Carnap was driven from Germany by Hitler, and his position has been condemned in the Soviet Union as 'subjective idealism*. Even in the United States… - Hilary Putnam
" "Carnap was driven from Germany by Hitler, and his position has been condemned in the Soviet Union as 'subjective idealism*. Even in the United States, there have been a great many who could not understand this attempt to turn philosophy into a scientific discipline with substantive scientific results, and who have been led to extreme and absurd misinterpretations of the work I have been reporting to you here. Few, perhaps, would have expected traditional empiricism to lead to the development of a speculative theory of ' universal learning machines'; and yet, in retrospect, a concern with systematizing inductive logic has been the oldest concern of empiricist philosophers from Bacon on. No one can yet predict the outcome of this speculative scientific venture. But it is amply clear, whether this particular venture succeeds or fails, that the toleration of philosophical and scientific speculation brings rich rewards and that its suppression leads to sterility.
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About Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam (July 31, 1926 - March 13, 2016) was an American philosopher who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. He is known for his willingness to apply an equal degree of scrutiny to his own philosophical positions as to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposes its flaws. As a result, he has acquired a reputation for frequently changing his own position.
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Hilary Whitehall Putnam
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Additional quotes by Hilary Putnam
If reason is both transcendent and immanent, then philosophy, as culture-bound reflection and argument about eternal questions, is both in time and eternity. We don't have an Archimedean point; we always speak the language of a time and place; but the rightness and wrongness of what we say is not just for a time and a place.
What we have is a device for producing sentences in response to sentences. But none of these sentences is at all connected to the real world. If one coupled two of these machines and let them play the Imitation Game with each other, then they would go on 'fooling' each other forever, even if the rest of the world disappeared! There is no more reason to regard the machine's talk of apples as referring to real world apples than there is to regard the ant's 'drawing' as referring to Winston Churchill.
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A few years ago I had occasion to visit Peru, and I got to know a fine philosopher and a truly wonderful human being-Francisco Miro Casada. Miro Casada has been an idealist all his life, while being, at the same time, a man of great experience (a former member of several governments and a former Ambassador to France). I found him a man who represents the social democratic vision in its purest form. Talking to him, and to my other friends in Peru (who represented quite a spectrum of political opinion), I heard something that was summed up in a remark he, Miro Casada, made to me, "Whenever you have a Republican president, we get a wave of military dictatorships in Latin America".
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