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Even though the model referred to satisfies the theory, etc., it is 'unintended'; and we recognize that it is unintended from the description through which it is given (as in the intuitionist case). Models are not lost noumenal waifs looking for someone to name them; they are constructions within our theory itself. and they have names from birth.

— Hilary Putnam Philosophical Papers Volume 3: Realism and Reason (1983)

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More quotes by Hilary Putnam

The positive argument for realism is that it is the only philosophy that doesn't make the success of science a miracle.

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

The Many Faces of Realism (1987)

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.

in: James Conant, Urszula M. Zeglen (2012)

Truth and falsity are the most fundamental terms of rational criticism, and any adequate philosophy must give some account of these, or failing that, show that they can be dispensed with.

Philosophical Papers Volume 2: Mind, Language and Reality (1975)

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.

Philosophical Papers Volume 1: Mathematics, Matter, and Method (1975)

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