Externalism is a group of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that the mind is not only the result of what is going on inside the nervous system (or the brain) but also of what either occur or exist outside the subject. It is often contrasted with internalism which holds that the mind emerges out of neural activity alone. Externalism articulates the belief that the mind is not just the brain or what the brain does.

There are different versions of externalism based both on the strength of the relation, and on what the mind is taken to be. William Lycan wrote, “Since Twin Earth was discovered by American philosophical-space explorers in the 1970s” ^[1] externalism subdivided into several variants described by Mark Rowlands.^[2] Externalism stresses the importance of factors external to the nervous system. At one extreme, the mind could possibly depend on external factors. At the opposite extreme, the mind depends necessarily on external factors. The most extreme form of externalism maintains that the mind is either constituted or identical with physical processes partially or totally external to the nervous system.

Another important criterion is which aspect of the mind is addressed. Some externalists focus on purely cognitive aspects of the mind (Andy Clark and David Chalmers,^[3] Shaun Gallagher,^[4] and many others^[5]), while some tackle either the phenomenal aspect of the mind or the conscious mind itself. A few consider only the phenomenal content, such as William Lycan,^[6] Alex Byrne ^[7] or Francois Tonneau,^[8] and others also argue the role of the mind as a vehicle of mental phenomenal activity, such as Teed Rockwell,^[9] or Riccardo Manzotti.^[10]

One last important differentiating factor is whether what is external to the mind is the content or the vehicle of the mind.

Proto-externalists[link]

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To this group belong many authors who weren’t dubbed as externalist but whose work suggested views not too far from current forms of externalism.

The first group of protexternalists to consider is the group of neorealists active at the beginning of 1900.^[11] In particular, Edwin Holt suggested a view of perception that considered the external world as constitutive of mental content. His rejection of representation paved the way to consider the external object as being somehow directly perceived: “Nothing can represent a thing but that thing itself” (^[12]) Holt’s words anticipated by almost a century the famous anti-representationalist slogan by Rodney Brooks "The world is its best representation".^[13] Recently, neorealist views were refreshed by Francois Tonneau who wrote that “According to neorealism, consciousness is merely a part, or cross-section, of the environment. Neorealism implies that all conscious experiences, veridical or otherwise” (Tonneau 2004, p. 97)^[8]

Another author to be taken into account is Alfred North Whitehead, whose process ontology is a form of externalism since it endorses a neutral ontology, whose basic elements (prehension, actual occasions, events, and processes) seamlessly proceeded from microscopic activity up to the highest level of psychological and emotional life. Although the main Whitehead text is rather difficult ^[14], recently David Ray Griffin wrote an interesting update on Whitehead's thought .^[15]

Also, John Dewey expressed a conception of the mind and its role in the world which is very sympathetic with externalism (Dewey 1925).

More recently, James J. Gibson defended an ecological view of perception and thus of many aspects of the mind ^[16] . He re-formulated several notions of various cognitive processes which are customarily internal to the brain. Two clear examples are optical flow and information. For Gibson the optical flow is not the computation of the spatial derivatives of the images acquired but the retina as in the classic computational view of the mind championed by David Marr ^[17] and many others,^[18] rather the optical flow is an environmental dynamic manifold into which the agent is moving. In Gibson's system, information gets a twist, too, and it is relocated at an ecological level. Gibson introduced the notion of affordance which is external to the agent as such being the potential causal engagement between the body of the agent and some other object.

Gregory Bateson also outlined an ecological view of the mind. ^[19] Because of his background in cybernetics, he was familiar with the notion of feedback that somehow hampers the traditions separation between the inside and the outside of a system. He questioned the traditional boundary of the mind and tried to express an ecological view of it, attempting to show that the chasm between mind and nature is much less obvious than it seems.^[20]

Semantic externalism[link]

Semantic externalism is the first form of externalism which was dubbed so. As the name suggests it focuses on mental content of semantic nature.

Semantic externalism suggests that the mental content does not supervene on what is in the head. Yet the physical basis and mechanisms of the mind remain inside the head. This is a relatively safe move since it does not jeopardize our beliefs of being located inside our cranium. Hilary Putnam focused particularly on intentionality between our thoughts and external state of affairs – whether concepts or objects. To defend his position, Putnam developed the famous Twin Earth thought experiment. Putnam expressed his view with the slogan "'meanings' just ain't in the head."^[21]

In contrast, Tyler Burge emphasized the social nature of the external world suggesting that semantic content is externally constituted by means of social, cultural, and linguistic interactions.^[22]

Phenomenal externalism[link]

Phenomenal externalism extends the externalist gist to phenomenal content. Fred Dretske (Dretske 1996) suggested that “The experiences themselves are in the head (why else would closing one's eyes or stopping one's ears extinguish them?), but nothing in the head (indeed, at the time one is having the experiences, nothing outside the head) need have the qualities that distinguish these experiences.” (Dretske 1996, p. 144-145).^[23] So, although experiences remain in the head, their phenomenal content could depend on something elsewhere.

In similar way, William Lycan defended an externalist and representationalist view of phenomenal experience. In particular, he objected to the tenet that qualia are narrow.^[1]

It has been often held that some, if not all, of mental states must have a broad content, that is an external content to their vehicles. For instance, Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit stated that “The contents of certain intentional states are broad or context-bound. The contents of some beliefs depend on how things are outside the subject” (Jackson and Pettit 1988, p. 381)^[24]

However, neither Dretske nor Lycan go far as to claim that the phenomenal mind extends literally and physically beyond the skin. In sum they suggest that phenomenal contents could depend on phenomena external to the body, while their vehicles remains inside.

The extended mind[link]

The extended mind model suggests that cognition is larger than the body of the subject. According to such a model, the boundaries of cognitive processes are not always inside the skin. “Minds are composed of tools for thinking” (Dennett 2000 ^[25] , p. 21). According to Andy Clark, “cognition leaks out into body and world”. The mind then is no longer inside the skull, but it is extended to comprehend whatever tools are useful (ranging from notepad and pencils up to smartphones and usb memories). This is in a nutshell the model of the extended mind. ^[26] . When someone uses pencil and paper to compute large sums, cognitive processes extend to the pencil and paper themselves. In a loose sense, nobody would deny it. In a stronger sense, it is rather controversial whether the boundaries of the cognitive mind would extend to the pencil and paper. For most of the proponents of the extended mind, the phenomenal mind remains inside the brain. While commenting on Andy Clark’s last book Supersizing the Mind ^[27] , David Chalmers asks “what about the big question: extended consciousness? The dispositional beliefs, cognitive processes, perceptual mechanisms, and moods […] extend beyond the borders of consciousness, and it is plausible that it is precisely the nonconscious part of them that is extended.” (Chalmers 2009 ^[28] , p. xiv)

Enactivism and embodied cognition[link]

Enactivism and embodied cognition stress the tight coupling between the cognitive processes, the body, and the environment ^[29] . Enactivism builds upon the work of other scholar which could be considered as cases of proto externalist such as Gregory Bateson, James J. Gibson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eleanor Rosch and many others. It suggests that the mind is either dependent on or identical with the interactions between the world and the agents. For instance, Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noe in a seminal paper suggested that the mind is constituted by the sensory-motor contingency between the agent and the world. A sensory motor contingency is an occasion to act in a certain way and it results from the matching between environmental and bodily properties. To a certain extent a sensory-motor contingencies strongly resembles Gibson’s affordances. Eventually, Noe developed a more epistemic version of enactivism where the content is the knowledge the agent has as to what it can do in a certain situation. In any case he is an externalist when he claims that “What perception is, however, is not a process in the brain, but a kind of skilful activity on the part of the animal as a whole. The enactive view challenges neuroscience to devise new ways of understanding the neural basis of perception and consciousness” (Noë 2004 ^[30] , p. 2). Recently Noe published a more popular and shorter version of his position .^[31]

Enactivism receives support from various other correlated views such as embodied cognition or situated cognition. These views are usually the result of the rejection of the classic computational view of the mind which is centered on the notion of internal representations. Enactivism receives its share of negative comments particularly from neuroscientists like Christoph Koch (Koch 2004 ^[32] , p. 9): “While proponents of the enactive point of view rightly emphasize that perception usually takes place within the context of action, I have little patience for their neglect of the neural basis of perception. If there is one thing that scientists are reasonably sure of, it is that brain activity is both necessary and sufficient for biological sentience.” To recap, enactivism is a case of externalism, sometimes restricted to cognitive or semantic aspects, some other times striving to encompass phenomenal aspects. Something that no enactivist has so far claimed is that all phenomenal content is the result of the interaction with the environment.

