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.