1. For some explanation of this terminology, see my Objectivity and the Problems of Jurisprudence, 72 Tex. L. Rev. 192–195 (1993).Google Scholar

2. For a more elaborate characterization of the “independence” requirement, sec the discussion and the sources cited in id. at 190–192.

3. Not all of Putnam's Reductionists are obviously Strong Objectivists (e.g., David Wiggins).

4. See Leiter, , supra note 1, at 192–193.Google Scholar

5. For example, on McDowell, 's reading in Anti-Realism and the Epistemology of UnderstandingGoogle Scholar, in Meaning and Understanding (Parrett, H. & Bouveresse, J. eds., 1981).Google Scholar

6. See, e.g., my Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, in Neitzsche, Genealogy, Morality (R. Schacht ed., 1994).Google Scholar I am now less convinced of this reading than I was at the time I wrote this essay in 1990. For a related reading, see also Clark, Maudemarie, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (1990)Google Scholar, and compare the critical discussion in my review of Clark, 's book in 31 J. Hist. Phil. 148–50 (1993).Google Scholar

7. Schiller, F. C. S., Plato or Protagoras? (1908)Google Scholar.

8. (1979).

9. Id. at 188.

10. Id. at 170.

11. (1982).

12. Id. at 165 (emphasis added).

13. (1991).

14. Id. at 23.

15. Why Reason Can't Be Naturalized, reprinted in Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason 235 (1983).Google Scholar

16. Putnam and the Relativist Menace, 90 J. Phil. 443–461 (1993).Google Scholar

17. Id. at 459.

18. Id. at 461.

19. Cf. the illuminating discussion in Kim, Jaegwon, Rorty on the Possibility of Philosophy, 77 J. Phil. 588–97 (1980).CrossRefGoogle ScholarSee esp. 589, 591–93, 596–97.

20. Rorty, , supra note 16, at 460.Google Scholar

21. See, e.g., Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism and Liberalism, in Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (1991).Google Scholar

22. Cf. the accounts of ethical relativism in Richard, Brandt, Ethical Theory 272 (1959)Google Scholar; Foot, Philippa, Moral Relativism, reprinted in Relativism: Cognitive and Moral 154 (M. Krausz & J. Meiland eds., 1982)Google Scholar; Frankena, William, Ethics 109 (2nd ed. 1973).Google Scholar

23. Dawn, , § 168.Google Scholar

24. This inference from the implausibilily of Platonic Realism of the “truth” of Relativism is all too common in the legal literature. One representative and influential example is Singer, Joseph William, The Player and the Cards: Nihilism and Legal Theory, 94 Yale L. J. 1–70 (1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For one take on the “middle way” in jurisprudence—similar in some respects to an earlier Putnam—see Part II of Coleman, Jules L. & Leiter, Brian, Determinancy, Objectivity and Authority, 142 U. Pa. L. Rev. 549–637 (1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Putnam, Hilary, Are Moral and Legal Values Made or Discovered? I Legal Theory 5–19 (1995) at 6.Google Scholar

26. Putnam dubs this general approach “Deweyan,” but it also resonates at many places with the work of John McDowell. Compare, for example, McDowell's idea that a domain which necessarily depends on subjective human responses—like the domain of value—can still be cognitive if it “allows for a sufficiently substantial conception of reasons for exercises of [judgment in this domain] to be capable of truth” and that the key to a proper epistemology of value is not to be found in the perceptual metaphor of intuitionism but in the idea of “susceptibility to reasons.” McDowell, John, The Lindley Lecture: Projection and Truth in Ethics (on file with the University of Kansas Department of Philosophy, 1987)Google Scholar.

