ABSTRACT
Of course, Putnam never presented himself as a social theorist or political commentator. Nor did he seem interested in connecting his vision of philosophy’s offering “meaningful orientation in life” to more targeted diagnoses of social pathologies (Putnam 1999, 52). Still, when it comes to addressing the contaminating effects of bad metaphysical reasoning, Putnam builds his case upon a rather opaque notion that certain philosophical ideas are especially prone to trickling-down into ordinary moral vocabularies. The aim of this essay is to retrace the toxic legacy of positivism in order to arrive at a clearer picture of how the products of philosophical reasoning (both good and bad) escape the cloistered discourse of expertise. Alongside Putnam, we will consider a parallel critique
of positivism advanced by the Frankfurt School social theorist Jürgen Habermas, who (at least initially) portrays the threat as a hollowing out of interpretive understanding by the singular rubric of technical-instrumental control. My concern here is not whether Habermas’s diagnosis is more reliable than Putnam’s, it is rather to show how their respective critical strategies reveal a deeper dispute concerning the social role of practically-oriented philosophies, both pragmatic and critical.
