Philosophical Reminiscences with Reflections on Firth's Work

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Philosophical Reminiscences with Reflections on Firth's Work Hilary Putnam Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 51, No. 1. (Mar., 1991), pp. 143-147. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205%28199103%2951%3A1%3C143%3APRWROF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T Philosophy and Phenomenological Research is currently published by International Phenomenological Society.

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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol.L 1. No.1, March 1991

Philosophical Reminiscences with Reflections on Firth's Work HILARY PUTNAM

Harvard University

When I offered to share some of my reminiscences of Rod Firth with you, I did not realize the strength of the feelings that would come flooding back when I thought of the more than twenty years that Rod and I worked in this building. Many of those feelings are suffused with imagery-images of Rod in his apple orchard years ago, Rod bringing us rhubarb to plant, Rod advising us (or at least advising Ruth Anna) on gardening, Rod driving me home countless times. But what I would like to reminisce about is the character of Roderick Firth's philosophical conversation. That conversation, as I recall it, was of two kinds. We often talked about the area in which Rod had a unique mastery, the area of classical epistemology, and I will say something about those talks and that area shortly. But often Rod would say something about current political issues, or about the views of philosophers who scorned classical epistemology, and what always struck me about those remarks was their extreme pithiness. Let me give two examples. The first of my examples will be a remark Rod made in explanation of his opposition to the Vietnam war. At that time I too was opposed to the war, but I had not yet adopted the radical "analysis" of the war which I later adopted (and which now seems to me simplistic, in comparison with Rod's view.) At that time, early in 1967 or 68, conflicting accounts of the "facts" were being presented. (I remember being especially struck by David Halberstam's brilliant reports.) Rod and I were talking about this, and Rod insisted that one could and should oppose the war without taking a stand on many of the controverted factual issues. He put it this way. (I am not quoting him verbatim, or course:) "We do know for sure that tremendous suffering is being caused by things our country is doingbombing rice crops, moving peasants out of their villages into fortified hamlets, etc. We know that it is controversial whether the 'dominos will fall' and communism will take over all of Southeast Asia if we don't do

this, as our leaders claim. We know that it is contoversial whether we will succeed in preventing those bad things if we do do this. But surely one cannot justify performing a deed which will certainly cause great suffering by citing consequences which are so unsure." This argument had great impact on me, and it continues to have a great impact on my thinking. It was, one might say, an epistemologist's argument; but it was also a moralist's argument. To this day, governments all over the world continued to do things which will certainly cause great suffering, and to justify their deeds by citing highly controversial "scenarios." Rod was a quaker, but his own pacifism was not a premise in this particular argument. Rod was saying that even ifyou believe that mass bombing, movements of populations, etc., could sometimes be justifred by the need to avert some greater evil, it is morally required that 1 ) it be certain, practically speaking, that the Greater Evil will befall i f you don't cause the suffering; and 2) that it be likewise certain that causing the suffering will avert the greater evil. A conjecture can never justify taking innocent life and causing suffering. To use language that George Kennan has employed, even if such means are sometimes justified (granting that for the sake of argument, and because most people believe that such means are sometimes justified), still there must be a "firebreak" between ordinary means of influencing other states and handling international relations and such means. To treat such means as simply on a continuum with "ordinary" means makes the slide into barbarism inevitable. This argument is so crystalline that one might think everyone would accept it, but in practice its implications are everywhere ignored. For example, f have heard even intelligent and morally concerned people say that mass bombing of civilian populations is justified on the ground that "the distinction between combatant and non-combatant makes no sense in modem war." (Why it made sense in ancient war they never say.) The same people vigorously denounce terrorists. Yet the terrorist's rationale is precisely that "the distinction between combatant and non-combatant makes no sense in modem war!" The fact is, that if we do not maintain a "firebreak" between war and simple murder, we are done for, morally speaking. I hope that these remarks do not offend anyone here, I make them because I believe these issues were close to Rod's heart. But I also make them to illustrate a point about Rod's style: it took him only about two minutes to make the argument I quoted, but I have thought about it for over twenty years! In a quite different area of philosophy, I remember once discussing Van Quine's idea that we can revise any of our beliefs, including our standards

