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Philosophers today are as fond as ever of apriori arguments with ethical conclusions. One reason such arguments are always unsatisfying is that they always prove too much; when a philosopher 'solves' an ethical problem for one, one feels as if one had asked for a subway token and been given a passenger ticket valid for the first interplanetary passenger-carrying space ship instead.

— Hilary Putnam Realism with a Human Face (1992)

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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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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Hilary Putnam (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.