Hilary Putnam

behaviors), and other mental states.” (Pete Mandik 109) This statement made by Mandik is an attempt to defeat Type-Identity Theory. Hilary Putnam, an American philosopher, mathematician, computer scientist, brought up what is known as the “multiple realizability” (Hilary Putnam) which is an essential argument that is advocating functionalism and the premise the portrays Hilary Putnam’s argument that “if the type-identity theory is true, a mental state of being in pain must be identical to…

A challenge to Skepticism Through Hilary Putnam's “Brains in a Vat” argument, he aims to refute the idea of philosophical skepticism introduced by René Descartes. At the conclusion of the first meditation in his First Meditations on Philosophy, Descartes argues that an evil demon may be artificially creating all of our life experiences. Through his hypothesis, Descartes exemplifies philosophical skepticism of the existence of an external world. Ideas, life events, experiences and beliefs that…

In "Putnam's BIV and The Disjunctive Argument", Brueckner breaks down what Hilary Putnam was trying to communicate. Putnam first establishes the setting of the "brains in a vat" hypothesis, which is a world filled with envatted brains and computers that stimulate the brains, and it turns out that you are a brain inside a vat. These brains go by the name of BIV, and then she goes on to state that she is not a BIV due to the considerations pertaining to meaning, which concerns reference and truth.…

Brains in a vat By Hilary Putnam* This story starts off with an ant crawling on a patch of sand, as it calls it traces a line in the sand. By pure chance the line that traces curves and redresses itself in such a way that it ends up looking like a recognizable caricature of Winston Churchill. And therefore, on these bases many people will say that on a little reflection that it has not. The ant after all had not seen the picture of Winston Churchill and it had no intentions of depicting…

In Hilary Putnam’s essay “Brains in a Vat”, he begins by mentioning an illustration of an ant making markings in the sand and how these markings depict Winston Churchill. He then goes on to mention whether or not one can consider that it is Churchill because the ant had no intention of replicating Churchill as it does not even know who he is (Putnam, 1981:1).”The argument is simple; what we said about the ant’s curve applies to any physical object. No physical object can, in itself, refer to one…

In his paper, The Nature of Mental States, Hilary Putnam advocates for functionalism, the idea that the mind is defined by what it does, rather than what it is composed of. The mind serves a purpose similar to that of a machine, taking various inputs, performing a function, and producing certain outputs. He contests the arguments of the brain-state theory which claims that mental processes and brain processes are the same. I will claim that Putnam’s argument for functionalism is successful…

but they all had different names. This could potentially create a barrier in communication. Hilary Putnam thought he could solve an issue like this by creating what he called natural kind terms. Even if you can buy into Putnam’s theory, as time evolves, our changing linguistic communities may reject natural kinds in favor of their own terminology. Before we can understand what natural kinds are, Putnam offers a thought experiment that sets up his argument on natural kinds. Imagine that there…

Introduction: The relationship between internal word concepts and the actual meaning of words, as they are used, has so far not been addressed in great detail. This is primarily because no problematic concepts have been put forth. That is, no internal concepts, that are not shared by an entire population, have been identified as having an influence on word meaning. Time-space synaesthesia is a psychological phenomenon, experienced by about twenty percent of people, where an individual perceives…

science into an understandable notion. He realizes that the values, standards ideas are all associated with one another and fail to arrange a base for ethics. Putnam further explains that there can be no common structure for knowledge in general, specifically ethics and scientific knowledge. Everything is in the course of renovation. Putnam discussed the theory of relativity and how events occur based under the theory. He claims that all things that exist at this moment are considered real. He…

1. Introduction Can Artificial Intelligence(AI) be conscious? This paper explores the possibility of consciousness in Artificial Intelligence by considering various positions from neuroscience, computer science and philosophy. 1.1 Consciousness in AI Artificial Intelligence refers to a machine or a program that is a flexible rational agent that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal. Searle argued that a conscious AI, or “Strong AI”, has a…