Putnam, Hilary

"The search for certainty is misguided; we must learn to live with fallibility."

"Realism and relativism are not the only options available to us."

"Our concepts cut the world at the joints that matter to us."

"The notion of a 'God's eye view' is not just unattainable; it is meaningless."

"We make the world intelligible through the concepts we deploy."

"Empiricism without rationalism is blind; rationalism without empiricism is empty."

"The boundaries of language are not the boundaries of the world."

"Truth is not correspondence to an independent reality; it is something we construct together."

"The problem is not that we lack access to reality, but that 'access to reality' is not a coherent notion."

"We should embrace conceptual pluralism rather than seek a single correct description."

"The mind-body problem dissolves when we abandon the assumption of intrinsic properties."

"Values are not discovered; they are made through human activity and commitment."

"The logical positivists were right to reject metaphysics, but wrong about why."

"Context is everything: meaning depends on use, and use depends on context."

"We inherit a conceptual scheme, but we can modify and extend it."

"The categories through which we understand the world are human products."

"Science does not give us truth about things-in-themselves; it gives us models that work."

"The externalist thesis: the mind is not entirely in the head."

"Necessity and possibility are not features of reality; they are features of our concepts."

"We should be pluralists about almost everything."

"The idea of a 'view from nowhere' is a view from somewhere, namely from nowhere in particular."

"Language is not a medium through which we see the world; it is part of the world."

"Human flourishing requires multiple incommensurable values."

"The pragmatists were onto something important: truth is tied to successful action."

"We live in multiple conceptual schemes, and that is not a defect but a feature."

"The supposed gap between appearance and reality is an artefact of our conceptual scheme."

"Science is one tool among many for understanding the world; it is not the only valid way of knowing."

"The idea that there is a single correct way to divide up reality is a mistake."

"Our conceptual schemes are not prisons; they are resources for understanding."

"The notion of intrinsic properties is suspect; all properties are relational."