1The present paper is devoted to a glimpse of Hilary Putnam’s academic activities close to William James and his revitalization of Jamesian pragmatism in his later period. Since 1950s, Hilary Putnam was active in the contemporary Anglo-American academic field of philosophy. He has become an important representative of American analytical philosophy and neo-pragmatist philosophy, and has carried out a great deal of exciting philosophical debates with many famous contemporary philosophers in both Europe and the United States. Putnam has a broad theoretical vision and rigorous thinking in philosophical argumentation. According to him, all topics that can be refined into philosophical issues can also be integrated. In his whole life, Putnam not only focuses on large philosophical issues, but also shows enough interests in specific philosophical concepts. He has even changed his positions on some crucial philosophical issues. Nonetheless, neither are these changes meaningless, nor do they completely negate and criticize Putnam himself. They are bound to be the inevitable development of a major philosopher’s thought.
- 1 The lecture, given at Beijing University in 1984, presents a remarkable (previously unpublished) pr (...)
- 2 In such lecture on Quine’s views, Putnam thinks that the Chinese conceptual scheme works as well as (...)
2In June 1984, Putnam visited China for an academic journey. He delivered a speech entitled “Nonstandard Models and Kripke’s Proof of the Gödel Theorem” at Beijing University1 and lectured on Quine’s views at Fudan University in Shanghai.2 In his earlier period, Putnam was famous as a mathematician, a computer scientist, a logician, as well as a philosopher. However, there is an overt American pragmatist component in his later philosophy, particularly an obvious pragmatic disposition in natural realism of common sense. Since the 1980s, Putnam has focused more on the elucidation of classical pragmatists’ works only to find some promising and forward-looking philosophical insights of classical pragmatists.
- 3 David Macarthur, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney, edited such fine vo (...)
3In the book Pragmatism as a Way of Life: The Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey, Putnam re-interprets the philosophical thoughts of William James and John Dewey, two of his favorite classical pragmatists.3 He believes firmly that classical pragmatism provides us with the most progressive and the most up-to-date philosophical forms within the theoretical framework upon which contemporary philosophical thinking depends. Therefore, in his later philosophy, Putnam defends the radical originality of James’s and Dewey’s philosophical views, especially the creative insights in Jamesian pragmatism. As is known to all, Putnam enjoys a very high academic reputation in contemporary American and even international philosophical circles. The later Putnam’s continuous inquiry into James has brought new attention to Jamesian pragmatism in European and American academic field.
4As a distinctively American philosophy, pragmatism has been deeply rooted in the society and culture of the United States since its birth. The classic works of pragmatism were written by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey, but it was James who made pragmatism famous. He is a philosopher who has exceptional powers of expression and, in the early years of the 20th century, he was widely read in Europe. In this way, pragmatism became a leading topic of discussion then. After World War II, due to various reasons such as changes in the international situations, the center of world philosophy research shifted from Europe to the United States, making the United States the center of philosophy in the world till today. At a time, pragmatism lost influence during the middle decades of the 20th century with many philosophers, first in Europe, then in America, turning towards logical positivism or logical empiricism, but it has never been eclipsed from the world philosophical scene even during the heyday of analytic philosophy. However, pragmatism is the only trend of thought that can really be called American philosophy.
Pragmatism is thus not another philosophical conception that should make a place for itself among other theories, say, of truth. It is a method for inquiring into all philosophical conceptions such as materialism or theism, monism or pluralism, determinism or indeterminism, etc. (Madelrieux 2017: 495)
5Howard Mounce, professor at Swansea University, wrote in his book The Two Pragmatisms: From Peirce to Rorty, “Pragmatism is not a body of thought which arose in Europe and then was extended to America; it is one which arose in America and then was extended to Europe” (Mouce 1997: 1) Therefore, pragmatism shows a trend towards diversification nowadays, in stark contrast to the modern European philosophy that regards human reason as the highest authority. The pragmatist tradition began to revive in the 1950s, when Willard Van Orman Quine advanced a view which was in some respects akin to it. In our own day, it may be said to flourish, having being defended by such leading American philosophers as Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty.
6As early as the 1940s, when young Putnam was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, he met three famous pragmatists: Edgar Arthur Singer Jr., Charles West Churchman and Morton White. Among them, Singer received his Ph.D. in psychology in 1894 at the University of Pennsylvania. After his dissertation, he briefly taught at Harvard for William James as an instructor in the psychology laboratory. He was professor at the University of Pennsylvania from 1909 until 1943. Churchman was a student of Singer at the University of Pennsylvania. White, having completed his Ph.D. in 1942 under Ernest Nagel, who was himself a student of John Dewey, was Putnam’s teacher when he taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1946 to 1948, and was also a colleague of Putnam at Harvard in the 1960s. Putnam had got very close relationships with the three scholars above, and it was since his undergraduate years from 1944 to 1948 that he began to learn some basic ideas of American pragmatism. At that time, Putnam’s basic academic training was mainly on logical positivism, which was very popular in the United States then. Undoubtedly, he stepped onto the American philosophical stage as an analytical philosopher.
- 4 In particular, it was in his response to Simon Blackburn that he had first publicly admitted such c (...)
- 5 Massimo Dell’Utri discusses the different forms of realism advocated by Putnam. For more informatio (...)
