Hilary Putnam Aristotle After Wittgenstein

Hello and welcome. My name is Victor Gijsbers and I teach philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands. In this video, I want to take a look at an article written by Hilary Putnam, the well-known 20th century American philosopher. And the article is called “Aristotle After Wittgenstein”. “Aristotle After Wittgenstein”. Of course, historically, Aristotle comes before Wittgenstein, a fairly long time before Wittgenstein indeed. But in this article, Putnam is interested in trying to think through what the possibilities and difficulties are for taking a sort of neo-Aristotelian view of form and trying to use it to solve the problem of intentionality, or more specifically, reference. So, let me unpack that. There is in philosophy a question about reference, right? So, we have terms, we have words like, let’s say, tree. When I use the word tree in a sentence, I say, I tell you that there’s a tree in my backyard, I’m referring to something, to an object in the world, right? My language hooks onto the world, as Putnam describes it. Either in general, I can say something like trees are plants and I’m referring to, you know, all of these trees, or very specifically, when I talk to you about the tree in my backyard, you know, I might mean one particular object. And so, of course, one of the things that philosophers who think about language, or for that matter, thought, have to do is to explain how language, or for that matter, thought, hooks up with the world, right? How does my word tree manage to refer to this thing? How is this relation created? And what Putnam is going to do in this article is he is first briefly going to introduce Aristotle and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, so the early Wittgenstein on form. Then he is going to sort of raise this question about reference. He’s going to talk about why he thinks that a contemporary theory, I think still an important theory, a causal theory of reference, why it doesn’t work. And then he sees whether either Wittgenstein or maybe Aristotle can help us. Now, he’s not going to be extremely optimistic about what Aristotle can do for us, but I do think like the general gist of the article is that at least the Aristotelian way of doing things might look more promising than the causal theory of reference, or sort of the Tractarian Wittgenstein-like account that of reference that you could try to to give there. So, he’s not going to end up endorsing the neo-Aristotelianism. He’s going to give us several problems for a neo-Aristotelian theory of reference, but at least it seems to be a theory that he thinks is worth contemplating, worth, you know, trying to work out further, and especially more promising than the famous causal theory of reference. So, where do we start? Putnam starts with a citation from book three of Aristotle’s De Anima. And Aristotle there writes the following. “The thinking part of the soul, while impossible, must be capable of receiving the form of an object, that is, must potentially be the same as its object without being the object.” And so, the idea for an Aristotelian is that things have form, right? And then like the most important form that I have, for instance, is I am a human being. And I might have other other forms as well. And being a human being means being a rational animal and so on. I mean, that’s that’s sort of my form. So, form is not like shape, right? It’s not like my physical shape. Like primarily, my form is being a human being, that is, being a rational animal. And so, if you if you see me, presumably, like with a mind that’s capable of understanding what you’re seeing, then you will see that I’m a human being and a rational animal. And so, the form comes from the world into your mind, into your soul. And as Putnam points out, like how that works, how form gets into the soul and how it, you know, how the soul can have this form without becoming a rational animal or whatever it is that it’s thinking about or looking at, I mean, these are difficult questions of Aristotle exegesis that people were worrying about for millennia. But the basic idea would be things have form. And when we look at them, that form gets into us and so maybe, if we start thinking about language and reference later on, maybe language can sort of hook onto form, like this form that is already there in the world. That would be the the basic idea. The next thing that Putnam does is he cites Wittgenstein. And again, this is the Wittgenstein from the Tractatus. And here is 2.18 from the Tractatus in Putnam’s translation. “Whatever picture of whatever form must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it at all, rightly or wrongly, is the logical form, that is, the form of the reality.” So, Wittgenstein too is talking here about form. And in this particular passage, he’s talking about the form of a picture, which corresponds in the world with the form of a of a fact or a state of affairs. Now, I don’t really understand why Putnam takes this sentence from the Tractatus, because in the rest of the article, Putnam wants to be talking, even when he’s talking about Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, he is talking about the form of objects. And in this passage, Wittgenstein is not talking about the form of objects, but pictures and states of affairs. He does, however, earlier in the in the twos of the Tractatus, also talk about the form of an object, which is basically its possibilities of being connected to other objects in states of affairs. And so, if I think of an object, then its logical form is all the possibilities, all the ways of it being connected to other objects in a state of affairs. All right, so Putnam is not wrong when he says that Wittgenstein has this idea of the form of an object. He just gives a sort of strange passage to illustrate it. But that’s okay. I mean, we we can work with this. Now, the notion of form in Aristotle and the notion of form in Wittgenstein here, even though they’re both applied to objects, are very different. They’re very different, first of all, because the kind of form that we’re talking about is very different. So, Aristotle would say that my form is like being a rational animal, among other things, maybe more specific things. I’m a rational animal. And Wittgenstein’s objects have a form which