Conceptual Relativity and the Intelligibility of Metaphysical Realism

In the last thirty years, Hilary Putnam’s views have traversed a nearly circular curve, going from scientific/metaphysical realism, to a kind of antirealism, and most recently back to a non-metaphysical, pragmatic and pluralistic, realism. Over the years Putnam has employed a number of arguments against metaphysical realism. The one with which we will be concerned, namely, the argument from conceptual relativity, goes back to the late 1970s, though he has continued to develop it through his more recent 2004 publications.1 Importantly, Putnam understands his arguments against metaphysical realism to imply not its falsity, but its unintelligibility. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the soundness of Putnam’s argument from conceptual relativity and to specify the sense in which that argument is supposed to show the unintelligibility of metaphysical realism. While I believe there is much that is of interest and value in Putnam’s work, I argue that Putnam’s argument from conceptual relativity is unsound and that it thus does not show the unintelligibility of metaphysical realism. I begin with a discussion of Putnam’s views on realism followed by a brief explanation of his account of conceptual relativity. In the final two-thirds of the paper I critically evaluate Putnam’s argument. In what follows I will use “realism ” and “metaphysical realism ” interchangeably. Putnam and Realism Though Putnam’s reasons for rejecting realism have changed over the last thirty years, he still faults the realist for holding on to a certain fantasy: “The metaphysical fantasy is that there is a totality of Forms, or Universals, or ‘properties, ’ fixed once and for all….”2 The point of th