7On Dec. 29th, 1976, Putnam was elected president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. In his presidential address entitled “Realism and Reason,” he repudiated the realist option that since the 1960s had been the background metaphysics to his philosophy, and embraced a verificationist position he called “internal realism.” He asserted that “Metaphysical realism was only a picture anyway. If the picture is, indeed, incoherent, then the moral is surely not that something is wrong with realism per se, but simply that realism equals internal realism. Internal realism is all the realism we want or need” (Putnam 1978: 130). Putnam’s rejection of metaphysical realism led him to embrace internal realism, which he later abandoned again. Internal realism is always regarded as a typically pragmatist thesis. Putnam himself once admitted, “I should have called it pragmatic realism!” (Putnam 1987: 17). However, in the Gifford Lectures Putnam delivered at the University of St. Andrews in the fall of 1990, he had the opportunity to present some new developments in his thought.4 Massimo Dell’Utri (2024: 99) says, “the shift from metaphysical realism to internal realism is a shift from a non-epistemic to an epistemic conception of the world and truth.” At that time, Putnam had abandoned internal realism and the verificationist semantics associated with it.5 He made an attempt to get rid of the troubles of internal realism and began to re-examine the traditional assertions of classical pragmatism.
8In 1994, Putnam chaired the John Dewey Lectures at Columbia University under the title “Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human Mind,” during which he presented “natural realism,” his final metaphysical position (Putnam 1994). For the later Putnam, although Dewey is very important and we cannot forget Peirce either, we must think of James as the core figure of the three giants of classical pragmatism. The later Putnam, therefore, shed much light on Jamesian pragmatism, and strongly defended many of James’s insightful views in philosophy. He believed that traditional pragmatism has withstood the test of time successfully since its birth. The later Putnam’s full interpretation and research of classical pragmatism provides a solid theoretical foundation for the trend of neo-pragmatism.
9Hilary Putnam believed that his keen interest in Jamesian pragmatism was largely due to the company of Ruth Anna Putnam, his wife and lifelong academic partner as well. Ruth Anna, editor of the book The Cambridge Companion to William James, was an internationally renowned American moral philosopher with a deep understanding on American pragmatism. The couple even co-authored the book Pragmatism as a Way of Life: The Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey in their late years. Hilary Putnam is full of praise for his wife’s influence on him,
- 6 For more information about Ruth Anna’s attitudes on pragmatism and her influence on Hilary Putnam, (...)
Ruth Anna Putnam’s “Taking pragmatism seriously”6 is a beautiful statement of almost all the ideas that I take to be of lasting value and vital importance in the legacy of American pragmatism. I am thrilled that she has put all this together so persuasively and yet so tersely. It could serve as a manifesto for what the two of us would like philosophy to look like in the twenty-first century and beyond. If I agree completely with the ideas in question today, this was not always the case, and Ruth Anna herself had a great deal to do with my “conversion.” (Putnam 2002: 12)
10Therefore, in a certain sense, the Putnams have attributed their lifelong philosophical quest to the tradition of American pragmatism, which establishes Hilary Putnam’s important position as a neo-pragmatist.
11In recent years, more and more European scholars, let alone American scholars, have developed an interest in Putnam’s later philosophy. Fernando González García and María Uxía Rivas Monroy, two scholars at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, have a deep understanding on the intrinsic value of the later Putnam’s revitalization of the American pragmatist tradition. They both believe that we can draw attention to some close connections between Putnam’s conception of reality and that of the classic pragmatists, mainly in three aspects:
(1) From a general perspective: a kind of humanism, which is related with the common sense point of view.
(2) From a metaphysical point of view: the role played by externalism, that is, the contribution of the world or the idea that the world is as it is independently of the particular interests of the person describing it.
(3) From an epistemological point of view: (i) The way in which externalism is balanced with the idea that the independence of the world does not need to be supported both by a kind of objectivity that sees description as mere copy, and truth as correspondence. (ii) The insight that there are not intermediaries between the world and us. (García & Monroy 2008: 224)
12In this way, the later Putnam also attempts to regard pragmatism as “a happy harmonizer” (James 1907: 69) between empiricism and rationalism like the way James does. Inspired by classical pragmatists, the later Putnam has showed us explicitly a conciliatory attitude towards these two extreme philosophical positions. All he has to do is to choose a middle path between conservative metaphysics and irresponsible relativism as his basic philosophical claim. He believes that the time has come for us to draw enough attention to pragmatism. In his eyes, William James is the greatest participant in the great movement of classical pragmatism. Despite the willingness on all sides to attribute the original coining of the term “pragmatism” as a philosophical mark to him, Peirce eschews the classical pragmatist development to the point of giving a new name – “pragmaticism” – to his own position. In fact, it is James who systematically developed the movement of classical pragmatism and gradually made it a trend of thought with a deep mark of “American philosophy” and a certain brand significance. When the later Putnam once talked about the influence of James on him, he recalled,
In 1980, however (influenced by Richard Rorty), I began to make a serious study of William James and was at once struck by James’s insistence that the picture of our experiences as “inside” our minds (or our “heads”) is an error. Earlier I had been aware of the possibility of denying the interface conception from a reading of Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia but had rejected the idea. But when I rethought the issue in the 1980s, it became clear to me that (even if James’s approach contained some untenable elements) James was right in thinking that the traditional conception must be given up. (Putnam 1997a: 200)
- 7 See Putnam “The Permanence of William James” (1995: 5-26).
