Hilary putnam profile

Hilary Putnam

By Natalya Perry

  • Brief Background

    Brief Background
    Hilary Putnam was born on July 31st 1926 in Chicago Illinois as an only child. He died on March 31st 2016. Throughout his lifetime, Hilary would make major contributions to philosophy.

  • How His Career Started

    How His Career Started
    Putnam graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and in 1951 he received his Ph.D. from UCLA. He taught at various universities before ending up teaching at Harvard in 1956. He had been involved in a lot of philosophy associations and was awarded many times for his work. He focused on issues in metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, and on the American Pragmatists and the later Wittgenstein.

  • Strong Realism

    Strong Realism
    Hilary Putnam had a strong view point of realism early on in his career which was "scientific realism". This realism is the questioning of if the world, including all its many things, beings, structures with causes, does truly exist, independent to both our mind and senses. He used arguments from philosophy of language and logic to aid in his stand points in his early essays on this strong realist view.

  • Twin Earth Experiment

    Twin Earth Experiment
    Putnam used his strong realistic ideas to explain his theory on objectivity through his "Twin Earth" experiment. He stated if a scientist from earth explored a "twin earth" then how could that scientist be so sure everything was the exact same as the original earth. in order to have an exact replica of that original earth, every molecule and cell would need to have the same patterns.

  • Is Earth A's water the Same as Earth B's Water?

    Is Earth A's water the Same as Earth B's Water?
    He states that a necessary truth in our physical world,and all other worlds physically like ours that water should possess the molecular structure H2O or gold the atomic number 79. If a explorer from our earth, Earth A, went to Earth B, and claim that there is "water" just like Earth A, how could that person be so sure? Even if that water looks, feels, and tastes like water from Earth A, unless it is made exactly of H2O, it cannot be the same.

  • "Meanings Ain't Just in the Head"

    "Meanings Ain't Just in the Head"
    This drove Putnam's external position of what truth and meaning actually stood for and what they mean to each individual and then as a whole. To have natural-kind terms like "water" to fix these references to be truth or falsity containing these simple like terms, isn't an expression of sense by this or that person, but those different people personally using the truth or failing to use the truth of such meanings to the specific kind of language to describe accurately.

  • Video on Hilary Putnam

    Video on Hilary Putnam
    Here is an interview Hilary Putnam did on what is science and how it is ever changing. It is pretty cool to have an actual interview of a scientist that was so influential! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4HQZrOeZ7E

  • Work Cited

    Work Cited
    1. “Hilary Putnam on Realism, Truth & Reason.” Philosophy Now: a Magazine of Ideas, https://philosophynow.org/issues/49/Hilary_Putnam_on_Realism_Truth_and_Reason.
    2. Hickey, Lance P. Hilary Putnam. Continuum, 2009.
    3. Żegleń, Urszula M., and Conant, James. Hilary Putnam Pragmatism and Realism . Routledge, 2002.
    4. Putnam, Hilary. Renewing Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1992.
    5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4HQZrOeZ7E