Best 9 quotes of Hilary Putnam on MyQuotes

... causes (pains) are not logical constructions out of their effects (behaviour).

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

I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!

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.

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

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'.

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.

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.

Philosophy needs vision and argument… there is something disappointing about a philosophical work that contains arguments, however good, which are not inspired by some genuine vision, and something disappointing about a philosophical work that contains a vision, however inspiring, which is unsupported by arguments…Speculation about how things hang together requires… the ability to draw out conceptual distinctions and connections, and the ability to argue… But speculative views, however interesting or well supported by arguments or insightful, are not all we need. We also need what [the philosopher Myles] Burnyeat called ‘vision’ – and I take that to mean vision as to how to live our lives, and how to order our societies.