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Hilary Putnam Quotes

Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. At the time of his death, Putnam was Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University.

He was known for his willingness to apply an equal degree of scrutiny to his own philosophical positions as to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposed its flaws. As a result, he acquired a reputation for frequently changing his own position.

In philosophy of mind, Putnam is known for his argument against the type-identity of mental and physical states based on his hypothesis of the multiple realizability of the mental, and for the concept of functionalism, an influential theory regarding the mind–body problem. In philosophy of language, along with Saul Kripke and others, he developed the causal theory of reference, and formulated an original theory of meaning, introducing the notion of semantic externalism based on a famous thought experiment called Twin Earth.

In philosophy of mathematics, he and his mentor W. V. Quine developed the "Quine–Putnam indispensability thesis", an argument for the reality of mathematical entities, later espousing the view that mathematics is not purely logical, but "quasi-empirical". In the field of epistemology, he is known for his critique of the well known "brain in a vat" thought experiment. This thought experiment appears to provide a powerful argument for epistemological skepticism, but Putnam challenges its coherence.

In metaphysics, he originally espoused a position called metaphysical realism, but eventually became one of its most outspoken critics, first adopting a view he called "internal realism", which he later abandoned. Despite these changes of view, throughout his career he remained committed to scientific realism, roughly the view that mature scientific theories are approximately true descriptions of ways things are.

In the philosophy of perception Putnam came to endorse direct realism, according to which perceptual experiences directly present one with the external world. In the past, he further held that there are no mental representations, sense data, or other intermediaries that stand between the mind and the world. By 2012, however, he rejected this further commitment, in favor of "transactionalism", a view that accepts both that perceptual experiences are world-involving transactions, and that these transactions are functionally describable . Such transactions can further involve qualia.

In his later work, Putnam became increasingly interested in American pragmatism, Jewish philosophy, and ethics, thus engaging with a wider array of philosophical traditions. He also displayed an interest in metaphilosophy, seeking to "renew philosophy" from what he identifies as narrow and inflated concerns.

Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem. He was at times a politically controversial figure, especially for his involvement with the Progressive Labor Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

✵ 31. July 1926 – 13. March 2016
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Hilary Putnam: 8   quotes 1   like

Famous Hilary Putnam Quotes

“No sane person should believe that something is 'subjective' merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.”

Hilary Putnam

(1987) The Many Faces of Realism. p. 71

“[Oddly enough, Putnam believes part of the attraction of some of these formalisms is their obscurity]. "I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!"”

Hilary Putnam

Putnam as quoted in: Julian Baggini, Jeremy Stangroom (2005) What Philosophers Think. p. 233

“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.”

Hilary Putnam

in What is Mathematics, in [Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, matter, and method, Cambridge University Press, 1979, 0521295505, 60]

“It was Rudolf Carnap’s dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project.”

Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam, in: James Conant, Urszula M. Zeglen (2012) Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism. p. 14

“What we are left with, if what I have said so far is right, is a conclusion that I initially found very distressing: either GRW or some successor, or else Bohm or some successor, is the correct interpretation—or, to include a third possibility to please Itamar Pitowski, we will just fail to find a scientific realist interpretation which is acceptable.”

Hilary Putnam

And the ghost of Bohr will laugh, and say, ‘I told you all along that the human mind cannot produce a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics’!
"A philosopher looks at quantum mechanics (again)", Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 56 (2005), 615–634

“The real significance of the Russell paradox, from the standpoint of the modal-logic picture, is this: it shows that no concrete structure can be a standard model for the naive conception of the totality of all sets; for any concrete structure has a possible extension that contains more 'sets.'”

Hilary Putnam

"Mathematics without foundations"
Source: Philosophical Papers Volume 1: Mathematics, Matter, and Method (1975, 1979)
Context: (If we identify sets with the points that represent them in the various possible concrete structures, we might say: it is not possible for all possible sets to exist in any one world!) Yet set theory does not become impossible. Rather, set theory becomes the study of what must hold in, e.g. any standard model for Zermelo set theory.

“To require that all of these must be reducible to a single version is to make the mistake of supposing that 'Which are the real objects?' is a question that makes sense independently of our choice of concepts.”

Hilary Putnam

Lecture I: Is There Still Anything to Say about Reality and Truth?
The Many Faces of Realism (1987)

“It is evident that Feyerabend is misusing the term 'meaning.'”

Hilary Putnam

He is not alone in such misuse: in the last thirty years, misusing the term 'meaning' has been one of the most common, if least successful, ways of 'establishing' philosophical propositions. But how did this distressing state of affairs come to be? The blame must be placed squarely upon the Logical Positivists. The 'Verifiability Theory of Meaning' ('the meaning of a sentence is its method of verification') was, from the first, nothing but a persuasive redefinition. If to call metaphysical propositions 'meaningless' were only to assert that these propositions are empirically untestable, it would be harmless (the metaphysicians always said that their assertions were neither empirically testable nor tautologies); but, of course, it is not harmless, because the Positivist hopes that we will accept his redefinition of the term 'meaning,' while retaining the pejorative connotations of being 'meaningless' in the customary {linguistic) sense, i.e. being literally without sense.
"How not to talk about meaning" (1965)
Philosophical Papers Volume 2: Mind, Language and Reality (1975)

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