Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam, (born July 31, 1926, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died

March 13, 2016), leading American philosopher who made major
contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of
mind, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of science,
the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of logic. He is
best known for his semantic externalism, according to which
linguistic meanings are not purely mental entities but reach out to
external reality; his antireductionist philosophy of mind; and his
persistent defense of realism, the view that truth and knowledge
are objective. In his later years he became increasingly sensitive to
the moral aspects of epistemology and metaphysics and, more
generally, to philosophy’s moral calling.

Early Life And Career

Putnam was the only child of Samuel and Riva Putnam. His father
was a writer and translator, an active communist, and a columnist
for the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party of
the United States of America (CPUSA). Putnam
studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of
Pennsylvania and attended graduate school in philosophy
at Harvard University and the University of California at Los
Angeles (UCLA). At UCLA he wrote a dissertation, under Hans
Reichenbach, on the concept of probability, obtaining a Ph.D. in
1951. He taught philosophy at Northwestern University, Princeton
University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
until 1976, when he joined the philosophy department at Harvard.
He retired as Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard in
2000.

At Princeton, where he became acquainted with the logical

positivist Rudolf Carnap and the mathematical logician Georg
Kreisel, Putnam immersed himself in mathematical logic. Among
other projects, he worked on one of the 23 unsolved problems in
mathematics identified by David Hilbert in 1900: that of finding a
general algorithm for solving Diophantine equations (polynomial
equations, named after Diophantus of Alexandria, involving
only integer constants and allowing only integer solutions). The
basis for a proof that the problem is unsolvable was provided by
Putnam, Martin Davis, and Julia Robinson in 1961 and completed
by Yuri Matiyasevich in 1970.

During the 1960s Putnam was deeply involved in the

antiwar movement that opposed U.S. participation in the Vietnam
War. He was active in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
and in the Progressive Labor Party, a Maoist group, but by the
early 1970s he had become disillusioned with far-left
political ideology. At about the same time, he developed a
sustained interest, both personal and professional, in
his Jewish heritage.

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Realism And Meaning
The unifying theme of Putnam’s philosophy is his defense
of realism, the view that, ordinarily, assertions (including theories,
beliefs, and so on) are objectively true or false. Putnam, like most
realists, also upheld the possibility of knowledge, distinguishing
between knowledge and mere belief, convention, dogma,
and superstition. Always self-reflective and self-critical, Putnam
frequently revisited and revised his earlier positions. The most-
pronounced change occurred in 1976, when he launched an attack
on the view he called “metaphysical realism,” recommending that
“internal realism” be adopted in its stead (see below Varieties of
realism). Internal realism, in turn, was also modified. Over the
years, however, it became exceedingly clear that Putnam’s
commitment to realism overrode the nuanced differences between
the various versions of realism he espoused. The clearest
indication of this core stability is the centrality of his theory
of meaning to all his versions of realism.

Questions about the nature of truth and objectivity have always

occupied a central place in philosophy. Following the “linguistic
turn” in Anglo-American (analytic) philosophy in the early 20th
century, these questions came to be inseparable from questions
about linguistic meaning and representation. An account of the
word-world relation (the relation between words and the things in
the world they refer to or represent) is thus considered
fundamental to contemporary philosophy. For instance, it is
crucial for philosophers to take a position on the question of
whether there is a uniquely correct representation of the world in
language or whether multiple languages represent the world
in diverse and possibly incompatible ways, all equally legitimate.
Moreover, truth and meaning are closely linked. To determine
whether a certain sentence is true, one must be able to understand
the sentence, to know what it means. On the other hand, it stands
to reason that understanding a sentence involves knowing under
what conditions it should be considered true (or false). Theories of
truth and meaning are thus inherently interconnected. This
connection is manifest in Putnam’s conception of meaning, first
proposed in his classic paper “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” (1975),
which construes meanings not as purely mental entities (e.g.,
mental images) or as purely conceptual constructs but as being
anchored in external reality. This conception, known as semantic
externalism, can therefore serve as a basis for an objective account
of truth and knowledge. Consequently, it can also support realism
—and was indeed employed by Putnam (and many others after
him) to that end.

Putnam’s early defense of realism was primarily directed against

the logical positivists, who held a verificationist theory of meaning.
According to this theory, synthetic statements—statements that
are not true, or false, merely by virtue of the meanings of their
terms (“All bachelors are unmarried”)—are cognitively meaningful
only if they are empirically verifiable, at least in principle. Logical
positivists claimed that value judgments, inasmuch as they express
emotional attitudes that are, by their very nature, subjective, have
no truth value (i.e., are neither true nor false) and are devoid
of cognitive meaning. They further claimed that the theoretical (as
opposed to the observational) claims of science are also
unverifiable and in fact function as predictive instruments
(predictors of observations) rather than as descriptions of an
independently existing reality. Against the logical positivists,
Putnam argued that the verificationist view of scientific theories
rendered the overwhelming success of science a miracle. In other
words, if successful scientific theories are not understood as
describing an independently existing reality, their success is
impossible to explain. This argument for realism came to be
known as the “no-miracle” argument for realism. Putnam was
equally critical of conventionalism, the view that logic,
mathematics, and extensive portions of science do not express
truths but are based on human stipulations—i.e., convention.

