These papers are all written from what is called a realist perspective. The statements of science are in my view either true or false (although it is… - Hilary Putnam

Let me close with a picture. My picture of our situation is not the famous Neurath picture of science as the enterprise of reconstructing a boat while the boat floats on the open ocean, but it is a modification of it. I would change Neurath's picture in two ways. First, I would put ethics, philosophy, in fact the whole culture, in the boat, and not just 'science', for I believe all the parts of the culture are inter- dependent. And, second, my image is not of a single boat but of a fleet of boats. The people in each boat are trying to reconstruct their own boat without modifying it so much at anyone time that the boat sinks, as in the Neurath image. In addition, people are passing supplies and tools from one boat to another and shouting advice and encouragement (or discouragement) to each other. Finally, people sometimes decide they don't like the boat they're in and move to a different boat altogether. (And sometimes a boat sinks or is abandoned.) It's all a bit chaotic; but since it is a fleet, no one is ever totally out of signalling distance from all the other boats. There is, in short, both collectivity and individual responsibility. If we hanker for more, is that not our old and unsatisfiable yearning for Absolutes?

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.

[Oddly enough, Putnam believes part of the attraction of some of these formalisms is their obscurity]. "I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!"