Recent forms of phenomenal externalism[link]

Some externalists suggest explicitly that phenomenal content as well as the mental process are partially external to the body of the subject. The authors considering these views wonder whether not only cognition but also the conscious mind could be extended in the environment. While enactivism, at the end of the day, accepts they standard physicalist ontology that conceives the world as made of interacting objects, these more radical externalists consider the possibility that there is some fundamental flaw in our way to conceive reality and that some ontological revision is indeed unavoidable.

Teed Rockwell recently published a wholehearted attack against all forms of dualism and internalism. He proposed that the mind emerges not entirely from brain activity but from an interacting nexus of brain, body, and world.^[9] He therefore endorses embodied cognition, holding that neuroscience wrongly endorses a form of Cartesian materialism – an indictment issued also by many others.^[33] Dwelling on John Dewey’s heritage, he argues that the brain and the body bring into existence the mind as a behavioral field in the environment.

Ted Honderich is perhaps the one with the longest experience in the field. He defends a position he himself dubbed radical externalism perhaps because of its ontological consequences.^[34] One of his main examples is that "what it actually is for you to be aware of the room you are in, it is for the room a way to exist."^[35] According to him, “Phenomenologically, what it is for you to be perceptually conscious is for a world somehow to exist”.^[34] Therefore he identifies existence with consciousness.

Another radical form of phenomenal externalism is the view called the spread mind by Riccardo Manzotti.^[10] He questions the separation between subject and object, seeing these as only two incomplete perspectives and descriptions of the same physical process.^[36] He supports a process ontology that endorses a mind spread physically and spatio-temporally beyond the skin. Objects are not autonomous as we know them, but rather actual processes framing our reality.^[37]

See also[link]

• Hard problem of consciousness

References[link]

External links[link]

• Andy Clark's online papers
• David Chalmers' home page
• Alva Noe's home page
• Ted Honderich's home page
• Riccardo Manzotti's home page
• Teed Rockwell's home page
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Externalism About Mental Content

John Rogers Searle

Born	(1932-07-31) July 31, 1932 (age 79) Denver, Colorado, U.S.
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic
Main interests	Philosophy of language Philosophy of mind Intentionality · Social reality
Notable ideas	Indirect speech acts · Chinese room
Influenced by David Hume · J.L. Austin · Bertrand Russell · Ludwig Wittgenstein Gottlob Frege · P.F. Strawson Hubert Dreyfus
Signature

John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932, in Denver, Colorado) is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he began teaching at Berkeley in 1959, where, among his many distinctions, he was the first tenured professor to join the Free Speech Movement. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004. Among his notable concepts are the "Chinese Room" argument against artificial intelligence.

Biography[link]

Searle's father, G. W. Searle, an electrical engineer, was employed by AT&T, while his mother, Hester Beck Searle, was a physician. John Searle began his college education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and subsequently became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he earned an undergraduate degree and a doctorate in philosophy and ethics.

Politics[link]

In the 1950s, as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Searle was the secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy" (McCarthy was then the junior Senator from Wisconsin).^[1]

While a professor at Berkeley in 1964, he joined the Free Speech Movement^[2] opposing policies of the university administration. Later, in 1969, he sided with the administration against the students over People's Park. Also in 1969, he served as chairman of the Academic Freedom Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California.^[3] He authored The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (1971).^[4] The book attempted to investigate the causes behind the campus uprisings of the era. In it, Searle notes: "I have been attacked by both the House Un-American Activities Committee and ... several radical polemicists.... Stylistically, the attacks are interestingly similar. Both rely heavily on insinuation and innuendo, and both display a hatred -- one might almost say terror -- of close analysis and dissection of argument." He asserts: "[M]y wife was threatened that I (and other members of the administration) would be assassinated or violently attacked."^[1] In an op-ed piece written shortly after 9/11, Searle maintained that:

We need to give up on the fantasy that we are going to find Bin Laden hiding in a cave, and when we do so, our troubles will be over... There will be plenty of others, perhaps reinspired by his martyrdom, to take up where he left off.^[5]

Further, he argued the attacks were part of a longer-term struggle whose only solution was to root out governments that supported terrorism.^[6]

Philosophy[link]

Speech acts[link]

Searle's early work, which did a great deal to establish his reputation, was on speech acts. He attempted to synthesize ideas from many colleagues including J.L. Austin (the term "illocutionary act"), Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.C.J. Midgley (the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules), and his own thesis, in 'Speech Acts,' that such acts are constituted by the rules of language. He also drew on the work of P.F. Strawson, John Rawls, and H. Paul Grice (the analysis of meaning as an attempt at being understood), Hare and Stenius (the distinction, concerning meaning, between illocutionary force and propositional content), and William P. Alston, who maintained that sentence meaning consists in sets of regulative rules requiring the speaker to perform the illocutionary act indicated by the sentence, and that such acts involve the utterance of a sentence which (a) indicates that one performs the act, (b) means what one says, and (c) addresses an audience in the vicinity. In his 1969 book Speech Acts, Searle sets out to combine all of these elements to give his account of 'illocutionary acts', which Austin had introduced in How To Do Things with Words.

Despite his announced intention^[7] to present a "full dress analysis of the illocutionary act", Searle in fact does not give one.^{[citation needed]} Instead, he provides an analysis of what he considers the prototypical illocutionary act of promising, and offers sets of semantical rules intended to represent the linguistic meaning of devices indicating further illocutionary act types (1969, 57-71).

Among the concepts presented in the book is the distinction between the 'illocutionary force' and the 'propositional content' of an utterance. Searle does not precisely define the former as such, but rather introduces several possible illocutionary forces by example. According to Searle, the sentences:

1. Sam smokes habitually.
2. Does Sam smoke habitually?
3. Sam, smoke habitually!
4. Would that Sam smoked habitually!

each indicate the same propositional content (Sam smoking habitually) but differ in the illocutionary force indicated (a statement, a question, a command, and an expression of desire, respectively) (1969, 22).

According to a later account, which Searle presents in Intentionality (1983) and which differs in important ways from the one suggested in Speech Acts, illocutionary acts are characterised by their having conditions of satisfaction (an idea adopted from Strawson's (1971) paper "Meaning and Truth" [9]) and a direction of fit (an idea adopted from Elizabeth Anscombe). For example, the statement "John bought two candy bars" is satisfied if and only if it is true, i.e. John did buy two candy bars. By contrast, the command "John, buy two candy bars" is satisfied if and only if John carries out the action of purchasing two candy bars. Searle refers to the first as having the word-to-world direction of fit, since the words are supposed to change to accurately represent the world, and the second as having the world-to-word direction of fit, since the world is supposed to change to match the words. (There is also the double direction of fit, in which the relationship goes both ways, and the null or zero direction of fit, in which it goes neither way because the propositional content is presupposed, as in "I'm sorry I ate John's candy bars.")

In Foundations of Illocutionary Logic^[8] (1985, with Daniel Vanderveken), Searle prominently uses the notion of "illocutionary point". (Although Searle does not mention earlier uses of the concept, it originates from Alexander Sesonske's article "Performatives".)

Searle's speech-act theory has been challenged by several thinkers, and in a variety of ways. A wide-ranging critique is offered by F.C. Doerge [10].^[9] Collections of articles referring to Searle's account are found in: Burkhardt 1990^[10] and Lepore / van Gulick 1991.^[11]

Searle-Derrida debate[link]

In the early 1970s Searle had a brief debate with Jacques Derrida regarding Speech Act theory. The debate was characterized by a degree of mutual hostility between the philosophers each of whom accused the other of having misunderstood the basic points of the other.^[12] Searle was particularly hostile to the deconstructionist framework of Derrida and refused to let his response to Derrida be printed along with Derrida's papers in the 1988 collection of the papers in the debate, Limited Inc. Searle did not consider Derrida's approach legitimate philosophy or even intelligible writing. Searle argued that he did not want to dedicate any attention to the deconstructionist point of view such as to not legitimize it. Some critics have consequently considered the debate a non-debate, but rather simply a series of elaborate misunderstandings^[13], while others have seen either Derrida or Searle as having gained the upper hand.^[14] The level of hostility in the debate can be seen from the fact that Searle in his reply stated that "It would be a mistake to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions", to which Derrida replied that that sentence was "the only sentence of the "reply" to which I can subscribe".^[15] The debate has nonetheless frequently been interpreted as a prominent example of a confrontation between analytical and continental philosophy.

