Hilary Putnam
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.
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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.
The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.
No sane person should believe that something is 'subjective' merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.
[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!"
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