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Putnam was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1926. His father, Samuel Putnam, was a scholar of Romance languages, columnist and translator who wrote for the Daily Worker, a publication of the American Communist Party, from 1936 to 1946 (when he became disillusioned with communism).[16] As a result of his father's commitment to communism, Putnam had a secular upbringing, although his mother, Riva, was Jewish.[3] The family lived in France until 1934, when they returned to the United States, settling in Philadelphia.[3] Putnam attended Central High School; there he met Noam Chomsky, who was a year behind him. The two have been friends—and often intellectual opponents—ever since.[17] Putnam studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving his BA (undergraduate degree) and becoming a member of the Philomathean Society, one of the oldest collegiate literary societies in the U.S.[3][14] He went on to do graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University,[3] and later at UCLA's Philosophy Department, where he received his Ph.D. in 1951 for a dissertation entitled "The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences". Putnam's teacher Hans Reichenbach (his dissertation supervisor) was a leading figure in logical positivism, the dominant school of philosophy of the day; one of Putnam's most consistent positions has been his rejection of logical positivism as self-defeating.[14] After briefly teaching at Northwestern, Princeton, and MIT, he moved to Harvard in 1965 with his wife, Ruth Anna Jacobs, who took a teaching position in philosophy at Wellesley College.[14] Hilary and Ruth Anna were married in 1962.[18] Ruth Anna Jacobs, descendant of a family with a long scholarly tradition in Gotha (her ancestor was the German classical scholar Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Jacobs), was born in Berlin, Germany,[19] in 1927 to anti-Nazi political-activist parents and, like Putnam himself, she was raised an atheist (her mother was Jewish and her father had been from a Christian background).[18] The Putnams, rebelling against the anti-Semitism that they had experienced during their youth, decided to establish a traditional Jewish home for their children.[18] Since they had no experience with the rituals of Judaism, they sought out invitations to other Jews' homes for Seder. They had "no idea how to do it [themselves]", in the words of Ruth Anna. They therefore began to study Jewish ritual and Hebrew, and became more Jewishly interested, identified, and active. In 1994, Hilary Putnam celebrated a belated Bar Mitzvah service. His wife had a Bat Mitzvah service four years later.[18] Hilary was a popular teacher at Harvard. In keeping with the family tradition, he was politically active.[14] In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was an active supporter of civil rights causes and an opponent of American military intervention in Vietnam.[15] In 1963, he organized one of the first faculty and student committees at MIT against the war. Putnam was disturbed when he learned from reading the reports of David Halberstam that the U.S. was "defending" South Vietnamese peasants from the Vietcong by poisoning their rice crops.[14] After moving to Harvard in 1965, he organized campus protests and began teaching courses on Marxism. Hilary became an official faculty advisor to the Students for a Democratic Society and, in 1968, became a member of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP).[14] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965.[20] After 1968, his political activities were centered on the PLP.[15] The Harvard administration considered these activities disruptive and attempted to censure Putnam, but two other faculty members criticized the procedures.[21] Putnam permanently severed his ties with the PLP in 1972.[22] In 1997, at a meeting of former draft resistance activists at Arlington Street Church in Boston, Putnam described his involvement with the PLP as a mistake. He said that he had been impressed at first with PLP's commitment to alliance-building, and its willingness to attempt to organize from within the armed forces.[15] In 1976, he was elected President of the American Philosophical Association. The following year, he was selected as Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Mathematical Logic, in recognition of his contributions to philosophy of logic and mathematics.[14] While breaking with his radical past, Putnam has never abandoned his belief that academics have a particular social and ethical responsibility toward society. He has continued to be forthright and progressive in his political views, as expressed in the articles "How Not to Solve Ethical Problems" (1983) and "Education for Democracy" (1993).[14] Putnam is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He retired from teaching in June 2000, but, as of 2009, he still gives a seminar almost yearly at Tel Aviv University. He is the Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He is also a founding patron of the small liberal arts college Ralston College. His corpus includes five volumes of collected works, seven books, and more than 200 articles. Putnam's renewed interest in Judaism has inspired him to publish several recent books and essays on the topic.[23] With his wife, he has co-authored several books and essays on the late-19th-century American pragmatist movement.[14] Philosophy of mind Multiple realizability An illustration of multiple realizability. M stands for mental and P stands for physical. It can be seen that more than one P can instantiate one M, but not vice versa. Causal relations between states are represented by the arrows (M1 goes to M2, etc.) Putnam's best-known work concerns philosophy of mind. His most noted original contributions to that field came in several key papers published in the late 1960s that set out the hypothesis of multiple realizability.