13Having read a deal of James’s philosophical works, Putnam admires James more and more, and regards him as his idol and spiritual mentor. In the paper The Permanence of William James, he made a very high evaluation of James and his radical empiricism.7 The later Putnam believes that James is a powerful thinker, as powerful as any in the early 20th century, and that his way of philosophizing contains possibilities which have been long neglected, that it points to ways out of old philosophical “binds” that continue to afflict us (Putnam 1995: 6). In the later Putnam’s opinion, many philosophers of James’s time underestimated or even despised the achievements of this great philosopher seriously. Thus, he believes his mission is to revitalize James’s reputation and re-establish the important role that James plays in the movement of American pragmatism.
14Undoubtedly, since the birth of pragmatism, the conception of truth has become its important and even unique topic. Putnam believes that, as a classical pragmatist, James will never fade in philosophy. However, when Putnam was wavering between metaphysics and relativism and was trying to seek a third path, he saw that many critics had misunderstood Jamesian pragmatism and had slandered it to varying degrees, and that some had even devalued James’s pragmatic theory of truth as irrationalism. Therefore, Putnam began to read and defend James publicly and enthusiastically. The later Putnam was eager to rehabilitate James’s reputation and to arouse people’s attention toward the “long-lost” classical pragmatism.
15According to the later Putnam, the abuse of James, especially on the matter of “truth,” is something of a movement among the first-generation analytic formalists who follows in the train of Bertrand Russell. The ordinary language philosophers and those who are obsessed with Ludwig Wittgenstein seems to have no interest in James, who, however, is certainly passé by any standard. Russell is the most famous one who criticizes James’s conception of truth severely. He even thinks that James’s conception of truth is almost ridiculous, and then criticizes James with a rather contemptuous attitude. Russell writes,
I find great intellectual difficulties in this doctrine. It assumes that a belief is “true” when its effects are good. If this definition is to be useful – and if not it is condemned by the pragmatist’s test – we must know (a) what is good, (b) what are the effects of this or that belief, and we must know these things before we can know that anything is “true,” since it is only after we have decided that the effects of a belief are good that we have a right to call it “true.” The result is an incredible complication. (Russell 1947: 845)
16However, Putnam argues that this is neither James’s original intention, nor what James has said. He points out that Russell’s misunderstandings on James’s conception of truth might come from a paragraph in James’s Pragmatism:
“The true,” to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the “right” is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won’t necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas. (James 1907: 222)
17Most of the critics only quote the first sentence of the paragraph above and believe that “the expedient” in James’s eyes determines the truth. However, Putnam points out that “the expedient” here actually refers to the “agreement” between ideas and reality. Unfortunately, Russell misquoted James’s words in his famous book History of Western Philosophy as, “the ‘true’ is only the expedient in the way of our thinking […] in the long run and on the whole of course” (Russell 1947: 844). Obviously, whether intentionally or not, Russell omitted “to put it very briefly” and “in almost any fashion” here. Anyway, Russell did not quote James’s original words explicitly, but imposed his own ideas about “the expedient” on James, so that most of his readers would misunderstand James’s real notions indirectly or passively. The later Putnam believes that James’s interpretation of “truth” is not to make a conceptual analysis, but to provide people with a way to inquire the problem of truth, while Russell’s attack on James’s conception of truth by pulling the truth out of specific context is almost groundless. What James did was just making a theoretical assertion rather than trying to define “truth.” Due to Russell’s status in contemporary philosophical studies and the spread of his book History of Western Philosophy in the academic field, the above mistake has existed for nearly a century, which probably James himself did not want to see. Thus, the later Putnam defended James’s conception of truth from the perspective of textual criticism.
18The later Putnam claims that Russell misunderstood James in the same way that many people misunderstood Wittgenstein. To argue for this, the later Putnam quotes Wittgenstein’s words:
For a large class of cases of the employment of the word “meaning” – though not for all – this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer. (Wittgenstein 2009: §I-43)
19Wittgenstein discusses the meaning of a word here. Many critics have ignored his words “though not for all” and have imposed their own ideas about the “use” of a word by Wittgenstein. They claim that Wittgenstein proposed the theory that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. As a matter of fact, Wittgenstein did not propose a universally general theory by giving a precise definition of “meaning” here. Rather, he simply discussed the “meaning” of a word by examples. However, these critics have taken Wittgenstein’s own ideas out of context and have distorted them inexplicably.
Regardless, Putnam’s reading of Jamesian thought often appears to be linked to his reiterated references to Wittgenstein’s merit of having taught us, better than any other thinker, to conceive and make philosophy as a practice of clarification rather than problem-solving. (Calcaterra 2022: 460)
20As a great pragmatist, James himself always adopts an inclusive attitude towards those misunderstandings and criticisms represented by Russell. James believed that the claims he had made in the book Pragmatism were too brief, and failed to relate various theories of truth to each other both explicitly and effectively. Therefore, he wrote a paper The Pragmatist Account of Truth and Its Misunderstanders to respond to those critical voices:
My ideas may well deserve refutation, but they can get none till they are conceived of in their proper shape. The fantastic character of the current misconceptions shows how unfamiliar is the concrete point of view which pragmatism assumes […] I have to admit, in view of the results, that we have assumed too ready an intelligence, and consequently in many places used a language too slipshod. We should never have spoken elliptically. The critics have boggled at every word they could boggle at, and refused to take the spirit rather than the letter of our discourse. This seems to show a genuine unfamiliarity in the whole point of view. (James 1909: 180-1)
21Many critics focus too much on James’s expressions of each word, so he has not been understood properly. James says modestly,
As far as I personally am concerned, I am sure that some of the misconception I complain of is due to my doctrine of truth being surrounded in that volume of popular lectures by a lot of other opinions not necessarily implicated with it, so that a reader may very naturally have grown confused. For this I am to blame, likewise for omitting certain explicit cautions, which the pages that follow will now in part supply. (Ibid.: 181-2)
22The later Putnam appreciated James’s notion of truth very much and made numerous attempts to clarify these misunderstandings. However, what James did not expect is that, despite his timely response, there were still various misunderstandings after his death. They mainly come from two famous philosophers: Morton White and Martin Gardner. White himself was also a pragmatist. He admired James very much, but did not agree with James’s conceptions on truth and belief. He says,
By the time his Pragmatism appeared, James was moving away, I suggest, from the notion that we test our beliefs individually in accordance with standards that are peculiar to the discipline from which they come. He was leaning more and more toward the view that when we think we are testing an isolated belief, whether metaphysical, scientific, or logical, we are really evaluating what he called a “stock of opinions” that is variously composed and subject to the demands of consistency, experience, and emotion. (White 1973: 118-9)
23In 1983, Gardner pointed out that there is a blind spot in James’s conception of truth.