27. I simplified Putnam's argument here in the interest of clarity for oral presentation.

28. See especially Putnam, Hilary, Reason, Truth and History (1981)Google Scholar. For a powerful critique of both this earlier view, and some later modifications, see Johnston, Mark, Objectivity Refigured: Pragmatism without Verificationism inGoogle Scholar Reality, Representation, and Projection (Haldane, J. & Wright, C. eds., 1993).Google Scholar

29. Putnam's general position is that “truth does entail warranted assertability if conditions are sufficiently good” (17). As Putnam says, “[t]hese are difficult issues” (15), but the basic idea is something like this: in familiar sorts of cases where facts really are recognizable and capable of verification—i.e. where conditions are ordinarily “ideal” or “sufficiently good”—to still insist that truth is not equivalent to warranted assertability is to admit the intelligibility of global skepticism. Recall Professor Putnam's example. It is fully verifiable by we humans how many chairs there are in this room; but to claim, nonetheless, that the truth about how many chairs there are in this room is not equivalent to what we would be warranted in asserting about how many chairs we can detect is to suppose that we could be massively wrong: the world—including the number of chairs in this room—could be wholly other than we ideally situated judgers take it to be. Professor Putnam rejects this skeptical possibility, for it “has only the appearance of sense” (17).

30. See Leiter, , supra note 1. at 192–193, 195.Google Scholar

31. Putnam, Hilary, Realism with a Human Face 21 (1990)Google Scholar. Cf. Rorty's attempts to explain why he cannot say this in Putnam and the Relativist Menace 450ff.Google Scholar

32. Cf. the discussion of “descriptive” and “revisionary” Protagoreanism in Johnston, supra note 28. Putnam's view may honor the Protagorean doctrine in a more troublesome way as well, given his attempt to distance himself from Rorty: for nothing in the argument as it stands rules out differing communities from reaching different “ideal” judgments about what is warranted in ethical matters.

33. For a powerful statement of this phenomenological point, see Bergmann, Frithjof H., The Experience of Values, reprinted in Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral PhilosophyGoogle Scholar (Hauerwas, S. & MacIntyre, A. eds., 1983.)Google Scholar

34. Here I have benefitted from discussion with Scott Shapiro. Note, too, that nothing hangs here on my choice or example: the difficulties that plague the experience of “annoyingness” will plague all evaluative concepts.

35. Absent some explanation of how it is that everyone else is perceptually handicapped.

36. Darwall, Stephen, Gibbard, Allan & Railton, Peter, Toward Fin de siecle Ethics: Some Trends, 100 Phil. Rev. 115–89 n. 99 (1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37. Harman, , The Nature of Morality (1977)Google Scholar; Blackburn, , How to Be an Ethical Antirealist, 12 Midwest Stud. Phil. 361–76 (1988)Google Scholar; Gibbard, , Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgement (1990)Google Scholar. On Nietzsche, see Chapter VI of my dissertation, Nietzsche and the Critique of Morality (1995) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan).

Note that these writers think the Explanatory Argument does different amounts of metaphysical work: Harman and Blackburn think it proves the truth of moral antirealism; by contrast, Gibbard recognizes (correctly) that it is not decisive: it is always open to the value realist to argue that the evaluative facts are simply identical with or supervenient upon the putatively nonevaluative explanatory facts; no explanatory considerations can disprove the claim of identity or supervenience (cf. Gibbard, at 116Google Scholar).

38. On this general topic, see the useful paper by Thagard, Paul, The Best Explanation: Criteria for Theory Choice, 75 J. Phil. 76–92 (1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. “Being a New Yorker” is, of course, unlikely to prove to be a fruitful category for empirical investigation and generalization (whatever its humor value). The point is that we could imagine a suitable psycho-social explanation that would dispense with evaluative properties and render intelligible a broad class of phenomena.

40. For some incisive criticism of this argument—and of the dubious metaphysics of nonreductive materialism generally—see Kim, Jaegwon, The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism, 63 Proc. Addresses Am. Phil. Ass'n. 31–47 (1989)Google Scholar, and Multipli Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction, 70 Phil & Phenomenological Res. 1–26 (1992).Google Scholar Both these papers are reprinted in Kim, Jaegwon, Supervenience and Mind (1993)Google Scholar. On the difficulties the nonreductive materialist has accounting for everyday phenomena like mental causation, see Letter, Brian & Miller, Alexander, Mind Doesn't Matter Yet, 72 Australasian. J. Phil 220–28 (1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. On this point, cf. McDowell, , Projection and Truth in Ethics, supraGoogle Scholar note 26.

42. It is, admittedly, a cnide history of ethics, painting with a broom, where a fine brush would really be needed. But Tor all that, I think the basic point made in the text still stands.

43. An argument Putnam himself considers at 17.