File:Hilary_Putnam.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons
Person · Open Library
- Works
- 95
Top works
- De Vienne à Cambridge
- Probability and confirmation
- Other minds
- realism and reason
- Feasible computational methods in the propositional calculus
via Open Library + Wikidata
Music · MusicBrainz
- Type
- Person
- Gender
- Male
- Origin
- United States
- Active from
- 1914-07-02
- Active to
- 2004-12-07
Discography
- The Music of Leroy Anderson, Vol. 11958
- Frederick Fennell Conducts Gershwin1961
- Frederick Fennell Conducts Victor Herbert1961
- Frederick Fennell Conducts Cole Porter1962
- Macho Marches1979
- Arnaud: Three Fanfares for Brass & Percussion / Vaughan Williams: Toccata Marziale, Folk Song Suite / Grainger: Lincolnshire Posy, Shepherd's Hey1980
- Stars And Stripes Forever1986
- Belle of the Ball1988
- British and American Band Classics1990
- Fennell Favorites!1991
via MusicBrainz · CC0
Listeners · Last.fm
- Listeners
- 5
- Total plays
- 8
<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Hilary+Putnam">Read more on Last.fm</a>
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- Scoping studies: towards a methodological framework
· 2005 · cited 30,629x
- Bowling alone
· 2000 · cited 15,819x
- Global Prevalence of Diabetes
· 2004 · cited 10,425x
- Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital
· 1995 · cited 7,539x
- LD Score regression distinguishes confounding from polygenicity in genome-wide association studies
· 2015 · cited 5,892x
via Crossref · CC0
Quotes
- “[Oddly enough, Putnam believes part of the attraction of some of these formalisms is their obscurity]. "I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!"”
- “It was Rudolf Carnap’s dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project.”
- “These papers are all written from what is called a realist perspective. The statements of science are in my view either true or false (although it is often the case that we don't know which) and their truth or falsity does not consist in their being highly derived ways of describing regularities in human experience. Reality is not a part of the human mind; rather the human mind is a part - and a small part at that - of reality.”
- “The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.”
- “In sum, a theory is only accepted if the theory has substantial, non-ad hoc, explanatory successes. This is in accordance with Popper; unfortunately, it is in even better accordance with the 'inductivist' accounts that Popper rejects, since these stress support rather than falsification.”
- “Truth and falsity are the most fundamental terms of rational criticism, and any adequate philosophy must give some account of these, or failing that, show that they can be dispensed with.”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
Key facts
- Born
- Hilary Whitehall Putnam , ( 1926-07-31 ) July 31, 1926, Chicago , Illinois, U.S.
- Died
- March 13, 2016 (2016-03-13) (aged 89), Arlington, Massachusetts , U.S.
- Spouse
- Ruth Anna Putnam
- Awards
- Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy (2011), Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy (2015)
- Education
- University of Pennsylvania ( BA ), Harvard University , University of California, Los Angeles ( PhD )
- Thesis
- The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences (1951)
- Doctoral advisor
- Hans Reichenbach
- Era
- 20th-century philosophy
- Region
- Western philosophy
- School
- Analytic , Neopragmatism , Postanalytic philosophy , Mathematical quasi-empiricism , Metaphysical realism (1983), Internal realism (1987, 1990), Direct realism (1994), Transactionalism (2012)
- Institutions
- Northwestern University , Princeton University , Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Harvard University
- Doctoral students
- James F. Conant , Mark Wilson
- Main interests
- Philosophy of mind , of language , of science , and of mathematics , Metaphilosophy , Epistemology , Jewish philosophy
- Fields
- Computer science , Mathematics
- Website
- https://putnamphil.blogspot.com/
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Given name
- Hilary
- Gender
- male
- Citizenship
- United States
- Place of birth
- Chicago
- Place of death
- Arlington
- Father
- Samuel Putnam
- Occupation
- computer scientist
- Educated at
- University of California, Los Angeles
- Employer
- Northwestern University
- Political party
- Progressive Labor Party
- Languages spoken
- English language
- Religion
- Judaism
- Doctoral advisor
- Hans Reichenbach
- Field of work
- mathematical logic
- Movement
- scientific realism
- Image
- Hilary Putnam.jpg
- Residence
- Massachusetts
Show 10 more facts
- Commons category
- Hilary Putnam
- date of birth
- 1926-07-31
- member of
- British Academy
- Erdős number
- 3
- date of death
- 2016-03-13
- manner of death
- natural causes
- writing language
- English language
- maintained by WikiProject
- WikiProject Mathematics
- influenced by
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- P8168
- Bradley
via Wikidata · CC0
~40 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Hilary Whitehall Putnam (/ˈpʌtnəm/; July 31, 1926 – March 13, 2016) was an American philosopher, mathematician, computer scientist, and figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He contributed to the studies of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.
Putnam applied equal scrutiny to his own philosophical positions as to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposed its flaws. As a result, he acquired a reputation for frequently changing his positions. In philosophy of mind, Putnam argued 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. Putnam also originated the computational theory of mind. In philosophy of language, along with Saul Kripke and others, he developed the causal theory of reference, and formulated an original theory of meaning, introducing the notion of semantic externalism based on a thought experiment called Twin Earth.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Hilary Putnam” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.