Abstract

In his seminal work, Representation and Reality and elsewhere in publications throughout the 1980's and 1990's, Hilary Putnam attempts an ingenious refutation of computational functionalism. His refutation centers upon three main pillars: the use of the Godel incompleteness theorems, his precise articulation of a triviality thesis and his argument that there can be no local computational reductions . ;We argue that each pillar is riddled with severe problems. His rescue of the Godel incompleteness theorems from the logical error committed by J. R. Lucas and Roger Penrose comes only at the expense of his argument succumbing to a paradox. His triviality theorem commits a modal error and faces a Kripke-Wittgenstein problem. We also show that both John Searle's metaphysics of computation and current triviality arguments fail to respect theorems of computability and computational complexity theory. We demonstrate, by a relative consistency proof, that computational ism is not committed to metaphysical realism and escapes Quinean indeterminacy and ontological relativity. The demonstration is relative to the success of Putnamian epistemic semantics. We argue that Putnam's no-local-computational-reduction claim amounts to nothing more than a claim that inductive reasoning cannot be formalized, that it erroneously saddles computationalism with radical Quinean meaning holism and that he fails to take into account well-known work in mathematical logic, cognitive science and artificial intelligence.