Abstract
Putnam’s internal realism is aimed at reconciling realist and antirealist intuitions about truth and the nature of reality. A common complaint about internal realism is that it has never been stated with due precision. This paper attempts to render the position precise by drawing on the literature on conceptual spaces as well as on earlier work of the authors on the notion of identity.
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Notes
It might be objected that this would remove the threat of incommensurability only if people had conscious access to the conceptual spaces that are activated in their minds. However, even if people do not have such access, psychologists can construct people’s conceptual spaces on the basis of those people’s similarity judgments by means of certain statistical techniques, the best-known of which is called “multi-dimensional scaling” (see ibid., 21–24).
Schmitt (1998, 271–272) remarks that metaphysical realists may deny that the world consists of a fixed number of objects, as long as they attribute any indeterminacy in this regard to “what the world is like unconstituted by mind” (ibid., 271). This is presumably right and need not be contested by internal realists. At any rate, given our explication of the cutting metaphor, the indeterminacy is, as will be seen, clearly (also) due to the workings of the human mind.
See, in the same vein, Sosa (1993, 615).
Note, incidentally, that, on our understanding of conceptual schemes, a conceptual scheme provides clear answers to the questions raised in the cited passage: if, for instance, the scheme contains only a space for representing spatial relations and a time space (and possibly also a shape space), then the tree and the space-time region that contains it are identical; if the scheme also contains a color space (and possibly further ones), then the two are non-identical.
See Kripke (1971) for the original argument.
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the workshop Anti-realistic Notions of Truth (Siena, 10–12 September, 2010), organized by Luca Tranchini and Gabriele Usberti. We thank the organizers for the invitation and the audience at the workshop for many helpful comments and questions. We also thank an anonymous referee for extremely helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.
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Decock, L., Douven, I. Putnam’s Internal Realism: A Radical Restatement. Topoi 31, 111–120 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-011-9105-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-011-9105-8