Renewing Philosophy

Putnam rejects the idea that intentional notions such as meaning, reference, and belief can be translated into the vocabulary of physics or computation without remainder. He targets naturalized semantics, including causal and informational theories that aim to define reference in non-semantic terms, and the computational picture of the mind. His argument is that any such reduction either presupposes the very notions it is meant to explain or fails to capture their normative character. The book therefore treats meaning as answerable to standards of correct use that cannot be read off from physical description alone.

Putnam was one of the originators of functionalism, the view that mental states are defined by their causal-computational roles. By the time of this book, and in the closely related Representation and Reality, he had argued against it, claiming that functionalist accounts cannot fix the content of propositional attitudes. Renewing Philosophy places that reversal in a larger setting, linking it to doubts about scientism and about the idea that a single scientific description could exhaust reality. Readers tracing his development should read it alongside the earlier technical papers to see how the position changed.

Both Putnam and Richard Rorty draw on pragmatism and attack the idea of a God's-eye view, but they diverge on what follows. Rorty concludes that truth and objectivity are best replaced by solidarity and conversational success. Putnam resists this, arguing that we can still make sense of truth as idealized rational acceptability, or as something answerable to experience and inquiry, without collapsing into relativism. The disagreement between them is one of the best-known in late twentieth-century American philosophy, and Putnam's lectures are among his most explicit statements of why he thought Rorty went too far.

Putnam argues that the fact-value dichotomy is untenable, because factual inquiry itself depends on values such as coherence, simplicity, and reasonableness. If so, a view that accepts only what science can describe cannot even account for science's own standards. This blocks the move from rejecting reduction to embracing subjectivism about value, since values are woven into rational inquiry rather than added to it. The point connects the book's concerns in the philosophy of language and mind with moral philosophy, and it prepares ground for his later work on the entanglement of fact and value.

Its critique of functionalism and of strongly naturalized semantics has remained a reference point, but defenders of reductive and causal approaches, including Jerry Fodor, have continued to argue that content can be given a naturalistic account. Putnam's own formulations of realism also shifted in later work, where he moved toward what he called natural realism, and some commentators see the lectures as a transitional statement. The book is therefore best read as a snapshot of a changing position rather than a final system, and later essays should be consulted for his refined views.

A frequent misreading takes his critique as a denial that there is a world independent of thought, or as a form of relativism. Putnam argues instead that the idea of a single, theory-independent description of reality is incoherent, while insisting that our concepts are constrained by how things are and that some descriptions are better than others. The target is a particular philosophical picture of how thought relates to the world, not the commonsense belief in an external reality. Reading him as an idealist or relativist overlooks his sustained opposition to those views.