El impacto medio ambiental del crecimiento económico

As Sosa points out, in my criticism of Bernard Williams’s views I argued that

there is no evidence at all for the claim . . . that science converges to a single theory. We simply do not have the evidence to justify speculation as to whether or not science is “destined’ to converge to some one defi nite theoretical picture . . . Mathematics and physics, as well as ethics and history and politics, show our con-ceptual choices; the world is not going to impose a single language upon us, no matter what we choose to talk about.²⁴

(As examples of questions on which we cannot expect science to dic-tate a single answer I listed whether stones are identical with

mere-22. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 610. Here Sosa is quoting from The Many Faces of Realism, p. 4 (emphasis added).

23. Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Proj ect of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin, 1978). See Chapter 2 in this collection for a description of Williams’s agreements with it.

24. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 613.

ological sums of particle- time- slices and whether points are individ-uals or limits.) In his essay, Sosa reconstructs this argument as follows:²⁵

a. There is no real possibility of a fi nished science.

b. Things- in- themselves are by defi nition the things in the ontology of a fi nished science, and intrinsic properties are by defi nition those in the ideology of fi nished science.²⁶

c. Hence, there is no possibility that that there are things- in- themselves with intrinsic, objective properties.

I do have to concede that I argued badly.

What I should have said was that the question “Do mereological sums exist?” is not a scientifi c question at all, and not that science isn’t going to “converge” to an answer. “Science” couldn’t care less whether we quantify over mereological sums or not, or whether we take points to be individuals or (as Whitehead and Russell did) to be limits, or, to shift to a mathematical example, whether we take sets as primitive (and identify functions with sets of ordered pairs), or we  take functions and numbers as primitive (and identify sets with

“characteristic functions,” as is customary in recursion theory), or take functions and numbers and sets as all primitive. Even if science

“converges” it isn’t going to converge to one single “ontology” and “ide-ology.” (But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other senses in which it may well converge.)

I was mistaken to write as if “one defi nite theoretical picture”

required one single ontology and one single ideology (i.e., as if theories did not have a number of alternative versions— a point that I myself stressed in other writings). I believe that this mistake accounts for So-sa’s attribution of “a” to me. But “b” is a proposition (indeed, the most impor tant one) that Bernard Williams argues for. I absolutely do not see why Sosa thinks that I agree with it. I have argued against “things- in- themselves” in vari ous places, but always, I believe, in the context of some debate, and then the term was to be understood as the par tic u lar

25. Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” 612–614.

26. Sosa also reads the following “defi nition” of subjective into my writings (p. 612): “ϕ is a subjective property = Df ↗ is postulated by a par tic u lar language or conceptual scheme.”

This would commit me to the view that all the properties we ever talk about are

“subjective”!

opponent (who might not be a realist at all) understood it. What I reject is not the idea of mind- independent things (in the sense of things caus-ally in de pen dent of the mind), but (1) the idea that there is one single metaphysically privileged use of “ thing” (or “object,” or “entity”), and (2) the idea that there is a fact of the matter as to such questions as “Is a table identical with the mereological sum of its time- slices?” But I would not express this by saying “ There are no things in themselves,”

because I don’t think any of the metaphysical uses of the notion I have seen to date are intelligible.

The situation is similar with re spect to “intrinsic properties.” I would not defi ne them in terms of Williams’s concept of fi nished science (or rather, asymptotically approachable fi nished science). Actually, I would say that when people talk about “intrinsic properties” they generally suppose them to be essential properties in the Aristotelian sense (properties without which something would not be the thing that it is), and also supposes them to be interest- independent. And I don’t think that there is a defi nite set of properties possessed by, say, dogs that are the

“intrinsic properties” of dogs interest- independently. What is “essential”

to being a dog from the point of view of a molecular biologist is not what is “essential” from the point of view of an evolutionary biolo-gist, nor what is “essential” from the point of view of someone who is interested in dogs as pets. (I argue this in detail in “Aristotle after Wittgenstein”).²⁷

So I throw the ball back to Sosa in the following sense: I say,

“Ernie, you want to read me as defi ning these metaphysical notions (‘ thing- in- itself,’ ‘intrinsic property’), in fact defi ning them the way Bernard Williams did, and then asserting ‘ there are no things- in- themselves with intrinsic properties.’ But I don’t think these notions are intelligible (as used by metaphysicians), nor do I think that all the dif fer ent (unfortunate) ways they have been used are captured by Wil-liams’s defi nition. I don’t want to either assert or deny the thesis that

‘ there are things- in- themselves with intrinsic properties.’ So do we have any remaining disagreement about this issue?” If the answer is “yes,” I suspect the remaining disagreement(s) will come up in what I shall say now about conceptual relativity.

27. Collected in Hilary Putnam, Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1994), 62–81.