This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Ryguasu (talk | contribs) at 00:22, 10 January 2003 (Moved Twin Earth stuff to "Twin Earth thought experiment"). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 00:22, 10 January 2003 by Ryguasu (talk | contribs) (Moved Twin Earth stuff to "Twin Earth thought experiment")(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Hillary Putnam is a key figure in the philosophy of mind during the 20th century. He was an early and influential advocate of functionalism (roughly, the view that the human mind is analogous to a digital computer) but in "Representation and Reality" he recanted his earlier views and set out to explain why functionalism, in his revised view, would not work. He is well known for his doctrine that "meaning is not in the head", which is most famously illustrated by his Twin Earth thought experiment.
Putnam also contributed to the resolution of Hilbert's tenth problem in mathematics.