— Ch. 1 · A French Childhood And A Chicago Birth —
Hilary Putnam.
~4 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
Hilary Whitehall Putnam arrived in the world on the 31st of July 1926, within a hospital in Chicago, Illinois. His father Samuel worked as a scholar of Romance languages and wrote for the Daily Worker from 1936 to 1946. The family moved to France just six months after Hilary was born. He spent his earliest years there before returning to the United States in 1933. This early move meant his first language became French rather than English. He recalled these memories as his very first childhood recollections decades later. The family settled in Philadelphia where he attended Central High School. It was at this school that he met Noam Chomsky who sat one year behind him in class. They remained friends and intellectual opponents throughout their entire lives.
The Mind As A Machine State
Putnam published key papers during the late 1960s that introduced the hypothesis of multiple realizability. He argued that pain could correspond to completely different physical states in diverse organisms. An animal might feel pain while possessing a nervous system structure entirely unlike that of a human. He extended this logic to alien beings or silicon-based life forms. These entities should not be denied the capacity to experience pain simply because they lack human neurochemistry. This argument challenged type-identity theories which claimed mental states were identical to specific brain states. Putnam defined functional isomorphism as a correspondence between states preserving functional relations. Two machines made of silicon chips versus cogs and wheels could share the same function despite different materials. This led to machine-state functionalism which identified mental kinds with functional kinds characterized by causes and effects.