptual schemes help the formulation of truths rather than falsehoods, more truths rather than few ones, important truths rather than unimportant ones. This is indeed the way the idea of a conceptual scheme and its relatives are used in the philosophy of science. Conceptual schemes, linguistic frameworks, paradigms, research programs, etc. are not directly tested. Their fate depends on the fate of the claims couched in their terms. (This connection between the adequacy of conceptual schemes and the truths of the claims they accommodate is not meant as a clarification of adequacy. It is a clarification of the difference between adequacy and truth. If it were proposed as an account of adequacy, it would be blatantly circular, given what was said before. It would explain adequacy in terms of truth. But we said that truth is based upon reference, and reference is determined by adequate conceptual schemes!) So adequacy is a good property, because it makes truths available for us. But the notion of adequacy is in a sense broader than that. Adequate conceptual schemes get us something more than truths. Let us see an example. The Danis of New Guinea have only two basic color terms, ‘mili’ and ‘mola’. The former stands for dark, cool colors (e.g. black, blue and green), the latter stands for light, warm

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colors (like white, red and yellow). The claims formulated in this simple idiom might be difficult to translate, since we do not have a single word that captures the meaning of the Dani’s word. The translation would involve circumlocution and/or would have a disjunctive form. Nevertheless, the Dani’s claims are about as true as the claims formulated in our own idiom. If a Dani describes an object as ‘mili’, she is probably right. Her situation is different from that of the representative of the affinity theory who calls salt in water a ‘compound’, i.e. puts forward a false view. So the problem with this very simple color vocabulary is not that it leads to the formulation of false claims. The problem is rather that this scheme is not sufficiently fine-grained. It covers the color space with two basic color concepts whereas English has eleven basic color concepts for the same purpose. This has bad consequences. Even though they have non-basic color terms as well, the Danis are less skilful with colors then we are. They can communicate about colors less efficiently, and they perform worse in memory exercises about colors. The shortage of conceptual resources makes colors less available for them than they are to us.xxxvii They cannot do certain things as well as we can. So inadequate conceptual schemes are not just barriers to reaching the truth, they can also be barriers to doing certain things well. It looks then that conceptual schemes are devices for reaching theoretical and practical aims. This suggests the following. A conceptual scheme is adequate if it is a good device for achieving certain goals. This might serve as a starting point for developing an explanation of adequacy. If we spell out what it means that a conceptual scheme is a good device for achieving certain goals, we have succeeded in explaining what it means for a conceptual scheme to be adequate. In the following pages I define adequacy as the capacity to support successful and choiceworthy practices, then I consider various objections. So I shall start with the notion of a practice. Practices are groups of actions which are carried out with the intention of achieving certain kinds of goals. The goal in American football is scoring more than the opponent. In order to achieve that goal the members of the team perform a number of actions like throwing the ball, catching it, running with it, blocking, tackling, etc. Scientific research is aimed at prediction, explanation and control. To reach these aims scientists formulate hypotheses, design experiments, perform mathematical calculations, write in scholarly journals, etc. The goal of cooking is to prepare edible and tasty food. This practice involves actions like slicing meat, frying potatoes, boiling eggs, etc. An action does not have to be successful in the sense of actually contributing to achieving the aim of the practice in order to belong to the practice. An incomplete pass belongs to football, even though it does not quite help in outscoring the opponent. An experiment which is badly designed does not get us closer to the aims of science. In performing an action belonging to a practice one may have other purposes in addition to achieving the goals of the practice. Your primary intention in publishing in scholarly journals may be to get tenure as opposed to uncovering the mysteries of nature. You may play football for exercise and ignore the score. Practices have vague boundaries. Does peeling potatoes belong to cooking, or is it merely a prerequisite that does not belong to the practice itself? It is difficult to say, the practice of cooking is not sufficiently well-defined. Another sense of vagueness is that it is unclear how much variation is permissible in the practice so

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that it could be regarded as the same practice. College football, professional football and touch football have different rules, yet they belong to the practice of football. But what if a new rule is adopted that requires that one should kick the ball into the endzone instead of running or throwing it? Would this game still be football? Aristotle shunned experiments and allowed mathematics only in astronomy. Was he still doing science? Again, it is difficult to say. I do not define the notion of practice more closely, partly because I hope that it is sufficiently clear, partly because I intend to keep the notion flexible, so that it can be applied on different scales, e. g. the practice of science as a whole, the practice of physics, the practice of quantum mechanics, the practice of hidden parameter interpretation.xxxviii Practices presuppose knowledge. To participate in a practice is to perform actions of a certain kind. To perform the actions one has to be aware of the end of the action and be able to select the means for achieving that end. If you are cooking spaghetti bolognese, you have to know what kind of flavor you would like the dish to have. You also have to be able to select the means for achieving that flavor, e. g. use a certain amount of tomato in the ragout, consider whether you should add basil, etc. Some of the knowledge presupposed by the practice is conceptual and explicit, some of it is practical and implicit. In cooking practical knowledge has enormous significance. You may have all the theoretical knowledge about recipes and cooking techniques and be a lousy cook. In bridge, practical knowledge has little significance. If you go through several books about bridge, it is assured that you will be at least an average player. You might not become a creative player who can deal with the unusual situations which are not covered by the books, but you will not be bad. It is theoretical knowledge which is important for our present purposes. Theoretical knowledge requires concepts.xxxix Every practice uses a particular system of concepts. The system of concepts used in a practice comprises the conceptual scheme of the practice. As it were, each practice comes with a conceptual scheme. For example, the practice of classical mechanics uses concepts like mass, acceleration, force, speed, time, space, friction, gravity. The conceptual scheme associated with microeconomics uses concepts like preference, opportunity cost, price, quantity, supply, demand, exchange, marginal revenue, marginal cost, etc. A practice may be successful or unsuccessful for a large number or reasons. The external circumstances may be unfavorable, the participants may not be persistent enough, they may lack the necessary abilities, there might be unexpected obstacles, the goals of the practice may exceed human capabilities, etc. One factor which contributes to the success or failure of a practice is the explicit knowledge shared by the participants. The participants must be able to find the right means to the ends. If they systematically fail at doing so, their practice will not be successful; i. e. it will not attain its goals, or will attain them only infrequently. The participants’ explicit knowledge may be insufficient for several reasons. They may be simply bad at making the best use of the conceptual resources. They may not have the necessary mental powers, they may not have been properly trained, etc. The case which is of primary importance here is when the explicit knowledge is insufficient, because the participants do not have appropriate conceptual resources at their disposal. For example, at the beginning of the century lots of people tried to construct airplanes without the slightest knowledge of aerodynamics. It is not just that they did not have

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a powerful theory at their disposal. They lacked even the concepts in terms which the relevant theoretical claims could have been formulated. They indeed manufactured lots of weird-looking and sometimes quite ingenious machines, which just did not stay up in the air. Some of these people were quite accomplished engineers and mechanics, and knew a great deal about machines; they still did not have the necessary conceptual resources. Another example is the failure of the project of machine translation in the fifties and early sixties. At that time, as a result of advances in computer technology and in linguistics, there was lots of enthusiasm about machine translation, and lots of people took it for granted that the problem could be solved in the near future. The enthusiasm gradually subsided and by the end of the sixties, when it was generally recognized that the problem is much tougher than it was thought. The failure was due to the insufficiency of the conceptual resources. At that time we just did not know enough about linguistic structure. The linguistic theory they knew did not have the right conceptual apparatus for expressing the generalizations they would have needed. Kuhn’s description of a scientific crises (Structure, chapter 7) provides a vivid picture of how this sort of failure comes to be realized. The relevant practice is a scientific specialty. It has well-defined goals, the solution of certain problems. There are also well-established criteria for the evaluation of the attempted solutions. The success of a specialty does not require that all attempts be successful; but persistent effort should generally yield solutions, and it should always eventually yield solutions when it comes to the most important problems. Sooner or later the scientists belonging to the specialty will come across problems which resist solutions. In the beginning the failure is blamed on the individual scientists. The problems are still supposed to be solvable. After many unsuccessful attempts, however, there emerges a growing awareness that the specialty just does not have the conceptual resources for dealing with the problems. Scientists attempt to revise and enrich the fundamental concepts of the specialty, and, as a result, the conceptual scheme which used to be generally shared, gradually disintegrates. Rival approaches proliferate, the practice, as a coherent whole, breaks down. The crisis continues until a new conceptual scheme emerges which eventually reshapes the field and restores the unity of the practice. I illustrated the notion of success, or rather the lack of success, by examples, because success does not admit a definition. Not only a precise definition, but anything that looks like a definition. The reason is that criteria of success differ from practice to practice. The kind of success Hunan style cooking enjoys is completely different from the success of interpretative sociology. The criteria of success are thus internal to a practice. It is the practice which lays down the criteria by which the success of a particular action or a series of actions can be determined. It is the internal character of success which makes the additional requirements of choiceworthiness necessary. Let me illustrate this with an example. Suppose you agree with me that parapsychology is 1% unexplained and surprising phenomena and 99% superstition. Now imagine that someone launches an empirical research program to demonstrate the reality and explore the nature of telepathical phenomena. She will have a ‘sender’ who is physically separated from the ‘receiver’, and she will measure how well the transmission of signals succeeds.

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Obviously, the receiver is going to get the messages wrong most of the time, so the investigation must be statistical. She chooses a probability coefficient so that even extremely weak connections will come out as statistically significant. Since she is going to get lots of significant correlations, she can formulate and test lots of hypotheses (e. g. left-handed women with dyed hair between the ages of 34 and 35 are better receivers before lunch than after it), most of which will be confirmed – due to the choice of the probabilistic coefficient. Moreover, she will elevate it into a methodological principle that when a significant correlation is found, there is no need to check whether the same factor is correlated with the opposite. So if she finds that A correlates with B, she will not check whether it is correlated with not-B. She then goes on to claim tremendous success for the project. Indeed, her practice is successful according to its own criteria, because the methodology was so contrived that it could not generate but success. Nevertheless, this kind of success is unlikely to convince you that parapsychology has to be taken seriously. The reason is that this kind of experimental practice is not choiceworthy, it is not worth pursuing. Choiceworthiness is an external condition on the practice. To regard a practice as choiceworthy does not oblige one to participate in that practice, it is simply the endorsement of the practice, something like ‘It is a good thing some people do that’.xl Choiceworthiness depends on two things. First, on the goals of the practice. Some goals are not worth pursuing, simply because they cannot be attained. It is a criticism of this sort that Stuart Dreyfus exercised over classical artificial intelligence: ‘Current claims and hopes for progress in … making computers intelligent are like the belief that someone climbing a tree is making progress toward reaching the moon’ (Mind Over Machine, 10). The idea is that even though classical artificial intelligence has made some sort of progress – SHRDLU is clearly superior to ELIZA –, if we focus on the goal, it looks that no progress has been made towards it. The second aspect of choiceworthiness is coherence with other practices which are regarded as successful and choiceworthy. The parapsychologist’s methodological principles do not mesh with the methodology of experimental psychology, or that of any other respectable experimental venture. Practices may also be incompatible if they are grounded on claims which are in explicit contradiction, like creationism and evolutionary biology. There may also be tensions which do not amount to explicit contradiction. For example, Aristotelian physics did not explicitly contradict Ptolemian astronomy, but they just did not fit well with each other, because the former could not provide causal-mechanical interpretation for the latter. This tension did much harm both to the Ptolemian practice of mathematical calculation and prediction of the movements of the planets and the Aristotelian practice of causal-demonstrative explanation of the same movements, and was a major reason for their joint downfall. The ideas of success and choiceworthiness interact in the following way. The idea of success involves a kind of causal independence of us. To be sure, whether a practice is successful or not depends on our actions. If we are stupid and careless, our practice will be less successful than it would be if we were clever and careful. But once we perform certain actions, it does not depend on us any more if the practice they belong to turns out to be successful or not. For example, you formulate

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a hypothesis to solve a problem. Of course, it is up to you what hypothesis you formulate. But once the hypothesis has been formulated, it is not up to you whether it solves the problem or not. You may believe or hope that it is the right solution, but whether or not it is the right solution has nothing to do with your beliefs and hopes. In other words, you choose certain actions through which you hope to attain or get closer to some aim of the practice you are engaged in. Once you perform the action, you will either get closer to the goal or not. What is true of particular actions is true of the practice as a whole. It is up to the participants to decide what actions to perform and to perform them. But once the actions have been performed, it is independent of their beliefs and desires whether they made progress towards the goals of the practice, i. e. whether the practice turned out to be a success or a failure. Choosing and performing certain actions is like casting the dice. Once the dice has been cast, the result is out of our control. It will show what it will show, not what you believe or hope that it will show. It is in virtue of this kind of causal independence of success that adequacy is objective. The belief in success does not cause success. The role of choiceworthiness is to prevent objectivity from being obscured. Different practices measure their special kind of success by different criteria. Normally, the criteria are chosen well and are applied carefully. After all, we can only learn from out mistakes if we manage to identify them. But people participating in a practice may also be concerned with their self-respect, pet ideas, career, etc., which may result in distorted judgments about success. This ubiquitous sort of phenomena usually does not matter, because the final verdicts are made in the larger community of participants, and individual bias and prejudice cancel out. The task of choiceworthiness is to keep things that way. It has to keep success from becoming artificial, i. e. it has to ensure that what we recognize as success remains causally independent of us. This notion of adequacy is a world apart from metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism, in so far as it recognizes the existence of conceptual schemes, regards them as disembodied theoretical structures whose adequacy depends on their relation to a mind-independent world. On the present view conceptual schemes are not disembodied. They are integral parts of practices, and their adequacy depends on their contribution to the practice. If you wish, this conception is strongly instrumentalist. It is not instrumentalist in the sense of denying objective validity. Rather it considers adequacy as a kind of usefulness. In carving up the world into individuals and classes we try to get entities that help us to get by. A conceptual scheme is an attempt at identifying such entities. Its adequacy consists in its doing so. It is easy to see that this instrumentalist account leads to conceptual pluralism (IR3). We, human beings, participate in a large number of successful and choiceworthy practices. Since the conceptual schemes used in these practices should be reckoned as adequate, it follows that there are several adequate conceptual schemes. Moreover, the same things can be the objects of different practices. Plants are studied by biology, grown by farmers, attended by gardeners, arranged by ike bana artists, traded by florists, cooked in the kitchen, etc. Each of these practices uses its own conceptual scheme to describe plants, and each of the conceptual

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schemes may be equally adequate. There is no reason to expect that there can be only one adequate scheme in a given domain. Now it is time to address some possible objections. Adequacy was identified with the capacity to produce success. But all we can evaluate is the actual success. From the actual success of the practice there is no completely safe inference to the capacity of the conceptual scheme to make a practice successful. Suppose the practice is highly unsuccessful. We might blame this on the conceptual scheme or on other factors, such as the stupidity of the participants, extraordinarily adverse conditions, etc. As a result, there is no safe procedure to ascertain the adequacy of a conceptual scheme. This is absolutely right, but it does not show that the account I suggested makes adequacy subjective. All it shows is that assessing the adequacy of a conceptual scheme is risky business. We might fail in our judgments about adequacy. We might bury a conceptual scheme prematurely before it could prove its mettle, or it might take too long for us to realize that we have exhausted the potential of the scheme. No doubt, historians can produce lots of examples of these kinds. Our judgments about the adequacy of conceptual schemes are fallible. But fallibilism is a world apart from subjectivism. The former holds that we might be wrong. The latter contends that the boundary between right and wrong is completely under our control; i. e. it depends solely on our beliefs and desires what is right and wrong. My account indeed entails the former, but not the latter. Remember that success is causally independent of our beliefs, so it is objective. It may also be alleged that the present conception of adequacy cannot be clearly marked off from that of useful fiction. It is well-known that there are conceptual schemes good enough for a number of purposes which are still not quite right, and the divisions and classifications they use are not accepted as real. On the metaphysical realist view these useful fictions are easy to distinguish from adequate conceptual schemes. The latter carve the beast of reality at the joints, the former – instrumentally useful as they are – do not. On the internal realist view, however, adequacy itself is intimately connected with instrumental utility. Therefore – the objection goes – internal realism does not have conceptual means for driving the wedge between adequate conceptual schemes and useful fictions. This can be answered quite easily. A useful fiction enjoys only limited success. We tend to call something a useful fiction if it works fine in some parts of the given domain, but not everywhere. It is the limitations that make us think that the conceptual scheme is not quite all right, that it is merely a fiction. This reply can be called into question on two grounds. First, one may claim that it replaces a qualitative difference with a difference in degree. Adequate conceptual schemes are qualitatively different from useful fictions. According to the reply, however, there is only quantitative difference: small success – useful fiction; big success – adequacy. This alone suggests that it fails to capture the distinction it is after. But why should we accept that there is a qualitative difference in the first place? It is easy to see why the metaphysical realist should think that there is. For him, adequacy – as opposed to instrumental utility – is a disembodied virtue, which is altogether independent of human practices. So it seems that the very idea of qualitative difference is based on a metaphysical realist conception of adequacy. But then the rebuttal begs the question. It accuses the internal realist of failing to account for a feature of the distinction,

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which is part only of the metaphysical realist conception. Second, it might be claimed that the internal realist distinction is extremely difficult to apply in practice. How much success should we require of a conceptual scheme so that it can be endorsed as adequate? Conversely, after how much failure should we demote a conceptual scheme to a useful fiction? Indeed, these questions do not permit a general answer. We have to decide on a case by case basis, and our judgments will be highly fallible. Yet, this is no argument against the internal realist conception, for the metaphysical realist is not better off when it comes to practical assessment. Since he cannot claim to have direct insight which would inform him whether a scheme is adequate, in practice, he can judge only on the basis of the scheme’s record; i. e., he has to rely on the same things as the internal realist. Consequently, the practical evaluation is just as difficult for him as for the internal realist. There is also a much more serious objection, which is similar to one discussed in the previous section. It alleges that the account is incomplete. There is an important question it leaves unanswered, and when that question is answered, the account becomes indistinguishable from metaphysical realism. The question is this. What determines the success of a practice? As it was said, success depends on many things, but the conceptual scheme has a crucial role in it. In what way can the conceptual scheme contribute to the success of a practice? I said that success is independent of our beliefs and desires. We may deceive ourselves or others about the achievements of a practice, but these bad judgments can be eliminated by the criterion of choiceworthiness. Once we have a fair judgment about the relative success of a practice, one may ask how could the conceptual scheme participate in the success or failure of the practice. What is it about the conceptual scheme in virtue of which it is responsible for the achievements of the practice? The only possible answer – goes the objection – is that the responsibility of the conceptual scheme consists in getting the structure of reality right. If the conceptual scheme cuts the beast of reality at its joints, it enables us to describe what is really going on. As it were, it allows us to formulate the linguistic counterparts of the real processes. If it does not cut at the joints, that creates a difficulty. Luck and ingenuity may help to overcome this difficulty to some extent, but a practice with an inadequate conceptual scheme is still handicapped. If this answer is accepted, the structure of reality has to be understood in a metaphysical realist way. Otherwise the answer would become circular: if the structure of reality were ontologically dependent on adequate conceptual schemes, and adequacy were explained partly in terms of success, the structure of reality could not be invoked to explain success. So we have a legitimate question, and the only possible answer presupposes metaphysical realism. To put it differently, the charge is that the internal realist account confuses adequacy with the marks of adequacy. My reply is similar to the one given to the similar objection in the previous section: this is not a genuine explanation. It explains the performance of conceptual schemes with the degree to which they match reality. But how can we check the match with reality? Only through the performance of conceptual schemes. So we only have access to the explanans through the explanandum. Compare it with the old joke: ‘Why is it raining?’ – ‘God is squeezing out a large sponge.’ – ‘What makes you think that?’ – ‘It’s raining, isn’t it?’ The reason why the joke is funny is exactly that it shows that allowing the

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explanans to be accessible only through the explanandum would vindicate even the most crazy explanation. Nevertheless, rejecting this explanation is not the same as rejecting any explanation of success. There are examples in which the success of an enterprise is given a genuine explanation. The main examples are provided by scientific discoveries in which the relative success of an earlier theory is explained in terms of a later theory, like the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s laws, etc. In these cases there is an independent way to check the explaining theory. It is these genuine explanations which may give rise to the demand that we should try to explain success. This demand is perfectly legitimate. But the idea that the world has an ontologically mind-independent structure which matches our conceptual structures does not answer this demand. To believe otherwise is to prefer metaphysical theft over scientific toil. One may also raise an objection, which rests on a certain reading of Kuhn. Consider what happens in scientific revolutions. According to Kuhn, it belongs to the nature of the scientific enterprise that within the same specialty there can be only one sort of scientific practice. There are, however, extraordinary periods when two paradigms, i. e. two very different practices, are present. Each paradigm has its own criteria of success. Thus there may be very little overlap between the criteria associated with different paradigms, and even if there is an overlap between the criteria, the same criteria may be applied rather differently in particular cases. Consequently, there cannot be rational arguments across paradigms. Eventually, one paradigm wins out, and the other one is condemned as a failure, and its conceptual scheme is deemed inadequate. However, this judgment of inadequacy does not rest on rational argument. Consequently, judgments of adequacy lack rational basis; they are subjective and arbitrary. To answer this objection, we must first see the charge of irrationalism raised against Kuhn in perspective. When the first edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appeared the philosophy of science was still very much dominated by the logical positivist picture of science. Many elements of that picture have already been challenged, but those which pertained to theory-choice were still intact. The logical positivist ideal was that philosophy of science should deliver a logical analysis of the concepts relevant for science, and ‘logical’ was understood in the narrow, technical sense. The idea was that the choice between theories has to be made on the basis of their degree of confirmation, and the degree of confirmation was to be defined in a way that is analogous to the way in which logical concepts, e. g. ‘entailment’ is defined. Once ‘degree of confirmation’ is defined in this rigorous fashion, theories can be compared in an algorithmic way. The rational was tacitly identified with the algorithmic. Given this tacit identification, Kuhn indeed seemed to embrace irrationalism. In fact, he did not say that scientists belonging to different paradigms do not share criteria of evaluation at all. Rather, he said that they do not share the same set of criteria, and that they sometimes disagree about the application of the shared criteria. But partial disagreement about criteria and about their application does not imply the total breakdown of rational argumentation. If it did, most debates were irrational. Consider, for example, a debate between members of an examination board.

