-
Born in Chicago, Illinois
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. As a result of his father's commitment to communism, Putnam had a secular upbringing, although his mother, Riva, was Jewish. The family lived in France until 1934, when they returned to the United States, settling in Philadelphia. -
Functionalism
Another area in which Putnam’s contributions have had enormous impact is the philosophy of mind, where he introduced the doctrine known as functionalism (sometimes referred to as “machine functionalism”), which attempts to define mental states in terms of their functional (or causal) roles relative to other mental states and behaviors. This doctrine takes the mind to be characterized not by the substance it is made of but by its functions and functional organization. -
Harvard University
Putnam was a philosopher of science and a major force in the Analytic fields of the philosophies of mind, language, and math. He joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1965. His habit of submitting his own positions to the same focused analysis and scrutiny that he so effectively levied against his interlocutors and philosophical opponents and adjusting accordingly led him to become known as something of a flip-flopper (reputation usually as unwelcome to a scholar as it is to a politician). -
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.
