Hilary Putnam Quotes on Mind
Hilary Putnam's contributions to philosophy of mind defined and then transformed two of the principal twentieth-century positions. The early functionalism of the 1960s — that mental states are defined by their functional role in the cognitive economy rather than by the physical substrate that realizes them — supplied the dominant framework against which subsequent disputes were conducted; Putnam's later partial retraction of his own functionalism, in Representation and Reality (1988), opened the way for the externalist and embodied approaches that would dominate the following decades. The Twin Earth thought-experiment (Meanings just ain't in the head) and the model-theoretic argument against metaphysical realism developed the implications of externalism for semantics and epistemology, and the late return to a more direct realism marks the principal restless 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:
“The mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world.”
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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 -
“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 -
“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"