Hilary Putnam

[Winner of the Teorema Essay Prize for Young Scholars 2024]. How can we know we are not dreaming? In this essay, I tackle this and related questions from a transcendental standpoint, by building a philosophical narrative centred upon three “giants”: Descartes, Kant, and Putnam. From each, I take some ideas and discard some others, with the aim of developing a historically informed, yet original, transcendental approach to dream skepticism. I argue that dreams can be distinguished from objective cognitions, since they (...) do not regularly fulfil the transcendental conditions of such cognitions, e.g. the conditions of linguistic reference. Indeed, drawing on some insights by G. E. Moore and Wittgenstein, I further argue that the formulations of dream skepticism prove nonsensical: they cannot be linguistically understood. However, reflection on these skeptical formulations may lead us to a clear aesthetic understanding of the transcendental conditions of sense, as well as of the meaning of philosophically problematic words like “dream,” “perception,” and “reality.”. (shrink)

This chapter responds to Saul Kripke’s critique of the idea of adopting an alternative logic. It defends an anti-exceptionalist view of logic, on which coming to accept a new logic is a special case of coming to accept a new scientific theory. The approach is illustrated in detail by debates on quantified modal logic. A distinction between folk logic and scientific logic is modelled on the distinction between folk physics and scientific physics. The importance of not confusing logic with metalogic (...) in applying this distinction is emphasized. Defeasible inferential dispositions are shown to play a major role in theory acceptance in logic and mathematics as well as in natural and social science. Like beliefs, such dispositions are malleable in response to evidence, though not simply at will. The chapter considers the Quinean objection that accepting an alternative logic involves changing the subject rather than denying the doctrine. The objection is shown to depend on neglect of the social dimension of meaning determination, akin to descriptivism about proper names and natural kind terms criticized by Kripke and Putnam. Normal standards of interpretation indicate that disputes between classical and non-classical logicians are genuine disagreements. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes two varieties of skepticism and the varieties of philosophical response those skepticisms have engendered. The aim of the exercise is to furnish a perspicuous overview of some of the dialectical relations that obtain across some of the range of problems that philosophers have called (and continue to call) “skeptical”. I argue that such an overview affords a number of forms of philosophical insight.

Recent writings by Hilary Putnam indicate the seriousness with which he has moved toward pragmatism. Putnam has not only characterized his own position as similar to pragmatism, he has written a number of essays presenting the views of the classical pragmatists, especially James, Dewey, and Peirce. “Putnam, Pragmatism, and Dewey” examines fundamental problems with Putnam’s recent efforts, especially as they pertain to Dewey’s epistemology.

In a blurb on the dust jacket, Hilary Putnam describes Barry Allen'sTruth in Philosophyas “a good, provocative, and important book” discussing issues of “common concern to both analytic and continental philosophers.” Yet Putnam admits that Allen's views “are ones that I myself am committed to combating and … I am certain most analytic philosophers will want to combat.” All the more reason to read this book, of course: know your enemy. Since Rorty clarified recent European philosophy for us in the (...) 1980s, we have seen the continuing political transformation of what used to be an abstract, purely academic domain. Indeed, in his last chapter, Allen connects truth with politics in his discussion of Foucault:The production and circulation of truth is as capable of complicity with tyranny, and all the more so with tutelage, as any instrument of government, and its products do not have tobe falseto have this effect.… Truth is inextricably situated amid all the major asymmetries of social power, (p. 173)Foucault challenges the assumption of many that in liberal democracies (of which Putnam, after his youthful excesses, must consider himself a defender) truth and freedom need each other. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam deals in this book with some of the most fundamental persistent problems in philosophy: the nature of truth, knowledge and rationality. His aim is to break down the fixed categories of thought which have always appeared to define and constrain the permissible solutions to these problems.

First published in 1978, this reissue presents a seminal philosophical work by professor Putnam, in which he puts forward a conception of knowledge which makes ethics, practical knowledge and non-mathematic parts of the social sciences just as much parts of 'knowledge' as the sciences themselves. He also rejects the idea that knowledge can be demarcated from non-knowledge by the fact that the former alone adheres to 'the scientific method'. The first part of the book consists of Professor Putnam's John Locke (...) lectures, delivered at the University of Oxford in 1976, offering a detailed examination of a 'physicalist' theory of reference against a background of the works of Tarski, Carnap, Popper, Hempel and Kant. The analysis then extends to notions of truth, the character of linguistic enquiry and social scientific enquiry in general, interconnecting with the great metaphysical problem of realism, the nature of language and reference, and the character of ourselves. (shrink)