Putnam, Hilary

"We cannot achieve a view of the world uncontaminated by our interests and purposes."

"Meaning is not in the head; it is in the world and in our practices."

"The ethical dimension of human life cannot be reduced to facts."

"We are beings who interpret the world, and that interpretation is constitutive of the world itself."

"The categories of thought and the categories of being are intimately connected."

"Objectivity does not require mind-independence; it requires the possibility of rational critique."

"The growth of human knowledge is not a progression toward perfect representation, but an exploration of possibilities."

"We should reject the myth of the 'given'—the notion that some experiences are theory-free."

"The world is not independent of all conceptual schemes; it is independent of any particular scheme."

"Our practices and institutions shape what we can know and how we can know it."

"The limits of my language are not the limits of my world; the limits of my world are the limits of my language."

"Truth is a regulatory ideal, not something fully attainable."

"We must learn to live with underdetermination: the data never uniquely determines the theory."

"The idea of a perspective-independent fact is the idea of something that no perspective could verify."

"Science progresses not by approaching a fixed reality, but by developing new ways of understanding."

"The boundary between the mental and the physical is not where we usually draw it."

"Our concepts are tools we have created to serve our purposes, and those purposes can change."

"The notion of 'mental content' cannot be understood in purely internalist terms."

"We live in a pluralistic world, and that requires a pluralistic epistemology."

"The attempt to ground knowledge in certainty is bound to fail; we must accept degrees of justification."

"Language and thought are not mirrors of nature; they are ways of relating to nature."

"The idea that there is a fact of the matter independent of all possible evidence is suspect."

"We should be deflationary about truth: it is not a deep metaphysical property."

"Our concepts are not fixed essences; they evolve as our practices change."

"The problem of other minds is not solved by introspection, but by accepting the openness of meaning."

"Science is successful not because it captures intrinsic properties, but because it describes functional relationships."

"We cannot achieve a view of the world independent of our values and interests."

"The growth of knowledge is not a linear progression but a complex network of interconnections."

"Meaning is use, and use is embedded in a form of life."

"We should accept that there are multiple, sometimes incommensurable ways of describing the world."