The debate began in 1972, when Jacques Derrida analyzed J. L. Austin's theory of the illocutionary act in his paper "Signature Event Context". While sympathetic to Austin's departure from a purely denotational account of language to one that includes "force", Derrida was sceptical of the framework of normativity employed by Austin. He argued that Austin had missed the fact that any speech event is framed by a "structure of absence" - the words that are left unsaid, because of contextual constraints, and by "iterability", the strictures on what can be said, given by what has been said in the past. Derrida argued that the focus on intentionality in speech act theory was misguided, because intentionality is restricted to be intentional about that which is already established as a possible intention. He also took issue with the way Austin had excluded the study of fiction, non-serious or "parasitic" speech, and wondered whether this exclusion reflected that Austin had considered these speech genres to be governed by different structures of meaning, or simply by a lack of interest. In his brief reply to Derrida "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida", Searle argued that Derrida's critique was unwarranted because it assumed that Austin's theory was attempting to give a full account of language and meaning, when in fact its aim was much narrower, Searle considered leaving out parasitic discourse forms justified by the narrow scope of Austin's inquiry.^[16][17] Searle agreed with Derrida's proposal that intentionality presupposes iterability, but Searle did not apply the same concept of intentionality used by Derrida, being unable or unwilling to engage with the continental conceptual apparatus.^[14] This in turn caused Derrida to criticize Searle for not being sufficiently familiar with phenomenological perspectives on intentionality.^[18] Searle also argued that Derrida's disagreement with Austin turned on his having misunderstood Austin's type–token distinction, and his failure to understand Austin's concept of failure in relation to performativity. Some critics have suggested that Searle was at fault for the unsuccesful nature of the exchange, by being so grounded in the Anglo-Saxon analytical tradition that he was unable to engage with the continental phenomenlogical tradition represented by Derrida.^[18]

Derrida in his response to Searle, "Limited inc, abc..." ridiculed Searle's positions, suggesting that Searle had formed a Société à responsabilité limitée (Society for Limited Responsibility) with Austin, because of the ways in which the ambiguities of authorship within Searle's reply circumvented the very speech act of the reply, since a clear sender of the message could not be established. Searle did not reply. Later in 1988, Derrida tried to review his position and his critiques of Austin and Searle, reiterating that he found the constant appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition to be problematic.^{[19][20][21][22][23][14][24][25]}

In 1995 Searle gave a brief reply to Derrida in The Construction of Social Reality, in which he called Derrida's conclusion "preposterous" and stated that "Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares that there is nothing outside of texts. ..."^[26]

Intentionality and the Background[link]

Searle defines "Intentionality" as the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs in the world.^[27] The nature of intentionality is an important part of discussions of the Searle's "Philosophy of Mind". Searle emphasizes that the word ‘intentionality, (the part of the mind directed to/from/about objects and relations in the world independent of mind) should not be confused with the word ‘intensionality’ (the logical property of some sentences that do not pass the test of 'extensinalidade').^[28] In Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Searle applies certain elements of his account(s) of "illocutionary acts" to the investigation of intentionality. Searle also introduces a technical term the Background,^[29] which, according to him, has been the source of much philosophical discussion ("though I have been arguing for this thesis for almost twenty years," Searle writes,^[30] "many people whose opinions I respect still disagree with me about it.") Background he calls the set of abilities, capacities, tendencies, and dispositions that humans have and that are not themselves intentional states. Thus, when someone asks us to "cut the cake" we know to use a knife and when someone asks us to "cut the grass" we know to use a lawnmower (and not vice versa), even though the actual request did not include this detail. Searle sometimes supplements his reference to the Background with the concept of the Network, one's network of other beliefs, desires, and other intentional states necessary for any particular intentional state to make sense. Searle argues that the concept of a Background is similar to the concepts provided by several other thinkers, including Wittgenstein's private language argument ("the work of the later Wittgenstein is in large part about the Background"^[31]) and Bourdieu's habitus.

To give an example, two chess players might be engaged in a bitter struggle at the board, but they share all sorts of Background presuppositions: that they will take turns to move, that no one else will intervene, that they are both playing to the same rules, that the fire alarm won't go off, that the board won't suddenly disintegrate, that their opponent won't magically turn into a grapefruit, and so on indefinitely. As most of these possibilities won't have occurred to either player,^[32] Searle thinks the Background must be unconscious, though elements of it can be called to consciousness (if the fire alarm does go off, say).

In his debate with Derrida, Searle argued against Derrida's notion that a statement can be disjoined from the original intentionality of its author, for example when no longer connected to the original author, while still being able to produce meaning. Searle maintained that even if one was to see a written statement with no knowledge of authorship it would still be impossible to escape the question of intentionality, because "a meaningful sentence is just a standing possibility of the (intentional) speech act". For Searle ascribing intentionality to a statement was a basic requirement for attributing it any meaning at all.^[33][34]

Consciousness[link]

Building upon his views about Intentionality, Searle presents a view concerning consciousness in his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992). He argues that, starting with behaviorism (an early but influential scientific view, succeeded by many later accounts that Searle also dismisses), much of modern philosophy has tried to deny the existence of consciousness, with little success. In Intentionality, he parodies several alternative theories of consciousness by replacing their accounts of intentionality with comparable accounts of the hand:

No one would think of saying, for example, "Having a hand is just being disposed to certain sorts of behavior such as grasping" (manual behaviorism), or "Hands can be defined entirely in terms of their causes and effects" (manual functionalism), or "For a system to have a hand is just for it to be in a certain computer state with the right sorts of inputs and outputs" (manual Turing machine functionalism), or "Saying that a system has hands is just adopting a certain stance toward it" (the manual stance). (p. 263)

Searle argues that philosophy has been trapped by a false dichotomy: that, on the one hand, the world consists of nothing but objective particles in fields of force, but that yet, on the other hand, consciousness is clearly a subjective first-person experience.

Searle says simply that both are true: consciousness is a real subjective experience, caused by the physical processes of the brain. (A view which he suggests might be called biological naturalism.)

Ontological subjectivity[link]

Searle has argued^[35] that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but are not necessarily ontologically objective.

Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is epistemically subjective, whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is epistemically objective. In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness.

Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) which are ontologically subjective, i.e. are experienced subjectively. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science".^[36] But the pain itself is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it.

Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality".^[37] His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism.

Artificial intelligence[link]

A consequence of biological naturalism is that if we want to create a conscious being, we will have to duplicate whatever physical processes the brain goes through to cause consciousness. Searle thereby means to contradict to what he calls "Strong AI", defined by the assumption that as soon as a certain kind of software is running on a computer, a conscious being is thereby created.^[38]

In 1980, Searle presented the "Chinese room" argument, which purports to prove the falsity of strong AI.^[39] (Familiarity with the Turing test is useful for understanding the issue.) Assume you do not speak Chinese and imagine yourself in a room with two slits, a book, and some scratch paper. Someone slides you some Chinese characters through the first slit, you follow the instructions in the book, write what it says on the scratch paper, and slide the resulting sheet out the second slit. To people on the outside world, it appears the room speaks Chinese—they slide Chinese statements in one slit and get valid responses in return—yet you do not understand a word of Chinese. This suggests, according to Searle, that no computer can ever understand Chinese or English, because, as the thought experiment suggests, being able to 'translate' Chinese into English does not entail 'understanding' either Chinese or English: all which the person in the thought experiment, and hence a computer, is able to do is to execute certain syntactic manipulations.^[40]

Stevan Harnad argues that Searle's "Strong AI" is really just another name for functionalism and computationalism, and that these positions are the real targets of his critique.^[41] Functionalists claim that consciousness can be defined as a set of informational processes inside the brain. It follows that anything that carries out the same informational processes as a human is also conscious. Thus, if we wrote a computer program that was conscious, we could run that computer program on, say, a system of ping-pong balls and beer cups and the system would be equally conscious, because it was running the same information processes.