is more something like, oh, this object can be connected to, I don’t know, three other objects, something like that, or it can be connected with these relationships, but not with these relationships. I mean, that’s the kind of form that Wittgenstein is thinking about. It’s much more abstract, much more sort of purely logical. Furthermore, when Aristotle talks about objects and their form, what he’s talking about are people and tables and sheep and clouds, maybe. I don’t know whether clouds have a form. You know, the kind of middle-sized objects that we encounter in daily life. When Wittgenstein is talking about objects in the Tractatus, these objects are sort of the elementary constituents of reality. But they’re not just sort of elementary particles or something like that. They’re fairly strange things. They’re each of them individual. They each have a name. Language is built up out of these names. They all exist necessarily, these objects. And Wittgenstein never tells us what they are. And there’s an early tradition of understanding the Tractatus that identifies them with something like sense data. And maybe later on people try to identify them with things like elementary particles, but Wittgenstein is completely agnostic about this. But he doesn’t tell us what these objects are, and they are at the very least very strange things. So, Aristotle, Wittgenstein, different objects, different notion of form, but they both talk about the form of objects when they think about thinking or language. And so, that’s why Putnam is bringing them together. Now, before we can see whether Wittgenstein and Aristotle can help us understand this notion of reference, we’ve got to understand what’s wrong with the most famous, most influential at the time that Putnam is writing this, and you know, maybe even still today, theory of reference, which is the causal theory of reference, or the causal theories of reference. Like the basic idea is that in order to for a for a word to get this property that it refers to a particular thing or that it refers to a particular kind of thing, um well, the minimal thing is that there has to be a causal connection. Like so, if I talk about trees, and if trees is to mean like to refer to those things in the world, then those things in the world, those trees, need to have had some kind of causal connection to our use of the word in the English language. But that is too minimal. To really be a causal theory of reference, what you would have to do is you would have to define a reference in terms of causal relations. Right? So you have to say, “Well, a word refers to an object X or to objects of type X just in case it has this and this kind of causal relation with them.” Right? So you really try to reduce talk about these intentional terms, meaning, reference, and so on. You try to reduce that to talk about causal relations. Right? So it’s a reductive type of theory, at least assuming that the notion of causation is a a reductive notion, that that that doesn’t sort of depend on intentional ideas like meaning and so on. Uh assuming that causation is just something in nature, what you’re trying to give here is sort of reductive theory of intentionality. Now, I think people still like to think about reference and causation, but maybe this idea, important when at the time that Putnam is writing this, but this idea that I could be a reductive analysis of reference in terms of causation, I’m not sure if there’s still many people around who are defending that, but I didn’t look it up. So, why does Putnam think that such causal theories of reference can’t really work? And he points out to us that there’s a couple of things that we believe about causation nowadays that don’t fit such a reductive causal theory of reference very well. The first thing is we believe that causation is a relation between events. Right? So, what causes what is not something causing some other thing, but some event causing another event. Right? So I clap in my hands. Ah, you heard a clap. Right? So there was a causal relation between my clapping and your hearing. It’s not so much that I caused you. Right? And it would also be very strange to say that there’s an object, my clapping, which causes another object, your hearing. It more seems like there’s one event causing another event. So the very idea that reference is about objects, um but that causation is about events, already seems to be a little bit of a mismatch. And then Putnam goes on to explain that uh what we’ve learned from from Donald Davidson is that we can describe events with very different in very different ways, some of which are logically equivalent in the sense that they always have to be true at the same sort of in the same circumstances, um but but but they have a very different meaning or or intention. But they just seem to talk about different things. And so events do not themselves sort of tell us, like from nature alone, uh how to describe them and what kind of terms and concepts and objects like to talk about when we describe the event. Now, Putnam gives us some examples. So one example is say he says “Someone gave me a pair of apples.” And then he says “Someone gave me an even prime number of apples.” And a pair is two, and the only even prime number is also two. And yeah, you know, one of these events seems to be talking about prime numbers, and the other doesn’t. Hmm. Okay, [clears throat] so how does that work? I mean, does this event involve prime numbers or not? Well, that seems to be just a matter of how we decide to describe it. Uh and then Putnam goes on to sort of reiterate a permutation argument that he gave in his 1981 book Reason, Truth, and History, where basically he shows that you can define some really weird references for terms which are really change weirdly in contexts where the word cat sometimes refers to cats, but in other circumstances refers to cherries. And you can do it in such a way that every sentence uh retains the same truth value, and in fact retains the same truth value in every possible world. And so what Putnam is suggesting here, uh very briefly, I think, um compared to like how he originally works out this this entire permutation argument, but what he is suggesting here very briefly is that we can describe the world using terms with very very different references such that the truths all come out the