What I am saying, then, is that elements of what we call "language" or "mind" penetrate so deeply into what we call "reality" that the very project o… - Hilary Putnam

I have not attempted in these papers to put forward any grand view of the nature of philosophy; nor do I have any such grand view to put forward if I would. It will be obvious that I do not agree with those who see philosophy as the history of 'howlers', and progress in philosophy as the debunking of howlers. It will also be obvious that I do not agree with those who see philosophy as the enterprise of putting forward a priori truths about the real world (since, for one thing, there are no a priori truths, in my view). I see philosophy as a field which has certain central questions, for example, the relation between thought and reality, and, to mention some questions about which I have not written, the relation between freedom and responsibility, and the nature of the good life. It seems obvious that in dealing with these questions philosophers have formulated rival research programs, that they have put forward general hypotheses, and that philosophers within each major research program have modified their hypotheses by trial and error, even if they sometimes refuse to admit that that is what they are doing. To that extent philosophy is a 'science'. To argue about whether philosophy is a science in any more serious sense seems to me to be hardly a useful occupation. The important thing is that in spite of the stereotypes of science and philosophy that have become blinkers inhibiting the view of laymen, scientists, and philosophers, science and philosophy are interdependent activities; philosophers have always found it essential to draw upon the scientific knowledge of the time, and scientists have always found it essential to do a certain amount of philosophy in their very scientific work, even if they denied that that was what they were doing. It does not seem to me important to decide whether science is philosophy or philosophy is science as long as one has a conception of both that makes both essential to a responsible view of the real world and of man's place in it.

Part of what makes moral philosophy an anachronistic field is that its practitioners continue to argue in this very traditional and aprioristic way even though they themselves do not claim that one can provide a systematic and indubitable 'foundation' for the subject. Most of them rely on what are supposed to be 'intuitions' without claiming that those intuitions deliver uncontroversial ethical premises, on the one hand, or that they have an ontological or epistemological explanation of the reliability of those intuitions, on the other.

The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.