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Hilary Putnams Birth
Born in Chicago, Illinois as an only child to Samuel and Riva Putnam. -
Realism
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. -
Relavitism
Putnam assumed 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 -
The Meaning of Meaning
Proposed a theory that rejected the assumption that meanings are mental entities in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning.’ ” It is the reference and 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. Putnam to put forward two claims that, taken together, defeat the relativist argument: -
Claims
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 by causal chains and by social practices such as pointing, moving, and weighing, rather than by definitions, descriptions, or mental images. This claim rebuts the incommensurability argument.
Different speakers can associate a word with beliefs and mental images, or even with the same definition, and yet diverge in the meanings they ascribe to it -
Science Video
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Other 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)
Philosophy in the Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism (2012) -
Hilary Putnams Death
Hilary Putnam passed away in Arlington, Massachusetts due to lung cancer. -