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More recent accounts of scientific rationality give a more detailed picture. The central idea is that in a debate between two comprehensive views the parties will find enough agreement to settle the disagreements. Laudan (Science and Values), for example, distinguishes between three levels in the debate, the theoretical, the methodological, and the axiological. The first concerns the factual claims. The second has to do with the methods of arriving at and adjudicating between factual claims. The third is about the goals of the discipline and science as such. Each level can be used to justify or criticize other levels. Methodologies lay down standards for the evaluation of factual claims. But factual knowledge also affects the feasibility of methodologies, e. g. the discovery of the placebo effect has a bearing on how certain experiments have to be conducted. Views about the goals of science can be used to evaluate methodologies as appropriate or inappropriate for reaching the goals. On the other hand, methodologies can issue judgements about the realizability of certain goals. Finally, factual claims and the avowed goals must also harmonize. Laudan argues that these three do not change together. So in every change there is an element of stability. So there is always common ground for the debating parties. This point can be easily expressed in the terminology I just developed. We do not have to worry that practices are self-justifying microcosms which have to satisfy only criteria which are internal to them. Practices have to be choiceworthy as well, which is an external constraint. However, the objection can be generalized into what might be called the relativistic objection. Granted that there are cross-practice criteria for choiceworthiness, it may be asked how these criteria themselves can be established. After all, adjudicating between rival small-scale practices in terms of choiceworthiness usually involves reference to other practices. If we criticize a practice for pursuing unrealizable, utopian goals, we must back this up by something, by a claim deriving from some practice. Similarly, if we attack a practice on methodological ground, we must compare it with other practices. So even though choiceworthiness does not presuppose a single practice, it seems to presuppose a large group of practices. Let us call the large group of practices taken for granted by criticism in terms of choiceworthiness a ‘large-scale’ practice. There might well be rival large-scale practices. Perhaps choiceworthiness might be decided in a way that is different from ours. Other people may rely on a complete set of practices when they judge whether a particular practice is worth pursuing. How can we decide between conflicting large-scale practices? Perhaps large-scale practices cannot be compared, because the cross-practice criteria used within a certain large-scale practice are rejected by those who participate in an another large-scale practice. So there is no neutral ground from which to compare them. Choiceworthiness would then be a pesticide that works only inside the house. To put it differently, it is granted that small-scale practices can be compared by using a sufficiently broad conception of rationality, but there might well be competing broad conceptions. There might be no way to compare rival conceptions of rationality. If there are indeed large-scale practices or conceptions of rationality and there is no rational way to choose between them, the conceptions of rationality are themselves arbitrary. This arbitrariness of rationality would then infect the small-scale practices as well. So, in the final analysis, adequacy turns out to be subjective and arbitrary. This is just the

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good old cultural relativist attack on objectivity. Human activities are divided into big completely disjunct chunks: cultures, historical periods, forms of life, what have you. It is then claimed that within these big chunks we have ways to measure truth, rationality, objectivity, and all the other things which make the rationalist’s eye gleam. But the chunks themselves are self-sufficient wholes, to which truth, rationality, objectivity, etc. are not applicable, because the different chunks do not overlap. My reply to this objection is that it poses no direct threat to internal realism. The objection went as follows. Take the internal realist account of objectivity. Assume, as cultural relativism does, that there are completely disjunct large-scale practices. Since adequacy presupposes a large-scale practice, you get relativism and must give up on the idea of objectivity. In other words, the conjunction of internal realism and cultural relativist premise about disjunct cultures does not leave room for objective adequacy. This, however, does not establish anything about internal realism taken by itself. There is no reason to conjoin internal realism and cultural relativist premise. The internal realist may simply reject the cultural relativist premise about completely disjunct large-scale practices, and then he may insist that the adequacy of conceptual schemes is an objective property. In other words, the conjunction of internal realism and the cultural relativist premise indeed disallows objective adequacy, but the party to be blamed for this is the latter. The situation were different if internal realism implied the cultural relativist premise. Then it would indeed give up on objectivity. But it does not. It would get into trouble only if the premise about completely disjunct cultures were true.xli In other words, internal realism is not committed to cultural relativism, but it needs additional arguments to ward it off. One may try to transform the relativistic objection into an indirect threat. It goes like this. It is true that internal realism does not imply relativism, but this is not enough. A tenable metaphysical-epistemological doctrine should rule out relativism as impossible, and internal realism does not meet this demand. That is true. If this demand is accepted, metaphysical realism, which holds that the structure of the world is ontologically independent of the human mind, fares much better. It may be conjoined with the relativist premise about disjunct cultures without leading to relativism. But I do not see any reason why the demand should be accepted, except for showing the superiority of metaphysical realism. It is reasonable to demand an objective notion of adequacy. But it is not reasonable to require that objectivity should be understood in the metaphysical realist way. To require that would be begging the question against internal realism. Besides, metaphysical realism does not fare any better in practice. In real life, the question concerns the adequacy of particular conceptual schemes. Suppose there are two competing conceptual schemes in a given domain. Which one is right? The idea of a mind-independent structure is of little help here. The advocates of the two schemes claim that it is their own scheme that captures that structure. But they have only epistemic criteria to substantiate their claims. Adequacy – in the metaphysical realist view – is completely non-epistemic, so there might be no way of knowing which scheme is adequate. To say that one of the schemes is adequate but we do not know which one leaves the situation completely symmetrical. To put it differently,

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metaphysical realism saves us from relativism by making us vulnerable to skepticism. The ontologically mind-independent structure of reality is independent of cultures. So cultural relativism must be wrong, since adequacy is rooted in something that does not depend on culture. But metaphysical realism offers no conceptual safeguard against the worry that the ontologically mind-independent structure might be just too distant for us to reach. Of course, the metaphysical realist can say lots of things to soothe that worry – just as the internal realist can say lots of things to soothe the worry about cultural relativism. The two accounts have complementary virtues. By making adequacy epistemic, internal realism guarantees that it is within our reach. But it has no built-in guarantees against cultural relativism. Metaphysical realism has built-in guarantees against cultural relativism. But it cannot secure in itself that that adequacy is accessible in principle. Let me illustrate this trade-off with an issue with regard to which internal realism fares better: scientific realism. Scientific realism holds that there is no fundamental semantical or epistemological difference between the theoretical and the observational parts of science. Theoretical terms are not abbreviations of complicated strings of observational expressions, and we may have as good reasons to believe in the truth of theoretical claims as in the truth of observational claims. One of the strongest objection against scientific realism is based on the thesis of underdetermination of theories by experience, which asserts that for any given set of empirical evidence there can be several different theories which are equally well supported by it. This threatens the epistemological part of scientific realism. Suppose we have an excellent theory, T. According to the thesis, there can be several other theories which have the same support as T. So why should T be true rather than one of the other theories? The natural answer goes like this. Normally, we have only one best theory. The underdetermination thesis talks about possible theories, but we have to deal with actual theories rather than with rivals which have never been formulated. So if T has no actual rival, we may trust in its truth. This reply, however, is not available to the metaphysical realist, because she has no good reasons to restrict her attention to actual theories. It is surely a contingent matter which theory we managed to hit upon. But why should such contingencies matter for truth? If reality is independent of the mind ontologically, and truth is radically non-epistemic, then practical considerations, like the consideration of actual theories only, have no bearing on truth. Theories are made true by the world itself, and the world is in a particular way, whatever we think about it. So what we actually think about has no effect on truth. Actuality, therefore, is irrelevant. She must then say this. There is no theory we can trust better to be true than T, but we cannot trust it completely either, for it is just a member of a multitude of theories, and its only distinction, that it happens to have been formulated, has nothing to do with truth. Even though we have no choice except for betting on T, there is room for doubt. Internal realism, on the other hand, can easily deploy this natural answer. The adequacy of a conceptual scheme does not depend on the possibility of other conceptual schemes. So if a theory, conceived as a practice driven by theoretical considerations, is choiceworthy and successful, we can believe in its truth and the adequacy of its conceptual scheme. It does not matter if there could be other

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successful practices in the same domain. Remember that internal realism holds that there can be more than one adequate conceptual schemes in a given domain (IR3), and each can accommodate true claims. The same idea also helps to defend scientific realism from a different and stronger version of the underdetermination thesis. According to this stronger version, there can be different, yet empirically equivalent theories. Theories which are empirically indistinguishable, no matter what sort or how much evidence we have, but which are still different. The threat based on this version of the thesis goes like the earlier version. The reply is the same. If the empirically equivalent theories utilize different conceptual schemes, they can all be true. This last point suggests that internal realism might have better defenses against some skeptical arguments than metaphysical realism. The following section will argue that this is indeed so. 3. GLOBAL SKEPTICISM AND BRAINS IN A VAT We often make mistakes, and we are aware of this. Therefore, we are willing to acknowledge that we are practically never completely safe. We felt certain before, and we were wrong. We are certain now, still, we might perhaps be wrong. Nevertheless, we do not live our lives in constant fear of mistakes. Mistakes are like accidents: they are bound to happen, but if we take precautions we have a fairly good chance of minimizing their number and their impact. If we do that, there is no reason to worry: we have enough protection. As J. L. Austin put it, ‘enough is enough: it does not mean everything’ (“Other Minds”, 52). This is the position of fallibilism. Fallibilism in this sense is not a technical philosophical doctrine, but rather a view that almost all reflective people endorse. Sharply different from fallibilism is the view that we might be wrong about practically everything at the same time, and could neither prevent nor rectify this global mistake. This is the view of global skepticism. Fallibilism considers mistakes local phenomena: they always affect relatively small pieces of knowledge. Global skepticism is the view the we might be making one big mistake, a mistake so big that only tiny morsels of our knowledge are exempt from it. The one big mistake of global skepticism is more ominous than the small mistakes of fallibilism not only because of its extent. Fallibilism holds that we can defend ourselves against mistakes, we have weapons to fight with. We shall lose some battles, but it is up to us how many. Global skepticism, on the other hand, leads us to believe that we are defenseless. There is nothing we can do to ward off the big one. The precautions we take to prevent the small mistakes are but parts of the big mistake. We are no longer fighting: we are captives in the enemy’s camp, powerless and vulnerable. For this reason, it is not quite appropriate to talk about mistake in connection with global skepticism. Mistakes are things we make. Being wrong about practically everything is rather something that happens to us. Therefore, global skepticism typically uses the language of ‘illusion’ or ‘deception’. A further difference between fallibilism and global skepticism concerns the possibility of recovery. According to fallibilism, mistakes do not last forever. Sooner or later we usually recognize and rectify them.

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On the global skeptical view, however, there is no hope for recovery. If we are victims of the grand illusion, we shall always remain so. The paradigm cases of global skepticism are Descartes’ great scenarios, the dream argument and the evil demon argument. In both scenarios we are wrong about virtually everything, and we can neither forestall, nor dispel the illusion. If it is all but a dream, we cannot refuse to go to sleep, and we cannot wake up. If it is the demon playing tricks on us, we cannot help falling for the tricks, and we will not even be able to realize that we have been deceived. My goal in this section will be to explore the relationship between skepticism and metaphysical realism and internal realism. I shall first investigate the relationship in the abstract, then make it more transparent through an analysis of Putnam’s brains in a vat argument. Internal realism is committed to a modest version of verificationism, in so far as it claims that for a certain range of sentences the truth conditions agree with the justification conditions. Yet, it does not promise instant gratification even with regard to this range of sentences. The justification procedures may be improperly executed or they may be inadequate. So it allows mistakes. But it does not allow the sort global mistake which we might be making if global skepticism is right. Translated into the internal realist idiom, a global mistake would mean that the overwhelming majority of our conceptual schemes are inadequate, and we have no way of realizing their inadequacy and replacing them with adequate conceptual schemes. But if the account of adequacy offered in the previous section is accepted, such a global mistake is impossible, for two reasons. First, adequacy has been defined as the capacity to support a successful and choiceworthy practice. Success and choiceworthiness are features we can recognize pretty well. We do have lots of successful and choiceworthy practices, so we do have lots of adequate conceptual schemes. It may occasionally turn out that a scheme we used to regard as adequate is not completely adequate or it is inadequate. But it cannot happen to the overwhelming majority of conceptual schemes at the same time. Second, since inadequacy is something we can notice, even if most of our conceptual schemes were in fact inadequate, we would sooner or later realize this. It would not remain unnoticed forever as the big mistake of global skepticism. The crucial idea is that adequacy is an epistemic notion. Saying that we might be systematically and persistently wrong in our assessments of adequacy would be changing the notion. The two elements of adequacy, success and choiceworthiness are themselves epistemic. Success means getting what we want. Choiceworthiness means coherence with other practices. We can normally tell whether we get what we want, and we can normally tell whether a practice coheres with other practices. If someone denies that, he is not talking about success and choiceworthiness any more. He is talking about some non-epistemic substitute. The situation is something like this. You may tear out a page from Encyclopedia Britannica, fold it, and put it in your pocket. You can do that with a couple of pages. But if you claim that you can put the whole Encyclopedia Britannica in your pocket, you are dead wrong, or you are thinking of something else than the Encyclopedia Britannica. So internal realism implies that global skepticism is wrong. This is certainly nothing like a conclusive refutation of skepticism. To argue against skepticism we must accept something to argue from. The skeptic may then

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go on to challenge our premises. The skeptic may also challenge internal realism. (Actually, one does not have to be a skeptic to do so.) But this is not the issue I want to explore. My question is rather this. If internal realism is accepted, would there be any room left for global skepticism? My answer is ‘no’. But if you ask the same question in connection with metaphysical realism, the answer should be ‘yes’. Metaphysical realism is committed to a radically nonepistemic conception of truth, and this conception is intrinsically vulnerable to skepticism. I contend that nothing but verificationism can protect us. This sounds a fairly bold claim, but it can be backed by a simple and completely general argument. Skepticism is predicated on a distinction between truth and illusion. Verificationism claims that the distinction does not make sense on the global scale with which skepticism is concerned. Since metaphysical realism cannot dismiss the distinction, the only route it may take is to claim that we can distinguish between truth and illusion. If it can be shown that we are not dreaming, or we are not being deceived by an all-powerful demon, skepticism can be retired. But to show that, one has to produce a criterion which tells illusion and truth apart. Suppose the metaphysical realist puts forward a criterion of this kind. This will not silence the skeptic, for she will claim that the distinction is within the illusion. It distinguishes between truth according to the illusion and illusion according to the illusion. If the metaphysical realist proposes another criterion, the skeptic simply repeats the previous move. The metaphysical realist is bound to loose, unless he opts for at least a modest form of verificationism, which he – by definition, (MR2) – cannot do. There is, however, a strategy frequently used to argue that metaphysical realism can escape skepticism. It consists in the admission of fallible justifications. Knowledge – leaving the Gettier problems aside – is understood as justified true belief. To know something, you must have a true belief and be able to provide justification for it. A justification is infallible if it is impossible for the belief to which it pertains to be false. To put it differently, if a belief has received infallible justification, it cannot be false. Today most epistemologists agree that it is unreasonable to demand that justifications should be infallible. We should lower the standards by which we judge whether we possess knowledge. We should still require that a belief should be true and justified, but we should rest content with weaker, fallible justification. The metaphysical realist may join the majority of epistemologists and argue as follows. Fallible justification does not exclude the possibility that the belief is false. It follows then that the possession of knowledge is compatible with the possibility of being wrong (e.g. Lehrer, Theory of Knowledge, chapter 9). If you have a true belief which is justified, but not in an infallible manner, you possess knowledge even though – the justification being fallible – you might be wrong. Knowledge is one thing, the possibility of being wrong is another. As a result, the worry I formulated – namely, that we might be wrong about everything – does not show that we do not have knowledge. But what a skeptical claim is supposed to state is that we do not have knowledge. So the worry I raised should not be regarded as a form of skepticism at all. By admitting fallible justifications, metaphysical realism has an answer to skepticism, and the worry I raised is not something we should care about.

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There are two issues here which should be carefully distinguished. The first is how fallibilism stands with respect to two claims. The second is which of these claims represents skepticism. The two claims are the following: (1) (2)

We do not have knowledge. We might not have knowledge. (= Possibly, we do not have knowledge.)

