Is There Still Anything to Say About Reality and Truth?

American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926-) has been a major contributor to the philosophy of mind, language, and knowledge in recent j decades. An earlier proponent of a "functionalist': '1 approach to mind and reference, Putnam later argued for an "internal" or "pragmatic realism;' in- fluenced by Peirce and James, for which the de- pendence of reference on humanly constructed theory does not undermine a realist account of truth. As he explains in the following 1985 lec- ture, for Putnam there can be no truth about the world that holds independent of a conceptual scheme; but given any such scheme, reference is fixed and not merely "conventional:' As such, his opposition to Richard Rorty's postmodern- ism is instructive. Both reject foundationalism on the basis of pragmatism. For Putnam, how- ever, having abandoned the hope for a "God's eye view" of reality, pragmatism leaves us with a chastened, but still realist and philosophical, account od truth.