Searle argues that this is impossible, since consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire. No matter how good a simulation of digestion you build on the computer, it will not digest anything; no matter how well you simulate fire, nothing will get burnt. By contrast, informational processes are observer-relative: observers pick out certain patterns in the world and consider them information processes, but information processes are not things-in-the-world themselves. Since they do not exist at a physical level, Searle argues, they cannot have causal efficacy and thus cannot cause consciousness. There is no physical law, Searle insists, that can see the equivalence between a personal computer, a series of ping-pong balls and beer cans, and a pipe-and-water system all implementing the same program.^[42]

Social reality[link]

Searle extended his inquiries into observer-relative phenomena by trying to understand social reality. Searle begins by arguing collective intentionality (e.g. "we're going for a walk") is a distinct form of intentionality, not simply reducible to individual intentionality (e.g. "I'm going for a walk with him and I think he thinks he's going for a walk with me and thinks I think I'm going for a walk with him and ...").

Searle's The Construction of Social Reality (1995) addresses the mystery of how social constructs like "baseball" or "money" can exist in a world consisting only of physical particles in fields of force. Adapting an idea by Elizabeth Anscombe in "On Brute Facts," Searle distinguishes between brute facts, like the height of a mountain, and institutional facts, like the score of a baseball game. Aiming at an explanation of social phenomena in terms of Anscombe's notion, he argues that society can be explained in terms of institutional facts, and institutional facts arise out of collective intentionality through logical rules of the form "X counts as Y in C". Thus, for instance, filling out a ballot counts as a vote in a polling place, getting so many votes counts as a victory in an election, getting a victory counts as being elected president in the presidential race, etc.

Rationality[link]

In Rationality in Action (2001), Searle argues that standard notions of rationality are badly flawed. According to what he calls the Classical Model, rationality is seen as something like a train track: you get on at one point with your beliefs and desires and the rules of rationality compel you all the way to a conclusion. Searle doubts this picture of rationality holds generally.

Searle briefly critiques one particular set of these rules: those of mathematical decision theory. He points out that its axioms require that anyone who valued a quarter and their life would, at some odds, bet their life for a quarter. Searle insists he would never do this and believes that this is perfectly rational.

Yet most of his attack is directed against the common conception of rationality, which he believes is badly flawed. First, he argues that reasons don't cause you to do anything, because having sufficient reason wills (but doesn't force) you to do that thing. So in any decision situation we experience a gap between our reasons and our actions. For example, when we decide to vote, we do not simply determine that we care most about economic policy and that we prefer candidate Jones's economic policy. We also have to make an effort to cast our vote. Similarly, every time a guilty smoker lights a cigarette they are aware of succumbing to their craving, not merely of acting automatically as they do when they exhale. It is this gap that makes us think we have freedom of the will. Searle thinks whether we really have free will or not is an open question, but considers its absence highly unappealing because it makes the feeling of freedom of will an epiphenomenon, which is highly unlikely from the evolutionary point of view given its biological cost. He also says: " All rational activity presupposes free will ".^[43]

Second, he believes rationality is not a system of rules, but more of an adverb. We see certain behavior as rational, no matter what its source, and our system of rules derives from finding patterns in what we see as rational.

Third, Searle believes we can rationally do things that don't result from our own desires. It is widely believed that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is", i.e. that facts about how the world is can never tell you what you should do ('Hume's Law'). By contrast, in so far as a fact is understood as relating to an institution (marriage, promises, commitments, etc.), which is to be understood as a system of constitutive rules, then what one should do can be understood as following from the institutional fact of what one has done; institutional fact, then, can be understood as opposed to the "brute facts" related to Hume's Law. For example, Searle believes the fact that you promised to do something means you should do it, because by making the promise you are participating in the constitutive rules that arrange the system of promise making itself, and therefore understand a "shouldness" as implicit in the mere factual action of promising. Furthermore, he believes that this provides a desire-independent reason for an action—if you order a drink at a bar, you should pay for it even if you have no desire to. This argument, which he first made in his paper, "How to Derive 'Ought' from 'Is'" (1964),^[44] remains highly controversial, but even three decades later Searle continued to defend his view that "..the traditional metaphysical distinction between fact and value cannot be captured by the linguistic distinction between 'evaluative' and 'descriptive' because all such speech act notions are already normative."^[45]

Fourth, Searle argues that much of rational deliberation involves adjusting our (often inconsistent) patterns of desires to decide between outcomes, not the other way around. While in the Classical Model, one would start from a desire to go to Paris greater than that of saving money and calculate the cheapest way to get there, in reality people balance the niceness of Paris against the costs of travel to decide which desire (visiting Paris or saving money) they value more.

See also[link]

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969)
• The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (political commentary; 1971)
• Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (essay collection; 1979)
• Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983)
• Minds, Brains and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures (lecture collection; 1984)
• Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (John Searle & Daniel Vanderveken 1985)
• John Searle and His Critics (Ernest Lepore and Robert Van Gulick, eds.; 1991)
• The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992)
• The Construction of Social Reality (1995)
• The Mystery of Consciousness (review collection; 1997)
• Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (summary of earlier work; 1998)
• Rationality in Action (2001)
• Consciousness and Language (essay collection; 2002)
• Freedom and Neurobiology (lecture collection; 2004)
• Mind: A Brief Introduction (summary of work in philosophy of mind; 2004)
• Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts (essay collection; 2007)
• Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays (2008)
• Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010)

Further reading[link]

• "Minds, Brains and Programs", The Behavioral and Brain Sciences.3, pp. 417–424. (1980)
• Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-27302-1
• Minds, Brains and Science (1984), Harvard University Press, hardcover: ISBN 0-674-57631-4, paperback: ISBN 0-674-57633-0
• "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?" (1990) Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association
• "Collective Intentions and Actions" (1990) in Intentions in Communication J. M. P. R. Cohen, & M. and E. Pollack. Cambridge, Mass.: . MIT Press: 401-416.
• The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) ISBN 0-262-69154-X
• The Problem of Consciousness, Social Research, Vol. 60, No.1, Spring 1993.
• The Construction of Social Reality (1995)
• The Mystery of Consciousness, Granta Books, (1997) hardcover: ISBN 1-86207-122-5, New York Review Books paperback: ISBN 0-940322-06-4
• Consciousness Ann. Rev. Neurosci. (2000) 23:557-78. Review.
• Rationality in Action, MIT Press, (2001) – contains (among other things) Searle's account of akrasia
• Consciousness and Language (2002), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-59744-7
• D. Koepsell (ed.) and L. Moss (ed.) "Searle and Smith: A Dialogue" in John Searle's Ideas About Social Reality: Extensions, Criticisms, and Reconstructions (2003), Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-1258-1
• Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004), Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-515733-8
• Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language and Political Power (2007), Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-13752-4
• Dualism revisited J Physiol Paris. 2007 Jul-Nov;101(4-6):169-78. Epub 2008 Jan 19.
• M. Bennett, D. Dennett, P. Hacker, J. Searle, Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language (2007), Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-14044-4
• The Storm Over the University

• Doerge (2006), Friedrich Christoph: Illocutionary Acts - Austin's Account and What Searle Made Out of It. Tuebingen: Tuebingen University. http://tobias-lib.ub.uni-tuebingen.de/volltexte/2006/2273/pdf/Dissertation_Doerge.pdf

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Searle

• John Searle's Machines Like Us interview
• Searle's homepage at UC Berkeley
• Conversations with Searle.
• Interview in Conversations with History series. Available in webcast and podcast.
• Conversations with History:John R. Searle on YouTube
• Video or transcript of an interview with John Searle on language, writing, mind, and consciousness
• John Searle at the Internet Movie Database
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
• Webcast of Philosophy of Society lectures
• Philosophy of Language: an interview with John Searle ReVEL, vol. 5, n. 8, 2007.
• The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies video interview with John Searle 2011-06-13
• BBC Reith Audio Lectures - John Searle: Minds, Brain & Science (1984)

Hilary Whitehall Putnam

Born	(1926-07-31) July 31, 1926 (age 85) Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic Pragmatism
Main interests	Philosophy of mind Philosophy of language Philosophy of mathematics Metaphilosophy Epistemology
Notable ideas	Multiple realizability Functionalism Causal theory of reference Semantic externalism Brain in a vat · Twin Earth Internal realism
Influenced by W.V.O. Quine, John Dewey, Hans Reichenbach, Alan Turing, Immanuel Kant, Nelson Goodman, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud[1]
Influenced Jerry Fodor, Ned Block, Joseph LeDoux, Tyler Burge, David Marr, Daniel Dennett, David Lewis, Donald Davidson

Hilary Whitehall Putnam (born July 31, 1926) is an American philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist, who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science.^[2] 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.^[3] As a result, he has acquired a reputation for frequently changing his own position.^[4] Putnam is currently Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University.

