1. See Dworkin, Ronald, Taking Rights Seriously (1978)Google Scholar, A Matter of Principle (1985)Google Scholar, and Laws Empire (1986).Google Scholar

2. See Hard Cases in Taking Rights Seriously, supra note 1.

3. See Austin, John, A Plea for Excuses in Philosophical Papers 183–85 (2nd ed., J.O. Urmson & G.J. Warnock eds., 1970)Google Scholar on the question as to whether ordinary usage is “the Last Word.”

4. One finds this tendency throughout analytic and continental philosophy; in Russell's quip that ordinary language is the repository of the metaphysics of the caveman, and in the following passage from Derrida: “Now, ‘everyday language’ is not innocent or neutral. It is the language of Western metaphysics, and it carries with it not only a considerable number of presuppositions of all types, but also presuppositions inseparable from metaphysics, which, although little attended to, are knotted into a system.” Position's 19 (Bass, Alan trans., 1981).Google Scholar

5. This example, which I recommend for an excellent discussion of this issue, is from Travis, Charles, Annals of Analysis C2 Mind 237–64 (1991)Google Scholar (critical notice of H.P. Grice, Studies in the Wav of Words).

6. I believe that Dworkin was influenced by an argument of Gareth Evans' purporting to show that second order vagueness is a self-contradictory idea (“second order vagueness” is the property that it is vague just where the line between an indeterminate case and determinate case should be drawn.) The fallacy in Evans' reasoning is nicely exposed by Richard Heck in A Note on the Logic of (Higher Order) Vagueness, 53Google Scholar Analysis 201–8 (1993). It is also worthwhile to recall Austin, 's “general warning in philosophy”Google Scholar in Austin, , supra note 3, at 203 n. 1:Google Scholar

It seems to be too readily assumed that if we can only discover the true meanings of each of a cluster of key terms, usually historic terms, that we use in some particular field (as, for example, “right,” “good,” and the rest in morals), then it must without question transpire that each will fit into place in some single, interlocking, consistent. conceptual scheme. Not only is there no reason to assume this, but all historical probability is against it, especially in the use of a language derived from such various civilizations as our[s] is. We may cheerfully use, and with weight, terms which are not so much head-on incompatible as simply disparate, which just do not fit in or even on.

7. See Fried, 's The Artificial Reason of the Law on What Lawyers Know, 60 Tex. L. Rev. 35 (1981).Google Scholar

8. I am influenced here by Anat Biletski's work on Hobbes. She has been kind enough to let me read the manuscript of her work in progress titled Hobbes: Language and Politics.

9. For a discussion of this aspect of Dewey's thought, see Putnam, Hilary and Putnam, Ruth Anna. Dewey's Logic Epistemology as Hypothesis, in 26 Trans. C.S. Purge Soc. 407–34 (reprinted in my Words and Life, forthcoming. Harvard University Press. 1994).Google Scholar

10. The idea that the axioms of rational preference theory are a priori has been defended-or rather, simply assumed—by Donald Davidson in his well-known papers on the philosophy of mind. (See, for example, the papers in Davidson, 's Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 1984).Google Scholar For a criticism of those axioms, see my Rationality in Decision Theory and in Ethics, in Rationality In Question (Biderman, Shlomo and Sharfstein, Ben-Ami eds., 1981)Google Scholar.

11. See, in particular, Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism (1982)Google Scholar and the discussions of pragmatism in his 1 Objectivity. Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers (1991)Google Scholar.

12. Sleeper, R. W., The Necessity of Pragmatism 141 (1986)Google Scholar. Let me say that I disagree with Sleeper's attribution of “the method of tenacity” to William James in the quoted paragraph.

13. E.g., in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, in Solidarity or Objectivity? and Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth reprinted in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth supra note 11, and, most recently, in Putnam and the Relativist Menace, 90 J. Phil. 443–61 (1993).Google Scholar

14. Cf. Solidarity or Objectivity, supra note 13.

15. I discuss it at more length in The Question of Realism, a paper which is included in my forthcoming Words and Life.

16. Id.

17. This idea, of course, is one that was eloquently defended by Max Weber. See, for example, his Science as a Vocation in From Max Weber (H.H. Gerth & C.W. Mills eds., 1958).Google Scholar

18. On this, see Mcdowell, John, Mind and World (1994).Google Scholar

19. For a discussion of this psychology, and its survival in both linguistic philosophy and existentialism, see Murdoch, Iris, the sovereignty of “Gooo” (1971).Google Scholar

20. The fullest statement of Dewcy's account, which I attempt to summarize below, is his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. A terse statement is his The Theory of Valuation in The Encyclopedia of Unified Science. See also Putnam & Putnam, supra note 9.

21. Dewey, John, Experienceand Nature 407–408 (1926).Google Scholar

22. In addition to Putnam & Putnam, supra note 9, see my A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy [with Afterword] in 63 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1671–97 (1990)Google Scholar, and Putnam, H. & Putnam, R. A., Education for DemocracyGoogle Scholar, in Words and Life.

23. See my Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity, in Words and Life.

24. The Fixation of Belief is reprinted in 5Google Scholar The Collected Papers of Peirce, Charles Sanders, Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (Charles Hartshorne & Paul Weiss eds., 1965)Google Scholar.

25. Variants of this position (often accompanied by incompatible positions and claims) are found in the writings of John Mackie, Gilbert Harman, Bernard Williams, David Wiggins, Simon Blackburn, and Alan Cibbard.

26. I discuss it at length in my Renewing Philosophy (1990). There are close connections between the irreducibility or normative notions (to physicalist ones) and the irreducibilily of semantical notions; indeed, I argue in that work that semantical notions are closely linked to normative ones.

27. This is the view that I defended in Reason. Truth and History (1981)Google Scholar. My Dewey Lectures, Sense, Nonsense and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human Mind, given at Columbia University in March 1994, reconsider and in pan retract that view. They appeared in 91 J. Phil. 445–517 (1994)Google Scholar.

28. This is argued in the first chapter of Reason, Truth and History. For a further discussion, see the paper by Crispin Wright in Reading Putnam (1994) and my reply.

29. “Rampant Platonism” is taken from Mcdowell, supra note 18.

30. This example figures in Murdoch, , supraGoogle Scholar note 19.

31. This point is also stressed by Murdoch, , supraGoogle Scholar note 19, who appears to have arrived at her position without reading the pragmatists.

32. On this aspect of pragmatism, see my Pragmatism (1994).

33. In Other Minds, collected in Austin, , supraGoogle Scholar note 3, at 84. Most of the points I have attributed to “American pragmatism” in this lecture arc also made by Austin—who, like Murdoch, appears not to have read the pragmatists.