Hilary Putnam has died

http://dailynous.com/2016/03/13/hilary-putnam-1929-2016/

by waffle_ss • 10 years ago

157 48 10 years ago

dailynous.com

rahuldeshpande• 10 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam

agumonkey• 10 years ago

Student of Quine, also reddit thread https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam

philippnagel• 10 years ago

His brain should be preserved in a vat.

rayval• 10 years ago

Hilary Putnam had many achievements in the field of philosophy. Here's some context about his concept of "brain in a vat"[1], in his 1981 book, "Reason, Truth and History".

The brain-in-a-vat concept was famously used in the The Matrix films.[2]

A summary from Philosophy Index: "The example supposes that a mad scientist has removed your brain, and placed it into a vat of liquid to keep it alive and active. The scientist has also connected your brain to a powerful computer, which sends neurological signals to the brain in the way the brain normally receives them. Thus, the computer is able to send your brain data to fool you into believing that you are still walking around in your body."

"The brain-in-a-vat thought experiment is generally used to ask the question: how do you know that you are not a brain in a vat? The question mirrors an early one from Descartes, which asks how you are to know that there is not an evil demon feeding false information to your senses. The essential conclusion is that, from the perspective of the brain itself, it is impossible to tell whether it is a brain in a vat or a brain in a skull." [1][3]

___________

Links: [1] http://www.philosophy-index.com/putnam/brain-vat/ [2] http://consc.net/papers/matrix.html [3] https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/Brains%20i...

omginternets• 10 years ago

How is the "Brain in a vat" version different from the Descartes version?

hyperpape3• 10 years ago

Good question. As far as the thought experiment itself, it's really just a modern phrasing of Descartes' thought experiment. I have no idea if Putnam was even the first to mention a BIV.[0]

The real novelty is Putnam's response, based on the causal theory of reference or content externalism or something like it (I'm fuzzy on this point). I hope I can do it justice from memory.

He argues that because the brain in a vat has never had the appropriate sort of causal contact with external objects, its thoughts don't refer to them. So the brain has whatever brain states go on in me when I think "the sky is blue", but it has never seen the sky, and so its mental states don't refer to the sky. They refer to something else. Probably some disjunctive property of however the apparatus stimulates the brain's nerves (it's really hard to say what this is). It turns out then, that the brain is not falsely believing/failing to know the facts that we might think about by thinking "the sky is blue", it's accurately representing some other kinds of facts. So that type of scepticism is self-undermining, because it attributes thoughts to the BIV that it couldn't possibly have.

I should add that it seems to me that while this argument is tremendously creative, it belongs to a whole strand of philosophy from the 80s that seems to have died out. There's a decent chance you'll read some Putnam, but AFAIK people aren't publishing much on his BIV argument (though people use the example of a brain in a vat sometimes).

[0] Arguably, Descartes posited that the deceiver could deceive you about anything, including logical relations, while the BIV case just involves people giving you misleading sensations, so that's one conceivable difference in the discussions, but that's not a point that I ever saw anyone discuss in detail. It matters for Descartes scholarship, but that's all.

hackuser• 10 years ago

Here's more about it from an authoritative and amazing free resource, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-content-externa...

nerfhammer• 10 years ago

One difference is <s>Putnam concludes you can't tell whether life is an illusion or not</s>, whereas Descartes concludes you can and also god exists. Setupwise it's essentially the same.

EDIT: I got Putnam wrong. There is still the theistic difference though.

mjklin3• 10 years ago

Does he take for granted that the mind == the brain? Because that seems philosophically tenuous to me.

For the body-mind interface, if any, is far from simple. Certainly the mind is not the only factor that organizes, unites or directs the body. The body manifests perfection at its conception, and in the days thereafter when it is still a microscopic embryo that could hardly be said to possess a mind its developing blood and immune system also react directly and independently to throw off poisons or diseases without any knowledge or known mental influence. -- Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life

We were all doing "intelligent" things well before we had brains...

mirimir3• 10 years ago

Seriously?

For what it's worth, the immune system and brain develop more or less concurrently. And have mechanistic similarities at the biochemical level.

skarist4• 10 years ago

A great thinker has passed. One of the great names of 20th century analytical philosophy. They have now all left us, Quine, Rorty, Davidson and now Putnam. RIP.

I guess they had a similar event on Twin Earth... even though their "water" may be a bit different from our H2O.

nullified-vga• 10 years ago

Kripke is still here. I would add him to that list.

skarist4• 10 years ago

Most definitely.

simondedalus6• 10 years ago

yeah. kripke can be convicted of truly awful exegesis of russell, frege, wittgenstein, but his own contributions to philosophy are mammoth. his attack on the identity of necessary truths and a priori knowledge alone is excellent.

tshtf• 10 years ago

Who stole his ideas from Ruth Barcan Marcus: http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/Archive/whose.html

GFK_of_xmaspast• 10 years ago

That phrasing is a little unfortunate.