It soon became apparent, however, that the most serious threat to

realism was not verificationism or conventionalism
but metaphysical relativism, a clear model of which was provided
by the American philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn in his
influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
According to Kuhn, different stages in the history of scientific
thought are characterized by different scientific paradigms, or
worldviews, each consisting of a body of formal theories, classic
experiments, and trusted methodologies. Because the theories of a
given paradigm will refer to entities that have no exact, if any,
parallel in other paradigms, theories falling under different
paradigms refer—literally—to different worlds and are therefore
“incommensurable”: they can be neither compared with each
other nor tested against some putative objective reality. In
essence, the notion of reality is discarded.

The theory of meaning underlying this relativist picture is that

meanings are constituted “internally” within each paradigm.
Theoretical changes generate changes in the meanings of scientific
terms (i.e., the terms are associated with different definitions or
descriptions), which in turn lead to changes in reference (i.e., the
terms are taken to refer to different entities). In short, meaning is
relative to a theory, paradigm, or conceptual scheme. Moreover,
truth is also relative in this sense, in virtue of the close connection
between truth and meaning: if the meaning of a theoretical
statement is relative to a theory, paradigm, or conceptual scheme,
then its truth value will be relative in the same way and to the
same extent.

If this theory of meaning is accepted—i.e., if typical scientific terms

have different meanings, and thus different referents, in different
paradigms—then theories grounded in different paradigms are
indeed incommensurable. Even worse, they lose contact with
reality. From the realist point of view, these conclusions are totally
unacceptable. Yet as long as the theory of meaning from which
they follow is accepted, they cannot simply be dismissed. To
defend realism against this kind of relativism, therefore,
an alternative theory of meaning is required.

Putnam rose to this challenge, proposing a theory that, among

other things, rejected the common assumption that meanings are
mental entities (e.g., beliefs or mental images). “Meanings just
ain’t in the head!” as he put it in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning.’ ” Nor
are meanings constituted by definitions or descriptions. Rather, it
is reference (or extension)—the entity one points to when
introducing or explaining a term—that is paramount in fixing
meaning and determining whether words vary in meaning from
speaker to speaker or from theory to theory. Although reference
does not exhaust meaning, it constitutes its essential core. The
same referent may thus be characterized in different ways in
different theories, so that the theories may vary while their
referents remain fixed. This move enabled Putnam to put forward
two claims that, taken together, defeat the relativist argument:

1. Theories grounded in different paradigms can refer to the same

entities. The connection between a scientific term and the entity to
which it refers is established by causal chains of prior uses of the
term and by social practices such as pointing, moving, and
weighing, rather than by definitions, descriptions, or mental
images. This claim rebuts the incommensurability argument.

2. Different speakers can associate a word with identical beliefs

and mental images, or even with the same definition, and yet
diverge in the meanings they ascribe to it. Putnam devised his
“Twin Earth” thought experiment to demonstrate this claim. Twin
Earth replicates Earth in almost every detail, including its
inhabitants, who are exact duplicates of the inhabitants of Earth,
speaking the same languages and having the same mental lives
(e.g., the same beliefs and mental images). On Twin Earth,
however, the stuff that looks, feels, and functions like water on
Earth is not H2O but a different chemical compound, abbreviated
XYZ. (Because the year is 1750—about 50 years before the
molecular structure of water was discovered—the inhabitants of
Earth and Twin Earth do not know that the substances they call
“water” are H2O and XYZ, respectively.) Although the beliefs and
images associated with the word water on Twin Earth are identical
to those associated with water on Earth (e.g., the inhabitants of
both planets believe that “water is the clear liquid that fills the
oceans, lakes, and rivers and falls as rain”), the term differs in
meaning on the two planets because the substance it refers to on
Earth differs from the substance it refers to on Twin Earth. The
word water, Putnam argues, always refers to the stuff “out there”
in the external world that a speaker, uttering “water,” might point
to when identifying or referring to a certain liquid as water. From
an Earthly perspective, the word water always refers to the stuff
that an Earthling might point to, whereas on Twin Earth it refers
to the stuff that a Twin Earthling might point to. This conclusion is
a manifestation of the externalism that is at the heart of Putnam’s
conception of meaning.

