CONCEPT
Putnam Against Putnam
The act of a philosopher refuting his own most influential theory in public—a working model of the intellectual honesty an age of confident pronouncements about AI most needs and most rarely practices.
Putnam Against Putnam names the most instructive thing
Hilary Putnam ever did: he destroyed his own best idea. In 1988, in a book pointedly titled
Representation and Reality, the philosopher who had invented
functionalism—the dominant theory of mind in the analytic tradition—set out to refute it, with the same rigor he had once used to build it. The reversal grew directly from his own externalism: if meaning and mental content depend on the world and the linguistic community rather than on anything internal, then functional organization cannot determine what a thought is about, and the theory of mind collapses under the theory of meaning he had also built. There is almost no parallel for this in the history of philosophy. For the cycle that began with
[YOU] on AI, the self-refutation is worth more than either of Putnam's settled positions, because it teaches a discipline almost no one in the AI debate practices: let the strongest objection win, even