Hilary Putnam Quotes

#1. Causes (pains) are not logical constructions out of their effects (behaviour).

Hilary Putnam

#2. 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

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

Hilary Putnam

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

Hilary Putnam

#5. 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

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

Hilary Putnam

#7. 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