Hilary Putnam Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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