one of my least favorite philosophy sayings

Hilary Putnam:

“Or rather, the time has come for a moratorium on the kind of ontological speculation that seeks to describe the Furniture of the Universe…”

Realism with a Human Face, p. 118

It seems to me like this advice comes about 200 years too late. A more timely demand would be for a moratorium on describing the furniture of human experience.

There is a certain tone in which one can utter a phrase such that it will never be critically assessed, but merely repeated with a knowing smile by those who agree with it. Putnam somehow hits that tone in the passage above. Whenever people cite that phrase to me, they do it with an air of being in on some overwhelmingly powerful conspiracy that has no time to trifle with its benighted opponents.

(But generally speaking, I usually like Putnam better than I expect to. Nonetheless, as Lingis once drily put it after spending a whole summer reading Putnam: “He doesn’t have a very wide range of concerns.”)