It seems to me that there was a blindness on James’s part […] to the kind of confusion that is inevitable whenever a philosopher […] takes a useful word, with a commonly understood meaning, and gives it a new and novel meaning. Pragmatists believed, of course, that great benefits would flow from redefining truth as the meeting of tests for truth, but the actual results were decades of bewildering debate in which they wasted incredible amounts of time trying to explain to their opponents that they did not mean what their words, taken in the usual way, implied. (Gardner 1983: 45-6)
24We can see that both White and Gardner almost believe that James’s conception of truth is not a theory, but only an explanation of confirmation.
25Confronting with all these different voices, Putnam has defended Jamesian pragmatism since the 1980s. The later Putnam claims that we should neither reject the great achievements on the theories of truth of both Russell’s and Tarski’s, nor belittle James’s conception of truth deliberately. In Putnam’s eyes, James’s grasp of the conception of truth must not be represented as simply a mysterious mental act by which we relate ourselves to a relation called “correspondence” totally independent of the practices by which we decide what is and is not true (Putnam 1995: 11). Pragmatists tend to believe that truth and verification are not two simply independent and unrelated notions. The later Putnam agrees with this, while he, unlike pragmatists, denies that we can define truth in a confirmational way. He claims that we have two capacities to make sure that we understand, in a specific situation, what is truth and what is confirmation, and these two capacities are always integrated.
26The later Putnam firmly believes that even if James’s conception of truth is untenable, James was very clear about the distinction between truth and confirmation and did not confuse the two. In this respect, Robert G. Meyers, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University at Albany, State University of New York, thinks that Putnam is right about this.
Putnam argues that James held that the notion of correspondence is empty unless some details are given about how the statement corresponds, and this can only be done by talking about confirmation. Thus, he did not confuse the two notions, but argued for their connection. (Meyers 1998: 355)
27Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam replied to Professor Meyers, expressing their views on the many misunderstandings caused by James’s conception of truth. They say, “James’s writings are so rich in content that one is not surprised when different readers find different points in one and the same essay by James or even offer divergent interpretations” (Putnam & Putnam 1998: 366). As for James, our assertions or opinions about something come from life. Similarly, the explanation of truth comes from the explanation of how to reach the truth. What is important is the ways of explanation rather than the “truth” itself.
28In this way, the later Putnam has pushed James to the later Wittgenstein. On the issue of truth, James and the later Wittgenstein have quite similar conceptions. Wittgenstein is a great philosopher who has pioneered two completely different styles of philosophy. It is worth mentioning that Wittgenstein himself once admitted that he had read James’s works and was inspired by this great pragmatist. It is these two great philosophers, James and the later Wittgenstein, who have given the later Putnam a lot of inspirations for philosophical thinking and have brought infinite joy to his research. Therefore, to answer questions like “What is truth?,” we do not need to provide a rigorous definition first, but only need to set relevant examples. The later Putnam’s strong defense of James’s conception of truth not only reflects his respect for James, but also enriches James’s pragmatic theory of truth to some extent. In addition, we can also find an obvious complex on the later Wittgenstein in the later Putnam’s philosophy.
29The later Putnam thinks that those who misunderstood and criticized James’s conception of truth are quite careless. In fact, they have ignored some of James’s notions on truth in their works and the connection between these notions. The later Putnam believes that James expounds his conception of truth in a rather sophisticated way while constructing his radical empiricism, and pragmatism is the essence of his conception of truth. Therefore, the later Putnam tries to separate the basic elements of James’s notions on truth from his whole theory, only to find out how these elements are connected with the metaphysical system of James’s radical empiricism.
30In the paper James’s Theory of Truth, the later Putnam summarizes the four strains in Jamesian pragmatism. The first is a Peircean strain (this strain is quite strong, but James’s critics ignore it); the second is the un-Peircean strain that truth is partly shaped by our interests; the third is a realist strain, summed up in the claim that truth involves agreement with reality, although that agreement is not one single relation; and the fourth is an empiricist strain, summed up in the claim that “truth happens to an idea” (Putnam 1997b: 166). We can see the distinction between the four strains in terms of the later Putnam’s way of classification. The former two strains reflect that James not only inherits and develops Peirce’s conception of truth, but also retains his own notions on truth to some extent, while the latter two reflect the metaphysics of radical empiricism. Even though James (unsuccessfully) has attempted to avoid the latter two strains, i.e. presupposing them in Pragmatism, they still reappear in The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism.”
