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Hilary Putnam had many achievements in the field of philosophy. Here's some context about his concept of "brain in a vat"[1], in his 1981 book, "Reason, Truth and History". The brain-in-a-vat concept was famously used in the The Matrix films.[2] A summary from Philosophy Index: "The example supposes that a mad scientist has removed your brain, and placed it into a vat of liquid to keep it alive and active. The scient…
How is the "Brain in a vat" version different from the Descartes version?
The real novelty is Putnam's response, based on the causal theory of reference or content externalism or something like it (I'm fuzzy on this point). I hope I can do it justice from memory.
He argues that because the brain in a vat has never had the appropriate sort of causal contact with external objects, its thoughts don't refer to them. So the brain has whatever brain states go on in me when I think "the sky is blue", but it has never seen the sky, and so its mental states don't refer to the sky. They refer to something else. Probably some disjunctive property of however the apparatus stimulates the brain's nerves (it's really hard to say what this is). It turns out then, that the brain is not falsely believing/failing to know the facts that we might think about by thinking "the sky is blue", it's accurately representing some other kinds of facts. So that type of scepticism is self-undermining, because it attributes thoughts to the BIV that it couldn't possibly have.
I should add that it seems to me that while this argument is tremendously creative, it belongs to a whole strand of philosophy from the 80s that seems to have died out. There's a decent chance you'll read some Putnam, but AFAIK people aren't publishing much on his BIV argument (though people use the example of a brain in a vat sometimes).
[0] Arguably, Descartes posited that the deceiver could deceive you about anything, including logical relations, while the BIV case just involves people giving you misleading sensations, so that's one conceivable difference in the discussions, but that's not a point that I ever saw anyone discuss in detail. It matters for Descartes scholarship, but that's all.
A great thinker has passed. One of the great names of 20th century analytical philosophy. They have now all left us, Quine, Rorty, Davidson and now Putnam. RIP. I guess they had a similar event on Twin Earth... even though their "water" may be a bit different from our H2O.
Tyler Burge, Kripke, and David Kaplan are still left from the old guard of the golden age of philosophy of language/mind era.
Hilary Putnam had many achievements in the field of philosophy. Here's some context about his concept of "brain in a vat"[1], in his 1981 book, "Reason, Truth and History". The brain-in-a-vat concept was famously used in the The Matrix films.[2] A summary from Philosophy Index: "The example supposes that a mad scientist has removed your brain, and placed it into a vat of liquid to keep it alive and active. The scient…
How is the "Brain in a vat" version different from the Descartes version?
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-content-externa...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i agree on the last point (all 3 more interesting, and i agree with including the 'even'). like i said above though, it's hard to deny that his discussion of contingent a priori as such speaks to kant more directly and strongly than, yeah, "two dogmas of empiricism" (i wasn't impressed either). to put it another way, i think it would be hard to take many other philosophers as deeply entrenched in a particular set of…
Yea that's a good point about just how much better (and...different) Kripkes work is than that which has been produced by the publish or perish academic system in philosophy. As far as I can tell it's been utterly counter-productive. In Kripkes favor I would also add that he was a great stylist, with warmth and humor and...flexibility of presentation. And that partly because of this NN and WRPL are perfect introducto…
http://www.uvm.edu/~lderosse/courses/lang/Kripke%281979%29.p...
(putnam is cited in this paper as well, by the by)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kripke is still here. I would add him to that list.
Who stole his ideas from Ruth Barcan Marcus: http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/Archive/whose.html
Hilary Putnam had many achievements in the field of philosophy. Here's some context about his concept of "brain in a vat"[1], in his 1981 book, "Reason, Truth and History". The brain-in-a-vat concept was famously used in the The Matrix films.[2] A summary from Philosophy Index: "The example supposes that a mad scientist has removed your brain, and placed it into a vat of liquid to keep it alive and active. The scient…
> For the body-mind interface, if any, is far from simple. Certainly the mind is not the only factor that organizes, unites or directs the body. The body manifests perfection at its conception, and in the days thereafter when it is still a microscopic embryo that could hardly be said to possess a mind its developing blood and immune system also react directly and independently to throw off poisons or diseases without any knowledge or known mental influence. -- Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life
We were all doing "intelligent" things well before we had brains...
Hilary Putnam had many achievements in the field of philosophy. Here's some context about his concept of "brain in a vat"[1], in his 1981 book, "Reason, Truth and History". The brain-in-a-vat concept was famously used in the The Matrix films.[2] A summary from Philosophy Index: "The example supposes that a mad scientist has removed your brain, and placed it into a vat of liquid to keep it alive and active. The scient…
Does he take for granted that the mind == the brain? Because that seems philosophically tenuous to me. > For the body-mind interface, if any, is far from simple. Certainly the mind is not the only factor that organizes, unites or directs the body. The body manifests perfection at its conception, and in the days thereafter when it is still a microscopic embryo that could hardly be said to possess a mind its developing…
For what it's worth, the immune system and brain develop more or less concurrently. And have mechanistic similarities at the biochemical level.
Hilary Putnam had many achievements in the field of philosophy. Here's some context about his concept of "brain in a vat"[1], in his 1981 book, "Reason, Truth and History". The brain-in-a-vat concept was famously used in the The Matrix films.[2] A summary from Philosophy Index: "The example supposes that a mad scientist has removed your brain, and placed it into a vat of liquid to keep it alive and active. The scient…
How is the "Brain in a vat" version different from the Descartes version?
EDIT: I got Putnam wrong. There is still the theistic difference though.