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of justification themselves with Rod, and Rod retorting briefly: "Of course we can, as a matter of empirical fact, change our beliefs about what the standards of justification are. But if Quine is saying that we can be justified in changing the criteria of justification, I just don't understand what that means." Here, I will say, I am probably somewhere "between" Van and Rod, or perhaps outright on Van's side; but Rod's "one liner" certainly highlights in a trenchant way what the key issue is. How can one have even a regulative ideal of rationality or of justification, if it is not constituted by criteria? Some of these same issues were discussed by Rod in his absolute gem of a Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. Rod was no "anti-realist," but there he discussed some of the central issues in both epistemology and metaphysics with the same combination of force and brevity that I am trying to give a picture of. If that Address has not yet been paid the attention it deserves, it is in large part, I think, because philosophers find it difficult to believe that arguments that are so short can reach so deep. The central argument of that Address is simply this: "naturalists" in epistemology and metaphysics (meaning here not Quine, but metaphysical materialists) tend to view our standards of justification as justified by their reliability in reaching truth. But, even if one accepts a correspondence theory of truth, there is a difficulty: namely that we have no independent way of telling if our standards of justification do bring us closer to the truth. At most, we can tell that very often beliefs that we were justified in accepting were such that we are now, at this later date, justified in saying they were true. Precisely the thing that is supposed to be being "empirically tested9,--the adequacy of our standards of justification-is being taken for granted in evaluating the test! One might try to answer Rod by saying that the standards we use at the later time need not be the ones we used at the earlier time-that our standards may change in time-but then, of course, one runs into the very question Rod put to Quine's view. Again, these two arguments, which take less than five minutes to state, will, I am convinced, repay years and years of study. Rod's greatest eminence, as I said earlier, was in the field of classical epistemology, about which Mark Pastin has already talked. Here too Rod was impatient of what seemed to him to be superficial treatment of deep issues. At the same time, he was by no means unaware of or unresponsive to serious challenges to the enterprise. One or the challanges-a challenge he regarded as the most serious he had encountered, and that he delighted in discussing with colleagues and students, was the challenge posed by John

Austin in Austin's lectures at Harvard in the late fifties, and in Austin's book Sense and Sensibilia. Austin convinced Rod that many of the ways in which classical epistemologists had tried to explain what it is to talk about the intrinsic character of immediate experience are deeply flawed and riddled with mistakes; and Rod spent a great deal of time (and wrote a series of classic papers) replying to the Austinian challenge. Another challenge came from what Rod saw as "Moderate Coherentist" views, such as the views of Roderick Chisholm, whose work Rod enormously respected and admired. I think it would be fair to sum up Rod's conclusions with respect to these two challenges by saying that, in Rod's view, Austin's most radical conclusions could not be right, although Austin's arguments certainly created a need for a thoroughgoing restatement of the classical view. Chisholm's views, on the other hand, might well be right; but the case was not closed, and as long as it was not, there was reason to go on with the program of classical foundationalism. That program did not, however, commit one to many of the things that its opponents were forever claiming it did. Saying that some of our beliefs are non-inferentially warranted ("self warranted") is not the same as claiming that they are incorrigible, Rod would point out; and speaking of self-warranted beliefs concerning the intrinsic character of immediate experience does not commit one to an acdobject analysis of immediate experience, as Wilfrid Sellars seems to claim. The question, for Rod, was first, last, and foremost the rational reconstruction of the justificatory relations among our beliefs. One could have alternative views concerning how such a rational reconstruction might best be effected; what Rod would not allow is waffng, or attempting to fudge the whole issue. I am by no means in agreement with Rod's own preferred epistemological program. But I agree with Rod that much of the criticism of that program simply misses the real issues. Philosophy is not just a "Western Tradition": all the great cultures in the world have worried about reality and appearance, and about the sources of our knowledge, and especially our ethical knowledge, even if the resulting discussions have very different shapes and trajectories. Worring about reality and appearance is part of the human fate. Even the work of the later Wittgenstein-no, strike that, especially the work of the latter Wittgenstein-makes no sense at all, not an iota of sense, except as a deep meditation upon precisely the issues that Roderick Firth was dealing with. There will always be epistemology, as there will always be critics of epistemology, and we vitally need both. Without great epistemologists there cannot be great anti-epistemologists or great philosophy. And Roderick Firth was arguably the greatest classical epistemologist of recent decades.

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I would like to close by coming back to my earlier theme. What I have been stressing is the depth of Rod's thought and the pithiness of the expression of that thought. Although Rod wrote simply-he tried always to be clear' to intelligent laymen and -women-and although he was a great teacher at every level from beginner to advanced graduate student, the full richness of those pithy arguments is something that it takes both advanced training and lots of reflection to bring out. Rod was, in that sense, "a philosopher's philosopher." I have seen some of Rod's Nachlass, and that writing is characterized by the very combination of pith and depth that I have been trying to convey, The discussion will continue, and Rod's writing is fated to have a lasting place in it.