[24] In these papers, Putnam argues that, contrary to the famous claim of the type-identity theory, it is not necessarily true that "Pain is identical to C-fibre firing." Pain, according to Putnam's papers, may correspond to utterly different physical states of the nervous system in different organisms, and yet they all experience the same mental state of "being in pain". Putnam cited examples from the animal kingdom to illustrate his thesis. He asked whether it was likely that the brain structures of diverse types of animals realize pain, or other mental states, the same way. If they do not share the same brain structures, they cannot share the same mental states and properties. The answer to this puzzle had to be that mental states were realized by different physical states in different species. Putnam then took his argument a step further, asking about such things as the nervous systems of alien beings, artificially intelligent robots and other silicon-based life forms. These hypothetical entities, he contended, should not be considered incapable of experiencing pain just because they lack the same neurochemistry as humans. Putnam concluded that type-identity theorists had been making an "ambitious" and "highly implausible" conjecture which could be disproven with one example of multiple realizability.[25] This argument is sometimes referred to as the "likelihood argument".[24] Putnam formulated a complementary argument based on what he called "functional isomorphism". He defined the concept in these terms: "Two systems are functionally isomorphic if 'there is a correspondence between the states of one and the states of the other that preserves functional relations'." In the case of computers, two machines are functionally isomorphic if and only if the sequential relations among states in the first are exactly mirrored by the sequential relations among states in the other. Therefore, a computer made out of silicon chips and a computer made out of cogs and wheels can be functionally isomorphic but constitutionally diverse. Functional isomorphism implies multiple realizability.[25] This argument is sometimes referred to as an "a priori argument".[24] Jerry Fodor, Putnam, and others noted that, along with being an effective argument against type-identity theories, multiple realizability implies that any low-level explanation of higher-level mental phenomena is insufficiently abstract and general.[25][26][27] Functionalism, which identifies mental kinds with functional kinds that are characterized exclusively in terms of causes and effects, abstracts from the level of microphysics, and therefore seemed to be a better explanation of the relation between mind and body. In fact, there are many functional kinds, such as mousetraps, software and bookshelves, which are multiply realized at the physical level.[25] Machine state functionalism A Turing machine can be visualized as a finite-length tape of slots (which can be, however, made -before the run- arbitrarily longer if needed) that are written or erased one at a time, with the choice of action determined by a "state". According to Putnam's machine-state functionalism, the notions of state in an abstract computer and mental state are essentially the same. The first formulation of such a functionalist theory was put forth by Putnam himself. This formulation, which is now called "machine-state functionalism", was inspired by analogies noted by Putnam and others between the mind and theoretical "Turing machines" capable of computing any given algorithm.[28] In non-technical terms, a Turing machine can be visualized as an infinitely long tape divided into squares (the memory) with a box-shaped scanning device that sits over and scans one square of the memory at a time. Each square is either blank (B) or has a 1 written on it. These are the inputs to the machine. The possible outputs are: Halt: Do nothing. R: move one square to the right. L: move one square to the left. B: erase whatever is on the square. 1: erase whatever is on the square and print a 1. A simple example of a Turing machine which writes out the sequence '111' after scanning three blank squares and then stopping is specified by the following machine table: State 1 State 2 State 3 B write 1; stay in state 1 write 1; stay in state 2 write 1; stay in state 3 1 go right; go to state 2 go right; go to state 3 [halt] This table states that if the machine is in state one and scans a blank square (B), it will print a 1 and remain in state one. If it is in state one and reads a 1, it will move one square to the right and also go into state two. If it is in state two and reads a B, it will print a 1 and stay in state two. If it's in state two and reads a 1, it will move one square to the right and go into state three. Finally, if it is in state three and reads a B, it prints a 1 and remains in state three.[29] The point, for functionalism, is the nature of the "states" of the Turing machine. Each state can be defined in terms of its relations to the other states and to the inputs and outputs. State one, for example, is simply the state in which the machine, if it reads a B, writes a 1 and stays in that state, and in which, if it reads a 1, it moves one square to the right and goes into a different state. This is the functional definition of state one; it is its causal role in the overall system. The details of how it accomplishes what it accomplishes and of its material constitution are completely irrelevant. According to machine-state functionalism, the nature of a mental state is just like the nature of the automaton states described above. Just as "state one" simply is the state in which, given an input B, such-and-such happens, so being in pain is the state which disposes one to cry "ouch", become distracted, wonder what the cause is, and so forth.