Background
Putnam, Hilary Whitehall was born on July 31, 1926 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Son of Samuel and Riva (Sampson) Putnam.
educator philosopher professor
Putnam, Hilary Whitehall was born on July 31, 1926 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Son of Samuel and Riva (Sampson) Putnam.
Central High School of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University and University of Calif, at Los Angeles.
Instructor philosophy Northwestern University, 1952—1953. Assistant professor Princeton University, 1953—1960, associate professor philosophy and mathematics, 1960—1961. Philosophy of science professor Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1961—1965.
Philosophy professor Harvard University, since 1965, Walter Beverly Pearson professor modern mathematics and mathematical logic, 1976—1995. Professor Cogan University, 1995—2000, emeritus professor, since 2000.
Author: (book) Philosophy of Logic, 1971. Contributor scientific papers.
Hilary Putnam is a philosopher who manifests a unique blend of technical skill and breadth of interest. Early in his career he made significant contributions to the philosophy of mathematics and the application of logic to quantum theory. Elsewhere, his best-known writings have covered topics in the philosophy of mind, meaning and the contemporary debates about realism.
It is no surprise, therefore, that Putnams discussions of the problems of meaning are intimately related to the positions he has taken, and frequently abandoned, on some of the central philosophical questions.
He formerly espoused a form of realist position, which he later described disparagingly as ‘metaphysical realism' which he characterized in terms of two basic theses: that there is a determinate and mind-independent World. And that there is ultimately one 'true' theory of this world which is the goal of scientific investigation.
Where meaning is concerned, the focus of much debate has been the thesis that meaning determines reference. Putnam has contended that theories which endeavour to reduce meaning to tnental states or inner processes are manifestly unsatisfactory.
Deploying what has become one °f the more shop-worn of philosophical fictions, he asks us to imagine two planets which differ only ■n the fact that one has water and the other a superficially indistinguishable fluid with fundamentally different chemical constituents. On the first planet there is an individual who speaks English. On the second planet another individual who speaks a language indistinguishable syntactically and phonetically from English.
Neither of these individuals can be distinguished in terms of their utterances about the local fluid they experience: they produce identical utterances featuring the word ‘water'. Putnam’s point is that the word cannot mean on the lips of the first individual what it does when uttered by the second individual, because in each case there is a different fluid being referred to. So the locus of meaning cannot be ‘in the mind’, or if it is, it cannot determine what is being referred to in the world heyond the skull.
But even granted at this point, a truth-conditional account would not be sufficient to pin down reference either. For this reason Putnam urged a shift down from the level of the Sentence to the level of terms or referring exPressions. So how does one fix the meaning of such terms? One familiar solution, rejected by Putnam, is the one according to which both Proper names and kind terms are to be construed us abbreviated descriptions or clusters of such.
Instead, Putnam exploits the idea, due to Saul Eripke, of the ‘rigid designator’, an expression which retains the same reference in ‘all possible Worlds'.
So a term like ‘Kripke’ would refer essentially to that individual, whereas the expresS1°n ‘The author of Naming and Necessity’ would n°tPursuing this approach with regard to kind lerms, for example ‘gold’, ‘copper’, etc., Putnam Would maintain that these ‘rigidly’ designate the particular metals whose fundamental constitution is the object of scientific investigation. He does, however, point out that reference can be secured by descriptions, amounting in effect to stereotypes, based on the more overt characteristics of the substances described, and this is the common currency of ordinary communication. Meaning, after all, has a social dimension and cannot be exclusively a matter of what goes on inside individual heads.
As he abandoned realism, so Putnam shifted his ground on the relation between reference and meaning: the ability to understand language does not require what realism demands, namely that there is some secure ‘match’ between language and ‘the world’. Thus has he moved to a more verificationist stance on meaning.
Of all the positions that Putnam has rejected, one of the most significant in late twentiethcentury philosophy is functionalism. Formerly its leading exponent, he later considered it to be fatally flawed.
Briefly, functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the thesis that psychological states, for example ‘believing that snow is white’, ‘hoping that functionalism is true’, are essentially computational states of the brain. Human psychology. therefore, is merely the software of the brain-computer. Putnam originally endeavoured to characterize functionalism in terms of Turing machine states, but one consequence of meaning not being in the head is that it is not possible to individuate concepts or beliefs without reference to the environment of the cognitive agent.
Putnam views the whole strategy of looking for some non-intentional characterization of the mental as misconceived, and the attempt to assign one kind of computational state to each kind of ‘propositional attitude’ as naive. Together with this goes his general rejection of a scientism which he saw as infecting philosophy, and his increasing preoccupation with normative issues. Putnam's influence may be measured in the lively debates he has conducted both against representatives of the realism he rejected on the one hand, and positions like that of Richard Rorty. which he regards as self-defeatingly relativistic.
Fellow: American Academy Arts and Science. Member: American Philological Society, Académie des Sciences Morale et Politique, Institut de France, British Academy, Association Symbolic Logic, Philosophy of Science Association, American Philological Association.
Philosophy of mind; philosophy of science. Philosophy of language.
William James, C. S. Peirce, John Dewey, Rudolf Carnap and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Married 1st Ema Diesendruck in 1948 (divorced in 1962), one daughter. Married 2nd Ruth A. Hall in 1962, two son one daughter.