In philosophy of mind, Putnam is known for his argument against the type-identity of mental and physical states based on his hypothesis of the multiple realizability of the mental, and for the concept of functionalism, an influential theory regarding the mind-body problem.^[2][5] In philosophy of language, along with Saul Kripke and others, he developed the causal theory of reference, and formulated an original theory of meaning, inventing the notion of semantic externalism based on a famous thought experiment called Twin Earth.^[6]

In philosophy of mathematics, he and his mentor W. V. Quine developed the "Quine-Putnam indispensability thesis," an argument for the reality of mathematical entities,^[7] later espousing the view that mathematics is not purely logical, but "quasi-empirical".^[8] In the field of epistemology, he is known for his critique of the well known "brain in a vat" thought experiment. This thought experiment appears to provide a powerful argument for epistemological skepticism, but Putnam challenges its coherence.^[9] In metaphysics, he originally espoused a position called metaphysical realism, but eventually became one of its most outspoken critics, first adopting a view he called "internal realism",^[10] which he later abandoned in favor of a pragmatist-inspired direct realism. Putnam's "direct realism" aims to return the study of metaphysics to the way people actually experience the world, rejecting the idea of mental representations, sense data, and other intermediaries between mind and world.^[11] In his later work, Putnam has become increasingly interested in American pragmatism, Jewish philosophy, and ethics, thus engaging with a wider array of philosophical traditions. He has also displayed an interest in metaphilosophy, seeking to "renew philosophy" from what he identifies as narrow and inflated concerns.

Outside philosophy, Putnam has contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem^[12] and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.^[13] He has been at times a politically controversial figure, especially for his involvement with the Progressive Labor Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s.^[14][15]

Personal life[link]

Putnam was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1926. His father, Samuel Putnam, was a scholar of Romance languages, columnist and translator who wrote for the Daily Worker, a publication of the American Communist Party from 1936 to 1946 (when he became disillusioned with communism).^[16] As a result of his father's commitment to communism, Putnam had a secular upbringing, although his mother, Riva, was Jewish.^[3] The family lived in France until 1934, when they returned to the United States, settling in Philadelphia.^[3] Putnam attended Central High School; there he met Noam Chomsky, who was a year behind him. The two have been friends—and often intellectual opponents—ever since.^[17] Putnam studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving his BA (undergraduate degree) and becoming a member of the Philomathean Society, one of the oldest collegiate literary societies in the U.S.^[3][14] He went on to do graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University,^[3] and later at UCLA's Philosophy Department, where he received his Ph.D. in 1951 for a dissertation entitled "The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences". Putnam's teacher Hans Reichenbach (his dissertation supervisor) was a leading figure in logical positivism, the dominant school of philosophy of the day; one of Putnam's most consistent positions has been his rejection of logical positivism as self-defeating.^[14]

After briefly teaching at Northwestern, Princeton, and MIT, he moved to Harvard in 1965 with his wife, Ruth Anna Jacobs, who took a teaching position in philosophy at Wellesley College.^[14] Hilary and Ruth Anna were married in 1962.^[18] Ruth Anna Jacobs, descendant of a family with a long scholarly tradition in Gotha (her ancestor was the German classical scholar Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Jacobs), was born in Berlin, Germany,^[19] in 1927 to anti-Nazi political-activist parents and, like Putnam himself, she was raised an atheist (her mother was Jewish and her father had been from a Christian background).^[18] The Putnams, rebelling against the anti-Semitism that they had experienced during their youth, decided to establish a traditional Jewish home for their children.^[18] Since they had no experience with the rituals of Judaism, they sought out invitations to other Jews' homes for Seder. They had "no idea how to do it [themselves]", in the words of Ruth Anna. They therefore began to study Jewish ritual and Hebrew, and became more Jewishly interested, identified, and active. In 1994, Hilary Putnam celebrated a belated Bar Mitzvah service. His wife had a Bat Mitzvah service four years later.^[18]

Hilary was a popular teacher at Harvard. In keeping with the family tradition, he was politically active.^[14] In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was an active supporter of civil rights causes and an opponent of American military intervention in Vietnam.^[15] In 1963, he organized one of the first faculty and student committees at MIT against the war. Putnam was disturbed when he learned from reading the reports of David Halberstam that the U.S. was "defending" South Vietnamese peasants from the Vietcong by poisoning their rice crops.^[14] After moving to Harvard in 1965, he organized campus protests and began teaching courses on Marxism. Hilary became an official faculty advisor to the Students for a Democratic Society and, in 1968, became a member of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP).^[14]

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965.^[20] After 1968, his political activities were centered on the PLP.^[15] The Harvard administration considered these activities disruptive and attempted to censure Putnam, but two other faculty members criticized the procedures.^[21] Putnam permanently severed his ties with the PLP in 1972.^[22] In 1997, at a meeting of former draft resistance activists at Arlington Street Church in Boston, Putnam described his involvement with the PLP as a mistake. He said that he had been impressed at first with PLP's commitment to alliance-building, and its willingness to attempt to organize from within the armed forces.^[15]

In 1976, he was elected President of the American Philosophical Association. The following year, he was selected as Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Mathematical Logic, in recognition of his contributions to philosophy of logic and mathematics.^[14] While breaking with his radical past, Putnam has never abandoned his belief that academics have a particular social and ethical responsibility toward society. He has continued to be forthright and progressive in his political views, as expressed in the articles "How Not to Solve Ethical Problems" (1983) and "Education for Democracy" (1993).^[14]

Putnam is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He retired from teaching in June 2000, but, as of 2009, he still gives a seminar almost yearly at Tel Aviv University. He is the Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He is also a founding patron of the small liberal arts college Ralston College. His corpus includes five volumes of collected works, seven books, and more than 200 articles. Putnam's renewed interest in Judaism has inspired him to publish several recent books and essays on the topic.^[23] With his wife, he has co-authored several books and essays on the late-19th century American pragmatist movement.^[14]

Philosophy of mind[link]

Multiple realizability[link]

An illustration of multiple realizability. M stands for mental and P stands for physical. It can be seen that more than one P can instantiate one M, but not vice versa. Causal relations between states are represented by the arrows (M1 goes to M2, etc.)

Putnam's best-known work concerns philosophy of mind. His most noted original contributions to that field came in several key papers published in the late 1960s that set out the hypothesis of multiple realizability.^[24] In these papers, Putnam argues that, contrary to the famous claim of the type-identity theory, it is not necessarily true that "Pain is identical to C-fibre firing." Pain, according to Putnam's papers, may correspond to utterly different physical states of the nervous system in different organisms, and yet they all experience the same mental state of "being in pain".