Another aspect of Putnam’s theory of meaning is what he called

“the division of linguistic labor”—namely, the fact that lay users of
a language need not have the detailed knowledge of it that experts
have. For example, as long as there are, in the community of
speakers, experts who know how to tell gold from other materials,
lay speakers can successfully use the term gold to refer to that
substance even though they lack the knowledge in question. This
view, originally articulated in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’ ” was
later elaborated on to highlight further features of linguistic
practice, the most important being context-dependence, or the
variation of meaning with speaker background and conversational
context. Thus, words such as honour and justice may have very
dissimilar meanings in different cultures, and even scientific terms
such as atom and heat can vary with time and context.

Hilary Putnam
QUICK FACTS
BORN

July 31, 1926

Chicago, Illinois

DIED

March 13, 2016 (aged 89)

SUBJECTS OF STUDY

 realism

Varieties Of Realism
Beginning in the mid-1970s, Putnam sought to distinguish his
understanding of realism from what he now called “metaphysical
realism.” According to Putnam (“Why There Isn’t a Ready-Made
World” [1983]),
What the metaphysical realist holds is that we can think and talk about
things as they are, independently of our minds, and that we can do this
by virtue of a “correspondence” relation between the terms in
our language and some sorts of mind-independent entities.
For Putnam, this picture of word-world correspondence is absurd,
pointing to a realism gone wild. Putnam considered metaphysical
realism to be blind to the autonomy and complexity of human
language. In particular, it is blind to the fact that the same reality
can be described in multiple ways.

Whether Putnam’s early realism was ever “metaphysical” in this

sense is questionable, but it is clear that his explicit critique of
metaphysical realism gives Putnam’s philosophy a Kantian bent;
this is particularly salient in the papers collected in Reason, Truth
and History (1981). Much like Kant’s denial of the knowability of
the “thing in itself,” the modest realism
Putnam endorsed there eschewed the notion of reality “in itself,”
with its built-in representation. After initially calling his position
“internal realism,” Putnam later referred to it as “commonsense
realism” or simply “realism,” as opposed to “Realism.” The
essential point is that none of these changes impelled Putnam to
deny objective truth. Truth under a description, he maintained, is
all the truth one needs to avoid subjectivism and relativism. He
emphasized, for example, the prevalence
in science and mathematics of the phenomenon of equivalence
between different theories or descriptions. Such equivalent
theories can differ in their respective ontologies (e.g., one
adducing forces, the other fields) and still predict and explain the
very same phenomena.

Not surprisingly, this middle ground soon came under fire. Critics
considered Putnam’s realism unstable and at risk of collapsing
into either metaphysical realism or relativism. The latter option
was particularly repugnant to Putnam: in its thoroughgoing denial
of objective truth, relativism is but a form of
radical skepticism and is clearly at odds with Putnam’s realism.

One of Putnam’s striking insights at that time was that the two
polar positions—metaphysical realism on the one hand
and skepticism on the other—are equally vulnerable, and for the
same reason. Both positions construe truth as radically non-
epistemic, and, thus, both countenance the possibility that the
best scientific theory of the world—a theory that satisfies every
epistemic desideratum and is perfect in every methodological
and aesthetic respect—could still turn out to be false. But this
possibility, Putnam argued, is meaningless, and so are the
metaphysical views that countenance it.

Putnam devoted considerable effort to the rebuttal of skepticism.

In particular, he addressed the oft-touted skeptical claim that, for
all one knows, one might be a brain in a vat. As Putnam described
it in “Brains in a Vat” (1981), this thought
experiment contemplates the following scenario:
A human being (you can imagine this to be yourself) has been subjected
to an operation by an evil scientist. The person’s brain (your brain) has
been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which
keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a super-
scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have
the illusion that everything is perfectly normal.

The purpose of the thought experiment, Putnam noted, is “to raise

the classical problem of scepticism with respect to the external
world in a modern way. (How do you know you aren’t in this
predicament?)” Here too, Putnam’s argument follows directly
from his theory of meaning. On the externalist conception of
meaning, words in the vat brain language do not have the same
referents as “normal” words in “normal” human languages
because they are not causally connected in the normal way to the
referents of normal words. In particular, for brains in a vat, the
word tree would refer not to real trees but at best to images of
trees produced by a supercomputer and experienced by envatted
brains. Likewise, the word vat in the vat brain language would
refer not to real vats but at best to images of vats so produced and
experienced. “In short,” Putnam concluded, “if we are brains in a
vat, then ‘We are brains in a vat’ is false.” The brains-in-a-
vat hypothesis is thus paradoxical and self-defeating. Skepticism
is, it turns out, fundamentally flawed: the skeptic’s concerns
cannot even be expressed in a meaningful way.
Putnam’s realism also led him to pursue a realist interpretation
of quantum mechanics, a theory generally considered to pose
insurmountable difficulties for the realist. Many physicists believe,
for example, that quantum mechanics, unlike classical mechanics,
does not represent the actual physical state of a system. Rather, it
is an algorithm for calculating the probabilities of the results of
measurements. Putnam’s first attempt to provide a more realist
understanding of quantum mechanics invoked the radical claim
that logic is empirical. He argued that quantum mechanics does, in
fact, represent real physical states, but the logical rules used for
quantum calculations diverge from those used in classical physics.
Putnam later renounced that approach, adopting a less radical
version of quantum mechanics put forward by David Bohm and
further developed by G.C. Girardi, A. Rimini, and T. Weber.