same way. And that means that unless sort of we can first decide which description is the right description, um like which terms we have to use, the idea that that we can just look at nature to tell us how to build reference into our how how language gets to refer to things uh is just hopeless. Right? If nature itself does not like if we only have sort of this abstract logical picture, and in the abstract logical picture we can either talk about cats or we can talk about these weird cat star things which are sometimes cats and sometimes cherries, but all the truths come out the same way, um if nature doesn’t sort of tell us which of these two things is the right way of talking, then nature also can’t tell us what the word cat refers to. Right? Does it refer to cats or does it refer to these cat-cherry hybrid weirdo uh constructions? Like there’s no way for nature to tell us that. And so what Putnam is working towards is the idea that we need something like form already in nature if we want to tell this kind of story about how language can hook up to the world. Right? Nature itself, without a story about form, can be described in too many different ways, and so there’s no sense in which it predetermines the reference of our language, and therefore in which it determines the reference of our language. So, okay. Let’s see how this goes when we move to Wittgenstein and Aristotle. Like can their notion of form then maybe help us? Can they say something like, “Aha, well, if we assume that there’s form in reality and form in language, then the story that we can tell is that language hooks up to the world by having the same form.” Right? That would be the basic idea. Language can hook up to the world by having the same form. Well, Putnam briefly discusses Wittgenstein, and he points out that well, first of all, we have no idea what Wittgenstein’s objects are, but also they kind of all seem to have more or less the same logical form, and so it’s really hard to see how reference could be determined by that kind of form. And I think that’s right. Uh it’s also a little bit weird to give this argument because the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus does not believe that reference comes in through this notion of form. Uh he believes that reference comes in through names. Right? The Tractarian language is built up out of names which stand sort of in a primitive relation of reference to particular objects. And it’s complete magic how that works. I mean, he doesn’t really have a theory about that, but that’s the level at which reference sort of exists. Uh so I think Wittgenstein would agree that form, Tractarian form, like even the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus would agree that Tractarian form can’t be the thing that generates reference. Okay. So then, let’s check out Aristotle. What about Aristotle? Well, Aristotle, Putnam points out, for Aristotle form is not a logical notion, but a metaphysical notion. And that maybe helps him because it’s more substantial, so to speak. There’s more to it. If you think that in my form is being a rational animal, um well, that has a certain sort of metaphysical substance, and so maybe my form as a rational animal is different from the forms of all these other things in the world, not from other humans, but from everything else in the world. And so there’s all these sort of naturally different forms in the world. And if maybe our language also has those kinds of forms in it, then we can have this very natural relation between on the one hand our speaking and on the other hand the world, and so possibly a neo-Aristotelian can tell a story about reference that roughly works like that. Right? Take our language, look at the forms of our language, take the world, look at the forms in the world, and wherever it matches, that’s where language is talking about that part of the world. That’s where reference is. Now, interestingly, Putnam tells us that something a little bit like this is happening in David Lewis. And I say interestingly because David Lewis is not known as a neo-Aristotelian. Uh I would say on the contrary, he’s known as a neo-Humean, and a lot of what he’s saying about stuff like modality is very anti-Aristotelian indeed. But what Putnam is thinking about is that Lewis has this idea of natural properties. So he thinks that certain properties in the world are intrinsically natural. And so, for instance, maybe, I mean, this I think for Lewis is something that in the end science perhaps will have to tell us, maybe something like having negative charge is a natural property. It’s not just our description. It’s sort of really one of the basic um most metaphysically fundamental properties that are out there in the world. So, Lewis is is giving us this this uh metaphysically realist story where the world has these natural properties. And then, like what you can say about reference is that our language hooks up. Like whenever we try to say something about natural properties, right? When we think that we are talking about the fundamental constituents of the world, um this naturally refers to the natural properties themselves. So, in order to get rid of these weird cat-cherry hybrid constructions that Putnam makes, we can say, “Well, that’s not a natural property.” Right? But there are natural properties in the world, and that’s what language sort of naturally hooks up to. And Putnam thinks that this is fishy. He thinks it’s fishy, and he explains the way that he thinks it’s fishy by pointing out that Lewis uses the story about naturalness uh in the discussion about Putnam’s brain-in-a-vat um scenario, where Lewis tells us, “Well, Putnam, I think, would say that if you’re a brain-in-a-vat, right? Uh and so, what you’re in touch with is maybe this computer model or these these electromagnetic pulses or whatever, um that that is what your language is referring to.” I mean, he doesn’t go into a lot of detail, but I think that’s what he wants to say, right? Your your ideas, your terms, your thoughts refer to um the simulation that you are that you are in contact with. And it couldn’t refer to anything else, right? Because you are, in fact, in contact with that simulation. I mean, that’s what you’re thinking about. Whereas Lewis tells us that, “No, no, we have to understand the brain-in-a-vat as sort of referring to what is truly