31When discussing the former two strains in Jamesian pragmatism, the later Putnam explains James’s conception of truth from two levels, i.e. the distinction between “absolute truth” and “half-truth.” First of all, he inquires the Peircean strain exposed in James’s “absolute truth.” In terms of the definition of truth, James writes (1909: 266-7), “Truth absolute means an ideal set of formulations towards which all opinions may in the long run of experience be expected to converge.” While Peirce insists that the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real (Peirce 1960: 268, §407). Therefore, in the later Putnam’s opinion, although we cannot deny that there are many differences between Jamesian pragmatism and Peircian philosophy, James inherits Peirce’s notions on the definition of truth, and we can also find some variations of such definition in James’s works.
James does not commit himself on this thesis here, but this extract, in which what Hilary Putnam has dubbed the “Peircean strain” is the most obvious, proves that in 1876 at least, Peirce was seen as an inferentialist on the issue perception. (Girel 2003: 170)
32According to the later Putnam’s understandings, no matter how we compare these two great pragmatists, James and Peirce, we will face two issues. On one hand, although Peirce does claim that the opinion is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate (Peirce 1960: 268, §407), he later further explains this statement as follows: “Truth’s independence of individual opinions is due (so far as there is any ‘truth’) to its being the predestined result to which sufficient inquiry would ultimately lead” (Peirce 1960: 343-4, §494). Therefore, the later Putnam might ask: would James agree with Peirce’s modification? On the other hand, Peirce insists that “external permanency” determines whether it can converge to a final opinion formed by true beliefs. The later Putnam might ask again: would James agree with this? Although we cannot know whether James himself agrees with Peirce on this issue, we can, undoubtedly, know that the later Putnam may believe that James will definitely not agree with Peirce in this respect.
33With respect to the first issue, the later Putnam argues that James is talking about an ultimate convergence to be actually, not just counterfactually, brought about (Putnam 1997b: 170). Comparatively, the second issue is easier, since James does claim that truth requires us to have some sufficient connections with reality. As for James, Peirce’s “external permanency” can be interpreted as a reality that exists forever and is independent of anything. In James’s own words, it is “our ideas ‘agree’ with reality” (James 1907: 201). To go a step further, he explains this in The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism”: “Truth meaning agreement with reality, the mode of the agreeing is a practical problem which the subjective term of the relation alone can solve” (James 1909: 224). Actually, James introduces a new form of correspondence theory, quite divergent from the classical one, and fundamentally based on the pragmatist notion of truth and reality as “processual.” He writes,
Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its verification. Its validity is the process of its validation. (James 1907: 201)
34This primarily includes the criterion of action, as James argues with his famous metaphor that mind is not a spectator of reality, but rather “the knower is an actor” (James 1920: 67). However, James also regards that what kind of connection is sufficient now that truth is connected with reality? Actually, this depends on our interests and practices. This is what Putnam calls the un-Peircean strain in Jamesian pragmatism. Therefore, the later Putnam thinks that James does not agree with Peirce fully. “James rejects both the view that agreement with reality is not required for truth and the Peircean view that our convergence to certain beliefs will be forced on us ‘by nothing human’” (Putnam 1997b: 170). On this point, James does not want to compromise with metaphysical realism. In his eyes, the absolute truth as “the ultimate convergence of opinions” has nothing to do with any theoretical basis other than interests and practices. In this case, can we arrive at this absolute truth? The later Putnam does not answer this question clearly, but he holds that what James claims really is that,
While it is true that we will never reach the whole ideal set of formulations that constitutes absolute truth, “we imagine that all of our temporary truths” will converge to that ideal limit. (Ibid.: 180)
35Now, how can we do if we cannot reach the absolute truth? The later Putnam argues that the non-Peircean strain in Jamesian pragmatism shows actually the so-called “half-truths,” i.e. the statements we accept at a given time as our best posits (ibid.: 171). In other words, the “half-truth” here is the knowledge of absolute truth that we have attained from “temporary truths.” In James’s view, this kind of knowledge is related to our interests and specific practices, but has little to do with the existence of truth itself (or absolute truth). We must discuss the conception of truth in our life of experience. The later Putnam writes in the paper William James’s Ideas,
What we have spoken of so far are what James called “half-truths,” these being the best anyone can hope to achieve, but always subject to correction by subsequent experience. James also appears to accept the Peircean idea of truth (he calls it “absolute truth”) as a coherent system of beliefs which will ultimately be accepted by the widest possible community of inquirers as the result of strenuous and attentive inquiry (what Peirce called the “final opinion”). (Putnam 1990: 221)
36The later Putnam appreciates greatly James’s distinction between the two kinds of truth. He says in another paper “James’s Theory of Truth (Again),”
James’s twofold requirement on truth: that a truth must “fit” the appropriate realities and must also fit our interests in connection with the particular idea or “formulation,” seems to me now to have a more fundamental status in his thought than the postulate that the future “consensus” will be true. (Putnam 2017: 194)
37In addition to the two strains related with Peirce, the later Putnam argues that the latter two strains in Jamesian pragmatism are mainly reflected in his metaphysics of radical empiricism. James has pointed out strongly that it is empty for us to think of the “agreement” between belief and reality only, because this “agreement” should appear in the words that pragmatists can understand. As a famous psychologist at Harvard, James believes that if external relations cannot connect belief with reality, we may conceive of beliefs as “so much flat psychological surface” (James 1909: 195). The later Putnam disagrees with James on this. He believes that the external relations James refers to are the same as the relations reflected in the process of verification. For James, we can sometimes think of verification as just “copying” a certain point of view of its reality. James claims that a true idea must copy its reality (James 1907: 199). Generally speaking, verification is an indirect and nonterminating process. James gave an example in Pragmatism (ibid.: 43). The belief that “the man goes round the squirrel” is constantly being made true by all of the many experiences which verify it either directly or indirectly. According to the later Putnam, be this right or wrong, this is not a theory that confuses truth and verification; it is rather an ambitious and novel attempt to define truth in terms of verification. Meanwhile, it suffices to say that, according to James, verification is possible even in the case of religious and ethical beliefs, not, indeed, in the lifetime of any one individual, but in the whole experience of the human race. In this way, James has elucidated verification by way of being acquainted with external entities directly, that is, “agreement” with reality. It is obvious that such “agreement” is rather incomplete.
