Hilary Putnam Quotes
Hilary Putnam was an American philosopher and one of the central figures of late twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Over a long career at Harvard he made foundational contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science, and changed his views often enough that his trajectory itself became a topic of philosophical study. The quotes below are attributed to Hilary Putnam, organized by topic.
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Hilary Putnam on Knowledge
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Attributed to Hilary Putnam:
“Philosophy without skill in argument is impossible; but skill in argument is not enough.”
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Attributed to Hilary Putnam:
“What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know.”
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Attributed to Hilary Putnam:
“The progress of philosophy lies more in revising our questions than in answering them.”
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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!”
Putnam as quoted in: Julian Baggini , Jeremy Stangroom (2005) What Philosophers Think . p. 233 -
“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, in: James Conant, Urszula M. Zeglen (2012) Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism . p. 14 -
“Hilary Putnam, in: James Conant, Urszula M. Zeglen (2012) Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism . p. 14”
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. -
“If the importance of science does not lie in its constituting the whole of human knowledge, even less does it lie, in my view, in its technological applications. Science at the best is a way of coming to know, and hopefully a way of acquiring some reverence for, the wonders of nature. The philosophical study of science, at the best, has always been a way of coming to understand both some of the nature and some of the limitations of human reason. These seem to me to be sufficient grounds for taking science and philosophy of science seriously; they do not justify science worship.”
Introduction: Science as approximation to truth
Hilary Putnam on Mind
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Attributed to Hilary Putnam:
“Cut the pie any way you like, meanings just ain't in the head.”
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Attributed to Hilary Putnam:
“The mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world.”
Hilary Putnam on Politics
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“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.”
Philosophical Papers Volume 1: Mathematics, Matter, and Method(1975, 1979) | "What is Mathematical Truth?"
Hilary Putnam on Truth
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Attributed to Hilary Putnam:
“The fact-value dichotomy is itself untenable.”
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“These papers are all written from what is called a realist perspective. The statements of science are in my view either true or false (although it is often the case that we don't know which) and their truth or falsity does not consist in their being highly derived ways of describing regularities in human experience. Reality is not a part of the human mind; rather the human mind is a part - and a small part at that - of reality.”
Introduction: Science as approximation to truth -
“Introduction: Science as approximation to truth”
These papers are all written from what is called a realist perspective. The statements of science are in my view either true or false (although it is often the case that we don't know which) and their truth or falsity does not consist in their being highly derived ways of describing regularities in human experience. Reality is not a part of the human mind; rather the human mind is a part - and a s -
“Introduction: Science as approximation to truth”
If the importance of science does not lie in its constituting the whole of human knowledge, even less does it lie, in my view, in its technological applications. Science at the best is a way of coming to know, and hopefully a way of acquiring some reverence for, the wonders of nature. The philosophical study of science, at the best, has always been a way of coming to understand both some of the na -
“In closing, I can only apologize for not having given any positive account of either mathematical truth or mathematical necessity. I can only say that I have not given such an account because I think that the search for such an account is a fundamental mistake. It is not that there is nothing special about mathematics; it is that, in my opinion, the investigation of mathematics must presuppose and not seek to account for the truth of mathematics. But this is the beginning of another paper and not the end of this one.”
Truth and necessity in mathematics" (1964) -
“Truth and necessity in mathematics" (1964)”
In closing, I can only apologize for not having given any positive account of either mathematical truth or mathematical necessity. I can only say that I have not given such an account because I think that the search for such an account is a fundamental mistake. It is not that there is nothing special about mathematics; it is that, in my opinion, the investigation of mathematics must presuppose and -
“Truth and falsity are the most fundamental terms of rational criticism, and any adequate philosophy must give some account of these, or failing that, show that they can be dispensed with.”
Philosophical Papers Volume 2: Mind, Language and Reality(1975) | "Introduction: Philosophy of language and the rest of philosophy" -
“Lecture I: Is There Still Anything to Say about Reality and Truth?”
The Many Faces of Realism(1987)