Putnam cited examples from the animal kingdom to illustrate his thesis. He asked whether it was likely that the brain structures of diverse types of animals realize pain, or other mental states, the same way. If they do not share the same brain structures, they cannot share the same mental states and properties. The answer to this puzzle had to be that mental states were realized by different physical states in different species. Putnam then took his argument a step further, asking about such things as the nervous systems of alien beings, artificially intelligent robots and other silicon-based life forms. These hypothetical entities, he contended, should not be considered incapable of experiencing pain just because they lack the same neurochemistry as humans. Putnam concluded that type-identity theorists had been making an "ambitious" and "highly implausible" conjecture which could be disproven with one example of multiple realizability.^[25] This argument is sometimes referred to as the "likelihood argument".^[24]

Putnam formulated a complementary argument based on what he called "functional isomorphism". He defined the concept in these terms: "Two systems are functionally isomorphic if 'there is a correspondence between the states of one and the states of the other that preserves functional relations'." In the case of computers, two machines are functionally isomorphic if and only if the sequential relations among states in the first are exactly mirrored by the sequential relations among states in the other. Therefore, a computer made out of silicon chips and a computer made out of cogs and wheels can be functionally isomorphic but constitutionally diverse. Functional isomorphism implies multiple realizability.^[25] This argument is sometimes referred to as an "a priori argument".^[24]

Jerry Fodor, Putnam, and others noted that, along with being an effective argument against type-identity theories, multiple realizability implies that any low-level explanation of higher-level mental phenomena is insufficiently abstract and general.^[25][26][27] Functionalism, which identifies mental kinds with functional kinds that are characterized exclusively in terms of causes and effects, abstracts from the level of microphysics, and therefore seemed to be a better explanation of the relation between mind and body. In fact, there are many functional kinds, such as mousetraps, software and bookshelves, which are multiply realized at the physical level.^[25]

Machine state functionalism[link]

A Turing machine can be visualized as an infinite tape of slots that are written or erased one at a time, with the choice of action determined by a "state". According to Putnam's machine-state functionalism, the notions of state in an abstract computer and mental state are essentially the same.

The first formulation of such a functionalist theory was put forth by Putnam himself. This formulation, which is now called "machine-state functionalism", was inspired by analogies noted by Putnam and others between the mind and theoretical "Turing machines" capable of computing any given algorithm.^[28]

In non-technical terms, a Turing machine can be visualized as an infinitely long tape divided into squares (the memory) with a box-shaped scanning device that sits over and scans one square of the memory at a time. Each square is either blank (B) or has a 1 written on it. These are the inputs to the machine. The possible outputs are:

• Halt: Do nothing.
• R: move one square to the right.
• L: move one square to the left.
• B: erase whatever is on the square.
• 1: erase whatever is on the square and print a 1.

A simple example of a Turing machine which writes out the sequence '111' after scanning three blank squares and then stopping is specified by the following machine table:

This table states that if the machine is in state one and scans a blank square (B), it will print a 1 and remain in state one. If it is in state one and reads a 1, it will move one square to the right and also go into state two. If it is in state two and reads a B, it will print a 1 and stay in state two. If it's in state two and reads a 1, it will move one square to the right and go into state three. Finally, if it is in state three and reads a B, it prints a 1 and remains in state three.^[29]

The point, for functionalism, is the nature of the "states" of the Turing machine. Each state can be defined in terms of its relations to the other states and to the inputs and outputs. State one, for example, is simply the state in which the machine, if it reads a B, writes a 1 and stays in that state, and in which, if it reads a 1, it moves one square to the right and goes into a different state. This is the functional definition of state one; it is its causal role in the overall system. The details of how it accomplishes what it accomplishes and of its material constitution are completely irrelevant.

According to machine-state functionalism, the nature of a mental state is just like the nature of the automaton states described above. Just as "state one" simply is the state in which, given an input B, such-and-such happens, so being in pain is the state which disposes one to cry "ouch", become distracted, wonder what the cause is, and so forth.^[30]

Rejection of functionalism[link]

In the late 1980s, Putnam abandoned his adherence to functionalism and other computational theories of mind. His change of mind was primarily due to the difficulties that computational theories have in explaining certain intuitions with respect to the externalism of mental content. This is illustrated by Putnam's own Twin Earth thought experiment (see Philosophy of language).^[11] He also developed a separate argument against functionalism in 1988, based on Fodor's generalized version of multiple realizability. Asserting that functionalism is really a watered-down identity theory in which mental kinds are identified with functional kinds, Putnam argued that mental kinds may be multiply realizable over functional kinds. The argument for functionalism is that the same mental state could be implemented by the different states of a universal Turing machine.^[31]

Despite Putnam's rejection of functionalism, it has continued to flourish and has been developed into numerous versions by thinkers as diverse as David Marr, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, and David Lewis.^[32] Functionalism helped lay the foundations for modern cognitive science^[32] and is the dominant theory of mind in philosophy today.^[33]

Philosophy of language[link]

Semantic externalism[link]

One of Putnam's contributions to philosophy of language is his claim that "meaning just ain't in the head". He illustrated this using his "Twin Earth" thought experiment to argue that environmental factors play a substantial role in determining meaning. Twin Earth shows this, according to Putnam, since on Twin Earth everything is identical to Earth, except that its lakes, rivers and oceans are filled with XYZ whereas those of earth are filled with H₂O. Consequently, when an earthling, Fredrick, uses the Earth-English word "water", it has a different meaning from the Twin Earth-English word "water" when used by his physically identical twin, Frodrick, on Twin Earth. Since Fredrick and Frodrick are physically indistinguishable when they utter their respective words, and since their words have different meanings, meaning cannot be determined solely by what is in their heads. This led Putnam to adopt a version of semantic externalism with regard to meaning and mental content.^[9][25] The late philosopher of mind and language Donald Davidson, despite his many differences of opinion with Putnam, wrote that semantic externalism constituted an "anti-subjectivist revolution" in philosophers' way of seeing the world. Since the time of Descartes, philosophers had been concerned with proving knowledge from the basis of subjective experience. Thanks to Putnam, Tyler Burge and others, Davidson said, philosophy could now take the objective realm for granted and start questioning the alleged "truths" of subjective experience.^[34]

Theory of meaning[link]

Putnam, along with Saul Kripke, Keith Donnellan, and others, contributed to what is known as the causal theory of reference.^[2] In particular, Putnam maintained in The Meaning of "Meaning" that the objects referred to by natural kind terms—such as tiger, water, and tree—are the principal elements of the meaning of such terms. There is a linguistic division of labor, analogous to Adam Smith's economic division of labor, according to which such terms have their references fixed by the "experts" in the particular field of science to which the terms belong. So, for example, the reference of the term "lion" is fixed by the community of zoologists, the reference of the term "elm tree" is fixed by the community of botanists, and the reference of the term "table salt" is fixed as "NaCl" by chemists. These referents are considered rigid designators in the Kripkean sense and are disseminated outward to the linguistic community.^[25]

Putnam specifies a finite sequence of elements (a vector) for the description of the meaning of every term in the language. Such a vector consists of four components:

1. the object to which the term refers, e.g., the object individuated by the chemical formula H₂O;
2. a set of typical descriptions of the term, referred to as "the stereotype", e.g., "transparent", "colorless", and "hydrating";
3. the semantic indicators that place the object into a general category, e.g., "natural kind" and "liquid";
4. the syntactic indicators, e.g., "concrete noun" and "mass noun".

Such a "meaning-vector" provides a description of the reference and use of an expression within a particular linguistic community. It provides the conditions for its correct usage and makes it possible to judge whether a single speaker attributes the appropriate meaning to that expression or whether its use has changed enough to cause a difference in its meaning. According to Putnam, it is legitimate to speak of a change in the meaning of an expression only if the reference of the term, and not its stereotype, has changed. However, since there is no possible algorithm that can determine which aspect—the stereotype or the reference—has changed in a particular case, it is necessary to consider the usage of other expressions of the language.^[25] Since there is no limit to the number of such expressions which must be considered, Putnam embraced a form of semantic holism.^[35]

Philosophy of mathematics[link]

Putnam made a significant contribution to philosophy of mathematics in the Quine–Putnam "indispensability argument" for mathematical realism.^[28] This argument is considered by Stephen Yablo to be one of the most challenging arguments in favor of the acceptance of the existence of abstract mathematical entities, such as numbers and sets.^[36] The form of the argument is as follows.

