[music] >>HILARY PUTNAM: Well the history is a little
misleading because, you know, the official history that -- when I was -- that the positivists
were the great school.
I think that's only true with hindsight.
It means we pay attention to a handful of positivist philosophers because they became
the important figures we discussed and differentiated ourselves with but when I was an undergraduate
I think most philosophy departments didn't have a positivist or certainly at most one.
UCLA had Hans Reichenbach.
You know, Princeton hired Peter Hempel, CG Hempel who was nicknamed Peter by his wife.
Hired CG Hempel while I was there.
It had no positivists when I came to Princeton in 1953.
Columbia had no positivists.
Ernest Nagel was not a positivist.
He was a pragmatist with respect for the logical empiricists, which is something...different.
And pragmatism wasn't replaced by logical positivism.
It had gone into a quiet desuetude.
Before.
I think more than anybody else it was Quine.
Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction which then, as it were, then Carnap became
the main, Quine's main opponent so you know it was right.
And I think the Carnap-Quine debate is really what made logical positivism so central.
But logical positivists were never a majority and it was never the case that most influential
philosophers would have called themselves logical positivists.
Yeah, but one doesn't need to accept even Dewey's version of the pragmatist theory of
meaning.
It's interesting.
A paradox.
My teacher, Hans Reichenbach is usually called a logical positivist, although he would never
be caught dead calling himself a positivist, by the way, criticized Dewey as being too
positivist because he thought Dewey doesn't really believe-- and in fact in Dewey's Quest
for Certainty, Dewey, who had, I think a daughter, I think it was his daughter, studied theoretical
physics, in fact she studied in Denmark.
And he's under the influence.
And there he appeals to Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics,
a version of verificationism about theoretical entities in physics that Reichenbach, himself,
found too positivist.
So you're saying that the existence of quarks and so on, that just means.
All that means is when we make certain experiments we will get certain results.
I think there is a tendency to...I mean I think both the positivists and the pragmatists
were verificationists.
That is, they looked for the meaning of our sentences in how they would be verified.
The difference is that the positivists used it to rule out large chunks of philosophy.
The pragmatists used it to try to see what philosophical positions really meant.
But nevertheless as theories of meaning I'm not a verificationist.
I think a statement can be perfectly meaningful even though there's no hope of verifying it.
As a for instance I often use, "There are no intelligent extra terrestrials."
If that's true we'll never verify it.
Because there are no.
If it's false we might verify it.
If there are intelligent extra-terrestrials, and they're sufficiently near in space and
time we might verify it.
But if there are no intelligent extra-terrestrials, there's no possible way of verifying that
statement.
Now for, it seems to me, for a verificationist, that has to be a meaningless statement, but
for me it is a statement that could be true.
In fact it would depress me if it were true, I can say [laughs].
We, we're alone.
We can conjecture, I think our ability to conjecture outruns the limits of any sort
of verificationist doctrine in philosophy.
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