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The techniques employed by philosophers of physics are usually the very ones being employed by philosophers of a less specialized kind (especially em… - Hilary Putnam
" "The techniques employed by philosophers of physics are usually the very ones being employed by philosophers of a less specialized kind (especially empiricist philosophers) at the time. Thus Mill's philosophy of science largely reflects Hume's associationism; Reichenbach's philosophy of science reflects Viennese positivism with its conventionalism, its tendency to identify (or confuse) meaning and evidence, and its sharp dichotomy between 'the empirical facts' and 'the rules of the language'; and (coming up to the present time) Toulmin's philosophy of science is an attempt to give an account of what scientists do which is consonant with the linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein. For this reason, errors in general philosophy can have a far-reaching effect on the philosophy of science. The confusion of meaning with evidence is one such error whose effects are well known: it is the contention of the present paper that overworking of the analytic-synthetic distinction is another root of what is most distorted in the writings of conventional philosophers of science.
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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
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.
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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