38Therefore, the later Putnam also interprets the following two situations in which James proves that a belief is true if it is in agreement with reality by way of verification. The first situation is that James believes that unverified ideas may also agree with reality. James calls this relevant connection “conjunctive relations” (ibid.: 137). In response to James, the later Putnam claims that such relations are given in experience and are precisely the kind of relations that constitute verification. The later Putnam gave an example to illustrate this. The idea that there are elm trees in a certain forest by going to the forest and seeing the elm trees may be verified directly. Moreover, this idea prompts us to go to the forest and see the elm trees, and terminates in that direct acquaintance of the elm trees constitutes its “agreement” with the elm trees. From here, we may learn that James attaches great importance to experience, which can be seen the empirical strain in his mind.
39The second situation is the concretization of the first one, that is, according to James, ideas that have not been verified directly can also “agree” with reality through “substitution.” The later Putnam gave another example. The belief that the couch in his office was there at 3 o’clock last Sunday morning leads to as successful a prediction as if he had directly verified it. In view of the above situations, James says when talking about the issue of “agreement,”
To “agree” in the widest sense with a reality can only mean to be guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we disagreed. Better either intellectually or practically! (James 1907: 212-3)
40In the later Putnam’s opinion, this account of “agreement” with reality has made James link truth to verificatory experiences, and it is necessary to see why James feel constrained to adopt it. In this way, the relations between our ideas and what they “agree with” or “refer to” can only be external relations. The later Putnam even asserts firmly, “Philosophers who think that our ideas possess intrinsic intentionality, he [James] insists, are simply wrong” (Putnam 1997b: 175). We can draw from this that it is James’s search for the external relations that constitute reference that has caused him to find particular “conjunctive relations,” and by observation, we can find that such relations can connect our ideas with what they refer to.
James’s pragmatic truths are, according to Putnam, the ideas or judgments that meet and are verified – actually, manifestly verified – by what radical empiricism identifies as “conjunctive relations” or “conjunctive experiences.” They connect what we have imagined, thought, or believed with the experiential realities we encounter as we act. (Cormier 2015: 806)
41The later Putnam believes that the most striking aspect of James’s radical empiricism is his intention close to “natural realism,” which is very different from the metaphysical realism in traditional empiricism. In his later philosophy, Putnam gives a very high evaluation of James’s defense of natural realism.
42Inspired by James, the later Putnam first proposes in the paper William James’s Theory of Perception that it would be wrong, however, to think of James as a philosopher whose primary interest is in the theory of perception, or even in resolving the subject-object dichotomy (Putnam 1990: 233). In case of the later Putnam, James, who is the first post-Cartesian philosopher in modern times, rejects the view that perception requires intermediary thoroughly. Putnam says,
One can, I believe, learn a great deal from James. He was the first modern philosopher successfully to reject the idea that our impressions are located in a private mental theater (and thus constitute an interface between ourselves and “the external world”), although one does not have to accept James’s whole metaphysics of “pure experience” to follow him. (Putnam 1997b: 181-2)
43It is James’s denial of the interface between the mind and the world that has given the later Putnam such great inspiration that he accepts James’s natural realism of common sense explicitly and thus faces the real world vis-à-vis all human beings and their lives in his own way of philosophical investigation. Therefore, Putnam re-examines the issue of perception in his later philosophy, thereby eliminating the gap between the inner world and the external world. James’s natural realism of common sense has changed the trajectory of the later Putnam’s quest in philosophy and has made the later Putnam take a decisive step towards the pragmatist tradition. What’s more, we can even believe that James’s natural realism of common sense, to a large extent, has separated the later Putnam completely from his early philosophy and has made him a firm neo-pragmatist.
44Traditional realism, no matter what form it takes, attempts to set man against reality and to think of reality as an objective existence beyond human being’s experience. James’s natural realism of common sense, however, puts aside this a priori binary split and focuses directly on man’s pre-reflective experience and daily life practices. What he asserts by the term “direct realism” today is not a particular theory of metaphysics; rather, it is our implicit and everyday conviction that in experience we are immediately aware of such common objects as trees and buildings, not to mention other people (Putnam 1996). The later Putnam argues that overcoming the traditional picture of perception is absolutely necessary if philosophy is to ever stop “spinning its wheels” in a futile attempt to locate a resting place in the dispute about metaphysical realism and antirealism. According to such a picture, our sensations are as much an impassible barrier between ourselves and the objects we perceive as a mode of access to them.
