A More Laudable Truthfulness

Abstract

When Hilary Putnam wrote in eulogy of his late colleague W. V. O. Quine, he began by asking what it was that made Quine an important philosopher.1 He went on to talk about two kinds of philosophers, those whose arguments were plausible and those whose arguments were and have ever been unbelievable. He counts Quine among the unbelievable (Berkeley is another). If you think you agree with Quine — if you think ontology is relative, translation indeterminate, and that words and sentences have no meaning — you don’t really understand what he’s saying. If you understand it, you see it’s crazy, despite Quine’s elegant arguments. Putnam says Richard Rorty is the only philosopher he knows who both understands and believes Quine’s unbelievable arguments. I am struck by the quick move from “important philosopher” to a discussion on the relative merits of an argument. In the sciences, a personal name (Godel, Darwin) is often shorthand for a proof or theory. Putnam implies that it’s that way in philosophy too. An important philosopher is an important argument. Important doesn’t mean true; it doesn’t even have to be plausible, just important. I wonder if Putnam is right, though, to tie the value of a philosopher’s work to an argument. Is philosophy so committed to dialectics? What if a philosopher