Hilary Putnam was born in Chicago in 1926, the son of an author and translator (Samuel Putnam).² When he arrived there from New York six years later, Milton Friedman found Chicago to be a “new, raw city bursting with energy, far less sophisticated than New York, but for that very reason far more tolerant of diversity, of heterodox ideas” Atlas 2000: 6). There is no particular reason to expect instructive parallels between philosophers and their native cities. But the reflection irresistible in this case. Putnam has an unmistakably American way doing philosophy and of writing it. Moreover, his approach to...

This artful, calculated comment is the centrepiece of an essay written in 1952, the year after Hilary Putnam completed his doctoral work. The judgement expresses one, quite influential, point of view concerning American intellectual life at the time his career was launched.

The remark is worth pondering: Putnam’s thinking developed within a context that was itself undergoing significant change. The immediate task is to relate his career to philosophy as he found it. And Trilling’s comment neatly establishes the basic contours of that encounter, features whose implications and motive force have played themselves out in recurrent themes throughout Putnam’s career....

Midway through his career, Putnam reflected on its beginnings. He stressed four basic issues on which he had been most susceptible to influence: realism, rationality, meaning and intentionality (Putnam 1975e: 153–91). Their combination produced a fifth: a function-based approach. Each issue speaks of the impact of European philosophers in general and of positivists such as Reichenbach in particular. Each expresses themes that, in isolation and in combination, provide structure to his philosophical contributions.

In retrospect, Putnam’s thinking has been susceptible to two kinds basic stimulus and inspiration. What we might call the “core influences” were positions taken on basic...

Realism, rationality and meaning are three basic issues on which, as he himself acknowledged, Putnam was most deeply influenced by the philosophical context in which he found himself. Having examined structural influences, we are now in a position to appreciate two more fundamental sources of inspiration and stimulus: ideas concerning the core topics of intentionality and a function-based approach.

Putnam’s overall concerns in the first part of his career, no less than second, are expressed by the quoted passage from John Austin 1911–60). How must we and the world be, and how must we be connected up with the...

The emotive force of these lines depends upon our recognition and ready acceptance of intentionality, of the relations that are possible between thought and reality. Putnam has given this phenomenon the greatest possible significance: “I see philosophy as a field which has certain central questions, for example, the relation between thought reality” (Putnam 1975b: xvii). He goes on to “mention some questions about which I havenotwritten, the relation between freedom responsibility, and the nature of the good life”. This passage was written thirty years ago; since then, Putnam has written on these latter subjects also, showing in each...

The first half of Putnam’s career was dominated in large part by tensions induced by his relationship to logical positivism and verificationism.¹ The results were felt principally in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind.

In philosophy of science, the main components were a developing realism, a rejection of the idea that any truths are absolutely apriori, and an assertion of the quasi-empirical character of mathematics. Putnam’s claims here required underpinning with a realist theory of meaning. So in the philosophy of language, his focus was on terms are central to scientific investigations...

During his functionalist period, Putnam identified verificationism a particular form of anti-realism that he labelled “the idealist tendency”: “even if it is not identical with the view that the ‘hard facts’ just actual and possible experiences, it makes little sense to anyone does not have some such metaphysical conviction lurking in his heart” (Putnam 1969: 441). And by this time, a robust realism had to characterize his response to broadly verificationist ways of thinking. But he developed towards this position, and it is one that is actually antedated by his resistance to verificationism. So it is worth tracing the various...

Einstein’s point draws attention to the complex interrelations among three topics: how it is possible to make statements in mathematics; how it is possible to know those statements; and how it is possible for those statements to be about what they are about. If we extend the question to the whole realm of scientific statements, then his remark captures Putnam’s deepest concerns. Given the conclusions to which we have seen him come in his early work on scientific theorizing, it became evident that his background position on intentionality (and most particularly on the way words refer to reality) required support...

Wordsworth is not alone in feeling his thought and experience to be constrained in this way. Descartes had come to a similar conclusion at the point where his method of doubt gave way to reassertion of much of what he had previously taken on trust. For it seems possible for the meditator to sustain much if not all of his mental life whether or not the world beyond his mind exists. So he may feel pressed to conclude that the objects that his thoughts are about and that he had previously assumed to be “external things” actually lack “external existence”;...

What Woolf describes here as the plight of novelists with certain kinds of realist or naturalist programme, Putnam recognized as the predicament foisted on certain kinds of philosopher, and, specifically, on those who would espouse the kinds of view endorsed by Putnam himself in the first half of his career.¹

Suppose one is setting out to describe everything that is, “the world”, whether as an artist or as a philosopher or as a scientist.² There are ways of doing so that inevitably leave one’s own self, or significant aspects of oneself, out of the picture. Recognizing that one is outside...

Catherine’s interlocutor is teasing her, of course. She is not being deep; her artfulness is quite conventional. But there is depth to the joke. Given the intentionality of thought, either there is something of which she is thinking, or she is not thinking at all. So she is being artful in pretending that there is some third possibility: thinking without an object of thought. This is a standard tactic to preserve a generally desirable fiction: one rarely likes to be caught not thinking. And her conversation partner is being playful in pretending to allow her that possibility. In calling it...

The laugh is on the policeman, Lestrade, as is customary in detective stories. But it might be wise to side with him and cultivate a proper diffidence. The notion of a fact gives rise to a number of problems that are “very hard to tackle”; in particular, one that is dependent on an issue we have already addressed: how it is even possible to think or say what is false or not the case. As noted at the time, this general issue concerning negativity has an eminent history and a deep connection to background problems of intentionality. And those particular...

Putnam’s emerging account of intentionality brought him, as we have seen, to revise his conception of truth. He made surface changes of formulation and changes of emphasis over this period, but the deep idea remained constant. Truth is not correspondence with states of affairs whose nature and existence are independent of minds. More specifically, it is constrained by those mental phenomena involved in conditions on knowing things. This is the exemplary instance of Putnam’s awareness of his overall redirection in this period: “I have come to see that one cannot come to grips with the real problems in philosophy without...

Previous chapters have described the settings and circumstances into which Hilary Putnam’s philosophical thought fitted during his formative years; they have defined the character of that thinking over the whole course of his development, depicting its contours in relation to alternative perspectives on core issues; and they have examined the content of his major contributions to philosophy, narrating the most significant movements in his thought across the span of a long career. This final chapter is retrospective and stimulated by the passage quoted above. Given what we now know of Putnam, what sense can we make of what is suggested...