(2) is a consequence of fallibilism. According to fallibilism, we might be wrong. If we are wrong, we do not have knowledge. Therefore, if we might be wrong, we might not have knowledge. Indeed, the fallibilist metaphysical realist does not hesitate to accept (2). However, he points out that (2) does not entail (1). (2) would entail (1) only if the infallibility of justification were regarded as a necessary condition for knowledge. But once the requirement of infallibility is given up, the logical connection between (2) and (1) is severed. Consequently, the metaphysical realist rejects (1). He then goes on to argue that there is no reason why he should not do so. He will point out that not even the evil genius argument or the dream argument, or any other famous skeptical scenario establishes (1). If it were shown that there is an evil genius playing tricks on us, or that we are dreaming all the time, we would indeed be wrong and possess no knowledge. But all what these scenarios show is that we might be victims of an evil deceiver or might be dreaming. This, however, establishes only (2). He then points out that skepticism aims at (1). Since (2) does not imply (1), no reason has been adduced to the effect that (1) is right or that metaphysical realism is committed to it. Since (2) is not a skeptical thesis, the charge that metaphysical realism is vulnerable to skepticism is unjustified. I think part of this argument is right, part of it is wrong. I grant that metaphysical realism is not committed to (1), and I also grant the arguments explaining why it is not. What I reject is the identification of skepticism with (1). To be sure, (1) is a skeptical claim. But I do not see why it should be recognized as the skeptical claim. In history, skepticism has taken lots of different forms. Different claims, like (1) and (2) were not always carefully distinguished, but ran side by side most of the time. Moreover, some of the skeptics, the Pyrrhonic ones, would have only accepted (2). I do not think, therefore, that the metaphysical realist should be allowed to pick one sort of skepticism he managed to get rid of and claim that thereby he disposed of skepticism as such. In turn, I must acknowledge that I failed to show that metaphysical realism is committed to skepticism as such. I showed only that metaphysical realism is committed to one sort of skepticism, a globalized version of fallibilism. Of course, the metaphysical realist may try to explain that this sort of skepticism is nothing we should worry about. He would try to downplay its significance in the following way. Putting on an amiable smile, he would say: ‘Look. I may be dreaming all the time, but it does not make any difference. If I am not going to wake up anyway, it is all right if I get tenure only in my dream. Skepticism is not something we should be worried about’. But this will not do. Saying that one is not worried about the problem does not make the problem go away. Answering that

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skepticism is uninteresting, because we can never find out the answer anyway, amounts to admitting that there is something fishy about the notion of truth transcending all possible verification. This, however, is pure hypocrisy: preaching metaphysical realism and practicing verificationism. I may turn now to Putnam’s argument about the brains in a vat to illustrate this point. Putnam intends to show that a particular skeptical scenario cannot possibly be true. If the argument were successful, it could probably be extended to other skeptical scenarios. However, I will argue that the argument is not successful. It fails as a refutation of skepticism, because it presupposes internal realism, which the skeptic has a right to reject. Nevertheless, it will be quite interesting to see why it fails, because the nature of the failure shows very well the relationship between metaphysical realism, internal realism and skepticism. To anticipate the conclusion, from the metaphysical realists point of view, the argument begs the question against the skeptic, but from the internal realists perspective, it is sound. Thus the internal realist may use the argument to refute an important sort of skepticism, but the metaphysical realist cannot. If one prefers a position that can ward off global skepticism of the form (2), this is an argument in favor of internal realism. Putnam’s argument is intended to prove that the following skeptical scenario is impossible (Reason, Truth and History, 5-17). Imagine this. We are all brains in a vat of nutrients which keep us alive. We have always been and will always be in this state. The only other thing apart from us and our vat is an extremely powerful computer, which is linked to our nerve endings. The computer happens to be programmed in such a way that it makes us believe that the world is the way we actually believe it is. For example, I imagine that I am writing about a philosopher called Hilary Putnam, and I want to lift my pen to reread what I have just written. What happens is this. My brain sends certain electric or chemical information to the nerve endings which would command my muscles to raise my hand – if I had a hand. Since I do not have a hand, the computer reads the information off my nerve endings and identifies my intention. In a split second it calculates what I should experience during the intended action and feeds back this information to my nerve endings. As a result, I imagine that I am actually carrying out the action: I feel the pressure of the pen on my fingers, the change of tone in my muscles, see my hand rising so that more and more of the text becomes visible. The computer synchronizes my experiences and those of other brains. When I experience that I am talking to someone, she experiences that she is hearing me, and everything goes just fine. There is no glitch: the computer works perfectly and does not make mistakes that would reveal our real situation. Putnam’s argument rests on the following assumption: (A)

A language user cannot refer to a certain thing unless the user stands in the right sort of causal connection to it.xlii

To make sense of this assumption, consider the following situation. There is a computer which runs a program producing English sentences. Let us call it ESD, which stands for English speaking device. ESD knows the whole grammar of

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English including semantic selection restrictions, so that it will not allow syntactically correct but semantically incorrect sentences like ‘The bachelor has become a widow’. In fact, it has the same linguistic competence as we do. It is immaterial what kind of English sentences it produces and in what order. It may produce sentences stored in the program, generate sentences in a random fashion, or do something more creative like writing love poetry or scholarly papers on Wittgenstein. On the other hand, it is crucially different from ordinary human speakers of English in that it is unable to receive information from the world. It has no sense organs, no keyboard, even its disk drives have been sealed. It is just a lonesome sentence generator, completely cut off from the world. The question is whether we should attribute reference to a device of this kind. If ESD writes ‘apple’ on the screen, should we say that it is referring to apples? Putnam suggests that we should not. The linguistic output of ESD is wholly independent of the way the world is. For example, once we managed to exterminate all plant life on Earth, ESD is still going to write on the screen sentences like ‘In spring the cherry trees will bloom again’. It cannot adjust its speech to the world. It is literally out of touch. It does not use the sentences to describe the world; rather, it manufactures them like an industrial robot. Its language use is completely self-contained, it is not related to the world. Reference, however, is a relation between language and the world. Since in ESD’s case there is no relation to the world, it cannot be credited with reference. To be able to refer, a language user has to have at least a minimal capability for adjusting her speech to the world. But such adjustment is not possible unless she can receive information from the world, and receiving information is a causal process. This is why the language user must stand in some sort of causal connection with the world. Moreover, not any kind of causal connection will do. For example, ESD is causally linked to the outside world, because it is hooked up to electricity, but this causal connection cannot transmit the required information. This is why the causal connection must be of the ‘right sort’. Even though (A) is true, it is somewhat misleading to formulate the constraint on reference in terms of causal connection. It is misleading, because it may seem to imply commitment to some sort of causal theory of reference, like the causalinformational view mentioned in 2.3. The point lies deeper. Reference demands that we should be capable of adjusting our speech to the world, at least in certain cases. To be able to do so, we must have epistemic access to the world. We must be able to learn what is happening. ESD is defined as informationally blind to the world. This is the real reason that we deny that the words, as they are used by ESD, have reference. If we imagine a sequence of scenarios, in which information-blindness gradually gives way to the sort of epistemic access we possess, our willingness to attribute reference to ESD will gradually increase. Epistemic access, however, implies some sort of causal connection. Seeing, hearing, talking to other people, and all other ways of obtaining information involve causal processes. This is why (A) is true. Nevertheless, it is not so much the constraint itself, but a consequence of the real constraint, which should be expressed in terms of (B).

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A language user cannot refer to a thing unless she has epistemic access to it.

Another consideration which suggests that (B) is more fundamental than (A) is that it helps to clarify why the connection must be of the right sort. The hook-up to electricity is not the right sort because it does not involve epistemic access. Once we accept that the plausibility of (A) derives from (B), it becomes clear that the assumption is very much in the spirit of internal realism. Internal realism regards reference is an epistemically loaded notion, since it argues that it is fixed by justification conditions. Metaphysical realism, on the other hand, treats reference as non-epistemic. If it did not, it would have to deny (MR2), the thesis that truth is radically non-epistemic. Since truth is determined by reference, were reference epistemic, truth would become epistemically tainted. It is relatively easy to see how (B) (and (A)) applies to the brains in the vat scenario. The brains suffer from a similar kind of epistemic (and causal) isolation as ESD. They do not have epistemic access to their environment. Their connection to the vat of nutrients is like ESD’s hook-up to electricity: it is necessary for their functioning, but does not shape their language use. Without nutrients the brains would soon be dead, but being kept alive by something is quite different from receiving information of that thing. The computer, on the other hand, does supply information to the brains, and this information does affect the brains’ language use, but it does not make it possible for them to adjust their speech to the real world. It is like you were in solitary confinement and your only visitor refused to discuss with you anything apart from the Grimm brothers’ tales. You would certainly receive information, but not information about the world. Actually, in the latter case you would still be better off than the brains: from the clothes of the visitor you could draw inferences about the weather and the changes in fashion. The computer, on the other hand, does not give any clue. The causal connection is carefully supervised so that not even the tiniest bit of information slips through which might arouse the brains’ suspicion about their real state. Given the lack epistemic access (or of appropriate causal connection), (B) (and (A)) implies that the brains cannot refer to the computer which is manipulating them or to the vat which is their home. The brains’ incapacity to refer to those things which are relevant for the description of their real situation raises this question. What shall we make of the brains’ language? The brains certainly use a language. In fact, the activity they regard as their use of language is just as sophisticated as the activity we consider as our language use. A tape recorder can produce English sentences, yet, it cannot be credited with using a language. But the brains are not like tape recorders, they are just as capable and self-conscious as we are. In fact, we may convert to a new religion, which holds that we are actually brains in a vat, and this would not shatter our belief that we are using a language. But if the brains are using a language, let us call it vat-English, what do the words of that language refer to? We have already seen that the brains do not stand in epistemic connection to the computer and the vat, so – in virtue of (B) – they cannot refer to them. For the same reason, they cannot refer to the usual objects English words refer to. The brains are informationally

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isolated from real trees. They have tree experiences even if there are not and have never been any trees. Is it then possible that their language lacks reference altogether? Should we say that all vat-English words are like ‘centaur’ in English, i. e. lacking in reference? This does not seem very convincing, because the brains are capable of adjusting their language use to what they take to be the world. If the computer makes the brains believe that cherry trees became extinct as a result of some mysterious illness, the brains will stop talking about cherry trees in the present tense. The relation their words bear to the imaginary world is similar to the relation English words bear to the real world. For this reason, we should take the vat-English words as referring to things appearing in the hallucination induced by the computer. Following Putnam, I shall call the things vat-English words refer to things in the image. The English word ‘tree’ refers to trees, its vat-English counterpart refers to trees in the image. This way of understanding reference in vat-English is in agreement with (B), for the brains have epistemic access to the things in the image. If a couple of brains imagine walking peacefully in the forest, and one of them notices a wolf, it will cry wolf. Changes in the things in the image have noticeable influence on what kind of vat-English sentences will be formulated. Also, certain vat-English sentences may result in changes in the things in the image. For example, a brain orders another one to cut down a tree. Through the computer’s mediation the second brain receives the order and complies. The computer reads off the second brains’ intention and sends the appropriate signals to all other brains, which will then imagine that the tree has been cut down. With this we have all the ingredients necessary for the exposition of Putnam’s argument. It takes the form of a constructive dilemma. (P1) (P2) (P3) (C)

We are either brains in a vat (speaking vat-English) or we are not brains in a vat (speaking English). If we are not brains in a vat (speaking English), the sentence ‘We are brains in a vat’ is false. If we are brains in a vat (speaking vat-English), the sentence ‘We are brains in a vat’ is false. The sentence ‘We are brains in a vat’ is false.xliii

If we disregard the parenthetical remarks, (P1) is but a tautology. The parenthetical remarks have been justified in the previous discussion. (P2) is the contraposition of the T-equivalence involving the sentence ‘We are brains in a vat’ in classical logic, where ‘“p” is not true’ is equivalent with ‘“p” is false’. (P3) is the crucial premise in the argument, which can be justified as follows. If we are brains in a vat, we are speaking vat-English. So the sentence mentioned in (P3) is a vat-English sentence. The words of vat-English do not refer to things, but to things in the image. Consequently, the vat-English sentence ‘We are brains in vat’ has different truth conditions than its English counterpart: its truth does not depend on whether we are brains in a vat, but on whether we are brains in a vat in the image. (To put it differently, in English and in vat-English the same sentence has different meanings.) So, for the vat-English sentence to be true, we must be brains in the vat

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in the image. But we are certainly not brains in a vat in the image. According to the scenario, the deception is perfect, so the brains’ experience is qualitatively identical with what normal human beings would experience. The brains imagine that they are completely normal, i. e. embodied, human beings. So if we are really brains in a vat, we are not brains in a vat in the image. Therefore, if we are brains is a vat, the vatEnglish sentence ‘We are brains in a vat’ is false. The argument is valid, its premises are true, so the conclusion should be accepted. Nonetheless, there is a general consensus that Putnam has failed to refute skepticism. I shall first discuss the usual objection raised against the argument, then explain how it can be answered from the internal realist point of view.xliv The critics usually point out that what we would like to know is whether we are brains in a vat, and (C) does not get us that far. One may attempt to spell out this objection as follows. (C) asserts that the sentence ‘We are brains in a vat’ is false, be it in English or in vat-English. From now on I shall call the English ‘We are brains in a vat’ sentence (E), and its vat-English counterpart (V). So the sentence mentioned in (P2) is (E), and the one mentioned in (P3) is (V). The charge that Putnam has failed to refute skepticism is substantiated in this way. Since we speak English, the argument should prove that we are not brains in a vat, i. e. that (E) is false. However, the argument does not establish this. Suppose that (E) is true. (P1), (P2) and (P3) are true for the reasons mentioned earlier. Since (E) is true, the language we speak is vat-English. This and (P3) jointly entail that (V) is false. If (E) is true, the only ‘We are brains in a vat sentence’ we can formulate is (V). Therefore, the sentence mentioned in (C) must be (V). (V) is indeed false, so (C) is true. Consequently, the premises and the conclusion are true. This shows that the argument is perfectly compatible with (E), which asserts that we are brains in a vat (Harrison “Putnam on Brains” , Iseminger “Putnam’s Miraculous”, Kinghon “External World”, Stephens and Restow “Brains in Vats”). In other words, the argument does not answer the question we are interested in, because it goes through even if we are brains in a vat. On second thought, however, it may seem that this attempt to spell out the objection is not successful, because it suffers form a kind of self-referential inconsistency. We adopted the convention that (E) stands for the familiar English sentence ‘We are brains in a vat’. Then we supposed that (E) is true, and it is this supposition that gets us into trouble, since if (E) is true, we are brains in a vat. But if we are brains in a vat, we must be speaking vat-English. Consequently, (E) itself cannot be in English. In other words, the supposition is inconsistent, because it is an English sentence which entails that it itself is not in English. Making this supposition is like saying ‘This sentence is not in English’ or ‘I am not speaking English now’. It involves some kind of self-referential inconsistency, like the liar paradox. Is there a way to overcome this difficulty? The way to get rid of this kind of inconsistency is to eliminate the self-reference. The sentence ‘The sentence mentioned in the previous paragraph between “saying” and “or” is not in English’ is not inconsistent. Similarly, ‘Bill is not speaking English now’ is not inconsistent. The reason why the objection turned out to be inconsistent is that we asserted of ourselves that we are brains in a vat. To avoid the inconsistency, we have to drop the first person idiom. We should suppose that they are brains in a vat.

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In light of this, the objection can be restated as follows. Some time in the future we venture into deep space, and on a distant planet we find a colony of brains in a vat supervised by a computer. After monitoring the nerve endings responsible for linguistic behavior, we realize that the syntax and the phonetics of the brains’ language agrees with that of ordinary English. Observing the connection between the brains’ linguistic and non-linguistic behavior (the activity of sensory and motoric nerve endings), we realize that it shows the same regularities as the connection between our linguistic and non-linguistic behavior. We conclude from this that the brains are using some weird variety of English. It cannot be ordinary English, since their epistemic isolation prevents the brains from referring to the same things as we do. So we call their language vat-English. Since English and vat-English refer to different things, they are not intertranslatable in the ordinary sense (van Inwagen, “On Always”, 101-3). Nonetheless, the mental states associated with the vat-English words are qualitatively identical with the mental states associated with the English counterparts of these words. If you wish, the narrow content is the same in the two languages. As a result, we can understand the brains in the sense of understanding what goes on in their mind. Then one day, a brain – call him Brutnam – comes up with an ingenious argument which is alleged to show that he and his fellows cannot be brains in a vat. Replacing the first person pronouns with the third person ones, his argument can be restated by us as follows: (BP1) (BP2) (BP3) (BC)

They are either brains in a vat (speaking vat-English) or they are not brains in a vat (speaking English). If they are not brains in a vat (speaking English), their sentence ‘We are in a vat’ is false. If they are brains in a vat (speaking vat-English), their sentence ‘We are brains in a vat’ is false. Their sentence ‘We are brains in a vat’ is false.

Given this reconstruction of the argument, the previous objection can be repeated without the danger of self-referential inconsistency. The argument is sound, yet it does not prove that Brutnam and his colleagues are not brains in a vat. (BC) is true, but it does not assert the required conclusion. Since Brutnam is a brain in a vat, he speaks vat-English. Therefore, the sentence mentioned in the conclusion is the vatEnglish ‘We are brains in a vat’ sentence, i. e. (V). But what we are interested in is the English sentence (E), and (V) is clearly not equivalent with that sentence. So the argument simply fails to speak to the issue. To put the point somewhat differently, Brutnam should have shown that he is not a brain in a vat; but all he has shown is that he is not a brain in a vat in the image. But is this a fair objection? One may argue that it is not. It challenges Brutnam to prove an English sentence, a feat Brutnam cannot possibly accomplish, since he does not and cannot speak English. It follows from his existential condition that English is not available to him. A brain in a vat can speak only some kind of vatlanguage. The objector may answer that this is just the point. Skepticism cannot be refuted, because the skeptical scenarios are loaded. To refute skepticism, you need a

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privileged position. If you are not dreaming, you can prove that another person is awake. If you are not being deceived by an evil genius, you may prove that some other person is not being deceived either. If you are not a brain in a vat, you can decide whether others are brains in a vat. The point is that you can never be in a privileged position when you are talking about yourself. The skeptic can always suggest that there is an external perspective, unavailable to you, from which you can be seen as the subject of illusions. In effect, the objector is saying that one who considers the objection unfair simply does not understand what skepticism is about. However, Brutnam’s defender does not have to acquiesce in this answer. She may contend that there is nothing there to understand, since there is no sense in which Brutnam is wrong (Tymoczko, “Brains Don’t Lie”). To begin with, Brutnam is speaking vat-English. For this reason, he can only be interested in questions that can be formulated in vat-English. The English sentence, which he indeed fails to prove, is just none of his concerns. He has proven that (V) is false, and this is all that he could have wanted. Brutnam is not only right about the anti-skeptical argument, but there is no sense in which he is being deceived. Of course, he might have made mistakes. This happens from time to time with every thinking creature. But he is not deceived about virtually everything as the skeptic alleges. For example, Brutnam asserts in vat-English ‘I have written several books on philosophy’. The skeptic would like to say that he is wrong, because he is just a brain in a vat who merely imagines to have written several books on philosophy. But Brutnam is right, and the skeptic is wrong. Brutnam is talking about things in the image, and in that world he has indeed written several books. Moreover, the vat-English sentence ‘I merely imagine that I have written several books on philosophy’ is false as said by Brutnam, just as (V) is false. Perhaps Brutnam’s defender’s point can be brought out more clearly by an analogous case expounded by O. K. Bouwsma in his ‘Descartes’ Evil Genius’. The evil genius boasts that he can deceive Tom about virtually everything. His first attempt is to transform everything into paper. This deception works for a while, but then Tom notices that flowers do not smell, objects get torn, and thus realizes that he was deceived. The evil genius is pleased to hear Tom’s painful realization of his deception, but he is still not content, since eventually Tom managed to formulate true beliefs, namely that the objects are made of paper. The second attempt is Descartes’ original scenario. However, the evil genius is frustrated once again, because Tom refuses to acknowledge that he is deceived. Bouwsma summarizes the moral as follows: For in this instance it is assumed that the illusion is of such a kind that no seeing, no touching, no smelling, are relevant to detecting the illusion. Nevertheless, the evil genius sees, touches, smells, and does detect the illusion. He made the illusion; so, of course, he must know it. How then does he know it? The evil genius has a sense denied to men. He senses the flower-in-itself, Milly-in-herself, etc. So he creates illusions made up of what can be seen, heard, smelled, etc., illusions all because when seeing, hearing, and smelling have seen, heard, and smelled all, the special sense senses nothing. So what poor human beings sense is the illusion of what only the evil genius can sense. This is formidable. Nevertheless, once again everything is clear. If we admit the special sense, then we can readily see how it is that the evil genius should have been so confident. He has certainly created his own illusions, though he has not himself been