1. One must have ontological commitments to all entities that are indispensable to the best scientific theories, and to those entities only (commonly referred to as "all and only").
2. Mathematical entities are indispensable to the best scientific theories. Therefore,
3. One must have ontological commitments to mathematical entities.^[37]

The justification for the first premise is the most controversial. Both Putnam and Quine invoke naturalism to justify the exclusion of all non-scientific entities, and hence to defend the "only" part of "all and only". The assertion that "all" entities postulated in scientific theories, including numbers, should be accepted as real is justified by confirmation holism. Since theories are not confirmed in a piecemeal fashion, but as a whole, there is no justification for excluding any of the entities referred to in well-confirmed theories. This puts the nominalist who wishes to exclude the existence of sets and non-Euclidean geometry, but to include the existence of quarks and other undetectable entities of physics, for example, in a difficult position.^[37]

Putnam holds the view that mathematics, like physics and other empirical sciences, uses both strict logical proofs and "quasi-empirical" methods. For example, Fermat's last theorem states that for no integer Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): n>2

are there positive integer values of x, y, and z such that Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): x^n+y^n=z^n

. Before this was proven for all Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): n>2

in 1995 by Andrew Wiles,[38] it had been proven for many values of n. These proofs inspired further research in the area, and formed a quasi-empirical consensus for the theorem. Even though such knowledge is more conjectural than a strictly proven theorem, it was still used in developing other mathematical ideas.[8]

Mathematics and computer science[link]

Putnam has contributed to scientific fields not directly related to his work in philosophy.^[2] As a mathematician, Putnam contributed to the resolution of Hilbert's tenth problem in mathematics. Yuri Matiyasevich had formulated a theorem involving the use of Fibonacci numbers in 1970, which was designed to answer the question of whether there is a general algorithm that can decide whether a given system of Diophantine equations (polynomials with integer coefficients) has a solution among the integers. Putnam, working with Martin Davis and Julia Robinson, demonstrated that Matiyasevich's theorem was sufficient to prove that no such general algorithm can exist. It was therefore shown that David Hilbert's famous tenth problem has no solution.^[13]

In computability theory, Putnam investigated the structure of the ramified analytical hierarchy, its connection with the constructible hierarchy and its Turing degrees. He showed that there exist many levels of the constructible hierarchy which do not add any subsets of the integers^[39] and later, with his student George Boolos, that the first such "non-index" is the ordinal Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \beta_0

of ramified analysis[40] (this is the smallest Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \beta
such that Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): L_\beta
is a model of full second-order comprehension), and also, together with a separate paper with Richard Boyd (another of Putnam's students) and Gustav Hensel,[41] how the Davis–Mostowski–Kleene hyperarithmetical hierarchy of arithmetical degrees can be naturally extended up to Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \beta_0

.

In computer science, Putnam is known for the Davis-Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT), developed with Martin Davis in 1960.^[2] The algorithm finds if there is a set of true or false values that satisfies a given Boolean expression so that the entire expression becomes true. In 1962, they further refined the algorithm with the help of George Logemann and Donald W. Loveland. It became known as the DPLL algorithm. This algorithm is efficient and still forms the basis of most complete SAT solvers.^[12]

Epistemology[link]

A "brain in a vat"—Putnam uses this thought experiment to argue that skeptical scenarios are impossible.

In the field of epistemology, Putnam is known for his "brain in a vat" thought experiment (a modernized version of Descartes' evil demon hypothesis). The argument is that one cannot coherently state that one is a disembodied "brain in a vat" placed there by some "mad scientist".^[9]

This follows from the causal theory of reference. Words always refer to the kinds of things they were coined to refer to, thus the kinds of things their user, or the user's ancestors, experienced. So, if some person, Mary, were a "brain in a vat", whose every experience is received through wiring and other gadgetry created by the "mad scientist", then Mary's idea of a "brain" would not refer to a "real" brain, since she and her linguistic community have never seen such a thing. Rather, she saw something that looked like a brain, but was actually an image fed to her through the wiring. Similarly, her idea of a "vat" would not refer to a "real" vat. So, if, as a "brain in a vat", she were to say "I'm a brain in a vat", she would actually be saying "I'm a brain-image in a vat-image", which is incoherent. On the other hand, if she is not a "brain in a vat", then saying that she is still incoherent, but now because she actually means the opposite. This is a form of epistemological externalism: knowledge or justification depends on factors outside the mind and is not solely determined internally.^[9]

Putnam has clarified that his real target in this argument was never skepticism, but metaphysical realism.^[42] Since realism of this kind assumes the existence of a gap between how man conceives the world and the way the world really is, skeptical scenarios such as this one (or Descartes' Evil demon) present a formidable challenge. Putnam, by arguing that such a scenario is impossible, attempts to show that this notion of a gap between man's concept of the world and the way it is, is in itself absurd. Man cannot have a "God's eye" view of reality. He is limited to his conceptual schemes. Metaphysical realism is therefore false, according to Putnam.^[43]

Metaphilosophy and ontology[link]

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, stimulated by results from mathematical logic and by some ideas of Quine, Putnam abandoned his long-standing defence of metaphysical realism—the view that the categories and structures of the external world are both causally and ontologically independent of the conceptualizations of the human mind. He adopted a rather different view, which he called "internal realism".^[10][44]

Putnam renounced internal realism in his reply to Simon Blackburn in the volume Reading Putnam.^[45] The reasons he gave up his "antirealism" are stated in the first three of his replies in "The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam", an issue of the journal Philosophical Topics, where he gives a history of his use(s) of the term "internal realism", and, at more length, in his The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World (1999).^[46]

Internal realism was the view that, although the world may be causally independent of the human mind, the structure of the world—its division into kinds, individuals and categories—is a function of the human mind, and hence the world is not ontologically independent. The general idea is influenced by Kant's idea of the dependence of our knowledge of the world on the "categories of thought".^[47]

The problem with metaphysical realism, according to Putnam, was that it fails to explain the possibility of reference and truth. According to the metaphysical realist, our concepts and categories refer because they match up in some mysterious manner with the pre-structured categories, kinds and individuals that are inherent in the external world. But how is it possible that the world "carves up" into certain structures and categories, the mind carves up the world into its own categories and structures, and the two "carvings" perfectly coincide? The answer must be that the world does not come pre-structured but that structure must be imposed on it by the human mind and its conceptual schemes. In Reason, Truth, and History, Putnam identified truth with what he termed "idealized rational acceptability." The theory, which owes something to C.S. Peirce, is that a belief is true if it would be accepted by anyone under ideal epistemic conditions.^[10]

Nelson Goodman had formulated a similar notion in Fact, Fiction and Forecast in 1956. In that work, Goodman went as far as to suggest that there is "no one world, but many worlds, each created by the human mind."^[48] Putnam rejected this form of social constructivism, but retained the idea that there can be many correct descriptions of reality. No one of these descriptions can be scientifically proven to be the "one, true" description of the world. This does not imply relativism, for Putnam, because not all descriptions are equally correct and the ones that are correct are not determined subjectively.^[49]

Under the influence of C.S. Peirce and William James, Putnam also became convinced that there is no fact–value dichotomy; that is, ethical and aesthetic judgments often have a factual basis, while scientific judgments have an ethical element.^[49]

Neopragmatism and Wittgenstein[link]

At the end of the 1980s, Putnam became increasingly disillusioned with what he perceived as the "scientism" and the rejection of history that characterize modern analytic philosophy. He rejected internal realism because it assumed a "cognitive interface" model of the relation between the mind and the world. Under the increasing influence of James and the pragmatists, he adopted a direct realist view of this relation. For a time, under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, he adopted a pluralist view of philosophy itself and came to view most philosophical problems as nothing more than conceptual or linguistic confusions created by philosophers by using ordinary language out of its original context.^[49]

Many of Putnam's most recent works have addressed the concerns of ordinary people, particularly their concerns about social problems.^[50] For example, he has written about the nature of democracy, social justice and religion. He has discussed the ideas of the continental philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, and has written articles influenced by "continental" ideas.^[14]

Criticism[link]

Putnam himself may be his own most formidable philosophical adversary.^[6] His frequent changes of mind have led him to attack his previous positions. However, many significant criticisms of his views have come from other philosophers and scientists. For example, multiple realizability has been criticized on the grounds that, if it were true, research and experimentation in the neurosciences would be impossible.^[51] According to Bechtel and Mundale, to be able to conduct such research in the neurosciences, universal consistencies must either exist or be assumed to exist in brain structures. It is the similarity (or homology) of brain structures that allows us to generalize across species.^[51] If multiple realizability were an empirical fact, results from experiments conducted on one species of animal (or one organism) would not be meaningful when generalized to explain the behavior of another species (or organism of the same species).^[52] Other criticisms of MR have been proposed by Jaegwon Kim, David Lewis, Robert Richardson and Patricia Churchland.^{[53][54][55][56]}

