Is Logic Empirical? - First Article: Hilary Putnam

First Article: Hilary Putnam

In his paper "Is logic empirical?" Hilary Putnam, whose PhD studies were supervised by Reichenbach, pursued Quine's idea systematically. In the first place, he made an analogy between laws of logic and laws of geometry: at one time Euclid's postulates were believed to be truths about the physical space in which we live, but modern physical theories are based around non-Euclidean geometries, with a different and fundamentally incompatible notion of straight line.

In particular, he claimed that what physicists have learned about quantum mechanics provides a compelling case for abandoning certain familiar principles of classical logic for this reason: realism about the physical world, which Putnam generally maintains, demands that we square up to the anomalies associated with quantum phenomena. Putnam understands realism about physical objects to entail the existence of the properties of momentum and position for quanta. Since the uncertainty principle says that either of them can be determined, but both cannot be determined at the same time, he faces a paradox. He sees the only possible resolution of the paradox as lying in the embrace of quantum logic, which he believes is not inconsistent.