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TRUTH deceived. But neither has anyone else been deceived. For human beings do not use the word ‘illusion’ by relation to a sense with which only the evil genius is blessed. I said that the evil genius had not been deceived, and it is true that he has not been deceived by his own illusions. Nevertheless he was deceived in boasting that he could deceive, for his confidence in this is based upon an ignorance of the difference between our uses of the words, ‘heavens’, ‘earth’, ‘flowers’, ‘Milly’, and ‘illusions’ of these things, and his own uses of these words. (151)

As I mentioned earlier, the purpose of the present discussion of the brains in a vat argument is not to refute skepticism, but to explore its relationship to metaphysical realism and internal realism. Now it is time to draw the conclusion. I began by laying out Putnam’s argument, then looked for ways to save skepticism. The first attempt was a failure, because the objection was self-referentially incoherent. I find it quite remarkable that it failed in this particular way, because this illustrates a general point: given our present perspective, we cannot consistently argue that our present perspective might be completely wrong. No perspective can accommodate global skepticism about itself. Skepticism about a perspective cannot be formulated within that perspective. To raise skeptical doubts about a perspective, one needs to presuppose that there is a perspective which is external, inaccessible and privileged. This was exactly the strategy I used to save skepticism. Instead of Putnam’s English language argument I considered Brutnam’s vat-English language argument. This way, we looked at the argument from outside, from a perspective inaccessible to brains in a vat such as Brutnam. It is also important that the perspective has to be inaccessible, i. e. it has to be such that it is unavailable to us as long as we remain the same sort of creatures as we are. If it merely happens to fall outside our present range of access, but is not doomed to be beyond our reach forever, it cannot support global skepticism, only skepticism of some more limited form. But an inaccessible external perspective alone still does not suffice. The opponent of skepticism may come back and say that within the different perspectives language is used differently, and there is no contradiction between the different uses, so both may be right. In connection with the original brains in a vat scenario I put this point saying that the brains do not make false assertions about real things, but true assertions about things in the image. Bouwsma expressed the same point by saying that the demon’s use of ‘illusion’ differs from our use of the term. To ward off this kind of reply, the skeptic has to add that the inaccessible external perspective is privileged, i. e. it is the perspective that really matters. It is the perspective from which alone truth can be discerned. The other perspectives, the brains’ or Tom’s, are simply incapable of accommodating the truth. Once we grant the possibility of an external, inaccessible and privileged perspective, there is no way to catch the skeptic. No matter how ingenious arguments we forge, he is going to escape. Metaphysical realism grants the possibility of an external, inaccessible and privileged perspective. Indeed, metaphysical realism is the position which grants this possibility. According to metaphysical realism, the world is ontologically independent of the human mind, and truth is the description of the world as it is in itself. If you wish, truth is the description of the world from the world’s own perspective, from a perspective which is not tied to any particular subject. In Nagel’s

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terms (The View From Nowhere), it is not a view from a particular position, but the view from nowhere. Truth so conceived is radically non-epistemic, so it might be completely inaccessible. This is exactly what skepticism requires: the possibility that the world’s perspective, or the view from nowhere, is different from our own. So skepticism and metaphysical realism are made for each other. Skepticism can be successfully defended on metaphysical realist assumptions, and metaphysical realism invites skepticism. On the other hand, internal realism does not grant the possibility skepticism needs. Truth is not independent of verification. For certain sentences, the reference-fixing ones, truth conditions are identical with justification conditions. Since we can check whether they are justified, we can check whether they are true. So there is no gap between truth and justification that would allow room for skepticism.xlv There is no inaccessible perspective. The world is ontologically dependent on the human mind, so it does not have a perspective of its own. Since it does not have a perspective of its own, there is no privileged perspective. If you wish, there is no view from nowhere. Thus internal realism and skepticism cannot be reconciled. Within internal realism skepticism cannot arise. By adopting internal realism one has banished global skepticism – more precisely, the globalized version fallibilism – for good. Given this relationship between metaphysical realism, internal realism and skepticism, it is easy to see why Putnam’s argument is begging the question against the skeptic. If we were brains in a vat, we would be speaking vat-English, and the vat-English sentence ‘We are brains in a vat’ is false. Given (B), we could not even entertain the idea the skeptic claims to have in mind when he claims that we might be brains in a vat. But on internal realist assumptions, it just does not make sense to talk about an idea which we are in principle incapable of entertaining. The skeptic is trying to say something unintelligible, and what he actually says is false. But he is wedded to metaphysical realism: he will insist that if one is willing to make knowledge-claims about the external world, these claims should be construed as being about an ontologically mind-independent world. Hence, he will not appreciate Putnam’s objection. For him, the talk of an idea we cannot possibly entertain makes perfect sense. For him, it is possible that practically all facts are such that we are in principle unable to conceive and to express them. However, our incapacity to conceive or express something does not affect in the least how things are. All in all, the world is completely independent of us. We might be wrong about everything, even if our attempts to state this are bound to be frustrated. Thus the argument fails as a complete refutation of skepticism. More importantly, however, it succeeds in showing that internal realism is safe from skepticism. The ghost of skepticism will haunt the metaphysical realist forever, but the internal realist has no reason to worry about it.

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CHAPTER 5 CONCEPTUAL PLURALISM

The issues addressed in this chapter are connected to (IR3), the thesis that there may be more than one adequate conceptual schemes of a given domain such that none of them can type-reduce the others. We have already seen how the internal realist account of adequacy gives rise to conceptual pluralism. But there are certain issues which have not been discussed in sufficient detail. First of all, it has been pointed out that the intersection of domains may pose a problem for internal realism. I have suggested that this problem can be solved by appealing to the idea of supervenience (2.2). It is some sort of supervenience between claims formulated in terms the different conceptual schemes which makes it legitimate to say that they share a domain. But I have not worked out this idea yet. Second, the notion of conceptual scheme, which is all-important for the formulation of a pluralistic thesis like (IR3), has been condemned by Davidson as incoherent. I have indicated that the notion Davidson attacks is not the one which I advocate. But given the weight of Davidson’s criticism, I have to show that more thoroughly. This is even more important in light of the fact that I did (and will again very soon) rely on Davidson’s idea that understanding requires massive agreement (3.2.), which plays an extremely important part in his criticism. Third, there are three doctrines which are much discussed these days which all bear on conceptual pluralism. Physicalism and naturalism seem to be in tension with it – or, at least, seem to put constraints on it –, because they emphasize the superiority of the conceptual schemes of physics and of the natural sciences over other conceptual schemes. On the other hand, relativism seems to be an extreme form of conceptual pluralism, which asserts something like that all conceptual schemes are on a par. It is important to clarify how the conceptual pluralism embodied in (IR3) is related to these doctrines. I have already made brief comments on these issues, but I still owe a comprehensive statement. It is these three topics which will be taken up in this last chapter. 1. ON SHARING A DOMAIN Each conceptual scheme deals with a particular segment of the world. The segments they deal with may be completely different, but they may also partly or completely coincide. In the latter case they may be said to be concerned with the same domain. Even though the idea is intuitively clear, and it is easy to give examples, it needs to be explained what it means. For metaphysical realism it is not a problem. The world has a certain structure, which is ontologically independent of

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the mind, and conceptual schemes latch onto certain parts of this structure. If the parts they latch onto coincide, the conceptual schemes share a domain. This explanation is not available for internal realism, since it denies there is a mindindependent structure. Rather, each conceptual scheme constitutes a particular structure. Since there is no common structure, internal realism cannot appeal to a common, mind-independent structure. To put it differently, on the internal realist view all the access we have to reality is from within conceptual schemes. We cannot step outside all conceptual schemes to see which parts of the world they attach to. If we cannot assume an external point of view – Putnam’s God’s Eye point of view –, how can we tell that whether the things we see from within two conceptual schemes are the same? I promised to give an explanation in terms of supervenience. It is time to make good on that promise. First I lay out the account, then I make clear why it is preferable to two other candidates. Supervenience is a kind of dependence between facts stated in different vocabularies. The idea is that facts described in a particular vocabulary determine the facts described in a different vocabulary.xlvi Let us call the two vocabularies A and B, and the facts described in these vocabularies A-facts and B-facts. B-facts supervene on the A-facts if and only if fixing the A-facts fixes the B-facts as well. In other words, the B-facts cannot change without a change in the A-facts. The notion is employed to express that certain facts are rooted in certain other facts, when we are unable to set up tighter connections between them. It was originally proposed to explain the connection between facts having to do with values and facts which do not involve values. The painting Mona Lisa is beautiful. This fact, which involves the normative property ‘beautiful’, is certainly not independent of such mundane facts that certain patches of paint are distributed on a piece of canvas in a particular way. The painting cannot cease to be beautiful without some change in these mundane facts. Yet, we cannot hope to define beauty in terms of mundane facts; beauty cannot be reduced. More recently the idea is invoked in attempts to for argue for some form of non-reductive materialism. Facts about the mental are rooted in physical facts. But the mental facts cannot be reduced to physical facts. So how are the two connected? The answer of non-reductive materialism is that the mental supervenes on the physical. The notion of supervenience seems fairly suitable for our purposes. Instead of two different vocabularies, we may now talk about two conceptual schemes, A and B. They share a domain if at least some of the facts described in one of them supervene on the facts described in the other one, i. e. a subset of the B-facts supervene on the A-facts. This criterion for the intersection of domains is quite congenial to internal realism. It does not demand going outside conceptual schemes. We do not have to assume any mind-independent structure to mediate between them. Rather, the shared domain can be described from inside any of the conceptual schemes. Also, the intuition we want to capture by the idea of sharing a domain is quite like the intuition which is formalized by the notion of supervenience. What we want to capture is that two sets of facts are not really distinct; in a way, they pull together. Nevertheless, supervenience captures more. It also captures that one of the two sorts of facts are more basic, the other sort is ‘derivative’. But this is no problem, for two reasons. First of all, internal realism has no problem with one

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conceptual scheme being more ‘basic’ than another one. Indeed, the internal realist can go along with physicalism stated in terms of supervenience. He can accept that physics gives the most basic description of the world and everything supervenes on the physical. What he resists is only the exclusive purchase claim often associated with physicalism, according to which, in the final analysis, there is really nothing else but the entities described in fundamental physics. Second, supervenience may go in both directions. The supervenience of B-facts on A-facts does not prevent the supervenience of A-facts on B-facts. It is true that in the cases in which the notion of supervenience is normally applied supervenience goes only in one direction. But that has to do with the cases rather than with the notion of supervenience. So invoking the idea of supervenience allows that out of two conceptual schemes sharing the same domain neither is more basic than the other. But supervenience has many kinds. We have to try to get clear about what kind of supervenience we need. First, supervenience can be weak or strong, and second, it can be local or global. Weak supervenience is a relation which obtains only in the actual world. It is also called within a world supervenience. It is about how certain types of facts happen to be related. It makes no reference to possibilities, except for possible future states. It asserts that changes in the two sorts of facts are correlated in such a way that the B-facts cannot change without a change in the A-facts. The historical career of the supervening facts hinges on the historical career of the more basic facts. With respect to Mona Lisa it asserts: should it ever cease to be beautiful, there will be an accompanying change in the patches of paint or in their distribution. It is rightly called ‘weak’ supervenience, because it is not strong enough to control non-temporal possibilities. In particular, it allows the possibility in which Mona Lisa is not beautiful, even though it consists of the same patches distributed in the same way. It denies only that this possibility can be realized in the actual world. Strong or across worlds supervenience is less permissive. It ranges over all possible worlds: Bfacts supervene on A-facts if and only if it is impossible – not just in this world but anywhere – for B-facts being different without the A-facts being different. It would assert about Mona Lisa that in any world in which it consists of the same patches of paint distributed in the same way it is bound beautiful, no matter how different from the actual world the world in question is. The local-global distinction is orthogonal to the distinction just discussed. It is not concerned with the range within which A-facts have a hold over B-facts. It is concerned with the range of A-facts which have a hold over a particular set of Bfacts. The set of B-facts in question is the set which involves a certain individual. The question is what A-facts control this set of B-facts: the set of A-facts pertaining to the individual, or a broader range of facts, possibly the set of all A-facts? Local supervenience holds that the only A-facts which matter for the B-facts involving an individual are the A-facts involving the same individual. For example, the claim about Mona Lisa is a local supervenience claim. If the beauty of Mona Lisa supervenes on the patches of paints it consists of, then it supervenes on local facts. But suppose we believe beauty is in the eye of the beholder, i. e. the fact that a painting is beautiful is partly due to certain psychological and cultural facts. In that case we should also involve these facts among A-facts on which Mona Lisa’s beauty

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supervenes. But then it ceases to be local supervenience, since the psychological and cultural facts do not involve Mona Lisa. It would be global supervenience. Which version of supervenience should we adopt? Notice first that this exposition of supervenience differs from the usual one. Supervenience is usually construed as a relation between two sets of properties rather than two sets of facts. This is not a serious departure. The reason why I opted for this sort of exposition is that different conceptual schemes may individuate differently, so it may happen that the individuals within one scheme cannot be identified with the individuals in the other scheme. When we speak of properties, it may be difficult to avoid mentioning the individuals which instantiate these properties. In this way, spelling out supervenience in terms of properties may result in formulations which create the impression that different conceptual schemes must share the same individuals. This impression is easier to avoid if we speak of facts. It is partly as a result of this consideration that I prefer global supervenience to local supervenience. Suppose we have two conceptual schemes which individuate differently. If we want to formulate a local supervenience claim, the A-facts, on which some B-facts supervene, have to be sorted into facts which involve the same individual as the B-facts and which do not. If we do not have the same individuals in the two schemes, the A-facts cannot be partitioned in this way. Consequently, local supervenience cannot even be formulated. But there are additional reasons as well for choosing global supervenience. There are cases in which certain facts are generally regarded as supervening on physical facts, but the supervenience is global. The most discussed and most controversial case is, of course, the supervenience of the mental on the physical. But there are less controversial cases in biology. Consider the notion of ‘fitness’. The fitness of a creature is a biological fact, which supervenes on physical facts. But the physical facts it supervenes on do not include only the physical facts involving the creature, but also the physical facts about the environment. Changes in the environment affect fitness quite dramatically. We may find even clearer cases in the social sciences. Certain sociological facts about individuals supervene on psychological facts. But the psychological facts involve more than facts about the individual. For example, someone’s influence or power depends on what other people believe about him or about his position. I am less certain about the strong-weak distinction. The criterion for sharing a domain should be strong enough to rule out accidental correlations. It might turn out that the changes in the meat consumption in Hungary are correlated with the changes in the changes in the size of the population of seals along the North American coast. Yet we would not want to say that the concepts employed in these economic and biological statements deal with the same domain.xlvii This suggests that the criterion should include an element of modality. This would make strong supervenience preferable, since it is clearly a modal statement. It speaks about possibilities in the full sense of the word. However, even weak supervenience includes an element of modality, namely temporal modality. It asserts more than how certain facts are correlated during a certain period. It tells us how facts were correlated in the past and how they will be correlated in the future. Since the world is rich enough, it is not unreasonable to expect that the accidental correlations did not obtain or will cease to obtain at some time. So even weak supervenience may be

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powerful enough to rule out accidental correlations. If it is, it is preferable, since establishing it would not involve us in the epistemological problems of establishing modal claims. On the other hand, it might not be strong enough. Therefore, in order to be on the safe side, I rather adopt strong supervenience. So the criterion I propose is this: two conceptual schemes share a domain, if at least some of the facts which can be described in terms of one of them supervene strongly and at least globally on some of the facts which can be described in terms of the other one. This criterion works well for adequate conceptual schemes. But inadequate conceptual schemes seem to pose a special problem. The inadequacy of a conceptual scheme may consist in its leading us to false sentences. Remember the zebralopes. The deficient scheme makes us assert that certain animals belong to the same species, whereas, as a matter of fact, they belong to different species. Or, for a better example, consider what Aristotle says about motion. Many things he says are false. Yet, his theory of motion shares a domain with mechanics. But false sentences do not describe facts. So how can the criterion be applied when one conceptual scheme does not describe facts? (This is a problem for metaphysical realism as well. Metaphysical realism holds that sharing a domain means capturing the same mindindependent structures. But inadequacy is just a failure to capture the real structures. So how can two conceptual schemes capture the same structures, if one of them does not capture these structures?) The reply is simply that even inadequate conceptual schemes allow the formulation of true sentences. Surely, Aristotle said many false things about motion. But he has also said things that are true. So he did get some facts right. And the facts he got right supervene on the facts described in mechanics. That is enough to secure that his conceptual scheme intersects with that of mechanics. There are two ways for trying to resist this reply. One is to say that Aristotle was just completely wrong. He did not manage to describe any facts. This is an incredible view. Moreover, Davidson’s theory of interpretation (“Radical Interpretation”, “Belief”, “On the Very Idea”, “Thought and Talk”, “Method of Truth”) provides firm grounds on which to reject it. Davidson’s point is that the very method of interpretation presupposes that the beliefs of the person we are interpreting are largely true. So if we understand Aristotle, which seems true, he must have got many facts right. The second way of rejecting the reply is to maintain that he was describing completely different facts. Again, this just seems wrong. Moreover, it seems to be a version of the view that people with different conceptual schemes inhabit different worlds, which rests on serious mistakes, as it has been argued earlier (3.2.). There are two other notions in terms of which one may try to provide a criterion for sharing a domain: explanation and token-identity. The idea that explanation can do the job comes from the philosophy of science, where it is often said that a new and better theory should explain the successes and failures of its predecessor. The superior theory is expected to make clear why the inferior theory worked in certain cases and why it failed in other cases. One may try to elevate this explanatory relation into a criterion for sharing a domain. So one may say that Aristotelian physics and mechanics intersect because we can account for the successes and failures of Aristotelian physics in terms of mechanics. This solution seems unsuitable for several reasons. One may note that it is theories which explain, not

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conceptual schemes. Theories are more than conceptual schemes. This defect can be rectified. Perhaps it is the explanatory relations between the theories formulated in terms of different conceptual schemes which signal that the conceptual schemes share a domain. However, if we have a closer look at what happens in such cases, it turns out that explanation presupposes supervenience. Aristotle had an account of the motion of unsupported objects. The objects are composed of elements, and each element has a natural place. If we do not interfere with them, the elements move towards their natural place. The unsupported objects which consist mainly of earth move towards the Earth, because that is where their natural place is. So Aristotle describes quite correctly how unsupported stones, trees, people, etc. move. Mechanics, on the other hand, makes no mention of elements or natural places. So how can it explain why Aristotle got right the motion of unsupported objects? It reconceptualizes the natural motion of earthen bodies as motion under the force of gravity. But what licenses this claim? Why should not we say instead that mechanics describes something completely different? The answer is in terms of supervenience. The facts described in Aristotelian terms could not be different without differences in the facts described in terms of mechanics. If this relation did not obtain, mechanics could not explain the success of the Aristotelian account. This shows that explanation presupposes supervenience. Consequently, if supervenience can do the job alone, we do not need the notion of explanation to provide a criterion for the identity of domain. Before going on I would like to comment on this case briefly. First of all, I told the story in a weird way. The natural version of the story would go like this. Even before the sophisticated scientific accounts were developed, people knew some basic facts about the motion of bodies; in particular, they knew that unsupported bodies fall down. These facts were not described in terms peculiar to any scientific theory. Aristotle gave a new, scientific account of these facts. Then Newton came along and gave a different scientific account. Both of them offered theoretical redescriptions of the old facts. It is because of these old facts that it is natural to judge the two scientific accounts were dealing with the same domain. Indeed, in the presence of the old facts, the intersection of the two theories is so obvious that one needs highly sophisticated philosophical views in order to raise doubts about it. I have no problem with the natural version. It is the historically correct account of what happened. I chose the weird version for two reasons. First, my problem is to give an account of how different conceptual schemes may share a domain. The starting point is than that we have two conceptual schemes and we have to decide whether they share a domain. If we want to have a general solution, we cannot presuppose that there are old facts such that the two conceptual schemes are consciously devised to capture them. There may be cases in which there are no old facts. Second, this way of presenting the case shows that we can do away with idea that there must be a third, neutral language, which mediates between two conceptual schemes. In this case there is indeed a mediating language, the everyday language, or, if you wish, folk physics. In fact, it is cases like these which suggest the necessity of some mediating conceptual scheme. But the idea of mediation is confused. For we may ask: what mediates between folk physics and Aristotelian physics? There is no plausible candidate. When it comes to the crunch, we have just two conceptual