[30] Rejection of functionalism In the late 1980s, Putnam abandoned his adherence to functionalism and other computational theories of mind. His change of mind was primarily due to the difficulties that computational theories have in explaining certain intuitions with respect to the externalism of mental content. This is illustrated by Putnam's own Twin Earth thought experiment (see Philosophy of language).[11] He also developed a separate argument against functionalism in 1988, based on Fodor's generalized version of multiple realizability. Asserting that functionalism is really a watered-down identity theory in which mental kinds are identified with functional kinds, Putnam argued that mental kinds may be multiply realizable over functional kinds. The argument for functionalism is that the same mental state could be implemented by the different states of a universal Turing machine.[31] Despite Putnam's rejection of functionalism, it has continued to flourish and has been developed into numerous versions by thinkers as diverse as David Marr, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, and David Lewis.[32] Functionalism helped lay the foundations for modern cognitive science[32] and is the dominant theory of mind in philosophy today.[33] Philosophy of language Semantic externalism One of Putnam's contributions to philosophy of language is his claim that "meaning just ain't in the head". He illustrated this using his "Twin Earth" thought experiment to argue that environmental factors play a substantial role in determining meaning. Twin Earth shows this, according to Putnam, since on Twin Earth everything is identical to Earth, except that its lakes, rivers and oceans are filled with XYZ whereas those of earth are filled with H2O. Consequently, when an earthling, Fredrick, uses the Earth-English word "water", it has a different meaning from the Twin Earth-English word "water" when used by his physically identical twin, Frodrick, on Twin Earth. Since Fredrick and Frodrick are physically indistinguishable when they utter their respective words, and since their words have different meanings, meaning cannot be determined solely by what is in their heads. This led Putnam to adopt a version of semantic externalism with regard to meaning and mental content.[9][25] The late philosopher of mind and language Donald Davidson, despite his many differences of opinion with Putnam, wrote that semantic externalism constituted an "anti-subjectivist revolution" in philosophers' way of seeing the world. Since the time of Descartes, philosophers had been concerned with proving knowledge from the basis of subjective experience. Thanks to Putnam, Tyler Burge and others, Davidson said, philosophy could now take the objective realm for granted and start questioning the alleged "truths" of subjective experience.[34] Theory of meaning Putnam, along with Saul Kripke, Keith Donnellan, and others, contributed to what is known as the causal theory of reference.[2] In particular, Putnam maintained in The Meaning of "Meaning" that the objects referred to by natural kind terms—such as tiger, water, and tree—are the principal elements of the meaning of such terms. There is a linguistic division of labor, analogous to Adam Smith's economic division of labor, according to which such terms have their references fixed by the "experts" in the particular field of science to which the terms belong. So, for example, the reference of the term "lion" is fixed by the community of zoologists, the reference of the term "elm tree" is fixed by the community of botanists, and the reference of the term "table salt" is fixed as "NaCl" by chemists. These referents are considered rigid designators in the Kripkean sense and are disseminated outward to the linguistic community.[25] Putnam specifies a finite sequence of elements (a vector) for the description of the meaning of every term in the language. Such a vector consists of four components: the object to which the term refers, e.g., the object individuated by the chemical formula H2O; a set of typical descriptions of the term, referred to as "the stereotype", e.g., "transparent", "colorless", and "hydrating"; the semantic indicators that place the object into a general category, e.g., "natural kind" and "liquid"; the syntactic indicators, e.g., "concrete noun" and "mass noun". Such a "meaning-vector" provides a description of the reference and use of an expression within a particular linguistic community. It provides the conditions for its correct usage and makes it possible to judge whether a single speaker attributes the appropriate meaning to that expression or whether its use has changed enough to cause a difference in its meaning. According to Putnam, it is legitimate to speak of a change in the meaning of an expression only if the reference of the term, and not its stereotype, has changed. However, since there is no possible algorithm that can determine which aspect—the stereotype or the reference—has changed in a particular case, it is necessary to consider the usage of other expressions of the language.[25] Since there is no limit to the number of such expressions which must be considered, Putnam embraced a form of semantic holism.[35] Philosophy of mathematics Putnam made a significant contribution to philosophy of mathematics in the Quine–Putnam "indispensability argument" for mathematical realism.[28] This argument is considered by Stephen Yablo to be one of the most challenging arguments in favor of the acceptance of the existence of abstract mathematical entities, such as numbers and sets.[36] The form of the argument is as follows. One must have ontological commitments to all entities that are indispensable to the best scientific theories, and to those entities only (commonly referred to as "all and only"). Mathematical entities are indispensable to the best scientific theories. Therefore, One must have ontological commitments to mathematical entities.