Hilary Putnam deals in this book with some of the most fundamental persistent problems in philosophy: the nature of truth, knowledge and rationality. His aim is to break down the fixed categories of thought which have always appeared to define and constrain the permissible solutions to these problems.

Hilary Putnam deals in this book with some of the most fundamental persistent problems in philosophy: the nature of truth, knowledge and rationality. His aim is to break down the fixed categories of thought which have always appeared to define and constrain the permissible solutions to these problems.

"The first two lectures place the alternative I defend -- a kind of pragmatic realism -- in a historical and metaphysical context. Part of that context is provided by Husserl's remark that the history of modern philosophy begins with Galileo -- that is, modern philosophy has been hypnotized by the idea that scientific facts are all the facts there are. Another part is provided by the analysis of a very simple example of what I call 'contextual relativity'. The position I (...) defend holds that truth depends on conceptual scheme and it is nonetheless 'real truth'. "In my third lecture I turn to the Kantian antecedents of this view, explaining what I think should be retained of the Kantian idea of autonomy as the central theme of morality, and extracting from Kant's work a 'moral image of the world' that connects the ideals of equality and intellectual liberty. In this lecture I defend the idea that moral images are an indispensible part of our moral and cultural heritage. "In the final lecture I defend the idea of moral objectivity. I compare our epistemological positions in ethics, history, analysis of human character, and science, and I argue that in no area can we hope for a 'foundation' which is more ultimate than the beliefs that actually, at a given time, function as foundational in the area, the beliefs concerning which one has to say 'this is where my spade is turned'. In ethics such beliefs are represented in moral images of the world.". (shrink)

Explains terms and concepts related to the nature and theory of knowledge, and identifies important individuals in the field.

The purpose of this contribution is to call attention to a problem which has not received the interest which, in my opinion, it deserves: the problem of representation of facts in physical theories. The crucial point is, that within the framework of fundamental physical theories, the representation of facts requires a breaking of the time-reversal symmetry and nonanticipative measuring instruments. These conditions are satisfied only when the apparatus is described as a system with infinitely many degrees of freedom. In the (...) framework of algebraic quantum theory generalized K-systems can represent facts at least in an asymptotic sense. Such a representation removes the main stumbling block which stands in the way of a fundamental theory of measurement in quantum theory. (shrink)

A clarification of the heuristic concept of decoherence requires a consistent description of the classical behavior of some quantum systems. We adopt algebraic quantum mechanics since it includes not only classical physics, but also permits a judicious concept of a classical mixture and explains the possibility of the emergence of a classical behavior of quantum systems. A nonpure quantum state can be interpreted as a classical mixture if and only if its components are disjoint. Here, two pure quantum states are (...) called disjoint if there exists an element of the center of the algebra of observables such that its expectation values with respect to these states are different. An appropriate automorphic dynamics can transform a factor state into a classical mixture of asymptotically disjoint final states. Such asymptotically disjoint quantum states lead to regular decision problems while exactly disjoint states evoke singular problems which engineers reject as improperly posed. (shrink)

The context of an operational description is given by the distinction between what we consider as relevant and what as irrelevant for a particular experiment or observation. A rigorous description of a context in terms of a mathematically formulated context-independent fundamental theory is possible by the restriction of the domain of the basic theory and the introduction of a new coarser topology. Such a new topology is never given by first principles, but depends in a crucial way on the abstractions (...) made by the cognitive apparatus or the pattern recognition devices used by the experimentalist. A consistent mathematical formulation of a higher-level theory requires the closure of the restriction of the basic theory in the new contextual topology. The validity domain of the so constructed higher-level theory intersects nontrivially with the validity domain of the basic theory: neither domain is contained in the other. Therefore, higher-level theories cannot be totally ordered and theory reduction is not transitive. The emergence of qualitatively new properties is a necessary consequence of such a formulation of theory reduction (which does not correspond to the traditional one). Emergent properties are not manifest on the level of the basic theory, but they can be derived rigorously by imposing new, contextually selected topologies upon context-independent first principles. Most intertheoretical relations are mathematically describable as singular asymptotic expansions which do not converge in the topology of the primary theory, or by choosing one of the infinitely many possible, physically inequivalent representations of the primary theory (Gelfand–Naimark–Segal-construction of algebraic quantum mechanics). As examples we discuss the emergence of shadows, inductors, capacitors and resistors from Maxwell’s electrodynamics, the emergence of order parameters in statistical mechanics, the emergence of mass as a classical observable in Galilei-relativistic theories, the emergence of the shape of molecules in quantum mechanics, the emergence of temperature and other classical observables in algebraic quantum mechanics. (shrink)