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schemes, and we cannot appeal to a third one. The only way to insist on mediation, and to avoid looking for a mediator if there is none, is to introduce the idea of the universal mediator. The universal mediator would be a conceptual scheme which is transparent for all conceptual schemes, so there is no need to mediate between it and other conceptual schemes. Perhaps it is better called ‘unmediated mediator’. It is supposed to mediate between other conceptual schemes, but it can be directly understood from all conceptual schemes. But the chances of a universal mediator are slim. Everyday language will not do, because it takes up too many elements from various particular conceptual schemes. The idea of the language of pure observation has been tried and has failed. It cannot be denied that in certain cases we can ascertain that two conceptual schemes deal with the same thing because there is third one which mediates between them. But we do not need a mediator. Supervenience is enough. This is why I sought to avoid references to the old facts. The intersection of the Aristotelian and the mechanical conceptual scheme could have been realized even in the absence of the prescientific descriptions of old facts. And now back to explanation. The most important reason for not basing the criterion on this notion is that there are conceptual schemes which do not really provide explanations. Some conceptual schemes help us in practices which are not theoretical. They are not aimed at increasing our understanding in some field. Their purpose is rather to satisfy certain needs. Consider carpentry, for example. The conceptual scheme carpenters use has some capacity to provide explanations. For example, a carpenter explain that a board is unsuitable for some purpose because it is too thin. But the explanatory potential of conceptual schemes attached to practical activities is rather limited. So a criterion based on explanation is likely to rule that such conceptual schemes do not intersect, i. e. it is likely to be too strict. The other notion in terms of which we may try to give an account of shared domains is token-identity. Two conceptual schemes share a domain if they are concerned with the same individuals. The first worry about this proposal is that there might be conceptual schemes which we would consider as sharing a domain even though they do not share individuals. I am not sure whether this worry is justified. But I would like to point out that we cannot accept the proposal unless we allow two things. First, the entities which are token-identical with each other might be ‘constructions’. My body is a set of molecules arranged in a rather complex way. It is not always the same set of molecules. So it is better to identify it with a series of sets of molecules. But a series of sets of molecules is not the sort of individual we usually talk about when we talk about molecules. Chemistry hardly ever talks about such individuals. It is a construction from the elements which can be readily described in the language of chemistry. This is not an argument against tokenidentity: constructed individuals are individuals. Second, there may be more than one individuals described in a conceptual scheme with which an individual described in another conceptual scheme can be identified. I just had breakfast. I am still digesting. At exactly what point do the molecules of the food become parts of my body? When I take them in my mouth? When they are swallowed? When they reach my stomach? After certain chemical processes have taken place in my stomach? Or only after they are absorbed? There may be no single best answer. In this case my body can be identified with different constructions out of molecules.xlviii

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Again, this is not an objection to token-identity. Rather, it is something we should accept if choose token-identity. But there is a reason for not choosing it. Consider the mind-body problem. Materialists claim that the mentalistic conceptual scheme and the conceptual scheme of neurophysiology share a domain. They may hold that certain mental events are token-identical with brain events. Suppose they have even pointed out the brain events which they take to be identical with certain mental events. The dualist may resist. He would say that the domains of the mentalistic discourse and the neurophysiological discourse do not intersect. The mental domain and the neurophysiological domains are completely different. Mental events and the brain events occur at the same time, but this is all they have in common. They are not identical. How could the materialist respond? He would have to argue that the connection is tighter than sheer temporal coincidence. To argue for a tighter connections means arguing for supervenience. It comes down to this. Token-identity presupposes supervenience. So even if we chose token-identity, we could not do without supervenience. But supervenience can make sense of the idea of intersecting domains alone. So we do not need token-identity. Moreover, supervenience would be a tenable criterion even if there were intersecting domains but no token-identity. Consequently, supervenience is a better criterion. 2. DAVIDSON’S CHALLENGE Davidson’s argument is complex. It consists of several separate arguments and it is directed against several different notions of conceptual scheme. I will not attempt here a comprehensive evaluation. I will merely to show that it does not work against my notion of conceptual scheme. So I will ignore many of the complexities and discuss only those aspects which seem to cut against my position. On the other hand, I will also consider possible readings of the argument which Davidson would probably reject. The overall structure of the argument is this. The idea of a conceptual scheme involves a twofold distinction. A conceptual scheme is not a language and not a theory either. If a conceptual scheme were a particular language, or, better, if it were associated with a particular language, we would have to talk about the English conceptual scheme, the German conceptual scheme, the French conceptual scheme and so on. Most friends of conceptual schemes do not want that. They would rather say that they share the same conceptual scheme. Of course, English, German and French differ in many respects, but their difference is not of the right sort. Different languages may have different conceptual schemes, but then they have to differ in certain specific ways. Similarly, theoretical differences, or differences in opinion, do not automatically amount to differences in conceptual schemes. Some people still believe that the Earth is flat. Surely, their beliefs are quite different from ours. Still, they do not have a different conceptual scheme. But saying what does not count as difference in conceptual scheme is not enough to legitimize the notion. One would have to say what such differences are. In other words, we need criteria to individuate conceptual schemes. If there are no such criteria, the concept is empty; it is nothing

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but a verbal ornament. In that case all claims about conceptual schemes, in particular, all claims about conceptual relativism based on this notion are senseless. The standard reply to this challenge is to link the notion to untranslatability. A conceptual scheme is a set of intertranslatable languages. If we can translate a language, it shares our conceptual scheme. If we cannot, it has a different one. This reply has two versions. The notion can be tied either to complete or to partial untranslatability. Against the first option Davidson argues that something that is untranslatable cannot identified as a language. Any evidence to show that something is not translatable into our language is also evidence to show that it is not a language. So it is impossible that there are different conceptual schemes. And if there cannot be different conceptual schemes, it makes little sense to say that we all share the same conceptual scheme. Partial untranslatability will not do either, for Davidson shows that cases of partial untranslatability can equally understood as cases of partial disagreement. So there is no principled way to distinguish between conceptual difference and disagreement in opinions. The conclusion is that the attempt to give clear sense to the notion has failed, and the notion should go by the board. The notion I used is clearly in the target area. I talked both about words and concepts, but it was assumed throughout the discussion that the same concept can be expressed by different words. Merely linguistic differences do not affect the identity of concepts. In keeping with this, I believe that conceptual schemes cannot be attached to particular languages. I also hold that the same conceptual scheme can be used to formulate views which contradict one another. As a result, clashing opinions do not have to signal different conceptual schemes. So I have to face Davidson’s challenge. I have to show that there is room for conceptual schemes as something in between languages and opinions. My response proceeds in three steps. First, I explain that the identity conditions of conceptual schemes as I used them do not hinge on untranslatability. However, I hold that different conceptual schemes may share the same domain, and some of my remarks concerning this may possibly be understood as claims about complete or partial untranslatability between conceptual schemes. The second and third steps of my argument will show that these claims are not demolished by Davidson’s argument. Remember that I identified a conceptual scheme as ‘a set of closely related concepts, which serve similar purposes, occur in similar contexts, and fit one another’. This definition of conceptual scheme does not make any reference to untranslatability. Also, it does not associate a conceptual scheme with a particular language or with a particular set of opinions. To see this, imagine two groups of scientists in two different countries who belong to the same specialty. They speak different languages, so their words are different. Their opinions may also differ about a variety of questions. But their conceptual schemes agree. They share the conceptual apparatus of the specialty, even though the words they use to express the concepts are different, and the views expressed by these concepts are also somewhat different. It may be objected that the definition still tacitly assumes the idea of translatability. How do we know after all that the words in the two communities express the same concepts? We have to translate the two languages. It is only when the translation succeeds that we can speak of a shared conceptual scheme. But then,

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presumably, difference in conceptual scheme is to be identified by the failure of translation. So this definition is not really different from the one Davidson proposes, namely that a conceptual scheme is a set of intertranslatable languages (“On the Very Idea”, 184). So am I just confusing the reader by dressing up a familiar notion in a fancy way? I hope not. Take a different case. As earlier, we have two groups of scientists in two different countries, but this time they belong to different specialties. Say, we have Polish entomologists and Russian ornithologists. On my criterion they have different conceptual schemes. The concepts of entomology and ornithology do not fit each other, they are not used in the same contexts and for the same purposes. Davidson’s criterion may yield the same judgment, if ‘language’ is understood in the appropriately. If it were understood as a complete natural language, there would be no untranslatability, for Polish and Russian are intertranslatable. But Davidson would be willing to use ‘language’ in a looser sense, in which we can call a proper part of a natural language a ‘language’, and thus talk about the language of psychology or the language of Newtonian physics. If he were not, he could attack Sapir and Whorf, but not Kuhn or Feyerabend.xlix Also, if he were not, the previous objection would fail, since his criterion would be clearly distinguishable from mine. So let us accept that his criterion yields the same judgment as mine, because Polish entomology and Russian ornithology are not intertranslatable. The judgment is the same, but the reasons for it are different. Which is the better reason, Davidson’s or mine? Mine is better, because it is deeper. The two sets of concepts cannot be mapped onto each other because they are used for completely different purposes. Entomologists and ornithologists are interested in different animals. They are engaged in different enterprises. So they need different concepts. That is why their concepts cannot be mapped onto one another. Untranslatability is but a natural consequence. So the objection does not work. Even if we construe Davidson’s criterion in a way that it yields the same judgments about the identity of conceptual schemes, my criterion still cannot be reduced to his criterion. So the identity conditions I propose for conceptual schemes is different from the identity conditions Davidson examines and finds untenable. Nevertheless, this was but the first step, which alone is insufficient to get me off the hook. It is possible that the identification conditions I propose and some other things I say together add up to a notion of conceptual scheme which is demolished by Davidson’s argument. We have to get clearer about the notion of conceptual scheme which he targets. He would surely have nothing against treating sets of concepts like those of the entomologists’ and the ornithologists’ as special units. If ‘conceptual scheme’ stood simply for such units, he would regard it as a somewhat vague, but permissible notion. He would not regard it as an interesting notion either. The claim that there are such units is trivial, and has no philosophical significance in itself. In fact, the criterion of identity he examines is unlikely to be directed against such units, for it makes little sense to say that entomological concepts cannot be ‘translated’ into ornithological ones. No one in his right mind would think that they can be. The idea of translation is out of place in this context. We can sensibly talk about translation only when it can be reasonably expected that two pieces of discourse can rendered intelligible in each other’s terms. We can only expect this if

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they talk about the same thing in some sense. So we can talk about translation between natural languages, since it is legitimate to expect that speakers of different languages can discuss the same subjects. Likewise, one may raise the issue of translation between different scientific theories which have the same subject matter, like classical mechanics and relativistic mechanics. This is the way ‘translation’ has to be understood in the definition of conceptual scheme Davidson proposes. If it is indeed understood in this way, he can deny that the entomological and the ornithological vocabulary have the status of different conceptual schemes. He also captures the views of most advocates of the scheme-idea. Whorf denies that the content of Hopi sentences can be adequately captured in English. Kuhn and Feyerabend deny that the content of certain superceded scientific theories can be captured in the contemporary idiom. We would have guessed otherwise. The claim of untranslatability comes as a surprise. This is part of the reason why the notion of conceptual scheme examined by Davidson is interesting. It suggests that there are pieces of discourse dealing with the same subject matter which cannot be translated into one another. If I am committed to this claim, Davidson’s argument may still hit me, even if my trivial conceptual schemes, like those of the entomologists’ and the ornithologists’ will survive. (IR3) says that there may be more than one adequate conceptual schemes of a given domain such that none of them can type-reduce the others. Is this a claim about untranslatability? There is some similarity between reduction and translation. In reduction we establish links between two families of predicates. Translation involves the creation of a dictionary telling which predicates of the two languages correspond to one another. But the epistemological status of the two are different. So unreducibility cannot be reckoned as a species of untranslatability unless we stretch the notions. Should we stretch the notions in this way? Davidson would certainly resist, since that would make his argument against conceptual schemes come to bear on his anomalous monism (“Mental Events”, “Psychology”, “Material Mind”). Anomalous monism, Davidson’s philosophy of mind, involves both identity of domains and irreducibility. Davidson believes that mental events supervene on physical events. In fact, each mental event is identical with a physical event, i. e. we have token-identity. However, there is nothing more than token-identity: mental event types and physical event types do not match, so the mental is irreducible to the physical. If irreducibility were taken as a species of untranslatability, the mentalistic and the physicalistic idiom should be regarded as untranslatable languages. (We have already seen that ‘language’ has to be taken in the loose sense in which these idioms are languages.) But if Davidson’s argument against conceptual schemes is sound, there cannot be untranslatable languages. Therefore, his description of the relation between the mentalistic and the physicalistic language must be wrong. So anomalous monism is refuted. The point is this. If Davidson were to regard the failure of type-reduction as a failure of translation, he would get into a fix: his argument against conceptual schemes would destroy his anomalous monism. So Davidson would not consider irreducibility as a kind of untranslatability. But then (IR3) is not a claim about untranslatability either. So my definition of conceptual scheme conjoined with (IR3) is not a target Davidson’s argument would hit.

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But I may still be committed to untranslatability in a different way. When Davidson touches on the issue of type reducibility, he says that A language may contain simple predicates whose extensions are matched by no simple predicates, or even by any predicates at all, in some other language. What enables us to make this point in particular cases is an ontology common to the two languages, with concepts that individuate the same objects … we will have to individuate according to familiar principles. A language that organizes such entities must be a language like very like our own. (“On the Very Idea”, 192)

This suggests that what guarantees translatability in the absence of a close match between predicates is agreement about individuation. However, I said that conceptual schemes may differ about individuation as well. If we have neither typereducibility, nor token-identity, translation may be impossible. So it looks that what I said about conceptual schemes still involves an untranslatability claim. I am not sure I would like to commit myself to this, but suppose I do. In this case I have to show that this commitment can be maintained. To be precise, what I have to show is this. There may be discourses having a common subject matter – or domain, to use the term from (IR3) – which both classify and individuate differently. Let me sketch a scenario of this kind. Suppose we have certain concepts for dealing with certain objects. Then it occurs to us that these objects can be put to some different use. In order to use them in a different way, we have to extend our knowledge about them. This requires the introduction of new predicates. The new predicates provide new ways of individuation. And it actually turns out that we are better off if we redraw the boundaries of individuals. The reclassification and the reidentification goes on for a while, and eventually we have arrived at a new discourse, which looks completely different from the old one. It talks about different entities, which are classified differently. There are no matching individuals or types. There is also no possibility of translation. However, the domain has not changed. We know that, because there are systematic connections between facts specified in the two conceptual schemes. If the facts in one of them change, so do the facts specified in the other one. There is no systematic way of spelling out the changes. The connections are two heterogeneous to allow the formulation of laws. What we have then is supervenience. And supervenience suffices for the identity of domains. Unlikely as this scenario is, there is nothing incoherent about it. Now, Davidson’s central argument is that something that is untranslatable would not be recognized as a language. This does not apply here. For we certainly recognize both conceptual schemes as linguistic. In fact, we need no evidence. Both belong to our language. We know that, because we know our language. There remains only one way this sort of untranslatability may be problematic. Davidson argues that the metaphors in terms of which the work of conceptual schemes is explained are inconsistent with untranslatability. One of the two metaphors he examines is the metaphor of organization. Conceptual schemes are supposed to organize or systematize the world differently. I used this metaphor myself. If it cannot be reconciled with untranslatability, I am in trouble. The problem Davidson sees is this. What is organized must be some sort of plurality. So the world to be organized must be conceived of as consisting of individuals. So even if two conceptual schemes organize differently, they must agree on individuation.

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(That is the thought I have just quoted.) And if two languages individuate similarly, they surely cannot be completely untranslatable. I used ‘organization’ in a broader sense. In the sense I used the term it includes not only classification, but also individuation. Whereas classification indeed presupposes a plurality of things, the same is not true of individuation. When we individuate, we divide or carve up the world into individuals. What can be divided or carved up must be a unity. If you are asked to divide two things, you will be bewildered. If there are two of them, they are already divided. The best you can do is to divide each of them. So the organization picture I used does not require agreement on individuation, so it does not imply translatability. This completes the second step of the my reply. What we have seen is that neither (IR3), nor anything else I said in connection with it make my position vulnerable to Davidson’s argument. There is only one kind of untranslatability claim I might accept, but that one has not been refuted by Davidson. (IR3) is about adequate conceptual schemes. These conceptual schemes can live in peace with one another. Each does its own job. But not all conceptual schemes sharing a domain maintain this peaceful relation. There are also competing conceptual schemes. Competing conceptual schemes have the same job, and they are sufficiently close so that they can be compared point by point. This second feature makes my discussion similar to what Davidson considers, when he turns from complete to partial untranslatability, the idea of ‘making changes and contrasts in conceptual schemes intelligible by reference to the common part’ (“On the Very Idea”, 195). The idea is there is some mismatch between the conceptual apparatus of the two languages, but it is local, and can be easily stated. Even though I did not speak about partial untranslatability, and even less did I try to spell out the notion of conceptual scheme in terms of partial untranslatability, the cases I discussed (zebralope and water) are of this nature. So what Davidson says about these cases may cut against my account. And what he says is that if we interpret someone’s speech, there is no clear way to distinguish between conceptual difference and disagreement in beliefs. He illustrates this with a friend who calls a ketch a ‘yawl’. Why did he do that? He may be mistaken, i. e. he may have a false belief, a belief which is different from yours. Or he may understand the word ‘yawl’ in a different way than you do (“On the Very Idea”, 196). Gathering more evidence about his behavior may help us to decide between the two options. But there is no general principle which would tell when we should locate the disagreement in the conceptual apparatus and when in the opinions. Perhaps the trouble is simply this. We have several equally good ways of describing the other’s concepts, provided that the attribution of belief is adjusted accordingly. In other words, there is no such thing as the set of concepts the other possesses. A conceptual scheme is supposed to be a single entity. But we cannot identify a single entity. We end up with several entities. So there is no such entity as someone’s conceptual scheme. People have different conceptual schemes on different interpretations. However, if this argument is accepted, it eliminates too much. One should also stop talking about someone’s beliefs, since different interpretations attribute different beliefs to the same person. If the fact that concepts and beliefs can be mutually adjusted during interpretation is detrimental for concepts, so it is for beliefs. But shedding the notion of belief is about the last thing Davidson wants.

