Wikipedia:Today's featured article/September 7, 2006

Hilary Putnam is an American philosopher and a central figure in Western philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. He is known for his willingness to apply an equal degree of scrutiny to his own philosophical positions and those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposes its flaws. As a result, he has acquired a reputation for frequently changing his own position. In philosophy of mind, Putnam is known for his hypothesis of multiple realizability, and for the concept of functionalism, an influential theory regarding the mind-body problem. 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. In philosophy of mathematics, he and his mentor W.V.O. Quine developed the "Quine-Putnam indispensability thesis," an argument for the reality of mathematical entities, later espousing the view that mathematics is not purely logical, but "quasi-empirical." In the field of epistemology, he is known for the "brain in a vat" thought experiment, which challenges epistemological skepticism. (more...)