“Introduction: Science as approximation to truth”
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Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, computer scientist, and figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He contributed to the studies of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he d…
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science · American mathematician and philosopher (1926–2016) · mathematician · philosopher · university teacher · non-fiction writer · computer scientist · also Hilary Putnam, Putnam
Born 31 July 1926 · Died 13 March 2016 · Q221697
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2026· 2 entries
“Introduction: Philosophy of language and the rest of philosophy”
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2016· 1 entry
Died 2016-03-13.
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2014· 1 entry
Awarded Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy (2014).
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2012· 1 entry
Awarded Lauener Prize (2012).
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2011· 3 entries
Awarded Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy (2011).
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Published “Phytozome: a comparative platform for green plant genomics” in Nucleic Acids Research — cited 4,917 times.
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And the Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy in 2015
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2006· 1 entry
Published “The Genome of Black Cottonwood, <i>Populus trichocarpa</i> (Torr. & Gray)” in Science — cited 3,748 times.
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2005· 1 entry
Wrote that he rejected the many-worlds interpretation because he could see no way for it to yield meaningful probabilities
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2000· 1 entry
Published “Bowling alone” in Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work — cited 15,852 times.
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1997· 1 entry
At a meeting of former draft resistance activists at Boston's Arlington Street Church, he called his involvement with the PLP a mistake
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1995· 1 entry
Published “Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital” in Journal of Democracy — cited 7,548 times.
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1994· 1 entry
Hilary celebrated a belated bar mitzvah service; Ruth Anna's bat mitzvah was celebrated four years later
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1988· 1 entry
Putnam also developed a separate argument against functionalism based on Fodor's generalized version of multiple realizability
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1985· 1 entry
Awarded Carus Lectures (1985).
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1983· 1 entry
“How Not to Solve Ethical Problems”
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1978· 1 entry
Putnam was interviewed for Bryan Magee's Men of Ideas television show and spoke about philosophy of science
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1976· 1 entry
Putnam was elected president of the American Philosophical Association
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1975· 1 entry
Putnam formulated his own indispensability argument based on the no miracles argument in the philosophy of science, saying, "I believe that the positive argument for realism [in science] has an analogue in the case of ma
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1974· 1 entry
“The 'corroboration' of theories”
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1970· 1 entry
With a proof that relied heavily on previous research by Putnam, Julia Robinson and Martin Davis
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1968· 1 entry
A member of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP)
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1967· 1 entry
“Mathematics without foundations”
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1965· 4 entries
“How not to talk about meaning”
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Organized campus protests and began teaching courses on Marxism
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“A philosopher looks at quantum mechanics”
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Followed by his 1969 essay "Is Logic Empirical
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1964· 1 entry
“Truth and necessity in mathematics”
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1963· 2 entries
“Probability and confirmation”
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Organized one of MIT's first faculty and student anti-war committees
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1962· 3 entries
Married fellow philosopher Ruth Anna Putnam (born Ruth Anna Jacobs), who took a teaching position in philosophy at Wellesley College
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“The analytic and the synthetic”
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Further refined the algorithm with the help of George Logemann and Donald W
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1951· 2 entries
Studied at University of California, Los Angeles, Doctor of Philosophy (1951).
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For his dissertation, The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences
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1926· 1 entry
Born 1926-07-31.
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