Hilary Putnam Quotes on Knowledge
Putnam's contribution to twentieth-century epistemology spans the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. The 1973 paper Meaning and Reference and the 1975 paper The Meaning of 'Meaning' introduced the Twin Earth thought-experiment and the externalist semantic doctrine that meanings just ain't in the head: the reference of natural-kind terms is fixed by the actual physical or chemical structure of the kind in question, not by the descriptions associated with the term in any individual speaker's head. The functionalist philosophy of mind Putnam earlier defended (and later partly retracted), the model-theoretic argument against metaphysical realism, and the late return to direct realism mark the principal stages of the most restless and fertile philosophical career of the late twentieth century.
Quotes
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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:
“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. -
“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 -
“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