Hilary Putnam Quotes

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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

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

Hilary Putnam

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

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

Causes (pains) are not logical constructions out of their effects (behaviour).

Hilary Putnam

Cut the pie any way you like, "meanings" just ain't in the head!

Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam

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Born: July 31, 1926

Died: March 13, 2016 (aged 89)

Bio: Hilary Whitehall Putnam is an American philosopher who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science.

Known for:

Reason, truth, and history (1981)
Representation and Reality (1988)
Realism with a human face (1990)
The many faces of realism (1987)

Hilary Putnam on Wikipedia

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