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He concludes: … the attempt to give a solid meaning to the idea of conceptual relativism, and hence to the idea of a conceptual scheme, fares no better when based on partial failure of translation than when based on total failure. Given the underlying methodology of interpretation, we could not be in a position to judge that others had concepts or beliefs radically different from our own. (“On the Very Idea”, 197) (italics added)

I grant the second sentence. Davidson’s theory of interpretation, with the principle of charity at its core, indeed disallows radical differences in opinion. But so did I when I spoke about competing conceptual schemes (3.2.), and when I defended my account of sharing domains (5.2.). In fact, I even cited Davidson at these points. So it is unclear how the argument works against my position. Let me recapitulate. I have allowed three sorts of differences between conceptual schemes. The first sort is the one which obtains between the conceptual scheme of entomology and ornithology. Davidson’s argument is not concerned with pieces of discourse which are related in this way. It is not this sort of difference he is out to challenge. The second sort is the difference between equally adequate conceptual schemes of the same domain. I have tried out various arguments which could be constructed on the basis of what Davidson says, but none of them shows that there are no conceptual structures which could differ in this way. Finally, there are competing conceptual schemes, of which only one can be adequate. I could hardly find anything that would qualify as an argument against that. 3. PHYSICALISM, NATURALISM, AND RELATIVISM In this concluding section I would like to explore the connection between internal realism and three general philosophical positions about which there has been much discussion in the last three or four decades. Let me begin with physicalism. Physicalism today is generally regarded as part of the scientific world view. Our century has produced unprecedented advances in practically all branches of science. This confirms the conviction, which has been around since the 18th century, that there is nothing that could not be studied in a scientific way. There is no entity which, by its very nature, would disallow scientific examination. The growth of physics has been especially impressive. Theories in various branches of science have been reduced to physics. Even in the branches where no reduction has been achieved, physics is becoming increasing relevant. Scientists in many different specialties have to turn to physicists for information to get along with their research. This is just what we should expect if physicalism is true. For physicalism, in the first and rough characterization, is the doctrine that everything is physical. There is much debate about the precise formulation of physicalism, but the core idea is clear. To be a physicalist is to commit oneself to the scientific view world, and to think that the present tendencies within science are likely to continue, i.e. the significance of physics is going to increase. This is sometimes put in terms of the final outcome of scientific research: if scientific research were completed, we would see that everything that there is can be described in physical terms. Every scientific

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enterprise would turn out to be a special branch of physics. Physics will provide universal coverage. There are several different ways in which people tried to spell out this core idea. So I cannot do justice here to all the different varieties. I would like to distinguish between two sorts of physicalism only. One is reductive chain physicalism (e.g. Oppenheim and Putnam, “Unity of Science”). It holds that anything non-physical can be reduced to physics through a series of type-reductions. For example, ‘demand’, which is a type in economics, can be reduced to some psychological types, which, in turn, can be reduced to neurophysiological types, which can be reduced to biochemical types, which can be finally reduced to physical types. Since there are many intervening steps, we cannot hope to give anything like a concise physical definition of ‘demand’. But the chain of reductions assures us that demand is something physical. The idea of reductive chains is closely associated with the idea of eliminativism. The types which are not included in any of the reductive chains terminating in physics fail to capture anything real. Therefore, what cannot be reduced should be eliminated. So reduction and elimination are two sides of the same coin. Being physical means occurring in a reductive chain. Since everything is physical, everything real must occur in a reductive chain; and what is not real should be eliminated. Reductive chain physicalism alone does not take sides on the issue whether some particular type should be reduced or eliminated. For example, both type-type identity theories of the mind and eliminative materialism are versions of reductive chain physicalism in this sense. Reductive chain physicalism was the only version of physicalism in its early days, and it still has hold on some people. It was the mind-body problem which has has led to the emergence of another version of the doctrine, non-reductive physicalism. By the seventies, many people came to believe that the mental cannot be reduced, but it should not be eliminated. So they looked for a different way to elaborate physicalism, and they found it in the notion of the supervenience. They formulate the doctrine as saying that everything supervenes on the physical. What I want to argue for is that non-reductive physicalism is perfectly compatible with internal realism. Of course, non-reductive physicalism has many varieties. The variety I shall discuss is the one which uses the notion of supervenience I employed in giving a criterion for sharing domain. It holds that all non-physical facts strongly and at least globally supervene on physical facts.l I use the same sort supervenience in both cases quite intentionally. The reason is that physicalism is really a claim about the identity of domains. It belongs to the core of physicalism that physics provides universal coverage. There is no fact which would fall outside of the domain of the conceptual scheme of physics. Any fact described in terms of any conceptual scheme must supervene on physical facts, which means that physics covers the domain of all other conceptual schemes. So the form of the supervenience claim in the criterion for sharing a domain and in the statement of physicalism must coincide. If it turns out that this formulation of physicalism is wrong, that will be compelling reason to modify the criterion. To show that internal realism is indeed compatible with non-reductive physicalism, we have to consider the central theses of internal realism. Let us begin with (IR1), which asserts that the structure of the world is ontologically dependent

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on the human mind. The first and most obvious reason one might think that this thesis clashes with physicalism is this. Physicalism holds that the world is thoroughly physical. (IR1) might be taken to mean that it is saturated with mentality. If things depend on the human mind, they cannot really be physical. This argument seems to be based on a kind of mind-body dualism, which is incompatible with physicalism. If we are physicalists, we hold that the mind is physical. The idea that something physical depends on something physical does not run against physicalism. One might also worry about the ontological nature of the dependence. To recapitulate, x is ontologically dependent on y, if it depends on it for its existence, i. e. it could not exist in the absence of y. So (IR1) holds that the structure of the world could not exist without the mind. But physics does not tell us anything like that. Indeed, what physics describes is a completely mindless world, in the sense that the theories of basic physics do not imply that there must be certain physical structures which can be identified with minds. In fact, the best theories we have suggest that in the history of the universe there was a period in which no physical structures existed which could support minds. The universe was just too hot for a while, so there were no stable and sufficiently well-organized structures which could have mentality. Of course, if you describe the complete physical story of the universe, you have, in a way, also described minds, since all facts about mentality supervene on physical facts. But this does not change the fact that in physics there is no special provision for minds. To see that this worry is unjustified we must distinguish between the content of the physical picture and the picture itself. What has just been described is the content of the picture. It is clearly true that it is not part of the content of the physical picture that the existence of physical things entails the existence of minds. But we can only talk about physical things by painting a physical picture. And the picture itself cannot be painted without minds. Physics does not do itself; it is people who do physics. So the picture itself is dependent on the mind. The content of the picture presupposes that there is a picture. In this way, the content of the picture is also dependent on the mind. Where the worry goes wrong is this. It focuses on the content of the picture. But if we focus on the content, we loose sight of the picture. Once we loose sight of the picture, we find no dependence on the mind, so we are tempted to say that (IR1) goes against physics. But if we keep in mind that the content is the content of a picture, we can see that it is dependent on the mind. It seems to me that this worry has really very little to do with physicalism. It can be raised without any references to physics. It would go like this. Take what we know about any non-mental thing. The set of facts we can list does not include the fact that it is ontologically dependent on the mind. So we have just found a counterexample to (IR1). But this sort of worry can be raised only if we forget that the facts we list are the facts we know, and knowledge presupposes mind.li This forgetfulness can be excused only by metaphysical realists, who believe that the facts are simply out there and their character is completely independent on the mind. So this is not really a worry about the compatibility of physicalism and internal realism. Rather, it is an expression of metaphysical realist resentment to internal realism.

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(IR2), which holds that truth is not radically non-epistemic does not present any special difficulties. (IR3), the claim that there may be more than one adequate conceptual schemes of a given domain such that none of them can type-reduce the others, contradicts two kinds of physicalism. One is reductive chain physicalism. Since physicalism is essentially a claim about the identity of domains, if someone chooses to spell out physicalism in terms of reductive chains, he has no reason to accept the criterion for sharing domains I have proposed. He would use a stronger criterion. He would say that two conceptual schemes share a domain if and only if they belong to the same reductive chain. But then sharing a domain would imply, or, at least, would come close to implying type-reducibility. It depends on the notion of type-reduction which is the case. If type-reduction is defined in a way that makes type-reducibility a transitive relation, sharing a domain would imply typereducibility, so reductive chain physicalism would be in straightforward contradiction with (IR3). If the definition of type-reduction allows that typereducibility is not transitive, we would not have a straightforward contradiction. This sort of reductive chain physicalist would allow that economics and neurophysiology share a domain without being type-reducible to one another, because economics is reducible to psychology and psychology is reducible to neurophysiology. So he would accept (IR3) in principle. But this would be accepting the letter and not the spirit. This kind of reductive chain physicalist would acknowledge only in very few cases that we have irreducible but equally adequate conceptual schemes of the same domain. The internal realist, who construes sharing domains in a more liberal way, would allow much more cases. Thus even though this sort of reductive chain physicalism and internal realism do not expressly contradict, they would issue conflicting judgments. The other sort of physicalism which contradicts (IR3) is the extreme view according to which nothing really exists in the strict sense of the word, except for the entities which can be completely described in physical terms. It is a kind of global eliminativism about everything apart from the physical. On this view there is nothing else but particles, fields, etc.; tables, elephants and clouds do not ‘exist’ in the strict sense of the word. This view is hardly ever embraced openly, even though one may often find statements of physicalism which can be construed in this way. On this view there is really only one adequate conceptual scheme, the conceptual scheme of physics. Other conceptual schemes are adequate only in some loose sense. The conclusion we must draw is than this. Physicalism have versions which contradict internal realism. But the version of physicalism we are concerned with, the version spelled out in terms of supervenience, is not one of them. We may turn now to the close ally of physicalism, naturalism. Even though the two doctrines are different, they are usually accepted or rejected together. On one reading, physicalism is just a special version of naturalism. Naturalism would then be the doctrine that everything is natural, in the sense that it can be described in terms of the natural sciences. Nevertheless, it would allow that certain things are natural, but not physical. However, it is difficult to find non-physicalist naturalists. One sign of this is that the ‘natural’ and the ‘physical’ tend to be regarded as virtual synonyms in the philosophical parlance. Many discussions of physicalism begin

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with the remark that the term ‘physics’ should be construed broadly, as encompassing chemistry, physiology, etc. Another sign is that whereas there is a discussion about the proper articulation of physicalism, there is no such discussion concerning naturalism. This gives the impression that people believe that naturalism conceived as a claim similar to, but less restrictive than physicalism is not worth articulating. At any rate, if naturalism is construed along the same line as physicalism, its relation to internal realism is clear. Since physicalism is a special version of naturalism, and I have argued that non-reductive physicalism is compatible with internal realism, I have also shown that internal realism is compatible with non-reductive naturalism. If we want to distinguish naturalism from physicalism, it is better to construe it as a philosophical program. The purpose of the program is to try to bring certain notions used in the characterization of human activities into the sphere of the natural sciences. Put differently, the purpose is to show that certain things which are characteristic of human beings, and which are often thought to distinguish human beings from the natural world, are well within the reach of the natural sciences. The favorite targets of naturalization are semantics and epistemology. Naturalists try to achieve their objectives in this way. They give some sort of analysis or theory of what they want to naturalize in terms which are respectable within the natural sciences. We have discussed two attempts to naturalize semantics in 3.3. The causalinformational view explains reference in terms of nomological connections. The teleological view explains it in terms of functions. ‘Nomological connections’ are the sorts of things which science is in the business of exploring. ‘Function’ is a respectable notion in biology. In both cases we have a redescription of semantic phenomena which uses the conceptual tools of the natural sciences. The naturalizing views are not themselves scientific views. They are attempts to bridge the gap between common non-scientific descriptions and scientific descriptions. They can also be taken as recommendations as to the overall shape which the empirically testable scientific theories about these phenomena should eventually take. Internal realism is not part of the naturalistic program. (Although the remarks in 3.1. which are concerned with the possible extension of the semantics advanced there to animals are pretty much in the spirit of naturalistic accounts.) This does not show that the two are incompatible. A naturalist may have views which have not been formulated within the framework of the naturalistic program. However, it is not at all easy to compare a set of doctrines and a program. One may try to compare internal realism with particular naturalistic claims. This is what I did in 3.3. But this does not promise a general answer, since internal realism may be compatible with the program without being compatible with some of the doctrines advanced within the program. There is, however, something about internal realism which may suggest that it does not mesh with naturalism. It has to do with the very idea of internalism. Internal realism holds that the only reality we can talk about is a reality structured through our concepts. We may change our concepts if we judge them inadequate, but we can never get rid of all conceptual structures to arrive at some sort of reality whose structure is independent of all conceptualization. Even if we shed certain conceptual schemes, we still remain inside some other conceptual schemes. So we

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cannot view things but from an internal perspective. However, the perspective of the natural sciences, which is also shared by naturalism, seems to be external. Consider an entomologists studying the life in a beehive. He is an outside observer who does not, need not and, probably, cannot see the world from the bees’ perspective. But this sort of external perspective has nothing to do with the sort of external perspective internal realism rejects. The entomologist’s external perspective is external to the bees. The external perspective internal realism rejects is a perspective which is external to all human conceptualization. It is what Putnam calls God’s Eye point of view (Reason, Truth and History, 49-50). If ‘internal’ is understood in the spirit of internal realism, the entomologist’s view is clearly internal. Nonetheless, there is a view which can also be spelled out in terms of the external-internal distinction and which does contradict the ambitions of naturalism. It is the view that science ‘objectifies’ what it examines, i. e. it treats it as an external object, but there are limits to what this sort of objectifying attitude can achieve. There are certain truths about ourselves which are not visible from the point of view science adopts. These truths can only be discovered if we treat ourselves as subjects rather than objects. They are not discovered in the way in which facts about the world are discovered. We live through them or experience them. In their case, there is no distinction between going through them and learning about them. This view is hardly ever articulated within analytic philosophy, even though it has affinities with what some people say about qualia. If this view is right, the naturalistic program cannot be completed. There will always be some internal residue which cannot be described from a scientific perspective. But internal realism is not connected to this view. It makes no distinction between the external objectifying attitude and internal experience. So it is not committed to the idea that there must be ‘unnaturalizable’ truths. Perhaps we can have a better idea of the relationship between internal realism and naturalism if we consider the motivations which guide the naturalistic program. One sort of motivation is trying to see to what extent our earlier non-scientific views can be integrated into science. Science has grown quite dramatically in the last centuries, especially in our century. It has come to encompass several fields which used to be outside of its area. There are several topics which used to be outside the limits of science but now we have scientific accounts of them. Some of these topics emerged as a result of scientific inquiry. Without science we would have no idea of black holes. But there are some topics whose existence was recognized before science came to study them. There are also fields which have not been completely incorporated into science so far. It would be interesting to find out what will happen with our non-scientific views about these fields. In principle, three things might happen. It may turn out that the non-scientific view clashes with the scientific account. In this case we are either forced to abandon our earlier views, or we may keep them and use them, but stop taking them too seriously. The second possibility is to find that the non-scientific views by and large agree with the scientific account. They may not be as precise the scientific views, they may leave certain things unexplained, but they are basically correct. They can be easily reformulated in scientific terms and, in this way, they can be made into parts of the scientific account. The third possibility is that the non-scientific views do not contradict the

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scientific views, but they also resist tight integration into science. For example, they are connected with certain practical activities, and they serve these activities quite well, but the concepts they use have no good counterparts in science. To put the same point differently, if the scientific views were stated in terms of the concepts of these non-scientific views, they would not satisfy the strict requirements scientific views are expected to meet. A non-scientific view may be a generalization about a class of things which, from the scientific viewpoint, do not form a homogeneous class. The non-scientific view does not match a single scientific generalization, or even a closed set of generalizations, but summarizes an enormous number of scientific views which belong to several different theories. If the purpose of naturalization is to find out which of these three possibilities is likely to be realized with regard to a particular field, and to explore in what way we may try to incorporate that field into science, it is perfectly compatible with internal realism. But there is another sort of motivation as well, which may be characterized as a distrust of anything non-scientific. It is based on the idea that only science can deliver the truth. If it is questionable whether particular concepts can be integrated into science, these concepts are suspicious. As they stand, they are unclean. They require legitimization, and it is only science that can give them legitimacy. They have to be shown to be precursors of or, at least, approximations to scientific concepts. If this cannot be shown, they belong to folk mythology, and should be treated accordingly. Psychologists, sociologists or historians may study how people came to use such concepts. But they should be discarded outside this context. At best, they can be regarded as useful fictions. This sort of thinking denies that there is a third alternative between rejection by science and integration into science. What cannot be integrated should be rejected. It is this idea which is captured by reductive chain physicalism: what cannot be reduced should be eliminated. This motivation goes against internal realism. The tight integration required for legitimacy points into the direction of demanding type-reducibility. But (IR3) holds that there may be equally adequate conceptual schemes of the same domain which are not typereducible. So naturalists with this kind of motivation are unlikely to appreciate internal realism. What we have finally come to is this. Internal realism has nothing against naturalism. But the naturalistic program can be pursued in a spirit which is in tension with internal realism. It is also important to see that internal realism has nothing to do with the ideas which give rise to anti-naturalistic and anti-science sentiments. There are two ideas of this kind. First, religion. Science and religion are hard to reconcile. One may try to eliminate the straightforward contradictions between the two by reinterpreting certain religious doctrines. However, the spirits of the two ventures are antithetical, so new and new contradictions are bound to appear. The second idea is secular. It is the fear that science will transform our life in unfavorable ways. The scientific knowledge of nature has transformed our environment quite dramatically. The fear is that if science finds out the truth about ourselves, some of the things we value most will have to be given up. For example, what will happen to love if we gain a scientific understanding of it? These fears are understandable. Some of them may even turn out to be justified. This would be an

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interesting question to explore. But internal realism is not a philosophical articulation of these fears. Let us now turn to the third doctrine, relativism. As it has been noted, the notion of conceptual scheme, which plays a crucial role in internal realism, has often been associated with relativism. Throughout the book I was working hard to free the notion of the relativistic implications. Let me recapitulate the most important moves. First, I defined conceptual scheme in a way which involves no commitment to relativism (2.1.). According to the definition, conceptual scheme are not global worldviews. They are not views, but sets of concepts, and they are not global, but rather small. You do not have a single conceptual scheme excluding all other conceptual schemes; rather, everyone uses several conceptual schemes. Nor does the definition include the idea that the difference in conceptual schemes has something to do with unintelligibility. Second, I claimed that reference is not relative to conceptual schemes in any serious sense. It is relative only in the trivial way in which reference is relative to language. One can speak of the reference of a particular word only if there is such a word in the language. Similarly, talk of the reference of a concept does not assume more than that there is such a concept. I did allow the notion of ‘relative reference’ in the explanation of the behavior of other people, but I emphasized that reference, as it is normally understood, is not relative. In addition, I have argued that the inference to relativism based on the notion of relative reference is misguided (3.2.). Relative reference is a completely innocuous explanatory construct, which can be legitimately invoked in rationalizing explanations of behavior. But what we ordinarily mean by ‘reference’ is not relative reference. The crucial idea that made it possible to avoid relativism in this context was that reference is fixed by adequate conceptual schemes. People with inadequate conceptual schemes do not refer to something else than we do. They do not have a special sort of reference relation which gives rise to truths different from our own truths. Rather, they refer to the same things, but they are often wrong in their claims. Truth was then defined in terms of reference. The non-relativistic notion of reference in this way results a nonrelativistic account of truth. Third, I gave a non-relativistic account of the adequacy of conceptual schemes (4.2.). This is important, since if my notion of adequacy had been committed to relativism, relativism would have infected reference and truth as well. Adequacy was defined in terms of success and choiceworthiness. I argued that success is causally independent of us, so it is objective. Choiceworthiness was introduced to prevent distorted evaluations of success. It is a criteria which prevents a practice with a given conceptual scheme from degenerating into a self-justifying microcosm. I raised the possibility of another relativistic threat, the idea that a large group of practices together may form a self-justifying whole. I argued that this is a genuine threat only if someone grants the relativistic premise that there are completely disjunct cultures with no common practices. But internal realism is free to reject it. Fourth, I examined Davidson’s attack on the notion of conceptual scheme, which is directed primarily against that notion of conceptual scheme in terms of which relativistic claims tend to be articulated (5.2.). I considered various ways in which Davidson’s argument may come to bear on what I said about conceptual schemes,

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but could not find any cogent argument against my position. It seems to me that this alone might be sufficient to show that my notion of conceptual scheme is not the sort which is associated with relativism. We may get a better picture, perhaps, if we consider what stance internal realism takes with regard to three general sorts of relativistic claims. The first general sort is connected to the notion of truth, and it holds that truth is a relative notion. There is no such thing absolute truth. Truth is relative to conceptual schemes, or something like that. The same view may be true relative to one conceptual scheme, and false relative to another conceptual scheme. Truth within a conceptual scheme may be objective. But there is no objective truth ranging over all conceptual schemes. This sort of claim is rejected by internal realism. According to internal realism, the adequacy of a conceptual scheme is an objective feature. Reference is fixed by adequate conceptual schemes. Truth is defined in terms of reference. Hence, it is objective. There is only one point in the account about which one may worry. Choiceworthiness figures in the definition of adequacy, and choiceworthiness involves coherence with other practices. One may think that it is possible that a particular practice seems choiceworthy when it is examined against the background of a certain set of practices, but it does not seem choiceworthy when it is checked against a different set of practices. So adequacy – and, therefore, truth – may be relative to complete sets of practices, i. e. cultures. This would be cultural relativism. Internal realism alone cannot rule out cultural relativism. But it is not committed to it. One may only smuggle relativism into internal realism if he holds that there are completely disjunct cultures. But the claim that there are completely disjunct cultures is itself a part of cultural relativism. So what we get is just this. Cultural relativism plus internal realism together imply cultural relativism. But those who reject the idea of completely disjunct cultures do not have to worry that internal realism saddles them with cultural relativism. The second sort of relativistic claim is that conceptual schemes are mutually unintelligible. Internal realism allows certain sorts of unintelligibility, but it is not the sort which unintelligibility relativists have in mind. There are two kinds of cases in which a particular conceptual scheme is not intelligible in terms of another conceptual scheme. In the first case they simply deal with different issues. This is a completely innocent situation. For example, the conceptual scheme of carpentry and microeconomics cannot be interpreted into each other, but this does not give rise to relativistic conclusions. The second case is when we have two conceptual schemes sharing a domain. If two conceptual schemes sharing a domain are mutually unintelligible in each other’s terms, they cannot be competitors. I argued, namely, that competition between conceptual schemes requires that they must be sufficiently similar to allow point by point comparison. But if point by point comparison is possible, then the conceptual scheme are not mutually unintelligible. So mutually unintelligible conceptual schemes sharing a domain cannot be in competition. One may then accept and use both. This is not relativism, but pluralism. Relativism is concerned with situations in which you have to choose between incompatible alternatives, but each choice is as good as the other. Internal realism, on the other hand, holds that if there are mutually unintelligible conceptual schemes, you do not have to choose, because the alternatives are not incompatible.

