Read more: A philosopher in the age of science
The recent death of Hilary Putnam at the age of 89 brings to a close one of the most distinguished, varied and prolific careers in analytic philosophy. He was one of the great American philosophers, and at the time of his death had a serious claim to being the greatest living philosopher. Born in Chicago in 1926 to atheist, left-wing parents, Putnam received his PhD from UCLA in 1951, studying under Hans Reichenbach, one of the original logical positivists (whose views Putnam rejected). From 1965 he was based at Harvard, where he continued being highly philosophically productive well after becoming emeritus, teaching classes up to the last years of his life.
Early in his time at Harvard he was heavily involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, gravitating towards communism, which he later renounced on account of human rights abuses. He had a religious change of heart as well as a political one, responding to the anti-Semitism he encountered by moving away from atheism and embracing the Judaism of his mother’s heritage. Putnam was, famously, even more prone to change his mind about issues within philosophy. This can be a source of amusement, as when it turns out that the two sides in an important debate are both Putnam, at different moments, often in fairly quick succession. But his mutability is widely admired as exemplifying the quest for truth: better to follow the argument where it leads and get things right now than to stubbornly insist that one was right before.
Putnam did not approve of narrow specialisation, and he made important contributions in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, metaphysics, ethics, and more. Since his varied insights across so many areas of philosophy defy summary, one way to get a sense of his work is to get to grips with just a few of his ideas.
Perhaps his most disruptive and counterintuitive claim was that, as he put it, “meanings just ain’t in the head!” You might well suppose that when you are thinking about something—water, for example—what you are thinking about is determined only by what is going on in your head, so that your exact doppelganger would be thinking about the same thing. But Putnam invites you to imagine a doppelganger of yours who has lived all her life in a world containing, instead of water itself, stuff superficially indistinguishable from water but with a completely different chemical make-up. How could your doppelganger be thinking about water, which she has never encountered, rather than this other stuff, which she has? And yet we are still imagining that the goings on in this doppelganger’s brain are identical to the goings on in yours. So Putnam concludes what we are thinking about is determined not just by what goes in our heads but also by our circumstances. Getting straight exactly what we mean by “meaning” in light of Putnam’s surprising insight has been a preoccupation of philosophers ever since.
One of Putnam’s most influential ideas was a (now prevalent) view in the philosophy of mind called “functionalism.” Many philosophers had thought that some version of materialism—the theory that says all facts are physical facts, or reducible to them—about the mind had to be right if mystery or spookiness was to be avoided. What is going on in your mind can’t be anything over and above what is going on in your brain. But the most straightforward version of materialism would simply identify mental states with brain states, which seemed implausible. One difficulty with such a view was that it seemed unduly chauvinistic: if what it is to be in pain is simply to be in some kind of brain state, it follows that creatures sufficiently different from us (for example, robots or Martians) are ruled out in principle from ever being in pain.
Putnam’s suggestion was that we should see mental states as “functional” states. Maybe what makes something count as pain is that it plays a certain functional role in our mental lives: roughly speaking, perhaps it is a response to bodily injury which makes us believe that we are being injured and want to avoid whatever is happening to cause the injury.
There’s no problem with seeing how a Martian could be in a state like that, even if the way in which pain is manifested in the Martian’s brain is very different from the way it is in ours. Functionalism therefore gives a clear explanation of why being in a certain brain state counts as, for example, being in pain. It has therefore often been thought the most attractive way of accommodating materialism—which we want to hold onto if possible.
But, true to form, an important later critic of functionalism was…Hilary Putnam
The recent death of Hilary Putnam at the age of 89 brings to a close one of the most distinguished, varied and prolific careers in analytic philosophy. He was one of the great American philosophers, and at the time of his death had a serious claim to being the greatest living philosopher. Born in Chicago in 1926 to atheist, left-wing parents, Putnam received his PhD from UCLA in 1951, studying under Hans Reichenbach, one of the original logical positivists (whose views Putnam rejected). From 1965 he was based at Harvard, where he continued being highly philosophically productive well after becoming emeritus, teaching classes up to the last years of his life.
Early in his time at Harvard he was heavily involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, gravitating towards communism, which he later renounced on account of human rights abuses. He had a religious change of heart as well as a political one, responding to the anti-Semitism he encountered by moving away from atheism and embracing the Judaism of his mother’s heritage. Putnam was, famously, even more prone to change his mind about issues within philosophy. This can be a source of amusement, as when it turns out that the two sides in an important debate are both Putnam, at different moments, often in fairly quick succession. But his mutability is widely admired as exemplifying the quest for truth: better to follow the argument where it leads and get things right now than to stubbornly insist that one was right before.
Putnam did not approve of narrow specialisation, and he made important contributions in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, metaphysics, ethics, and more. Since his varied insights across so many areas of philosophy defy summary, one way to get a sense of his work is to get to grips with just a few of his ideas.
Perhaps his most disruptive and counterintuitive claim was that, as he put it, “meanings just ain’t in the head!” You might well suppose that when you are thinking about something—water, for example—what you are thinking about is determined only by what is going on in your head, so that your exact doppelganger would be thinking about the same thing. But Putnam invites you to imagine a doppelganger of yours who has lived all her life in a world containing, instead of water itself, stuff superficially indistinguishable from water but with a completely different chemical make-up. How could your doppelganger be thinking about water, which she has never encountered, rather than this other stuff, which she has? And yet we are still imagining that the goings on in this doppelganger’s brain are identical to the goings on in yours. So Putnam concludes what we are thinking about is determined not just by what goes in our heads but also by our circumstances. Getting straight exactly what we mean by “meaning” in light of Putnam’s surprising insight has been a preoccupation of philosophers ever since.
One of Putnam’s most influential ideas was a (now prevalent) view in the philosophy of mind called “functionalism.” Many philosophers had thought that some version of materialism—the theory that says all facts are physical facts, or reducible to them—about the mind had to be right if mystery or spookiness was to be avoided. What is going on in your mind can’t be anything over and above what is going on in your brain. But the most straightforward version of materialism would simply identify mental states with brain states, which seemed implausible. One difficulty with such a view was that it seemed unduly chauvinistic: if what it is to be in pain is simply to be in some kind of brain state, it follows that creatures sufficiently different from us (for example, robots or Martians) are ruled out in principle from ever being in pain.
Putnam’s suggestion was that we should see mental states as “functional” states. Maybe what makes something count as pain is that it plays a certain functional role in our mental lives: roughly speaking, perhaps it is a response to bodily injury which makes us believe that we are being injured and want to avoid whatever is happening to cause the injury.
There’s no problem with seeing how a Martian could be in a state like that, even if the way in which pain is manifested in the Martian’s brain is very different from the way it is in ours. Functionalism therefore gives a clear explanation of why being in a certain brain state counts as, for example, being in pain. It has therefore often been thought the most attractive way of accommodating materialism—which we want to hold onto if possible.
But, true to form, an important later critic of functionalism was…Hilary Putnam
