Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

196 J.J.C. Smart and J.J. Haldane
The deployment of this fact in reply to Putnam and others needs to be
adapted according to variations in the way in which epistemological assumptions
feature in their critiques of realism, but we are agreed on it as a general
point of response. Where we differ is over the issue of plurality as that enters
Putnam’s argument from conceptual relativity. One way of reading the relativity
claim is as another instance of epistemological seepage into ontology.
And if it is understood as the argument that since all thought is conceptually
structured therefore all we ever think of are conceptual structures, it is easily
dismissed. First, because it does not follow from the fact that we think with
concepts that concepts are what we think of ; 5 second, because even if that did
follow it would not impugn the mind-independence of reality but only provide
a basis for scepticism.
However, there is another way of regarding Putnam’s insistence on conceptual
relativity and that is as the shadow cast upon epistemology by the
metaphysical claim that reality is radically pluralistic and hence not such as
to be adequately characterized by one style of description, in particular that of
basic physical theory. Conceptual relativity is thus the claim that there is no
single correct scheme for describing reality precisely because reality itself is
not ‘monomorphic’ or reducible to a single level of nature. Smart writes:
Putnam wants ‘realism’ with a human face, but I want to see the world sub specie
aeternitatis (realism with a cosmic face?), by which I mean that we should
eschew indexical expressions in our description of reality, and also eschew such
concepts as that of colour, which are defined in terms of a normal human
percipient . . . I can agree with Putnam that causation and other concepts in
ordinary life are highly contextual and dependent on particular human interests.
I can relegate them to what Quine calls ‘second grade discourse’, not suitable
for metaphysics but highly convenient for our ordinary human practical activities
and social intercourse. 6
Putnam’s easily predictable response to this is that no good case can be
made for relegating intentional, evaluative and other non-scientific characterizations
to the realm of ‘second grade discourse’. However, in order to deny
truth-bearing priority to physical theory over psychological or moral description
he thinks it is necessary to diversify ‘reality’ by relativizing the ‘real’ to
a plurality of ways of thinking. Like Putnam, Haldane wishes to insist upon
the ontological reality of the biological, the psychological and so on – as well
as the physical – but to do so while remaining a metaphysical realist. That is,
he regards these domains as ‘populated’ in various ways and to various extents
independently of our conception of them: biological and psychological properties
are there to be discovered and described and are not functions of our modes
of description. As he writes elsewhere: