Hilary Putnam has been at the center of contemporary debates about the nature of the mind and of its access to the world, about language and its relation to reality, and many other metaphysical and epistemological issues.

In this book he turns to pragmatism - and confronts the teachings of James, Peirce, Dewey, and Wittgenstein - not solely out of an interest in theoretical questions, but above all to respond to the question whether it is possible to find an alternative to corrosive moral scepticism, on the one hand, and to moral authoritarianism, on the other.