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The third sort of relativistic claim is that you may face incompatible alternatives without neutral criteria which to rely on. I have outlined the basic mechanism for the evaluation of conceptual schemes. In order to decide whether a conceptual scheme is adequate we have to determine the success and choiceworthiness of the practice it supports. Success is an internal criterion, because the kind of success a practice tries to achieve depends on the aims of the practice. If two practices have different aims, success is not a neutral criterion, but we do not have to choose between such practices. If they have the same aims, like competing scientific theories do, success is a neutral criterion. Choiceworthiness is also a neutral criterion (supposing – as I do – that there are no completely disjunct cultures). It serves to put practices in perspective by comparing them with related practices. So internal realism does provide neutral criteria. Of course, these criteria are far too general to use in particular situations. There is room for disagreement with regard to the more specific criteria, i. e. the local specifications of these general kinds of criteria. People may rank the importance of the various criteria differently. It is also possible that they agree about the criteria, but disagree about there applications. These possibilities establish merely that sometimes it is very difficult to choose between rivals. If relativism is to be an interesting doctrine, it must assert more than people may sometimes fail to agree. It must establish that there is some sort of in principle barrier which prevents consensus. Internal realism is clearly not committed to the existence of these barriers. Moreover, if it is right, it makes it more difficult to argue for the existence of such barriers. All in all, the relation between internal realism and relativism seems to be this. Internal realism does not imply relativism. It rules out certain forms of relativism, but does not refute all versions of the doctrine. One of the reasons why people may find relativism fascinating is that it seems to justify human freedom. They fear that the idea of absolute truth is linked to intellectual dictatorship. I think this fear is misplaced. Truth alone does not infringe on people’s right to believe what they like. Only other people can do that. Since internal realism is committed to fallibilism, it gives us reasons for not constraining intellectual liberty in the name of truth. For we might not possess the truth.

NOTES

Notes to Chapter 1 1 At least in the sense of ‘realism’ they were willing to allow. ‘Realism’ in the sense in which it is contrasted with idealism or phenomenalism, i. e. in the sense in which it is normally used in philosophical discussion, was rendered meaningless by the criterion of verifiability. 2 Quine’s rejection of the second dogma of empiricism, namely that each sentence taken by itself can be checked against experience, is a straightforward consequence of the rejection of the dogma of the analytic-synthetic distinction. With the analytic sentences vanished from the picture, there is no special set of sentences whose only job is to transfer meaning from observational to theoretical terms. Rather, all sentences in which theoretical terms occur contribute to the meanings of these terms. Thus the link between theoretical terms and experience consists in the whole network of sentences. To attribute empirical significance to a theoretical sentence the whole network must be presupposed. This is why what is tested empirically is a whole network of sentences rather than a single sentence. 3 Kuhn and the others were not the only ones to object to the idea of pure observation or raw experience. Sellars has argued that if something satisfies the logical positivists’ description of ‘the given’, it must be epistemologically inert, i. e. it cannot figure in justificatory arguments. But the whole point of the given was to provide foundations for knowledge. Quine may have also rejected the idea of raw experience. His position is not absolutely clear on this issue. He keeps talking about ‘retinal irradiations’ and ‘surface irritations’, which may be regarded as the physicalistic equivalents of the logical positivists’ sense-data and may be supposed to fulfil a similar epistemological role. On this reading Quine departs from the positivists only in denying that this sort of raw experience can be captured in language. Whereas the logical positivists believed in the possibility of a language of pure experience, Quine does not. He believes that wherever there is language, there is conceptualization, and wherever there is conceptualization, we are in the domain of theory-building (Word and Object, 2-3). So there is pure observation, but there is no pure observation language. But his break with the positivists may be more radical than that. Perhaps his retinal irradiations and surface irritations have nothing to do with sense-data. It may not be more than a physiological fact about us that we have such irritations. This fact should be included in the naturalistic account of knowledge, but these entities are never cited in our arguments and are never invoked as final arbiters between rival knowledge claims 4 Kuhn’s book is notoriously unclear. I am not claiming that the view to be described now can actually be found in the book, but many people have understood it along these lines. 5 Nelson Goodman does not want to shy away from such conclusions: ‘I am afraid that my remarks above about conflicting truths and multiple actual worlds may be passed over as purely rhetorical. They are not.’ (Ways of World-Making, 110)

Notes to Chapter 2 1 This is a development of Putnam’s most explicit concise description of metaphysical realism: ‘… the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of “the way the world is”. Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things.’ (Reason, Truth and History, 49) Let me indicate briefly why I did not stick to this formulation. The first statement speaks only about objects, while one can be metaphysical realist about any ontological category. The last sentence forgets about deflationists, who can be metaphysical realists as well. The ‘exactly one true and complete description’ is spelled out in such a way that only one member of a class empirically equivalent theories can be true, where empirically equivalent theories are taken to be such that no possible experiment can decide between them (ibid.,73; “Three Kinds of Scientific Realism”, 197-8). That is an extremely strong view to which few people would subscribe. As a result, metaphysical realism would turn into a view with very few advocates. Moreover, Putnam himself is not always willing to saddle metaphysical realism with this claim (Meaning and the Moral Sciences, 131-3; “Equivalence”, 42-45). 2 What about vagueness? I do not think it poses an insolvable problem for the metaphysical realist. He may take three lines. The first and least popular line is to say that in reality there are vague classes.

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The membership criteria do not sort all objects into members and non-members. Classical logic does not fit the structure of reality. In this case, the right logic is a three-valued logic or, more likely, an infinitevalued logic. On the three-valued logic view objects are sorted into members, boundary cases, and nonmembers. In the infinite-valued logic solution criteria assign degrees of membership. The second, somewhat more popular line is epistemicism. Vague predicates stand for classes with sharp boundaries and with yes-or-no membership criteria. We just cannot identify the classes vague predicates stand for. The last and probably the most popular position is to say that vagueness is purely a linguistic affair. Natural classes have sharp boundaries, but some linguistic classifications are not sufficiently fine-grained to capture them. In other words, vague predicates may be useful for practical purposes, but they are unsuitable for grasping the real structures. 3 In the coherence theory of truth ‘consistency’ has to be taken in the syntactic sense. If it is taken in the semantic sense, it presupposes the concept of ‘truth’, which would make the theory circular. The syntactic notion of ‘consistency’ may be called epistemic because it is linked to procedures. 4 Davidson does not believe this any more (“Afterthoughts”, 135). 5 I will not distinguish between reference and satisfaction, for the distinction between the semantic properties of individual expressions and predicates does not matter for my purposes. So I will keep talking about reference. 6 ‘Partially’ here is a different sort of qualification than the one I talked about four paragraphs earlier. In this case we have partial adequacy in the strict sense of adequacy. On the other hand, a conceptual scheme may be – at least in principle – completely adequate ‘for all intents and purposes’, without being even partially adequate in the strict sense. 7 Or we may find that a particular mental state is realized only in a very limited number of ways. If we do not disallow all disjunctive reductions, this might also qualify as type-reduction. 8 Again, this is a development of Putnam’s description of internal realism, which goes as follows: ‘it is characteristic of this view (internal realism) to hold that what object does the world consist of? is a question that it only makes sense to ask within a theory or description. Many “internalist” philosophers, though not all, hold further that there is more than one “true” theory or description of the world. “Truth”, in an internalist 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 or discourse-independent “states of affairs”’. (Reason, Truth and History, 49-50) I have already indicated why I diverge from Putnam’s formulation in connection with the metaphysical realist theses. Here there is an additional difference to be noted. When I spell out (IR2) in detail, it will not hinge on a conceptual link between truth and ideal rational acceptability. Actually, I find the notion ‘ideal rational acceptability’ problematic. What does ‘ideal’ mean here? If it is too close to actual rational acceptability, than the claim will be difficult to maintain. We have seen that our ideas of rational acceptability change in history. So why should we take it for granted that right now we are pretty close to the ideal? If, however, ideal rational acceptability can be quite different from rational acceptability, the notion may loose its epistemic ring. ‘Ideal rational acceptability to God’ is not an epistemic category. Putnam tries to solve the problem in this way: ‘Epistemically ideal conditions’, of course, are like ‘frictionless planes’: we cannot really attain epistemically ideal conditions, or even be absolutely certain that we have come sufficiently close to them. But frictionless planes cannot really be attained either, and yet talk of frictionless planes has ‘cash value’ because we can approximate them to a very high degree of approximation. (Reason, Truth and History, 55) But this analogy is suspicious. In mechanics ‘ideal plane’ serves as a benchmark of description, and measurements and calculations do tell us exactly how far a particular system is from the ideal. Epistemically ideal conditions are not like that. 9 This is one of the ideas Davidson (“On the Very Idea”) attacks. Davidson’s argument will be taken up later, but let me indicate briefly why his criticism does not apply. His point is conceptual scheme cannot disagree about organization without agreeing on individuation. But if different conceptual schemes individuate similarly, they cannot be completely untranslatable. So one cannot use the idea of untranslatability to distinguish between conceptual schemes. However, I did not use the idea of untranslatability in the explanation of the notion of conceptual scheme. Moreover, by ‘organization’ I mean not only classification, but individuation as well. I shall also explain shortly how conceptual schemes which organize differently can be said to organize the same domain of reality.

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I suspect that this dilemma did cause a problem for Putnam. In the beginning he often relied on the organization picture to explain the counterpart of my (IR1) (Reason, Truth and History, 52-3). But he also recognized the need for external constraints (ibid., 54). This is what sets up the dilemma. Then he criticized and abandoned the organization picture for its alleged metaphysical realist implications (Many Faces, 19, 35-6), and stopped to rely on the counterpart of (IR1) in the exposition of internal realism. He came to emphasize (IR3) instead (Many Faces, x-xi; “Truth, Activation Vectors”, 433). 11 There is a traditional worry that the notion of the thing in itself cannot fulfill this role. The explanation of facticity relies on the category of causation. The thing in itself ‘causes’ us to experience things as we do. Kant thus tacitly applies the category of causation to the thing in itself. However, he explicitly forbids the application of categories to anything but phenomena. There is a usual reply to this worry. Kant uses ‘category’ in two different senses: as pure and as schematized. The schematized category includes a temporal element, and it is through the schematization that the category can be applied to phenomena. Since the thing in itself – by definition – is not subject to time, a form of our sensibility, schematized categories cannot be applied to it. On the other hand, nothing precludes the application of pure – unschematized – categories. Hence, Kant’s prohibition can be understood as holding only for schematized categories. So he can be acquitted of the charge of incoherence. Moreover, the application of unschematized categories is inescapable if we are to think of the thing in itself at all, since human thought, by its very nature, is subject to the categories. However, these sorts of thoughts do not amount to knowledge. Knowledge cannot outstrip the bounds of possible experience, but thoughts of the thing in itself do – by the very definition of the thing in itself. So the explanation of facticity itself is not a piece of knowledge. 12 Putnam does not try this route. Even though he occasionally toys with the thought that the idea of the noumenal contains a grain of truth (Reason, Truth and History, 61-2; “Why there isn’t a Ready-Made World, 225-6), his official line is that the notion should be rejected (Meaning and the Moral Sciences, 56; Many Faces, 45-6; Sacks, The World, 8). 13 ‘…”objects” and reference arise out of discourse rather than being prior to discourse…’ (Putnam, “Introduction”, xvi) 14 This is somewhat similar to Wittgenstein’s view in On Certainty. Wittgenstein emphasizes there are some empirical propositions we cannot doubt, because doubting them would call into doubt the meaning of our words, e.g. ‘I am no more certain of the meaning of my words than I am certain of certain judgments. Can I doubt that this color is called “blue”?’ (§126. See also §§80, 81, 114, 124, 140). Of course, he would reject the philosophical speculations about the structure of reality, criteria of identity and the like.

Notes to Chapter 3 1 This is the phenomena of vagueness. There is also higher order vagueness: it is indeterminate where the domain of indeterminacy begins or ends. In such cases the justification conditions are not precise enough to yield consistently the same judgement about the edges of the indeterminate region. 2 Millikan would certainly object (Language; White Queen). In her view, very roughly, a representing item stands for that thing with respect to which the behavior produced as a result of the occurrence of the item would discharge its function. Obviously, if a stickleback is trying to chase off of a red-bellied model, its behavior is dysfunctional. Millikan has a point. Such a stickleback is indeed dead wrong. In the next sections I shall show that this idea can be accommodated within my account. The crucial point is that the stickleback’s ‘conceptual scheme’ is inadequate. 3 In addition to promising to shed light on the notion of analyticity, the present account may also be a starting point for a theory of sense. Sense is supposed to be the semantic property which determines reference. It is also a semantic property which is supposed to solve some major problems in the philosophy of language, like the possibility of non-tautologous identity statements and the possibility of meaningful expressions that lack reference. The present view seems to be able to handle the cases. Consider the identity statement ‘Clark Kent = Superman’, which Lois Lane fails to recognize as true. The puzzle is how she can fail to recognize this. The answer is that mechanisms which fix the reference of the terms of the statement are different. Now take a term without reference, like ‘Pegasus’. We understand this term because we know the justification condition of the sentence ‘This is Pegasus’. Sadly, this justification condition is not satisfied by any objects. Of course, trying to use these ideas to develop a

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theory of sense would soon involve us in enormous complexities, and I am not at all sure that these could be handled. 4 Well, there is a way to guarantee that: to adopt the view that the structure of reality is infinitely fine-grained: the bottom divisions are everywhere, so the upper divisions are bound to meet them. As it was pointed out in 2.2., this view is equivalent to blob realism, the position that unifies the problems of metaphysical realism with that of internal realism. 5 For example, David Lewis makes no bones about accepting (MR1). He holds that here are ‘elite classes’ which cut at the joints of nature, and these are more eligible to serve as referents than the nonelite ones. Yet, he does not believe that this can eliminate Quinean indeterminacy (“Putnam’s Paradox”, 227-8). 6 Strictly speaking, I should not speak of two different conceptual schemes here. First, the sets of concepts we have here {zebra} and {zebra; zebralope} are far too small to be called schemes. Second, if we suppose that we have here two comprehensive zoological taxonomies which differ only at this point, they just do not differ enough to count as separate schemes. They should be called perhaps two variants of the same scheme. I use the word ‘scheme’ for the sake of convenience. In fact, nothing in the ensuing discussion presupposes that what we contrast here are conceptual schemes. The term may be replaced here by completely unloaded expressions like ‘set of concepts’ or ‘conceptual resources’. 7 Suppose that their conceptual schemes are not close at all. One of them has only concepts about the internet, the other has only concepts about carpentry. In this case they will not be able interpret each other. In real life, however, people are not so narrow-minded, except in pathological cases. Yet, it may happen that someone completely lacks certain sorts of concepts. E.g. many people completely lack the conceptual apparatus of quantum mechanics. Without the conceptual resources one does not ‘translate’ the vocabulary in question. Rather, he learns the relevant vocabulary with the help of the other person – relying on an overall interpretation of the rest of the language. 8 The restriction to linguistic behavior is not really necessary. The following remarks apply to all explanation of actions in terms of beliefs and desires, provided that beliefs and desires are identified through their semantic content, and semantic content is cashed out at least partly in terms of reference. Some people believe, as Fodor (“Methodological Solipsim”) did, that no explanation of behavior should appeal to anything outside the mind. Reference is a relation to something outside the mind, so it cannot be invoked in the explanation of behavior. If that is right, the notion of relative reference is superfluous. The only work relative reference is allowed to do is to explain behavior in certain cases. If it cannot do even that, we have to get rid of it. Consequently, the ordinary notion of reference should be identified with reference simpliciter without further ado. 9 In denying (3) I echo an idea which figures prominently in Quine’s (Word and Object) and Davidson’s (“Radical Interpretation”, “Belief”, “On the Very Idea”) (and possibly also Dennett’s (“Intentional Systems”, ”True Believers”)) theory of understanding, the idea that in order to understand the other we have to see how his views are related to out own. Those who reject this, like Feyerabend (Against Method), argue that you can also understand a way of thinking ‘from inside’, without seeing it in relation to your views. They think that understanding is more like primary language acquisition than translation or interpretation. 10 As opposed to the zebra-zebralope case, here we may indeed talk about two different conceptual schemes. The adoption of the Daltonian theory has changed many concepts and has changed them quite substantially. 11 This seems to be somewhat similar to Quine’s indeterminacy of radical translation. There are two languages between whose words we are trying to set up correlations. There are different options, which result from the holistic nature of the enterprise. Of course, the similarity is not perfect. In this case, the ‘translation’ is not radical – there are historical and cultural ties between the languages –, and the indeterminacy results from other factors than the choice of basic units and the individuative apparatus. 12 In fact, I think it cannot. But I have no arguments over and above the ones which can be found in the literature (Loewer, “From Information”). 13 How did we find what the stickleback’s mental item refers to? We did not find that out. We knew it all along. Ethologists knew pretty well that the stickleback can identify rival males. The question was how it can do that. 14 What we more often rationalize is Mother Nature, who carefully adjusts creatures to their environments through the process of natural selection. (Dennett, “Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethology”, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, esp. chapters 8 and 9).