45James’s successful transformation of realism has a lot to do with his dual identity as a psychologist and philosopher. On one hand, he is a professor of experimental psychology at Harvard and has made great achievements in psychology research. His book The Principles of Psychology (1890) has always been recognized as an authoritative work of American psychology since its publication. In this book, James puts forward an assertion that can be called “phenomenology of perception.” On the other hand, as a philosopher with a unique temperament, James’s philosophical thoughts benefits greatly from his psychology research for many years. In the book Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), James tries to construct a satisfactory form of realism in his pragmatic philosophy, i.e. natural realism. As a matter of fact, this is a successful shift from psychology to philosophy, which shows that James has made a thorough transformation of traditional psychologism.
46In essence, the fundamental assertions of this radical empiricism proposed by James deny the tradition of subject-object dichotomy absolutely, which is similar to the way of phenomenological research. According to this way, we only need to grasp the important role of perception and to perceive any specific objects immediately by abandoning any intermediary non-material. Perception is not a private “sense datum,” in which we can find the “impressions” of certain particular objects. Putnam says,
When I described the traditional picture, I mentioned two elements: in perception we receive “impressions” that are immaterial, totally different – separated by a metaphysical gulf – in fact from all the material objects we normally claim to perceive; and from the character of our internal mental impressions we infer how things are in the external physical world. Today, however, a majority of philosophers appear to be hard-core materialists (even if they prefer the more innocuous label of “naturalist”), and these philosophers would say that our “impressions” are little more than brain events or processes. These philosophers would say that the representational theory of perception no longer requires us to posit a “metaphysical gulf” between impressions and external objects. (Putnam 1996: 160)
47Therefore, according to the later Putnam, James’s ways of dealing with sensory experience is totally different from those of traditional British empiricists, such as David Hume. The insurmountable metaphysical gulf in traditional empiricism is abandoned by James. From then on, reality itself no longer contains two things which are totally different and even mutually opposed to each other, i.e. subject and object, but only contains materials, phenomena and other things that can be perceived immediately. It is precisely because of the existence of these things that we can think about reality in different ways. Obviously, the later Putnam has become interested in James’s such assertion as perceptual realism and agrees with it strongly. Putnam claims,
James is certainly correct that in the course of living our lives, we have to think of ourselves as living in what he calls “a common world,” that each of us must think that she is aware of the other’s body and not simply a representation of it, and we all have to think that we are aware of many of the same objects. (Putnam 1996: 164)
48However, the later Putnam’s highly appreciation of James is not without any condition. He also concedes that James’s perceptual realism contains some problematic factors. It does not think of human beings’ “sensations” as brain processes. We are, for example, aware of the blue of the sky as a color extended over an area, not as a cortical process. Meanwhile, an “interface” between external objects and us consists now of cortical processes on the surface of the brain, rather than processes in the mental substance. Even if we were to concede that our sense impressions are brain processes, our cognitive processes would entail no farther position. The objects of perception may impinge on our mind/brains only causally, not cognitively. Just as Michela Bella says,
We can analytically distinguish the respective semantic areas of the two terms, so that synonyms of “concept” are terms such as “idea, thought and intellection,” all that is the mediated; whereas, the term “perception” stands for what is immediate or simply perceived, therefore its synonyms are “sensation, feeling and intuition” and expressions such as “sensitive experience, immediate flow.” Their most distinctive characteristic is that perceptions are continuous, while concepts are discreet as regards their meaning. (Bella 2018: 17)
49We can see that James’s perceptual realism still retains some traces of traditional dualism, because he insists that we depend on external relations to connect minds, ideas and common objects. The later Putnam dissatisfies with this. He believes that James should not stop there, since James could have denied the traditional claims of interface completely after giving up the his so-called “interface” above. David Macarthur asserts,
If we focus on the perceptual aspect of this interface conception of the mind then whether we conceive perceptual intermediaries as immaterial or material, the immediate objects of perception are mental entities and not external things. We know external things, if we do, in virtue of an inference from reports of these mental entities. On the later Putnam’s view, therefore, the Cartesian cum materialist tradition is to be understood in terms of a “veil-of-ideas” account of perception, even though the nature of the “veil” has changed to accommodate the shift to materialism and computer models of the mind. (Macarthur 2004: 169)
50Obviously, to some extent, the later Putnam’s philosophical thinking is more thorough than that of James’s. He not only clarifies the obscure, scattered and tortuous expressions in Jamesian pragmatism, but also arouses scholars’ attention to the dim Jamesian pragmatism for a time. The later Putnam has solved some confusions in his own philosophical thinking through the elucidation of James’s natural realism of common sense. James’s claim to eliminate the interface is an important factor in the later Putnam’s turning to pragmatism in his later philosophy.
51After giving up metaphysical realism, the later Putnam was standing at the crossroads of seeking for a new and reasonable philosophical assertion, and he attained a lot of comfort in Jamesian pragmatism. Then, the later Putnam elucidated more on James’s works and lectured Jamesian pragmatism in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard. He praises James and asserts that even if James isn’t the unique philosopher who defends natural realism, he is the first philosopher who is approaching to natural realism since the Cartesian turn in modern philosophy. Later on, John Austin, a philosopher of the Oxford school of ordinary language, and John McDowell, a philosopher of the Pittsburgh school in the United States, also put forward similar ideas respectively, but Putnam didn’t tell us too much whether they had drawn something from James. There is no doubt that James has said repeatedly in Radical Empiricism that his radical empiricism is very close to natural realism. Obviously, what James has done in this book is to construct a system of metaphysics sophistically that is totally different from traditional empiricism, and such kind of metaphysics is gradually injecting new philosophical inspirations into the later Putnam, who is far away from metaphysical realism already.
