Comments On Richard Boyd's “What of Pragmatism with the World Here?”

I agree with many of the things Richard Boyd says. The extent of our agreement would be apparent from my chapter in this volume. What's more, I have agreed with those things for a long time, although I think Boyd missed this because he has been reading me in a systematically wrong way. Boyd was so upset by the things I wrote in my “internal realist” period that he has been projecting those views onto my publications ever since, and he shouldn't be doing that. But even in that period, as I have explained in “From Quantum Mechanics to Ethics and Back Again,” I mistakenly believed that Boyd's sort of scientific realism (Putnam 1978: 20 ff) was compatible with my “verificationist semantics” (Putnam 1983). ¹ That was the result of a conversation with Rogers Allbritton, which I have described in that paper. I know this will disappoint Axel Mueller, who has criticized me for accepting Boyd's principles, or the ones that I learned from Boyd, namely that theories in the mature science are typically approximately true, and terms in the mature sciences typically refer. I have long believed those principles (since the 1960s, anyway), and I am unrepentant in that respect (Putnam 2012). ² However, I also think that those principles are not enough to refute the idea that the “right” semantics is verificationist semantics (whether of Dummett's kind, or of the kind I advocated in Reason, Truth and History), because the anti-realist can simply reinterpret the whole language, including all scientific hypotheses expressible in it, and if these principles represent a scientific hypothesis, in a very liberal sense of “scientific” (as we both claim), then the antirealist can reinterpret them too. And that was what I tried to do in my lecture titled “Realism and Reason” (Putnam 1977) and subsequently: accept scientific realism, but reinterpret it to make it compatible with verificationist semantics. I have always been a scientific realist, in spite of the misunderstanding, which is very widespread, that I renounced scientific realism – that's just wrong. And I've never accepted Nelson Goodman's idea that we “make” the world.