Abstract

I argue that, contrary to appearances, there is an underlying substantive and methodological unity beneath the diversity of Hilary Putnam's work. This underlying unity is provided by naturalism, or contextualism. Naturalism, in this sense, amounts to the claim that both reductionist and transcendentalist strategies in philosophy are flawed. They are flawed because they manifest the same fundamental error: attempting to eliminate assumptions from theorizing by providing totalistic explanations. Such totalistic explanations are problematic because they end up viciously circular and frequently self-refuting. Naturalism, understood in this way, may also be called contextualism: each of the major positions Putnam has adopted throughout his career combines anti-reductionist and anti-transcendentalist strategies in an attempt to show the importance of seeing things in relation to a specific context. ;I also argue that naturalism does more than just provide unity to Putnam's work. It presents a means of criticizing his work, criticizing it on its own terms. This is done by applying a naturalist argument to Putnam's most recent theory: internal realism. When this is done, his internal realism is shown to be one more variety of a totalistic explanation, one that falls victim to the same criticisms Putnam has levelled against so many others--including his own earlier incarnation as a scientific realist--with such success. ;I conclude by claiming that the issues with which Putnam has been concerned throughout his career, in particular the topics that have been the focus of his most recent work, i.e. truth and realism, can only be satisfactorily understood from a consistent naturalist perspective. Using this perspective, I suggest, following the lead of some other prominent naturalists, that we abandon the attempt at giving totalistic explanations and learn to accept that assumptions are ineliminable from discourse