15 Quotes by Hilary Putnam

No sane person should believe that something is subjective merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.

I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!

I'm hoping that kids listen and take (the message) in their hearts.

High school is when a lot of kids begin to feel pressure to do drugs and start drinking.

...while there is such a thing as correctness in ethics, in interpretation, in mathematics, the way to understand that is not by trying to model it on the ways in which we get things right in physics....

... causes (pains) are not logical constructions out of their effects (behaviour).

It was Rudolf Carnap's dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project.

Cut the pie any way you like, "meanings" just ain't in the head!

The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.