Philosophical Papers: Volume 2, Mind, Language and Reality

Overview

Hilary Putnam gathers a set of rigorous, wide-ranging essays that helped reshape late 20th-century philosophy of mind, language, and semantics. The collection juxtaposes detailed technical arguments about psychological explanation with broader reflections on meaning, reference, and the relationship between scientific theory and common-sense concepts. Putnam's tone is analytic and argumentative, aiming to show how philosophical puzzles yield to careful attention to semantic and empirical considerations.

Major Essays

"Brains and Behaviour" examines the relation between neurophysiological descriptions and psychological explanations, pressing on the limits of reductive identity theories that equate mental types with particular brain states. The essay emphasizes that psychological vocabulary plays a distinctive explanatory role and that any adequate account must respect the multiple ways mental states can be realized by biological systems.
"Psychological Predicates" develops what became known as functionalism: mental states are characterized by their causal relations to inputs, outputs, and other mental states rather than by a strict type-identity with neural states. Putnam uses thought experiments about multiple realizability to argue that a satisfactory theory of mind must allow the same mental predicate to be instantiated by very different physical substrates.
"The Meaning of 'Meaning'" delivers the collection's most famous argument: semantic content depends on factors outside the individual's head. The Twin Earth thought experiment shows that two indistinguishable subjects could mean different things by the same term because their environments differ. From this Putnam draws the claim that meanings are not purely internal entities and that natural-kind terms pick out kinds in the world rather than merely concepts in the mind.

Core Themes

A persistent theme is the critique of reductionism: Putnam resists the notion that mental or semantic phenomena can be fully captured by a single physical or psychologistic vocabulary. He insists that explanatory practices in psychology and semantics are constrained both by empirical facts and by the normative project of giving conditions for correct application of terms. This yields a pluralistic but disciplined picture of explanation across levels.
Another central motif is externalism about content and reference. Putnam challenges internalist intuitions and argues that the meanings of many terms, and the contents of many propositional attitudes, depend constitutively on relations to the external world and to communities of speakers. That move ties philosophy of language to metaphysical questions about natural kinds and scientific practice.

Philosophical Impact

The essays helped to establish functionalism as a dominant framework in philosophy of mind and to set semantic externalism at the center of debates about meaning and mental content. The Twin Earth thought experiment became a staple in undergraduate and graduate courses and provoked extensive literature on narrow versus wide content, social aspects of meaning, and implications for epistemology of belief and knowledge. Putnam's insistence on linking philosophical analysis to scientific and semantic practice shifted the agenda of several subfields.

Style and Approach

Arguments are compact, example-driven, and often framed through thought experiments that reveal tensions in competing theories. Putnam mixes formal precision with accessible prose, keeping technical details tightly connected to broader philosophical stakes. The essays balance critical dismantling of rival positions with constructive proposals that aim for theoretical continuity with scientific practice.

Conclusion

The collection presents a sustained, interconnected set of interventions on how to think about minds, meanings, and reality. It stands as both a historical marker of shifting philosophical currents in the 1960s and 1970s and as a continuing resource for anyone grappling with how language, thought, and the world hang together.