One of the main arguments against functionalism was formulated by Putnam himself: the Twin Earth thought experiment. However, there have been other criticisms. The Chinese room argument by John Searle (1980) is a direct attack on the claim that thought can be represented as a set of functions. The thought experiment is designed to show that it is possible to mimic intelligent action, without any interpretation or understanding, through the use of a purely functional system. In short, Searle describes a situation in which a person who speaks only English is locked in a room with Chinese symbols in baskets and a rule book in English for moving the symbols around. The person is instructed, by people outside the room, to follow the rule book for sending certain symbols out of the room when given certain symbols. Further, suppose that the people outside the room are Chinese speakers and are communicating with the person inside via the Chinese symbols. According to Searle, it would be absurd to claim that the English speaker inside "knows" Chinese based on these syntactic processes alone. This thought experiment attempts to show that systems that operate merely on syntactic processes cannot realize any semantics (meaning) or intentionality (aboutness). Thus, Searle attacks the idea that thought can be equated with the following of a set of syntactic rules. Thus, functionalism is an inadequate theory of the mind.^[57] Several other arguments against functionalism have been advanced by Ned Block.^[58]

Putnam has consistently adhered to the idea of semantic holism, in spite of the many changes in his other positions. The problems with this position have been described by Michael Dummett, Jerry Fodor, Ernest Lepore, and others. In the first place, they suggest that, if semantic holism is true, it is impossible to understand how a speaker of a language can learn the meaning of an expression, for any expression of the language. Given the limits of our cognitive abilities, we will never be able to master the whole of the English (or any other) language, even based on the (false) assumption that languages are static and immutable entities. Thus, if one must understand all of a natural language to understand a single word or expression, language learning is simply impossible. Semantic holism also fails to explain how two speakers can mean the same thing when using the same linguistic expression, and therefore how any communication at all is possible between them. Given a sentence P, since Fred and Mary have each mastered different parts of the English language and P is related differently to the sentences in each part, the result is that P means one thing for Fred and something else for Mary. Moreover, if a sentence P derives its meaning from its relations with all of the sentences of a language, as soon as the vocabulary of an individual changes by the addition or elimination of a sentence, the totality of relations changes, and therefore also the meaning of P. As this is a common phenomenon, the result is that P has two different meanings in two different moments in the life of the same person. Consequently, if I accept the truth of a sentence and then reject it later on, the meaning of that which I rejected and that which I accepted are completely different and therefore I cannot change my opinions with regard to the same sentences.^[59][60][61]

The brain in a vat argument has also been subject to criticism.^[62] Crispin Wright argues that Putnam's formulation of the brain-in-a-vat scenario is too narrow to refute global skepticism. The possibility that one is a recently disembodied brain in a vat is not undermined by semantic externalism. If a person has lived her entire life outside the vat—speaking the English language and interacting normally with the outside world—prior to her "envatment" by a mad scientist, when she wakes up inside the vat, her words and thoughts (e.g., "tree" and "grass") will still refer to the objects or events in the external world that they referred to before her envatment.^[42] In another scenario, a brain in a vat may be hooked up to a supercomputer that randomly generates perceptual experiences. In this case, one's words and thoughts would not refer to anything, and would therefore be devoid of content. Semantics would no longer exist and the argument would be meaningless.^[63]

In philosophy of mathematics, Stephen Yablo has argued that the Quine–Putnam indispensability thesis does not demonstrate that mathematical entities are truly indispensable. The argumentation is sophisticated, but the upshot is that one can achieve the same logical results by simply replacing all occurrences of the expression "so-and-so exists" (e.g., numbers exist) by occurrences of the expression "so-and-so is assumed (or hypothesized) to exist". For example, one can take the argument for indispensability described above and replace all references to existent entities with references to entities assumed to exist as follows.

1*. One must have ontological commitments to all and only the entities that are assumed to exist and are indispensable to the best scientific theories.

2*. Mathematical entities that are assumed to exist are indispensable to the best scientific theories. Therefore,

3*. One must have ontological commitments to mathematical entities that are assumed to exist.^[36]

Finally, Putnam's internal realism has been accused by Curtis Brown of being a disguised form of subjective idealism. If this is the case, it is subject to the traditional arguments against that position. In particular, it falls into the trap of solipsism. That is, if existence depends on experience, as subjective idealism maintains, and if one's consciousness were to stop existing, then the rest of the universe would stop existing as well.^[47]

Academic genealogy[link]

Major works[link]

• The "Innateness Hypothesis" and Explanatory Models in Linguistics, 1967.^[64]
• Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings. Edited with Paul Benacerraf. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964. 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ISBN 0-521-29648-X
• Philosophy of Logic. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972. ISBN 0-04-160009-6
• Mathematics, Matter and Method. Philosophical Papers, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. 2nd. ed., 1985 paperback: ISBN 0-521-29550-5
• Mind, Language and Reality. Philosophical Papers, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. 2003 paperback: ISBN 0-521-29551-3
• Meaning and the Moral Sciences. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
• Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. 2004 paperback: ISBN 0-521-29776-1
• Realism and Reason. Philosophical Papers, vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 2002 paperback: ISBN 0-521-31394-5
• Methodology, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Essays in Honour of Wolfgang Stegmüller. edited with Wilhelm K. Essler and Carl G. Hempel. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983.
• Epistemology, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science: Essays in Honour of Carl G. Hempel. edited with Wilhelm K. Essler and Wolfgang Stegmüller. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985.
• The Many Faces of Realism. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987. ISBN 0-8126-9043-5
• Representation and Reality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. ISBN 0-262-66074-1
• Realism with a Human Face. edited by James F. Conant. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-674-74945-6
• Renewing Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-674-76094-8
• Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell. edited with Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-89672-266-X
• Words and Life. edited by James F. Conant. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-674-95607-9
• Pragmatism: An Open Question. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. ISBN 0-631-19343-X
• The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-231-10287-9
• Enlightenment and Pragmatism. Assen: Koninklijke Van Gorcum, 2001. 48pp.
• The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Description. ISBN 0-674-01380-8
• Ethics Without Ontology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-674-01851-6
• Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
• Philosophy in an Age of Science. edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming.

Works about Putnam[link]

• Y. Ben-Menahem (ed.), Hilary Putnam, Contemporary Philosophy in Focus, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005.
• P. Clark-B. Hale (eds.), Reading Putnam, Blackwell, Cambridge (Massachusetts)-Oxford 1995.
• C.S. Hill (ed.), The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, Fayetteville, Arkansas 1992.
• M. Rüdel, Erkenntnistheorie und Pragmatik: Untersuchungen zu Richard Rorty und Hilary Putnam, (Dissertation) Hamburg 1987.
• Maximilian de Gaynesford Hilary Putnam McGill-Queens University Press / Acumen, 2006.

See also[link]

	Biography portal
	Logic portal

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers
• Rietdijk–Putnam argument

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Harvard University Philosophy Faculty page
• An extensive bibliography
• An extensive directory
• Hilary Putnam at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• London Review of Books contributor page
• Hilary Putnam: On Mind, Meaning and Reality, Interview by Josh Harlan, The Harvard Review of Philosophy, spring 1992.
• Putnam, Hilary and Ruth Anna, "The Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy", read to the Santayana Society at its annual meeting in New York on December 28, 1995.
• "To Think with Integrity", Hilary Putnam's Farewell Lecture, The Harvard Review of Philosophy, Spring 2000.
• Putnam, "The Depths and Shallows of Experience", video lecture, UCSB, September 1, 2003. Comments by Hubert Schwyzer and Bruno Latour.
• Putnam, "The Fact/Value Dichotomy and its critics"; Roundtable on Externalism audio/video lecture, audio discussion, March 2007, University College Dublin.
• Hilary Putnam - Externalism: Its Motivation And Its Critics, video of a lecture, delivered at Harvard University on October 4, 2007
• A short film about the Putnam-Rorty debate and its influence on the pragmatist revival
• The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies video interview with Hilary Putnam 2010-04-21 (with transcript)