What Is Realistic about Putnam’s Internal Realism?

Abstract

In 1976, Hilary Putnam, longtime champion of metaphysical realism, startled philosophical community by abandoning metaphysical and offering his own alternative which he has been elaborating and defending ever since. Putnam makes an interesting claim about his new position: He insists that appropriate description of view is realism (or sometimes pragmatic realism) and that it is a view that a person motivated by the spirit might justifiably hold. Very few contemporary realists are sympathetic to Putnam's suggestion that his view is realistic. Admittedly, Putnam's position does boast a rich ontology. Electrons exist every bit as much as chairs and tables do, and electrons can even help to explain superficial properties of macro-objects. Few realists, however, are willing to count this as a sufficient condition for being a realist. After all, Putnam insists that ontological commitment is always internal to a conceptual scheme; there is no scheme-independent fact of matter about ultimate furniture of universe. Putnam, then, is no more a realist than is Kant and for many contemporary philosophers, that is to be no realist at all. Failure to recognize realistic motivations for Putnam's rejection of metaphysical has led to a widely shared misunderstanding of Putnam's arguments against metaphysical realism. Realist critics of these arguments, convinced that they pose no serious threat to their views, typically