Putnam, Hilary

Putnam, Hilary

(born July 31, 1926, Chicago, Ill., U.S.) U.S. philosopher. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1951 he taught at Northwestern University, Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard. Early in his career he was a defender of scientific realism. In the 1960s he extended the causal theory of reference to natural-kind and other scientific terms. He is known as the originator of functionalism in the philosophy of mind, though he later rejected that approach (see philosophy of language). Beginning in the mid-1970s he gradually abandoned his earlier scientific realism in favour of a pragmatically oriented view he called “internal realism.” According to this view, scientific theories are not true absolutely but only relative to large-scale conceptual schemes. Among his many works are Philosophical Papers (3 vol., 1975–83), Reason, Truth, and History (1981), and Pragmatism (1995).

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Putnam, Hilary (1926–  ) philosopher, logician; born in Chicago. He earned a doctorate from the University of California: Los Angeles (1951), and after teaching at Rockefeller University (1951–52), Northwestern (1952–53), Princeton (1953–61), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1961–65), he became a professor at Harvard (1965). A prominent analytic philosopher, he dealt with both technical problems and broader questions; his works include Mind, Language, and Reality (1965).