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Hilary Putnam (1926 – 2016) is an American philosopher at Harvard, of analytic philosophy, mind, language, mathematics, and science. The ‘real world’ depends upon our values (and, again, vice versa).
Hilary Putnam, American philosopher
Probaway’s maximizing on Hilary Putnam – Numbered paragraphs are split.
1.a. Science has been successful at destroying religious answers to human relationships with reality but hasn’t provided satisfying alternatives.
1.b. Philosophers claim that science has forced humanity to live without foundations.
1.c. Without any proposed purposeful end for humans, we must philosophize without foundations.
2.a. Today the hope has been abandoned that science can be shown to proceed by formal syntactic methods.
3.a. When a physicist states a law of nature with absolute mathematical precision, it is only descriptive and offers no morality to guide us.
4.a. It seems unlikely that alien beings living on an extragalactic planet would care if we believed the murder of innocent people was morally wrong.
4.b. Beings identical to us living in an infinitely remote place would have no motivation to feel moral outrage at our immoral actions.
4.c. Our objective moralities have no meaning outside of our social group or influence.
5.a. Physics and mathematics are independent of human motivations and morality; they may measure them but offer no understanding of them.
5b. Theories and images of our reality may be used to manipulate humans, but they are independent of morality and are not moral.
5c. Ethics is wholly subjective and can not be judged by the objective names and rules projected on things by physics and mathematics.
6.a. If metaphysical systems existed in the natural world, then physicists and mathematicians could offer useful ideas, but that word “if” has no foundations in metaphysical realities.
6.b. The notion of a transactional link between the noumenal ideas and the phenomenal world is nonsense.
6.c. Our criteria of what is acceptable rationally develop reciprocally with our theoretical idea of the empirical world.
6.d. The flip side of noumenal dependence is the dependence of the empirical world on our criteria of rational acceptability.
6.e. The real world depends on our values, and our values reciprocally depend on the real world.
7.a. There are an infinity of objective points of view from which every other thing that can be viewed, can be viewed with unique objectivity.
8.a. Why should we squander our life in proving that we don’t really exist, that we don’t think, and nothing has value?
8.b. Let us recognize the obvious fact that our lives function, that we do think and value many things like intellectual truth and moral behavior.
Probaway’s COMMENTS on Hilary Putnam
We must have criteria of rational acceptability to even have an empirical world, that these reveal part of our notion of an optimal speculative intelligence. In short, I am saying that the ‘real world’ depends upon our values (and, again, vice versa). Everything is mixed with everything else, and to fully understand anything you must understand everything, but as that is impossible it is necessary to observe what we can and choose what we think is most relevant, apply our thoughts to our actions and observe what works.
Let us recognize that one of our fundamental self-conceptualizations … is that we are thinkers and that as thinkers we are committed to there being some kind of truth, some kind of correctness that is substantial…. That means that there is no eliminating the normative. We are forced by our relationship with our world to act, and to do so requires of us that we think and that we must operate on the assumption that we are correct in our thoughts and actions. Subsequently, we repeat the procedure and make adjustments with our new understanding of what is considered to be a valid reality. At every moment we are embroiled in a multidimensional reality from which we choose with a multidimensional brain what seems right for the moment.
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