Hilary Putnam

American philosopher (Harvard) whose "no miracles" argument — that scientific realism is "the only philosophy that doesn't make the success of science a miracle" — became the central positive case for convergent realism in the late 20th century. Matters to this vault as the figure Larry Laudan's 1981 "A Confutation of Convergent Realism" is written against throughout: nearly every section of Laudan's paper quotes and rebuts Putnam by name, making Putnam's own position the structural target of the vault's entire scientific-realism / denominator-problem cluster even though his own texts (1975, 1978) have not yet been read directly in this vault.

References

• claim-laudan-1981-list-challenged-as-unrepresentative-since-the-1980s — the paper built to rebut Putnam's no-miracles argument; Putnam's own texts on convergent realism are a further lead, not yet read at primary.