Knowledge Tree
Hilary Putnam
Facts (14)
Sources
Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2025 ... plato.stanford.edu Jun 18, 2004 3 facts
claimHilary Putnam and Paul Oppenheim proposed strict intertheoretical deduction as the reductive norm for the unity of science in 1958.
claimNon-reductive physicalism combines ontological physicalism with the view that special sciences, such as economics, possess autonomous conceptual and representational levels that are not reducible to the underlying physical substrate, as supported by Hilary Putnam (1975), Richard Boyd (1980), and Jerry Fodor (1974).
perspectiveHilary Putnam argued in 1975 that understanding the natural world requires using a diversity of conceptual and representational systems that may not be capable of being put into the tight correspondence required by the older deductive paradigm of interlevel relations.
Naturalized epistemology - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org 3 facts
perspectiveHilary Putnam argues that the existence of 'thinkers' requires the existence of 'truth,' and without the normative, there is no sense in which a thought can be considered right or wrong.
perspectiveHilary Putnam argues that without the normative, naturalized epistemology cannot define truth, as notions explaining truth are only intelligible when the normative is presupposed.
perspectiveHilary Putnam argues that replacing traditional epistemology with naturalized epistemology would eliminate the normative, which is necessary for concepts like justification, rational acceptability, and warranted assertibility.
Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence? A Framework for Classifying ... arxiv.org Nov 20, 2025 3 facts
claimHilary Putnam argues that even a full counterfactual structure can be mapped to a physical system by arbitrarily partitioning and defining states, including the use of disjunctions.
perspectiveHilary Putnam and John Searle argue that there is no intrinsic, non-trivial way to determine if two physical processes implement the same effective method, as the individuation of these methods is subjective.
claimHilary Putnam and David Chalmers argue that for any physical system, one can almost always find a mapping from its physical states and transitions to the internal states and transitions of a Finite State Automaton.
David Ludwig (Wageningen University and Research): Publications ... philpeople.org 2 facts
perspectiveHilary Putnam advocates for 'pragmatic pluralism,' which posits that reality can be described in different but equally fundamental ways, and considers this pluralism regarding conceptual resources as a challenge to standard positions in the philosophy of mind.
claimHilary Putnam has criticized the metaphysical foundations of contemporary philosophy of mind, arguing that standard positions rest on dubious ontological assumptions.
Naturalism in Epistemology - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu Jan 8, 2016 1 fact
claimHilary Putnam argued against the possibility of naturalizing reason in his 1982 paper "Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized", published in the journal Synthese.
Consciousness and AI - Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science oecs.mit.edu Feb 5, 2026 1 fact
claimHilary Putnam's functionalism was motivated in part by the belief in multiple realizability, which is the claim that mental phenomena could be realized in very different kinds of physical systems.
David Chalmers - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org 1 fact
claimHilary Putnam and Saul Kripke proposed that Kripke's view on names can be applied to the reference of natural kind terms, a theory known as direct reference theory.