[37] The justification for the first premise is the most controversial. Both Putnam and Quine invoke naturalism to justify the exclusion of all non-scientific entities, and hence to defend the "only" part of "all and only". The assertion that "all" entities postulated in scientific theories, including numbers, should be accepted as real is justified by confirmation holism. Since theories are not confirmed in a piecemeal fashion, but as a whole, there is no justification for excluding any of the entities referred to in well-confirmed theories. This puts the nominalist who wishes to exclude the existence of sets and non-Euclidean geometry, but to include the existence of quarks and other undetectable entities of physics, for example, in a difficult position.[37] Putnam holds the view that mathematics, like physics and other empirical sciences, uses both strict logical proofs and "quasi-empirical" methods. For example, Fermat's last theorem states that for no integer n>2 are there positive integer values of x, y, and z such that x^n+y^n=z^n. Before this was proven for all n>2 in 1995 by Andrew Wiles,[38] it had been proven for many values of n. These proofs inspired further research in the area, and formed a quasi-empirical consensus for the theorem. Even though such knowledge is more conjectural than a strictly proven theorem, it was still used in developing other mathematical ideas.[8] Mathematics and computer science Putnam has contributed to scientific fields not directly related to his work in philosophy.[2] As a mathematician, Putnam contributed to the resolution of Hilbert's tenth problem in mathematics. Yuri Matiyasevich had formulated a theorem involving the use of Fibonacci numbers in 1970, which was designed to answer the question of whether there is a general algorithm that can decide whether a given system of Diophantine equations (polynomials with integer coefficients) has a solution among the integers. Putnam, working with Martin Davis and Julia Robinson, demonstrated that Matiyasevich's theorem was sufficient to prove that no such general algorithm can exist. It was therefore shown that David Hilbert's famous tenth problem has no solution.[13] In computability theory, Putnam investigated the structure of the ramified analytical hierarchy, its connection with the constructible hierarchy and its Turing degrees. He showed that there exist many levels of the constructible hierarchy which do not add any subsets of the integers[39] and later, with his student George Boolos, that the first such "non-index" is the ordinal \beta_0 of ramified analysis[40] (this is the smallest \beta such that L_\beta is a model of full second-order comprehension), and also, together with a separate paper with Richard Boyd (another of Putnam's students) and Gustav Hensel,[41] how the Davis–Mostowski–Kleene hyperarithmetical hierarchy of arithmetical degrees can be naturally extended up to \beta_0. In computer science, Putnam is known for the Davis-Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT), developed with Martin Davis in 1960.[2] The algorithm finds if there is a set of true or false values that satisfies a given Boolean expression so that the entire expression becomes true. In 1962, they further refined the algorithm with the help of George Logemann and Donald W. Loveland. It became known as the DPLL algorithm. This algorithm is efficient and still forms the basis of most complete SAT solvers.[12] Hilary Whitehall Putnam (born July 31, 1926) is an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science.[2] He is known for his willingness to apply an equal degree of scrutiny to his own philosophical positions as to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposes its flaws.[3] As a result, he has acquired a reputation for frequently changing his own position.[4] Putnam is currently Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. In philosophy of mind, Putnam is known for his argument against the type-identity of mental and physical states based on his hypothesis of the multiple realizability of the mental, and for the concept of functionalism, an influential theory regarding the mind–body problem.[2][5] In philosophy of language, along with Saul Kripke and others, he developed the causal theory of reference, and formulated an original theory of meaning, inventing the notion of semantic externalism based on a famous thought experiment called Twin Earth.[6] In philosophy of mathematics, he and his mentor W. V. Quine developed the "Quine–Putnam indispensability thesis", an argument for the reality of mathematical entities,[7] later espousing the view that mathematics is not purely logical, but "quasi-empirical".[8] In the field of epistemology, he is known for his critique of the well known "brain in a vat" thought experiment. This thought experiment appears to provide a powerful argument for epistemological skepticism, but Putnam challenges its coherence.[9] In metaphysics, he originally espoused a position called metaphysical realism, but eventually became one of its most outspoken critics, first adopting a view he called "internal realism",[10] which he later abandoned in favor of a pragmatist-inspired direct realism. Putnam's "direct realism" aims to return the study of metaphysics to the way people actually experience the world, rejecting the idea of mental representations, sense data, and other intermediaries between mind and world.[11] In his later work, Putnam has become increasingly interested in American pragmatism, Jewish philosophy, and ethics, thus engaging with a wider array of philosophical traditions. He has also displayed an interest in metaphilosophy, seeking to "renew philosophy" from what he identifies as narrow and inflated concerns. Outside philosophy, Putnam has contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem[12] and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.[13] He has been at times a politically controversial figure, especially for his involvement with the Progressive Labor Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[14][15] |
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