Putnam vs Rorty on Truth
Pragmatism with or without correspondence
Venue: Putnam, *Reason, Truth, and History* (1981); Rorty, *Consequences of Pragmatism* (1982); decades of exchanges through the 1990s.
Two of the leading American philosophers of the late 20th century, both heirs of pragmatism, on whether truth is a substantive philosophical notion.
Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty were both leading American analytic philosophers and both drew on classical pragmatism (James, Dewey), but their views diverged sharply on truth. Putnam, after his early scientific realism and his middle "internal realism" phase, defended a substantive notion of truth as more than warranted assertibility — there is, he held, a fact of the matter about whether our best theories are getting things right, even if not a god's-eye correspondence to mind-independent reality. Rorty pushed further into post-philosophical pragmatism: truth is simply the compliment we pay to sentences we are warranted in asserting; "objectivity" reduces to intersubjective agreement; philosophy should give up its foundational pretensions and become a "conversation of mankind." Their decades-long exchange shaped late-20th-century debates over realism, relativism, and the inheritance of American pragmatism.
Historical Context
Both Putnam and Rorty had moved through analytic philosophy of language and mind before their pragmatist turns. Rorty's *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* (1979) is the manifesto of his break with mainstream analytic; Putnam's 1981 *Reason, Truth, and History* was his transition to internal realism.
Parties
Truth is a substantive notion: it is more than warranted assertibility, even if not god's-eye correspondence. The pragmatist heritage requires holding on to the cognitive ambition of inquiry.
Key arguments
- Internal realism: truth is idealized rational acceptability — what we would be warranted in asserting under epistemically ideal conditions.
- Rorty's deflation of truth loses what made pragmatism interesting: the regulative ideal of inquiry pursuing something that constrains belief.
- Common-sense realism about middle-sized objects and about scientific entities is defensible without metaphysical commitment to a god's-eye view.
- Late Putnam (after 1990) moved closer to common-sense or natural realism, increasingly critical of his own earlier internal realism — but always against Rorty's relativism.
Allied schools
Truth is simply the compliment we pay to sentences we are warranted in asserting; there is no substantive notion of correspondence to mind-independent reality. Philosophy should abandon its foundational pretensions and become a "conversation of mankind."
Key arguments
- There is no useful work for "truth" to do beyond what "warranted assertion" does.
- Philosophy's mirror-of-nature picture — the mind as accurately representing an external reality — is a 17th-century invention we can and should drop.
- Objectivity reduces to intersubjective agreement; "getting it right" is "getting it agreed within the relevant community."
- Solidarity, not objectivity: pragmatism's political-cultural significance is the move from foundationalism to ongoing conversation.
Allied schools
Dimensions Engaged
Observer
Observer · Knowledge Extent: is there a meaningful sense in which knowledge corresponds to mind-independent reality, or is "correspondence" itself a dispensable philosophical posit?
Information
Information · Ontological Status: is truth a substantive property of information-contents or a courtesy term we extend to warranted assertions?
Verdict in retrospect
No resolution. Putnam moderated and revised his position across the 1990s and 2000s without ever joining Rorty; Rorty kept his deflationary line but extended it into increasingly political directions (achieving liberalism, cultural left). The debate continues to define late-20th-century neo-pragmatism — and contemporary philosophy continues to negotiate its aftermath, with realists, pragmatists, and post-philosophical figures all staking out positions in territory the exchange opened.
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Further reading
- Putnam, *Reason, Truth, and History* (1981); *Words and Life* (1994)
- Rorty, *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* (1979); *Truth and Progress* (1998)
- Conant, "Putnam and Rorty on Pragmatism" in *Rorty and His Critics* (2000)