Hilary Putnam Quotes

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No sane person should believe that something is subjective merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.
Hilary Putnam
Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without providing a replacement. Whether we want to be there or not, science has put us in the position of having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position-and no end to it is in sight-is that of having to philosophise without 'foundations'.
Hilary Putnam
All of this is really impossible, in the way that it is really impossible that monkeys should by chance type out a copy of Hamlet.
Hilary Putnam
Philosophy needs vision and argument… there is something disappointing about a philosophical work that contains arguments, however good, which are not inspired by some genuine vision, and something disappointing about a philosophical work that contains a vision, however inspiring, which is unsupported by arguments…Speculation about how things hang together requires… the ability to draw out conceptual distinctions and connections, and the ability to argue… But speculative views, however interesting or well supported by arguments or insightful, are not all we need. We also need what [the philosopher Myles] Burnyeat called ‘vision’ – and I take that to mean vision as to how to live our lives, and how to order our societies.
Hilary Putnam
Rosenzweig daringly criticizes Plato’s dialogues because in them “the thinker knows his thoughts in advance,” and moreover the other is only raising the objections the author thought of himself.
Hilary Putnam (Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies))
Darwin’s point about variation often goes unappreciated today in philosophical discussions, even though it has been uncontroversial for well over a century. Recent discussions of natural kinds, prompted by the seminal ideas of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, often assume that one can revive essentialism. Yet if species are natural kinds no such revival is in prospect. Kripke and Putnam largely restricted their discussions to the cases of elements and compounds, and with good reason. For, given the insights of neo-Darwinism, it’s clear that the search for some analogue of the microstructural essences can’t be found. No genetic or karyotypic property will play for species the role that atomic number does for the elements.
Philip Kitcher
As the philosopher Hilary Putnam put it: ‘The difference between science and previous ways of trying to find out truth is, in large part, that scientists are willing to test their ideas, because they don’t regard them as infallible . . . You have to put questions to nature and be willing to change your ideas if they don’t work.’FN4811
Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success)
When I got to Harvard, I knew all the people who were the leaders of the radical left. Hilary Putnam at that time was one of the biggest leaders of it. But I was closest to the posture of people like Rawls and Cavell—that is, a kind of left liberal opposing the war, supporting the creation of African-American studies, very concerned with issues of race and gender, but not Marxist.
Anonymous
Turing was able to show that there are certain classes of problem that do not have any algorithmic solution (in particular the 'halting problem' that I shall describe shortly). However, Hilbert's actual tenth problem had to wait until 1970 before the Russian mathematician Yuri Matiyasevich-providing proofs that completed certain arguments that had been earlier put forward by the Americans Julia Robinson, Martin Davis, and Hilary Putnam-showed that there can be no computer program (algorithm) which decides yes/no systematically to the question of whether a system of Diophantine equations has a solution. It may be remarked that whenever the answer happens to be 'yes', then that fact can, in principle, be ascertained by the particular computer program that just slavishly tries all sets of integers one after the other. It is the answer 'no', on the other hand, that eludes any systematic treatment. Various sets of rules for correctly giving the answer 'no' can be provided-like the argument using even and odd numbers that rules out solutions to the second system given above-but Matisyasevich's theorem showed that these can never be exhaustive.
Roger Penrose (Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness)
there is no remotely plausible way to understand why those theories are so successful, other than by assuming that they are at least roughly correct. This is sometimes called the no miracles argument, following philosopher Hilary Putnam’s observation that it would be a miracle for scientific theories to work so well if they weren’t true.
David Wallace (Philosophy of Physics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))