52In response, the later Putnam raises two questions. (1) As a pragmatist, how did James revitalize natural realism? (2) To what extent can we accept natural realism without taking seriously James’s radical empiricism? As for the first question, the later Putnam replies explicitly. He points out that James’s typically pragmatist insistence is “that we take seriously the way in which we think about – and have to think about – perceptual experience in the course of living our lives that virtually forced natural realism upon him” (Putnam 1996: 164). Many philosophers do not appreciate the richness and complexity of James’s perceptual realism, and they even think of Jamesian pragmatism as a form of anti-realism. Some of them always believe that if a pragmatist is a pragmatist on a certain issue, then he may still be a pragmatist on many great issues. Some others even believe that a philosopher is either a pragmatist or a realist, but he cannot be both at the same time. However, some philosophers are pragmatists on one thing, but are realists on others, because some topics are independent of each other conceptually. In the later Putnam’s view, James is such a philosopher who has two identities at the same time. He thinks James as a direct realist about perception, but not about conception.
53The second question is worth of discussing further here. James has transformed experience thoroughly so as to defend natural realism. He removes the psychological contents of “impression” in traditional empiricism and transforms it into a pre-reflective life experience. In this way, perception can perceive physical objects immediately without the assistance of any mental intermediaries. Furthermore, James’s reality in radical experience is not the traditional external entity that is unrelated to human perception. According to James, reality is a pre-reflective existence, which includes not only what can be perceived immediately, but also things such as values or ethical judgments that permeate our lives. In this way, James’s version of realism is coherent with holism.
54As for the later Putnam, James’s radical empiricism, in essence, is a neutral monist ontology. Putnam summarizes as follows:
In such an ontology, the properties and relations we experience are the stuff of the universe; there is no nonexperiential “substratum” […] and these experienced or experienceable properties and relations (James is unfortunately a little vague at this crucial point) make up both minds and material objects. Moreover, minds and material objects in a sense “overlap”; the very thing I experience as a sensation of red is, in another context, also what I refer to as “a patch of color on the wall.” Illusions do not prove that we never “directly experience” external objects; in James’s radical empiricist metaphysics, what the phenomena of illusions go to show is that not every bit of pure experience has the status of being a part of a “real” object, not that none do. (Putnam 1996: 165)
55The later Putnam thinks that James’s ontological doctrine of experience is relatively exaggerated and metaphysical. He insists that James doesn’t need to construct a rigorous ontology for this, and that James is rather serious in restricting “pure experience.” In James’s views, the world is one that can be experienced, and we cannot find an absolute way to know when we are in an illusion. If we think so, all we have to do is to make an attempt to touch this so-called “illusion,” or to observe it from different positions, or to ask others directly whether they can see the “illusion.” In other words, if we want to solve this problem, the easiest way is to return to life practice and to test it with real events. The real purpose of James’s ambitious attempt to construct a system of metaphysics is to achieve that we can take seriously in philosophy the way we talk and think about perpetual experience in daily life. Putnam once recalled,
Only after I began to teach courses on the philosophy of William James and to focus on his radical empiricism did I begin to see that the endless pattern of recoil in modern philosophy (from extravagant versions of realism to equally extravagant versions of antirealism and back again) can never be brought to rest unless we challenge the picture of the mind, and particularly the picture of perception, that makes it seem impossible to take our ordinary talk of perceiving and thinking about objects seriously unless one reinterprets it in terms of a representational theory of the mind. Understanding how that theory fails to provide the desired “foundation” for our ordinary talk makes it seem Rortian nihilism must be the only option that remains. (Putnam 1996: 168)
56We can learn from this that although the later Putnam appreciates highly James’s natural realism of common sense, he also points out some shortcomings in Jamesian pragmatism very appropriately. This also shows that the later Putnam had the kind of open-mindedness and clear mind that a great philosopher must have. He always kept the spirit of pragmatism in mind, through the elucidation of classical pragmatism, especially Jamesian pragmatism.
57Although the later Putnam drew a lot from James, he was satisfied with this. Rather, he connected classical pragmatism with neo-pragmatism, and continued to learn from many neo-pragmatists what can be used and particularly what can be used effectively. His reinterpretation of James’s notions on “truth” and “reality” not only inherits critically and develops James’s pragmatic conceptions of truth and those of natural realism, but also enables himself to follow the essence of traditional pragmatism in his later philosophy, and eventually gets close to neo-pragmatism. In his later years, Putnam adopted a very pragmatic way to turn himself into a neo-pragmatist. As a pragmatist, he treated philosophical “positions” as experiments in deliberate living. He has given complexity to today’s conception of pragmatism and has navigated in person the contemporary pragmatism via sustained writings. His aim was not to fix on one position but to attempt to do justice to the depth and complexity of reality.
58Pragmatism is the birthmark of American philosophy. Hilary Putnam has placed classical pragmatism in the discussion of contemporary world philosophy, and has participated personally in the discussion as a Jamesian natural realist, which rejuvenates traditional pragmatic philosophy at the crossing moment of the 20th and 21st centuries. Therefore, the tradition of American pragmatism is full of vitality in contemporary philosophy through the later Putnam’s unremitting efforts. Putnam was greatly interest in the complexity of real life in his late years, and was full of hope for the prospect of pragmatism in 21st century. It is also an essential component of his doctrine of neo-pragmatism to investigate contemporary philosophy via the creative philosophical insights of classical pragmatists. What’s more, the later Putnam applied the American pragmatist tradition to several other kinds of philosophical inquiries. According to him, the insights of classical pragmatists are still applicable very much in dealing with social, political and moral issues in the 21st century.