EazyC• 10 years ago

Tyler Burge, Kripke, and David Kaplan are still left from the old guard of the golden age of philosophy of language/mind era.

skarist4• 10 years ago

Yes... as is John McDowell, Crispin Wright, John Searle and Alvin Plantinga.

hyperpape3• 10 years ago

Fodor too.

simondedalus6• 10 years ago

unlike a lot of contemporaries read through the end of the 20th century / beginning of the 21st, putnam was a rigorous and important philosopher (as opposed to, say, jerry fodor, who should be lauded for generating interest in philosophy and opening new discussions but whose arguments are almost uniformly terrible, technically).

i'd forgotten about his direct realism, but it makes sense given his sort of instinctual bent toward wittgenstein. i wish more analytic philosophers were adventurous enough to reject platonist place-holders and carry their views out to the furthest logical extent.

sorry that this comment was so vague, but what else could it be? just wanted to post that we've lost a great mind.

some random reading in the realm of what i'm talking about:

http://philpapers.org/rec/FINWOR (doesn't mention putnam if i recall, but the wittgensteinian considerations here can shed light on what i'm talking about re: putnam's instincts)

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23171-hilary-putnam-pragmatism-and-r... the quick summary of direct realism here corresponds very well with how many of us chicago-wittgensteinians are pulled toward direct realism; once you discard the idea of a correspondence theory of truth and knowledge, and start to recognize that truth conditions are ubiquitously context dependent (in terms of what the speaker is trying to accomplish with the words, the shared cultural knowledge of speaker and listener, etc etc), so too can you get rid of many of the pesky oddities of traditional 20th century analytic philosophy of mind: (abstract?) mental items, qualia (maybe), etc etc. if i see a cow, i don't see "cow + some LaTeX symbol" that exists just-for-me--that's not how language works, and we're not talking about magic observational souls, we're saying that guy over there looked and saw a cow--or whatever we're actually talking about).

anyway, putnam is very worth reading, if only to remember rigor and honesty. as with all philosophy, the conclusions you can take or leave.

sriram_sun• 10 years ago

Just wanted to highlight this from the article: "If you would like to make a gift in Hilary’s memory, please donate to Southern Poverty Law Center, 400 Washington Avenue, Montgomery, Alabama 36104."

woodandsteel4• 10 years ago

A little background for the non-philosophers. In the history of Western philosophy, there is a great debate. On one side is the foundational-axiomatic position. According to this general view, philosophy correctly done is like geometry. You start out with a limited set of perfectly clear and absolutely certain concepts and prepositions, and then use these to logically deduct everything important about reality. Major philosophies that assume this include cartesian dualism, materialism, and absolute idealism.

The contrary view is that we can know about reality, but our understandings are always imperfect, including not being able to express everything in a single set of precise concepts. In my view this was Aristotle's overall view, but in any case in the last century and a half, Western philosophy has swung in this direction, including Whitehead, Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein, and all the Pragmatists. Putnam was a leading American philosopher in this anti-foundationalist trend.

Let me add that the foundational-axiomatic position tends to imply that political rule should be by something like a philosopher-king, while I think the anti-foundational one implies liberal democracy.

js8• 10 years ago

"Let me add that the foundational-axiomatic position tends to imply that political rule should be by something like a philosopher-king, while I think the anti-foundational one implies liberal democracy."

Really? That's a very strong statement which I would like to see to be backed up with some axioms. :-) (Because both analytic philosophy and democracy seem more preferable to me.)

woodandsteel4• 10 years ago

A foundational-axiomatic view implies a philosopher king because the vast majority of citizens lack the intellectual ability, much less motivation, to understand it and apply it to political decisions.

Anti-foundationalists, in contrast, think that reality is far too complicated for a single person to figure out, and so we need extended democratic discussion. They also tend to believe that average citizens have a considerable degree of rationality and good motivation, and so can be trusted to be responsible voters. This is, of course, imperfect, but as Churchill famously said, it is better than all the alternatives.

As far as analytic philosophy goes, the classic version is foundationalist-axiomatic, but later versions, such as Strawson, are anti-foundationalist. Later Wittgenstein I think is a mixed case.

kijin• 10 years ago

Anarcho-capitalists and libertarians of the Austrian School of economics (e.g. those who follow Ludwig von Mises) make a fetish of foundational axioms, yet they are firmly opposed to philosopher-kings.

But they're not exactly fans of modern democracy, either, so it seems that foundational-axiomatic positions do often lead to uncompromising absolutism of one kind or another.

danidiaz• 10 years ago

while I think the anti-foundational one implies liberal democracy.

With Heidegger a notable exception.

woodandsteel4• 10 years ago

I think Heidegger was only partly anti-foundationalist. At the root of foundationalist-axiomatic philosophy is a denial of experienced finitudes in the area of knowledge, and by implication many other aspects of reality. Heidegger starts out affirming experienced finitudes in his phenomenology of human existence, but then abandons it for a supernaturalistic view of human history in terms of race or later cosmos.

cgio• 10 years ago

Given your observation, I think you might enjoy the book "Soul Machine: the invention of modern mind" by George Makari.

woodandsteel4• 10 years ago

Looks interesting, I'll have to check it out.

arstin3• 10 years ago

Some readers here might be interested in the nice blog he kept last year.

http://putnamphil.blogspot.com/?m=1

igravious• 10 years ago

Better link: https://putnamphil.blogspot.com/

petegrif2• 10 years ago

A was a big fan of 'Meaning and the Moral Sciences.'

petegrif2• 10 years ago

I was a big fan of 'Meaning and the Moral Sciences.'

yoaviram• 10 years ago

I was very lucky to attend one of Putnam's seminars at Uni abot logic and necessity. His in depth understanding of mathematics, physics, biology and many other sciences made him an almost ideal critic. I was impressed by how, when challenged, he was always able to restate his arguments based on stronger, more fundamental assumption. Putnam is a pleasure to read (which is not always the case when it comes to philosophers) and addresses many of the topics that occasionally come up on hacker news. Can't recommend him enough.

conceit• 10 years ago

Just read the name yesterday linked to "trial-and-error predicates" [2], reading on Neural Nets, super-Turing computation and hypercomputation [1].

[1] mentiones nonrecursive sets of numbers, which seems awfully related to a crackpot theory of mine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation [2] direkt link from the wiki artikel: https://dx.doi.org/10.2307%2F2270581

Hilary Putnam has died

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