Hilary Putnam

Before writing the tenets of Semantic Externalism, Hilary Putnam had put forward the question Is Semantics Possible? in 1970. When he had framed this question there were three people who had started working on this. These Philosophers were- Jerry Fodor, Jerold katz and Putnam himself. But by the course of time they all took different direction with the same question. Putnam had written two successive articles on this question, one is ‘ the meaning and reference’ in 1973 and the other is ‘ the meaning of meaning’ in 1975. In those two successive articles he had thrown light on Semantic Externalism. The conclusions of analytic and synthetic distinction is later termed as Semantic Externalism. Putnam’s view is that this analytic synthetic distinction…

impossible to draw any sort of conclusions about the outside world when our data received from it changes every moment. However, contrary to Moore’s beliefs, I would suggest that humans are still capable of outward knowledge. Although our understanding of the outside world is driven by electrical stimuli within the brain, this electrical stimulus is not random. The brain simply reacts to the influences within the world, and sends signals accordingly. Of course, to play devil’s advocate, there…

In Hilary Putnam's "Brains in a Vat" theory, he argues against ontological, external-world skepticism. However, his arguments seem very unconvincing in some places. In this paper I will go over Putnam's "Brains in a Vat" theory and then I will specify where I think Putnam's arguments are not sufficient enough to satisfy myself. Before I present my criticism, I will briefly summarize Putnam's argument. Consider an ant crawling on a beach that accidentally outlines a picture of Winston…

Zhiyuan Li Philosophy 3000 In his paper Realism and Skepticism: Brains in a Vat Revisited, Graeme Forbes tries to articulate Putnam’s brains in a vat (BIV) argument. According to Forbes (1995), in order for a normally embodied thinker to think about concepts such as brain, in and vat, she “must somehow be informationally linked to” instances of those concepts (206). However, Forbes does not consider (and it seems to me that he does not think he needs to consider) what particular sorts of…

Personally, I have always thought teachers were inspiring and enthusiastic people, recently I have learned not everyone agrees with this statement. Some believe teachers are extremely positive and overly peppy, others believe teachers are negative people that do not care about their students. I have also learned, a lot of these viewpoints come from the media by over exaggerating a teacher’s role or not giving them enough credit. Teachers in the media are portrayed differently than actual…

Freedom Writers’ is an American film, directed by Richard Granvense and based on a true story about a dedicated and idealistic teacher, Erin Gruwell. Ms Gruwell inspires and teaches her class of belligerent and aggressive students, that there is another life outside of gang violence and death. The students are divided into groups based on racial backgrounds, whom all believe that they have no future. Thus, hatred was part of their everyday life at the beginning of the movie. However, this was…

Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World, written by Leah Hager Cohen, is a biography of the author who has a relationship with Lexington School for the Deaf and a portrait of two deaf students (Sofia and James) throughout their time at the school. She switches her delivery, telling her family’s story and the stories of the two teenagers to narrate the truth about the deaf world. The book sheds light on the deaf school in New York, the stories of the two students, deaf culture, and various…

Introduction In the film, “Mean Girls”, a young girl named Cady Harson enters the American School system after being home-schooled in Africa. For the first day of school, she finds herself overwhelmed with fear being surrounded by so many teenagers in the school. She was introduced as a new student to the many different social groups, but she was especially introduced as one of the Plastics. The plot begins when Cady decides to take down the group’s leader, Regina George, in order to sabotage…

The idea of marriage has changed over time, at one time it meant the man having whichever girl he so choose and the girl had no choice, at one time it meant money and ranking, now it means if “love” one another. During the medieval times the women had no say the man would pick her and she would marry him most of the time without really knowing him. Chaucer the author of Canterbury Tales explains this process in the tales of his book. In today’s world choice of marriage is a common…

I would be lying to you all if I said that I have always wanted to travel to China let alone spend a semester there. Entering college at Wheaton (MA) two and a half years ago I dreamed of learning a romance language like Italian in hopes of traveling to Europe my junior year to have a picture-perfect semester. After watching the Lizzie McGuire movie a million times, anything seemed possible. If I learned Italian and went to Italy, maybe I could be riding around Rome on Moped with a cute pop star…