At a gathering of the School of Arts and Sciences on Nov. 7, 2023, the next tribute to the life and repair of the late Hilary Whitehall Putnam was unfold upon the everlasting information of the School.

Hilary Putnam’s affect on analytic philosophy was and stays huge, ranging broadly throughout fields together with mathematical logic, philosophy of science and arithmetic, philosophy of thoughts and language, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics.

Born in 1926, Hilary Whitehall Putnam spent his first eight years in France; his father, Samuel Putnam, was a famous literary translator and a well-known of the expatriate inventive neighborhood.  After the household’s return to the U.S., Putnam attended Philadelphia’s Central Excessive Faculty after which the College of Pennsylvania, the place he acquired his bachelor’s diploma in 1948.  After a yr in graduate faculty at Harvard College, he transferred to the College of California, Los Angeles, the place he accomplished his Ph.D. in 1951 below the supervision of the eminent logical empiricist Hans Reichenbach.  Assistant after which affiliate professor at Princeton College between 1953 and 1961, he was recruited to the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how as a full professor in 1961 to go their new philosophy division.  In 1965 he moved upriver to Harvard, the place he stayed for the rest of his profession.

Putnam’s early work focused on philosophy of science and on mathematical logic.  In logic, he was a central contributor to the answer of Hilbert’s Tenth Downside, and he co-published the primary paper on “positive construction” in set principle together with his pupil George Boolos.  In philosophy of science, his criticisms of the logical empiricist evaluation of scientific theories and his formulation of the conceptual equipment to interchange it performed a significant function within the eclipse of the older views.  Notably noteworthy was his concept that totally different scientific theories might be wildly divergent however, nonetheless, their phrases might discuss with the identical properties.  On this manner, the theories would nonetheless be commensurable, a view diametrically against these of the empiricists and their followers and nonetheless debated as we speak.

That view of properties knowledgeable Putnam’s revolutionary work within the philosophy of thoughts.  His 1960 paper Minds and Machines formulated the place he dubbed “functionalism,” by which human psychological states are taken to be realizations of the inner states of a computational machine whose traits are given via the hyperlinks they forge between inputs and outputs.  Based on this view, psychological properties are similar to computational properties, although we speak about them in very other ways.  Functionalism turned the dominant view in philosophy of thoughts and cognitive science for many years and remains to be broadly maintained.

Putnam’s most far-reaching work lay in philosophy of language, the place he originated semantic externalism: the reference of our phrases is just not decided by options which are cognitively obtainable to us however by info of the exterior world that we might know nothing about.  In assist of this view, Putnam proposed the thought-experiment of Twin Earth: think about a planet very like ours on which there’s a standard substance that appears, smells, and tastes like our water, in order that it performs the identical function in every day life exterior the laboratory but has a chemical composition totally different from H2O.  Putnam argued that the denizens of that planet would refer by their phrase “water” to that totally different substance however to not our water, although their psychological and linguistic representations surrounding the phrase could be the identical as ours.  Twin-Earth-style examples have since develop into a staple of philosophy.

Putnam’s views weren’t fixed: he had a repute for incessantly altering his thoughts.  For instance, 28 years after he proposed functionalism, he printed a e book that argues towards it.  A few of the most seen modifications have been in his stance in metaphysics.  At first, he championed what he referred to as “scientific realism.”  Within the mid-Nineteen Seventies, feeling that such a view licensed existence assertions that have been too distant from the proof for them, he proposed what he referred to as “inside realism.”  Subsequently, he judged that he had moved too far within the path of verificationism and rebounded with a view he referred to as “pragmatic realism,” however he later discovered this insufficiently sturdy and changed it with “common sense” or “naive” realism.

These evolving takes on realism have been paralleled by Putnam’s search to combine the scientific perspective that permeated his earlier considering with historic and humanistic information.  This development is mirrored within the titles of his books of the Nineties equivalent to “Realism with a Human Face” and “The Threefold Wire: Thoughts, Physique, and World.”  Throughout this time, he additionally turned religiously observant and anxious in a scholarly manner with Jewish custom, leading to his 2008 e book, “Jewish Philosophy as a Information to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein.”  The identical issues, in a secular setting, are mirrored in his twenty second and final e book, the posthumously printed “Pragmatism as a Means of Life: The Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey,” co-authored together with his spouse Ruth Anna Putnam, a professor of philosophy at Wellesley School.

One conventional subject turned outstanding in Putnam’s later work.  He argued towards the notion that there’s a sharp distinction between info and values, between “is” and “ought.”  That distinction was orthodoxy in philosophy, going again not less than to Hume.  For Putnam, in distinction, truth and analysis are inextricably entangled.  Therefore there might be no impugning the objectivity of evaluative discourse whereas accepting factual, scientific information.

Putnam retired from instructing at Harvard in 2000, though he remained professionally lively till his last yr.  He was survived by his spouse; two daughters, Erika Putnam Chin and Maxima Kahn; two sons, Samuel and Joshua; and 4 granddaughters.

Respectfully submitted,

Edward J. Corridor
Charles D. Parsons
Thomas M. Scanlon
Warren Goldfarb, Chair