Top 9 Quotes & Sayings by Hilary Putnam

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American philosopher Hilary Putnam.

Last updated on November 5, 2024.

Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.

American - Philosopher | Born: July 31, 1926

Source: Wikipedia

No sane person should believe that something is subjective merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.

Hilary Putnam

I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - You write backward Es!

Hilary Putnam

The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.

Hilary Putnam

I can only please one person per day. Today isn't your day, tomorrow doesn't look good either.

Hilary Putnam

Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without providing a replacement. Whether we want to be there or not, science has put us in the position of having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position-and no end to it is in sight-is that of having to philosophise without 'foundations'.

Hilary Putnam

While there is such a thing as correctness in ethics, in interpretation, in mathematics, the way to understand that is not by trying to model it on the ways in which we get things right in physics.

Hilary Putnam

It was Rudolf Carnap's dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project.

Hilary Putnam

Cut the pie any way you like, "meanings" just ain't in the head!

Hilary Putnam

... causes (pains) are not logical constructions out of their effects (behaviour).

Hilary Putnam