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Notes to Chapter 4 1 Of course, it is a rather complicated question what A and B look like. One reason for the simplification is that A and B may not be fully verbalizable: we can tell if they are satisfied, but we cannot make them fully explicit. 2 In defending his constructive empiricism against the ‘no miracle’ argument for scientific realism, van Fraassen replies in a similar way (The Scientific Image, 39-40, esp. footnote 34). 3 I am afraid, this section will be somewhat sketchy and unsophisticated. This is my fault, but I have an excuse. The issue addressed here has rarely been addressed in the way I intend to, so I cannot rely on technical resources of the sort which are usually developed during prolonged philosophical discussion. This is also the reason why I frequently mention questions which were raised and discussed within the philosophy of science. It is in that field that questions closely related to the ones I discuss emerged. 4 There is one important provision. Each basic color has a prototypical version, the ‘focal’ color, the availability of which is practically unaffected by of words and verbal concepts. In fact, it was the Dani who provided a very strong argument for the existence of focal colors. Given their weak performance in memory tests, it was surprising that each color has a variety with which they are as successful as us. 5 This is the same sort of double vagueness which is also present in the notion of a conceptual scheme. In fact, it is the vagueness of practices which accounts for part of the vagueness of conceptual schemes. Conceptual scheme were defined as sets of closely related concepts, which serve similar purposes, occur in the similar contexts, and fit one another. This definition makes clear that conceptual schemes are often tied to particular practices. In so far as practices are vague, so are conceptual schemes. 6 If one wants to use ‘conceptual scheme’ in the broader sense of involving non-verbal representations as well (as it was briefly indicated in 3.1.), the restriction to theoretical knowledge should be lifted. Concepts would then be devices for coding practical knowledge, i. e. know-how. The male stickleback has the practical knowledge of chasing off rivals in the mating period. This practical knowledge presupposes the ability to pick out rival males. 7 For example, in the sixties some physicists had this attitude to Geoffrey Chew’s theory of nuclear democracy. By that time a vast number of elementary particles have been discovered and new ones were being discovered practically every other day. Most particle physicists were trying to explain the properties of these particles in terms of even more fundamental particles. Given the rate of the discovery of the particles it was not obvious that this task could be accomplished. Chew’s view was that we should stop looking for even more fundamental particles and just take it for granted that there are a vast number of elementary particles. Most physicists, however, remained in the mainstream. Yet, some believed that Chew’s ideas are worth exploring by someone, even if they were not willing to undertake this themselves. Thus they regarded nuclear democracy as choiceworthy. Alas, nuclear democracy never became successful. 8 Therefore, it would be nice to refute that premise. Unfortunately, I have no general argument to show this. The standard move against relativism is to say that it is self-refuting, because if it is true, it undermines its own validity. Since it denies universal validity, it cannot be universally valid itself. This move cannot be employed here, since the premise about disjunct cultures in itself is not a fully-fledged relativistic claim. I think the only way to deal with it is to take particular cases and to show that even quite distant cultures have much in common. This would be a useful exercise also because it would also help to sharpen our understanding of practices. However, I cannot undertake that task now. 9 Of course, the very fact that Putnam makes use of this assumption makes his argument vulnerable against the skeptic. The skeptic may reject this assumption and thereby ward off Putnam’s conclusion even if the rest of the argument is impeccable. This, however, does not make the argument worthless, if we understand it in the context of the metaphysical realism - internal realism debate: it can do some damage to metaphysical realism. 10 This is a simplified version of Anthony Brueckner’s (“Putnam’s Model-Theoretic”) reconstruction of the argument. Most other reconstructions consider only one horn of the dilemma, the first disjunct of (P1), (P3) and (C). The various reconstructions in the literature differ only in small details which are not relevant from the present point of view. I could have used almost any one of them to make my point, but Brueckner’s reconstruction makes this especially easy. For further details see Harrison (“Putnam on Brains”), Casati and Dokic (“Brains in a Vat”), David (“Neither Mentioning”), Tymoczko(“In Defense”, “Brains Don’t Lie”), Tichy (“Putnam on Brains”), Farrell (“Putnam on the Vat-People”), Kinghon (“External World”), Van Kirk (“Kant’s Reply”), Heil (“Epistemic Route”), Sacks (The World, 56-76)), Nagel (The View From Nowhere, 71-4), Dell ‘Utri (“The Case of the Brains”), Collier (“Could I

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Conceive”), Iseminger (“Putnam’s Miraculous”), Stephens and Restow (“Brains in Vats”), van Inwagen (“On Always”). 11 The objection I am going to discuss takes different forms depending on the reconstruction. Sometimes the argument is claimed to have a missing premise, or one premise is claimed to be false, or it is said to assume that we know one of the premises which the skeptic may challenge. This is not the only line of criticism, but it is the only one which I think is successful. The argument has few defenders. Farrell (“Putnam on the Vat-People”) believes that it can be vindicated if it is supplemented with a Wittgensteinian account of rule following. I do not think this is right. Tymoczko (“In Defense”, “Brains Don’t Lie”) defends the argument in the same way as I am going to, but he does not recognize that this line of defense presupposes a good deal of internal realism. Dell ‘Utri (“The Case of the Brains”) holds that from the internal realist position the argument is valid, but his reasons are different from mine. 12 Well, there are two small gaps, which were already mentioned: the justification procedure may be badly executed, or the conceptual scheme may be inadequate. But these gaps are not large enough for global skepticism. They only allow fallibilism.

Notes to Chapter 5 1

Instead of facts described in different vocabularies one may talk of different sorts of facts, i. e. one does not have to mention linguistic items. The non-linguistic formulation is more general: it allows one to speak of supervenience even in cases when one has only general terms to distinguish between kinds of facts (e. g. physical facts and mental facts), but does not have the terms to describe particular facts belonging to these kinds. Since I am looking for a relation between different conceptual schemes, the linguistic version suits my purposes better. This sort of formulation is not unusual (see e. g. Davidson, “Thinking Causes”, 4-5). 2 This cannot be handled by building into the criterion some requirement concerning the range of the correlation, e. g. that all facts describable from a conceptual scheme should be appropriately correlated with facts describable in the other scheme. This would certainly yield the right judgment about the nonidentity of domains in this case, since not all economic facts are appropriately correlated with biological facts. But this requirement would be far too stringent. First of all, conceptual schemes may share a domain in such a way that their respective domains intersect, but neither includes the other. For example, paleontologists and geologists studying the history of Earth are occasionally interested in the same things. Furthermore, the intersection may be unsystematic, since some conceptual schemes may serve rather special purposes. Second, imposing a requirement of this kind would demand a much sharper definition of conceptual schemes that can be expected. If the boundaries of conceptual schemes are vague, it is not very helpful to speak of all facts describable within a conceptual scheme, since the range of ‘all’ is also vague. 3 Putnam makes the same point about the identification of mental states and brain states (“Reflections”, 160-161). 4 But on another occasion, when he is questioned about the compatibility of his anomalous monism and his criticism of the idea of conceptual scheme, Davidson says that ‘a conceptual scheme, in the context of the above remarks, is supposed to correspond to a whole language’ (“Psychology”, 243). 5 Perhaps this should be liberalized so as to allow that past physical facts may be part of the supervenience base. This thesis would then be this: the history of the world strongly supervenes on its physical history. Such liberalization is called for if certain notions are found to involve essential reference to history. For example, there is a view according to which ‘function’ is such a notion. According to this view, something has a given function if it has evolved exactly because it has had the effects which are now regarded as performing that function (Millikan, Language, chapters 1-2, and “Proper Functions”; for a criticism of this sort of view see Bigelow and Pargetter, “Functions”). Generally speaking, I regard the core idea of physicalism more important than any particular precise formulation. If there are counterexamples to a particular formulation, I suggest one should abandon the formulation rather than declare that physicalism has been refuted. For example, Crane and Mellor (“No Question of Physicalism”) have argued that no interesting formulation of physicalism is tenable. No problem. Physicalism does not have to be an interesting doctrine. 6 Compare this with what Putnam writes in a similar context: ‘Here the philosopher is ignoring his own epistemological position. He is philosophizing as if naive realism were true of him (or, equivalently, as if he and he alone were in an absolute relation to the world).’ (“Introductions”; xi)

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INDEX adequacy, 10, 12, 13, 20, 21, 22, 2427, 30, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 55-57, 59-61, 66, 67, 73, 74, 84-87, 91, 92, 94, 96-98, 100, 110, 114, 121, 123, 124, 127, 129, 131-134, 136, 138 See also choiceworthiness, success analyticity, 4-7, 19, 49, 50, 129, 133, 136 anti-realism, 6, 52 Austin, 16, 99 belief, 10, 11, 15, 20, 38, 58, 69, 79, 80, 81, 85, 90-93, 101, 106, 110, 114, 118, 123, 124, 134, 136 Berkeley, 56 blob realism, 27, 28, 30, 35, 136 boundary, 13, 14, 20, 21, 25-28, 33, 41, 42, 48, 84, 87, 92, 122, 134, 139 See also classification, individuation, organization brains in a vat, 10, 99, 100, 103, 105109, 111, 112 Brueckner, 138 causal, 12, 16, 25, 41, 60, 69-73, 83, 91, 104, 105 causal independence, 12, 25, 91, 92, 132 charity, 22, 68, 69, 124 choiceworthiness, 87, 89-93, 96, 98, 100, 132, 133, 138 classification, 2, 12, 13, 17, 19-22, 25, 26, 30-32, 37-41, 43, 45, 46, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 63-65, 70, 79, 82, 85, 87, 92, 112, 122, 127, 130, 133-135, 138 See also organization coherence theory, 15, 134 competition, 57, 73, 82, 97, 123, 124, 133 concept, 2, 3, 5, 7, 13-19, 22, 23, 25, 28-31, 35, 37, 39-41, 43-49, 51,

52, 56, 58, 60, 62, 67, 69-74, 8082, 85-89, 95, 114, 118-124, 129131, 134, 136, 137 conceptual change, 6, 59, 68, 69 conceptual scheme, 1-10, 12, 17-30, 35, 37-42, 55-68, 73, 74, 84-89, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, 100, 110, 111, 113-125, 127, 129, 131-139 See also competition constraints, 21, 24, 26-28, 30, 35, 40, 51, 71, 72, 79, 96, 105, 110, 135 See also objectivity correspondence theory, 15-17, 51, 74, 75 criteria of identity, 9, 13, 26, 30-32, 34, 37, 52, 65, 73, 82, 84, 120, 135 See also individuation Davidson, 9, 10, 15, 19, 58, 68, 110, 114, 118-124, 132, 134-136, 138, 139 deflationism, 16, 50, 133 dependence on the mind, 12, 52, 70, 75, 83, 126, 127 desire, 10, 20, 58, 69, 91-93, 136 Devitt, 12, 15 disquotational schemas, 41, 42, 73, 77 domain, 10, 12, 19, 21-25, 28, 37, 3942, 48, 57, 69, 92, 93, 97, 98, 110117, 119, 121-125, 127, 131, 133, 135, 139 See also many worlds problem, supervenience, tokenidentity, type-reduction Dummett, 36, 50 eliminativism, 125, 127 epistemic, 8, 15, 16, 51, 74, 77, 97, 100, 105, 106, 109, 134 evil genius, 102, 109, 110, 111

148

INDEX

external, 11, 12, 26, 27-29, 35, 75, 79, 88, 90, 96, 110-112, 129, 133, 135 externalism, 67 See also Twin Earth facts, 6, 10, 13, 14, 21, 25, 30, 41, 61, 80, 82, 83, 111-116, 122, 125, 126, 129, 138, 139 fallible, 34, 43, 92, 93, 99, 101-103, 112, 134, 138 Field, 15, 16 Fodor, 69, 71, 72, 136 folk psychology, 22, 41, 42, 47 forms of sensibility, 2, 14, 28, 29 function, 29, 41, 73, 74, 78, 128, 135, 139 functionalism, 22

intelligibility, 19, 28, 36, 55, 120, 123, 133 See also charity, interpretation, translatability internal realism 1, 9, 10, 14, 24, 26, 28, 29, 32-36, 40-42, 46, 49, 50, 52, 55-58, 67, 69, 70, 73-75, 80, 82-84, 93, 94, 96-101, 103, 105, 107, 110-112, 124-129, 131-136, 138 internalism, 41, 67, 75, 129 See also narrow psychological states interpretation, 16, 41, 58, 69, 85, 88, 90, 114, 123, 124, 136, 137 See also intelligibility, translatability intrinsic, 13, 27, 73, 85 See also inherent

Goodman, 39, 133

James, 15 justification, 15, 29, 32-34, 36-38, 41-53, 65-67, 70, 73-75, 77-84, 100-102, 105, 112, 126, 135, 136, 138 justification conditions, 32-34, 36-38, 41-53, 65-67, 70, 73-75, 77-84, 100, 105, 112, 135, 136

Herder, 2 hermeneutic, 2-8, 42, 62, 64, 68 holism, 18, 47, 137 Humboldt, 2 idealism, 4, 6, 9, 14, 17, 133 incommensurability, 7, 62 See also many worlds problem independence of the mind, 9, 12, 14, 16, 21, 26-28, 30, 37, 39-41, 51, 52, 55, 70, 72, 79, 85, 91, 94, 97, 98, 112, 114, 133, 134 See also causal independence, ontological independence, structure indeterminacy, 10, 41, 53, 54, 135137 indeterminate, 44, 135 individuals, 15, 21, 31, 37, 40, 51, 56, 89, 91, 92, 112, 113, 117, 122, 134 individuation, 12-14, 17, 21, 26, 29, 41, 53, 72, 73, 85, 113, 118, 121, 122, 135 See also criteria of identity, organization infallible, 43, 44, 79, 81, 101 inherent, 13, 14, 21, 25-28, 30, 55, 70 See also intrinsic

Kant, 1-9, 14, 28-31, 35, 36, 135, 138 knowledge, 1, 3-5, 11, 20, 26, 28-30, 35, 39-42, 49, 65, 66, 77, 79, 81, 86, 88, 95, 99, 101, 102, 122, 127, 131, 133, 135, 137 Kuhn, 7-9, 26, 42, 89, 94, 95, 120, 133 language, 9, 10, 16, 19, 31, 36, 39, 45, 47, 53, 54, 58, 75, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 100, 104-106, 108, 111, 116-119, 121, 122, 131, 133, 136, 137, 139 Laudan, 95 laws, 5, 69, 71, 94, 122 See also nomological connection Lewis, 41, 136 logical positivism, 4-8, 36, 82, 95, 133

INDEX many worlds problem, 4, 5, 8, 39, 42, 62, 64, 115 See also incommensurability mental content, 10, 64, 68, 69 mental states, 12, 22, 47, 67, 73, 109, 134, 139 See also belief, desire, folk psychology metaphysical realism, 9-18, 23, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 40, 41, 53, 54, 56, 74, 79, 82, 91-93, 97, 98-103, 111, 112, 114, 127, 133-136, 138 Millikan, 73, 75, 135, 139 model-theoretic argument, 40, 52, 53 narrow psychological states, 64, 65, 66 See also internalism naturalism, 10, 23, 75, 110, 124, 128, 129, 131, 133 nomological connection, 69-73, 128 See also laws non-epistemic, 12, 16, 25, 33, 51, 74, 79, 97, 98, 101, 105, 112, 127 non-reductive physicalism, 125, 126, 128 noumena, 1, 2, 4, 8, 35, 135 See also thing in itself object, 13, 14, 17, 22, 24, 25, 27-29, 31, 37, 40, 41, 43, 46, 49, 53, 54, 73-76, 81-83, 86, 92, 106, 110, 115, 121, 122, 129, 133-136 objectivity, 26, 30, 55, 79-85, 91, 92, 96, 97, 132 See also constraints observation, 4-7, 47, 80, 98, 116, 133 ontological independence, 12, 14, 15, 27, 30, 40, 51, 54, 56, 74, 75, 83, 97, 111 operationality, 43, 44, 50, 51 organization, 5, 7, 25, 27-29, 35, 39, 41, 42, 56, 121, 122, 135 See also blob realism, boundary, classification, individuation, organizational metaphysical realism organizational metaphysical realism, 26, 28, 30, 35, 85

149 Peirce, 14, 15, 36 phenomena, 1, 2, 4, 8, 18, 20, 29, 41, 42, 71, 90, 91, 99, 128, 135 physicalism, 10, 18, 19, 24, 42, 56, 88, 90, 110, 112, 115, 116, 119, 121, 124-128, 130, 133, 139 See also eliminativism, non-reductive physicalism, reductive chain Popper, 15 practical criteria, 44, 51, 66, 67, 81 practice, 4, 28, 44, 68, 87-93, 95-98, 100, 116, 132, 133, 137, 138 pragmatism, 14, 15 Putnam, 1, 9, 10, 12, 31, 37, 40, 41, 52, 53, 64, 68, 75, 83, 100, 103, 104, 106, 107, 111, 112, 125, 129, 133-136, 138, 139 quasi-noumenal, 29, 30, 39, 41, 42, 56, 57 quasi-phenomenal, 29-31, 39, 56, 59, 61, 64, 74, 75 Quine, 6, 10, 41, 53, 54, 133, 136, 137 rationalization, 60, 73, 75, 84, 131, 137 reductive chain, 125, 127, 130 reference, 3, 10, 16, 30-38, 40-42, 46, 47, 49, 50-54, 58-79, 83, 84, 86, 96, 104-107, 109, 134-137, 139 See also reference simpliciter, relative reference reference simpliciter, 59-63, 65, 66, 73, 136 reference-fixing, 35, 36, 38, 40, 4244, 46-52, 61, 66, 67, 70, 71, 74, 75, 78, 81, 83, 84, 112 relative reference, 59-65, 68, 73, 74, 84, 131, 136 relativism, 3-7, 10, 17, 19, 26, 28, 62, 64, 85, 96, 97, 110, 118, 120, 124, 131-134, 138 See also incommensurability, many worlds problem

150 representation, 11, 46, 74, 137 scientific realism, 83, 98, 99, 137 semantics, 10, 33, 36, 50, 70-73, 75, 128, 129 skepticism, 10, 32, 52, 74, 97, 99103, 107, 109-112, 138 See also brains in a vat, evil genius structure, 5, 12-14, 17, 18, 21, 22, 2528, 30-32, 34, 37-40, 42, 51, 52, 54-56, 59, 66, 73, 74, 82, 83, 85, 89, 94, 97, 111, 112, 118, 126, 129 See also dependence on the mind, independence of the mind success, 13, 35, 42, 43, 87, 88, 90-92, 98, 100, 103, 108, 137, 138 supervenience, 24, 42, 110-117, 122, 125, 128, 138, 139 Tarski, 15, 16, 51, 74-79, 84 See also T-equivalence teleological, 41, 69, 73-75, 128 T-equivalence, 16, 107 theory, 4-9, 13, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26, 33, 34, 36, 38, 40, 43, 47, 50, 51, 57, 58, 65, 68, 70, 72-75, 80, 83, 85, 86, 89, 94, 95, 98, 105, 114, 115, 118, 120, 124-126, 128, 130, 133, 134, 136, 137 thing in itself, 1, 28, 29, 135 See also noumena token-identity, 21, 22, 40, 115, 117, 121, 122 translatability, 9, 19, 109, 118-123, 135 See also charity, intelligibility, interpretation truth, 3, 6, 9-11, 15-17, 22, 23, 33, 35-37, 40-43, 47, 49-51, 53, 58, 61-65, 68, 73-86, 91, 96-98, 100, 101, 103, 105, 107-112, 114, 122, 124, 126, 127, 130-132, 134 See also coherence theory, correspondence theory, deflationism, verificationism truth conditions, 33, 36, 41, 42, 50, 53, 58, 73-79, 84, 100, 107, 112

INDEX Twin Earth, 10, 41, 64-68, 72 type-reduction, 12, 21-23, 25, 40, 41, 110, 121, 122, 127, 131, 134 useful fiction, 92, 130 vagueness, 10, 19, 48, 87, 120, 134, 135, 137, 139 van Fraassen, 137 verificationism, 9-11, 15, 17, 33, 36, 42, 50, 53, 74, 75, 78, 79, 84, 100103, 112 Wittgenstein, 48, 104, 135, 138

INDEX

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