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Hilary Putnam: On Mind, Meaning and Reality Archived March 3, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, Interview by Josh Harlan, The Harvard Review of Philosophy, Spring 1992. "To Think with Integrity" Archived March 3, 2016, at the Wayback Machine , Hilary Putnam's Farewell Lecture, The Harvard Review of Philosophy , Spring 2000.
- Overview
- Early life and career
- Realism and meaning
Hilary Putnam, (born July 31, 1926, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died March 13, 2016), leading American philosopher who made major contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of logic. He is best known for his semantic externa...
Putnam was the only child of Samuel and Riva Putnam. His father was a writer and translator, an active communist, and a columnist for the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). Putnam studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and attended graduate school in philosophy at Harvard University and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). At UCLA he wrote a dissertation, under Hans Reichenbach, on the concept of probability, obtaining a Ph.D. in 1951. He taught philosophy at Northwestern University, Princeton University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) until 1976, when he joined the philosophy department at Harvard. He retired as Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard in 2000.
At Princeton, where he became acquainted with the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap and the mathematical logician Georg Kreisel, Putnam immersed himself in mathematical logic. Among other projects, he worked on one of the 23 unsolved problems in mathematics identified by David Hilbert in 1900: that of finding a general algorithm for solving Diophantine equations (polynomial equations, named after Diophantus of Alexandria, involving only integer constants and allowing only integer solutions). The basis for a proof that the problem is unsolvable was provided by Putnam, Martin Davis, and Julia Robinson in 1961 and completed by Yuri Matiyasevich in 1970.
During the 1960s Putnam was deeply involved in the antiwar movement that opposed U.S. participation in the Vietnam War. He was active in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and in the Progressive Labor Party, a Maoist group, but by the early 1970s he had become disillusioned with far-left political ideology. At about the same time, he developed a sustained interest, both personal and professional, in his Jewish heritage.
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The unifying theme of Putnam’s philosophy is his defense of realism, the view that, ordinarily, assertions (including theories, beliefs, and so on) are objectively true or false. Putnam, like most realists, also upheld the possibility of knowledge, distinguishing between knowledge and mere belief, convention, dogma, and superstition. Always self-reflective and self-critical, Putnam frequently revisited and revised his earlier positions. The most-pronounced change occurred in 1976, when he launched an attack on the view he called “metaphysical realism,” recommending that “internal realism” be adopted in its stead (see below Varieties of realism). Internal realism, in turn, was also modified. Over the years, however, it became exceedingly clear that Putnam’s commitment to realism overrode the nuanced differences between the various versions of realism he espoused. The clearest indication of this core stability is the centrality of his theory of meaning to all his versions of realism.
Questions about the nature of truth and objectivity have always occupied a central place in philosophy. Following the “linguistic turn” in Anglo-American (analytic) philosophy in the early 20th century, these questions came to be inseparable from questions about linguistic meaning and representation. An account of the word-world relation (the relation between words and the things in the world they refer to or represent) is thus considered fundamental to contemporary philosophy. For instance, it is crucial for philosophers to take a position on the question of whether there is a uniquely correct representation of the world in language or whether multiple languages represent the world in diverse and possibly incompatible ways, all equally legitimate. Moreover, truth and meaning are closely linked. To determine whether a certain sentence is true, one must be able to understand the sentence, to know what it means. On the other hand, it stands to reason that understanding a sentence involves knowing under what conditions it should be considered true (or false). Theories of truth and meaning are thus inherently interconnected. This connection is manifest in Putnam’s conception of meaning, first proposed in his classic paper “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” (1975), which construes meanings not as purely mental entities (e.g., mental images) or as purely conceptual constructs but as being anchored in external reality. This conception, known as semantic externalism, can therefore serve as a basis for an objective account of truth and knowledge. Consequently, it can also support realism—and was indeed employed by Putnam (and many others after him) to that end.
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Putnam’s early defense of realism was primarily directed against the logical positivists, who held a verificationist theory of meaning. According to this theory, synthetic statements—statements that are not true, or false, merely by virtue of the meanings of their terms (“All bachelors are unmarried”)—are cognitively meaningful only if they are empirically verifiable, at least in principle. Logical positivists claimed that value judgments, inasmuch as they express emotional attitudes that are, by their very nature, subjective, have no truth value (i.e., are neither true nor false) and are devoid of cognitive meaning. They further claimed that the theoretical (as opposed to the observational) claims of science are also unverifiable and in fact function as predictive instruments (predictors of observations) rather than as descriptions of an independently existing reality. Against the logical positivists, Putnam argued that the verificationist view of scientific theories rendered the overwhelming success of science a miracle. In other words, if successful scientific theories are not understood as describing an independently existing reality, their success is impossible to explain. This argument for realism came to be known as the “no-miracle” argument for realism. Putnam was equally critical of conventionalism, the view that logic, mathematics, and extensive portions of science do not express truths but are based on human stipulations—i.e., convention.
It soon became apparent, however, that the most serious threat to realism was not verificationism or conventionalism but metaphysical relativism, a clear model of which was provided by the American philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn in his influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). According to Kuhn, different stages in the history of scientific thought are characterized by different scientific paradigms, or worldviews, each consisting of a body of formal theories, classic experiments, and trusted methodologies. Because the theories of a given paradigm will refer to entities that have no exact, if any, parallel in other paradigms, theories falling under different paradigms refer—literally—to different worlds and are therefore “incommensurable”: they can be neither compared with each other nor tested against some putative objective reality. In essence, the notion of reality is discarded.
- Yemima Ben-Menahem
Mar 18, 2016 · March 17, 2016. Hilary Putnam, a Harvard philosopher whose influence ranged widely across many fields of thought, including mathematical logic, philosophy of mind and language, epistemology and ...
Nov 8, 2023 · Born in 1926, Hilary Whitehall Putnam spent his first eight years in France; his father, Samuel Putnam, was a noted literary translator and a familiar of the expatriate artistic community. After the family’s return to the U.S., Putnam attended Philadelphia’s Central High School and then the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his ...
Hilary Putnam on Realism, Truth & Reason. Putnam is one of today’s leading living philosophers. He has changed his ideas repeatedly on some central philosophical problems including the nature of truth. Christopher Norris tells the story so far. Hilary Putnam (born 1926) is a Harvard-based philosopher whose work has ranged widely over topics ...
Obituary Hilary Putnam (1926-2016) Maria Baghramian remembers her long-standing mentor and friend.. Hilary Whitehall Putnam, Cogan University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard, one of the most original and influential philosophers of our time, died on 13th March 2016, in his home in Arlington, Massachusetts.
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Hilary Putnam - Philosophy, Mind, Logic: Another area in which Putnam’s contributions have had enormous impact is the philosophy of mind, where he introduced the doctrine known as functionalism (sometimes referred to as “machine functionalism”), which attempts to define mental states in terms of their functional (or causal) roles relative to other mental states and behaviours.
