Ahmad Ebadi; Mohammad Emdadi Masouleh
Abstract
Hillary Putnam is one of the contemporary philosophers who study the fact/value dichotomy. In his thoughts, these two concepts are interpretation and even conceptually not separate, a notion named instructive pragmatism. He accuses the advocates of this dichotomy and believes that when they say morality ...
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Hillary Putnam is one of the contemporary philosophers who study the fact/value dichotomy. In his thoughts, these two concepts are interpretation and even conceptually not separate, a notion named instructive pragmatism. He accuses the advocates of this dichotomy and believes that when they say morality is separate from fact, they base their trust on the supposition that they realize fact in its exact sense. He sets three reasons that lead to resorting to this dichotomy of reality/value and by rejecting all, paves the way for his criticism of this dichotomy. The drawbacks recognized by him in this context, consist of 1. conversion of a non-destructive distinction into a destructive metaphysical dichotomy, 2. The impact of science from the values in generating science, 3. existence of consensus regarding ethical issues similar to that of other domains, 4. inaccuracy in the analysis of moral judgment into the two perspective and descriptive components, 5. wrong moral thick concepts, a reason in the interpretation of facts and values. Next to accepting his thoughts, and strong points in rejecting fact/value dichotomy, we believe when he defends the character of constructive facts, the following deficiencies become evident in his views: 1. inaccuracy in changing facts due to the conceptual schema, 2. the problem of backward causation, 3. lack of conceptual competence, 4. problem of incoherence and 5. use mention fallacy. The objective of this paper is to analyze and assess the strong and weak points of Putman’s views on fact/value dichotomy.
Hamid Alaeinejad
Abstract
According to semantic externalism, the meaning of some words and thus the content of some of our mental states is determined at least partly by features of the external world. For the first time, Putnam has tried to argue that accepting externalism leads to the rejection of skepticism about the external ...
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According to semantic externalism, the meaning of some words and thus the content of some of our mental states is determined at least partly by features of the external world. For the first time, Putnam has tried to argue that accepting externalism leads to the rejection of skepticism about the external world. However, it is widely argued that this argument does not work; therefore, some philosophers have tried to provide an alternative argument that, by accepting the semantic externalism approach, will succeed in rejecting skepticism about the external world. Nevertheless, these arguments are subject to further criticisms. In this paper, I attempt to develop some arguments to show that none of these externalist arguments succeed in rejecting skepticism. On the other hand, using the basic idea of skepticism in rejecting the possibility of acquiring knowledge, I suggest a new externalist argument on which basis it can be correctly claimed that skepticism is an untenable position.