be natural.” And what is truly natural are these things in the natural world, like I don’t know, maybe electric charge or whatever, or maybe trees or whatever. I don’t think trees would come out as natural under Lewis’s ideas. Something like electric charge, maybe. Um and so, the brain-in-a-vat, even though he’s not in contact with the external world, still manages to refer to the external world. So, here is here is Lewis. In short, it is precisely because no interaction Here’s Putnam on Lewis. In short, it is precisely because no interaction at all is required for language to hook onto the world that, in Lewis’s view, terms can refer to things with which we and our linguistic ancestors have never had the slightest contact. Of course, on any theory, we can refer to some things with which we have not have had the slightest contact because we can describe them using terms for properties and things with which we have had contact, but the fact that even this is not necessary for reference on Lewis’s view makes his account totally magical. Right? So, Putnam thinks that uh unless there is some kind of connection between you and the world you’re referring to, the idea that you could refer to that world is just magical. That’s not what a real theory of reference ought to look like. So, it’s a pretty quick argument, um but you can see why he would think that. Right? You can see why you would think that our language can only refer to things that we are at least indirectly in contact with. Right? I can, of course, talk about things I’ve not been in contact with, like a planet that we haven’t seen yet or something like that, but I’ve been in contact with with stars and planets and so on. Okay. So, um that might be a problem for a neo-Aristotelian theory of reference, right? That it seems to be magical in the sense that if you say, “Well, you just take your language in its form and reality in its form, and then you get reference between them when the forms are the same, then even though you’ve never been in contact with these forms, you can still refer to them.” And Putnam thinks that that’s weird, that that is magical. A second problem, which he touches on only very briefly for a neo-Aristotelian of reference, would be that um we might be completely wrong about forms, right? We think that Aristotle, like his science was wrong about a lot of things at a very deep level. So, does that mean that he didn’t manage to refer to things? Like did Aristotle fail to refer to water because he had no idea that water was H2O or like even that it consisted of particles and so on and so forth? I mean, that seems weird, right? We would like a theory on which Aristotle is already referring to water even though he doesn’t really know metaphysically what water is. All right. So, that’s the second problem. The third problem uh is something that Putnam seems really interested in. He talks uh at it at some length. The third problem is that we should worry, now as Aristotle didn’t worry, we should worry about whether things really have these unique essences, whether they really have this one form that defines what they are. And Putnam gives an example from biology. He says, “Well, is it part of the essence of dogs that they descend from wolves? Right? Is it part of the essence of dogs that they descend from wolves?” And then he says, “Well, according to the evolutionary biologist, yes. According to the molecular biologist, no. If you look at things from sort of different parts of science or from different interests sort of in general, um you will describe them in different ways, and you will think different things about them are essential.” And so, Putnam rejects this idea, which, for instance, we find in Kripke. He rejects this idea that there are these sort of unique essences, like water is uniquely H2O, dogs are uniquely the domesticated descendant of wolves, um human beings are uniquely rational animals, and so on and so forth. He rejects the idea that there is this one privileged description of things that gives us their unique essence. And if that doesn’t exist, um then, of course, it becomes a lot less clear that there is such a thing as my form which determines reference, right? And so, once again, we’ve got a reason, according to Putnam, to think that maybe this neo-Aristotelian um account of reference is not going to really work. So, his conclusion at the end of the paper is that um even an account of intentionality, reference, meaning, whatever, uh in terms of form is probably not going to be reductive. And I think that probably a lot of people who do think of themselves as neo-Aristotelians uh nowadays might be happy with that. Right? So, the arguments that Putnam gives against the neo-Aristotelian theory of reference are primarily arguments against a neo-Aristotelian reductive theory of reference, where reference is defined in terms of form, and forms are understood in ways that do not require us to talk about reference, meaning, interest, you know, anything that has to do with humans and their thinking. Whether there’s anyone who thought that that was possible, I’m not sure. I mean, Putnam is really sort of exploring, I think, a possibility that um isn’t there yet in the books. He’s trying to see whether it’s something that we should try, and he certainly seems to think that it works maybe better than a purely causal theory of reference, but still not going to work well enough that he has to give up his own idea, uh where his own idea is that intentional vocabulary, talking about reference and meaning and so on, is irreducible, right? You can’t naturalize it. You can’t turn it into um a discourse that does not already talk about things like meaning and interpretation and reference and so on. So, that was Aristotle after Wittgenstein. Lots of Aristotle, little bit of Wittgenstein. Um I think it’s a fun article. Putnam wrote it for a book. Uh it’s the kind of article that I think you you you I mean, when you get invited to write for a book called something like modern thinkers and ancient thinkers or thinkers ancient and modern, um you can just try something out, right? And that’s what he’s doing here. He’s trying out Aristotle when applied to a contemporary discussion about reference, seeing what happens. I think [snorts] the result is uh is interesting and enlightening, and I hope you thought so, too. Thanks.