July 31, 1926 - March 13, 2016 Hilary Putnam was a an American philosopher, mathematician, a computer scientist, and in analytic philosophy.
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Received his Ph.D. in 1951 from UCLA
His dissertation concerns itself with The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences and the problems of the deductive justification for induction. Written under the direction of Putnam’s mentor, Hans Reichenbach, the book considers Reichenbach’s idealization of very long finite sequences as infinite sequences and the bearing this has upon Reichenbach’s pragmatic vindication of induction. -
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Professor at Princeton University
He taught at Princeton for 8 years where he received tenure in both the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Mathematics. -
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Professor at M.I.T.
Taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -
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Professor at Harvard University
Professor Putnam taught Matmnatical logic at the University of Harvard from 1965 until his retirement in 2000. During his tenured at Harvard, Professor Putnam wrote extensively on issues in metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics. philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, and on the American Pragmatists and the later Wittgenstein. -
Theory of Multiple Realizability
His best know work in philosophy was his contributions to the philosophy of the mind. He argued the claim to the Typed Identity theory, which categorized mental events that then could be grouped into types of physical events. He argued the same mind state could be realized by more than one physical state. For example, two people (physical state) could be thinking about a cheeseburger from McDonald's at the same time (mental state). Which allows multiple realizability to exist. -
Functionalism
This is a short clip from a 1978 interview in which Hilary Putnam explains the functionalist theory of mind. He breaks down in a way to make it very understandable for the everyday person. The basic idea is that what makes something a mental state of a particular type is not what it's made of, but its function, the role it plays. The mind is like the program or software of the physical brain. https://streamable.com/778lsq -
Representation and Reality
The first philosopher to advance the notion that the computer is an apt model for the mind takes a radically new view of his own theory of functionalism in his book. Putnam argues that in fact, the computational analogy cannot answer the important questions about the nature of such mental states as belief, reasoning, rationality, and knowledge that lie at the heart of the philosophy of mind.