Putnam’s realism also extended to mathematics. Together with the

American philosopher W.V.O. Quine, he proposed the
indispensability thesis: given that mathematical objects such
as numbers, sets, and groups play an indispensable role in the best
theories of the world, their reality must be granted (see
also philosophy of mathematics: The Fregean argument for
Platonism).

RELATED BIOGRAPHIES

 Sir Michael A.E. Dummett

 Bertrand Russell
 Alfred North Whitehead
 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
 René Descartes
 John Searle
 George Berkeley
 Henri Poincaré
  Gottlob Frege
 Donald Davidson

Philosophy Of Mind
Another area in which Putnam’s contributions have had enormous
impact is the philosophy of mind, where he introduced the
doctrine known as functionalism (sometimes referred to as
“machine functionalism”), which attempts to define mental states
in terms of their functional (or causal) roles relative to other
mental states and behaviours. This doctrine takes the mind to be
characterized not by the substance it is made of but by its
functions and functional organization. In “Philosophy and Our
Mental Life” (1975), Putnam put this idea as follows:
The question of the autonomy of our mental life…has nothing to do with
that all too popular…question about matter or soul-stuff. We could be
made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter.

Putnam further observed that function and structure do not stand

in a one-to-one correspondence. The same function can be
performed in different physical systems, a claim known as the
“multiple realizability” thesis. Putnam drew an analogy between
human mentality and computers, which have hardware (the brain)
and software (the mind) that are likewise disjoint. Hence, function
cannot be characterized in purely material terms. Precisely
because there are various physical systems in which a given
function can be performed, mental properties and activities cannot
be uniquely reduced to physical properties and processes.
Functionalism thus implies the failure of
psychophysical reductionism (the attempt to explain mental
phenomena entirely in terms of the states and properties of
physical systems).

Putnam’s semantic externalism eventually led him to abandon

functionalism. Although it identifies mental states by their
function rather than by their material composition, functionalism
is still committed, according to the later Putnam, to an
internalist conception of these states. In other words, functional
states are brain states, which are insensitive to the outer world and
to the individual’s concrete interactions with it. On the basis of
externalism, Putnam also rejected innatist theories
of language and grammar (such as those of Noam Chomsky) and
denied the feasibility of an internal mental language common to
all human minds (“mentalese”). More generally, because mental
states typically have semantic content, according to Putnam, they
cannot be characterized in purely syntactic terms. To think about
the apple tree outside the window, for example, one must be in
contact with that particular tree and that particular window. How
could such specific links to specific external objects already be
encoded—ready-made, so to speak—in human brain states? The
context-sensitivity of meaning provides yet another argument
against theories that uphold fixed mental states embodying fixed
meanings. If, as in the above-mentioned example, the meaning of
the term honour changes from one context to another, it is
unlikely that there is a single mental state that is invariably
associated with the meaning of honour. To the extent that
functionalism is committed to the existence of fixed universal
mental states of this kind, it too is implicated by these
considerations.

Fact And Value

Despite his early sympathy with Marxism, Putnam never
committed himself to strict materialism. Over the years, however,
he distanced himself noticeably from that position. A
clear manifestation of this distance can be found in his critique of
the traditional fact-value dichotomy—that is, the distinction
between what is (facts) and what ought, or ought not, to be (norms
and values). In expressions such as cruel behaviour or smart
move, the factual-descriptive component cannot, Putnam argued,
be disentangled from the value judgment. Human language is both
factual and value-laden. Furthermore, epistemic concerns, such as
reasons for doubt and belief, have serious moral repercussions,
especially when doubt is cast on someone’s credibility.

These are just some of the many indications of a shift in Putnam’s

philosophical sensibilities. Although he remained an active
philosopher of science, keeping abreast of the latest developments
in areas such as the foundations of quantum mechanics, he
became increasingly critical of scientism, the view that all
knowledge is scientific. Putnam preferred to see philosophy
reassert its traditional role of guiding, edifying, and inspiring
human life. The titles of his later works—Realism with a Human
Face (1990), Words and Life (1994), Ethics without
Ontology (2004), Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life:
Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (2008),
and Philosophy in the Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics, and
Skepticism (2012)—attest to this yearning. All of those writings
convey a deep sense of moral commitment that had become as
characteristic of Putnam’s thinking as his lifelong commitment to
objective truth.