On Putnam’s Realism

Hilary Putnam, a famous analytic philosopher of contemporary American, is famous forhis unique research and fickle ideas in the contemporary Western philosophy world. As a coretheory of Putnam’s, realism has great significances on ontology and analytic philosophy.Putnam’s realism research has undergone three periods: scientific realism, inherent realismand pragmatism realism. The issues of truth and the relationship between fact and value arethe core issues, which consistently penetrate the study of realism. From scientific realism toinherent realism, then to Pragmatic realism, Putnam’s realism has shifted from ontology toepistemology. Affected by naturalism and semantics, the core of Putnam’s scientific realismresearch focused on functionalism of mind philosophy and external semantics. Putnamintroduced the speaker and accept the influence of language environment on the language toconstruct a realism theory, which was based on experience theory. Pragmatic realism insistedthat truth is reasonable, but different from the inherent realism, Putnam’s pragmatic realismresearch focused on the issues of the relation between fact and value. Putnam believed that theintegration of fact and value beyond the boundary of the absolute and the relative, and heproposed the theory of goodness when there were contradictions between fact and value. Thus,Putnam’s realism completed the transformation from scientism to humanism. As newtheoretical achievements, Putnam’s realism played an important role in contemporary analyticphilosophy. Putnam’s realism theory has some gaps, but we must recognize that Putnam hasmade great contributions in the realism research and his research achievements have greatsignificances to the research of the contemporary realism.