Amanda Gefter’s “Finding Peter Putnam” is one of the most remarkable life stories I’ve ever read; here’s a snippet to give you an idea of who he was:
His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr […] “Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,” Wheeler said in 1991. And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.
Robert Works Fuller, a physicist and former president of Oberlin College, who worked closely with Putnam in the 1960s, told me in 2012, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he’s completely unknown.”
His ideas, insofar as I understood them, do sound remarkable and prescient. But I’m bringing it to LH for this tidbit:
Just then, a perfect opportunity arose to present Putnam to the public. Wheeler was invited by the Neurosciences Research Program at MIT to speak at their March 1975 meeting on “reality and consciousness.” He insisted he could only do it as half of a pair. […]
I listened to the meeting, recorded on a reel-to-reel, stowed away in the archives at MIT. Here, finally, was Putnam’s chance to explain his ideas to the top neuroscientists of the time. I pressed the headphones tight against my ears.
Wheeler had just finished speaking about the observer in quantum mechanics and introduced Putnam with a warning. “Some terms Peter uses, one needs a glossary to translate.” Wheeler placed a transparency on the projector—he’d made an actual glossary of Putnam’s terms. The crowd burst into laughter. I didn’t have to see Putnam’s face to feel it growing hot. When he began to speak, he stuttered.
“You only perceive signals that are useful for shaping behavior … A game is a special kind of mathematics … But for a game you need a goal function … We’re suggesting that the category repetition is a candidate … You’re searching for rules of choice that allow a repeating or self-reproducing path … There’s a transcendental core to the laws of physics themselves …”
The crowd grew restless. Wheeler’s talk had gone long, and there wasn’t time for Putnam to finish. The neuroscientists headed out for lunch and the tape cut out.
There are probably quite a few people who would benefit from such a glossary when they give talks. Thanks, Nick!
“I’d spent more than a decade hunched over inscrutable pages under the weight of so much regret about how Putnam’s story had ended.”
And yet, nothing of scientific substance has come out of all this? Granted, Amanda Gefter appears to be a (prolific and well-thought of) science jourmalist rather than an actual scientist, but if Putnam’s ideas were so wonderful (the man himself seems to have decided they weren’t), why has nobody really made anything out of them?
Just implying that they prefigure all sorts of later scientific ideas really does not count.
He wasn’t a scientist but a philosopher, and that’s a pretty uncharitable read. Gefter isn’t asking you to take her word for it — that’s why she quotes people with actual (non-journo) credentials. And did you actually read the piece or just skim? She doesn’t just “Imply,” she describes his ideas and what they prefigure. But hey, maybe she made it all up.
I did read all of it. But it is possible I am indeed uncharitable.
But substitute “philosophical” for “scientific” and “philosopher” for “scientist” in my previous comment.
What I’m driving at, is who else has been looking at these papers? And what insights have they d8scovered? Where have they published them? (Not rhetorical.)
So it’s your position that if material hasn’t been published it’s ipso facto unimportant and not worth paying attention to? The whole point of the piece was to explain why he didn’t publish. The people who read his work seem to have thought highly of it. But again, maybe Gefter made it all up.
I love stories like this, even though the subject matter leaves me cold. I wonder now, where did the storage spaces full of papers go to?
This Peter Putnam is mentioned early in the wiki article on Computational theory of mind one line before the first mention of Hilary Putnam (although the timeline is a bit screwed up). But Hilary’s name is highlighted so you can click to the wiki article about him but Peter’s is not because he is not the 1976-born bodybuilder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Putnam
But it also appears that the references to “our Peter” may have been added just in the last few days, citing inter alia the article hat references?
I am limited by snippet view, but google books does seem to confirm at least one actual while-living publication by our Peter, vis “On the Origin of Order In Behavior,” co-authored with Robert W. Fuller and appearing in the 1966 edition of _General Systems: Yearbook of the Society for General Systems Research_.* Fuller does have his own wiki page, which likewise has a reference to Putnam that may have been added quite recently.
Also not this Peter Putnam who likewise sounds interesting and with the odd detail that this obit was apparently not published until 15 years after his death. https://paw.princeton.edu/memorial/peter-brock-putnam-42-50
*Alluded to by Gefter but with no details. But she didn’t make up at least that statement in the article.
I love stories like this, even though the subject matter leaves me cold.
Same here!
I had vaguely heard of Putnam, both as a student of Wheeler who was occasionally mentioned in passing when people talked about Wheeler’s broader interests, and for the massive donation Putnam made to The Nature Conservancy. I never knew it was the same person, however.
Well, if he didn’t publish, that – ipso facto – puts a pretty tight limit on how influential his ideas may have been, doesn’t it.
It’s even worse if the people who did know of his work (because they happened to know him personally or whatever) thought he was still going to publish, because in that case they probably deliberately refrained from using his work in their own. I’m currently doing that with a thesis that was defended in 2020, that is downloadable from a public website, and that I hope will still be submitted for peer review (if it hasn’t already) and published properly; I don’t want to scoop the author. (I do cite the thesis and say explicitly I’m not using it.)
The only Putnam I’ve heard of in Philosophy is Hilary.
More to DE’s point, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has no article/seems not to mention Peter. (Although it’s notoriously difficult to search.)
“Peter Putnam (trans.)” [1953] in the Philosophy of History article is presumably not our Peter.
(I am trying to skim the article. Gelfer might be a respected journo, but this is the sort of oblique style full of irrelevant details up with which I can not put. If there’s something to say, get on and say it; too much with the booming voice and jazz records.)
Again, the whole point of the article is to explain why nobody has heard of this Peter Putnam. It’s actually a good read.
It’s actually a good read.
Well, maybe. But in a genre I just can’t stand. There’s very little quoted from Putnam himself. And what is seems to be there to demonstrate how inscrutable is his writing. For example:
I’ve read a lot of Philosophy of Mind material. This sounds like pseudery/throwing in obscure words for the purpose only of obscurity.
Perhaps the claimed influence on others is merely a case-in-point of behaviour Physicists should avoid when dabbling in other subjects? (I’m speaking as a fully paid-up member of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and other Professional Thinking Persons.)
Gefter goes on at length with what she claims is his model. But with hardly any actual quotes. So is this Putnam’s thought, or her ‘recreation’? And is she really channeling what’s become conventional wisdom long after? As an exercise in exegesis, I’m pretty sure my Philosophy lecturers would tell me to go back and do it again.
The joint paper with Wheeler seems not to demarcate which authors wrote which sections. (I can’t detect a variation in styles.)
A Physicist. Wheeler’s biog also claims only that he’s a Physicist.
Putnam appears to have published nothing within Physics, so not even a Physicist. (Publishing something/anything would at least show he could organise his thoughts into a coherent narrative that would pass peer review. The joint paper with
Wheeler[my mistake] Fuller seems not to have been formally published.)I put it to the jury that the opinion of Physicists who’ve studied fuck-all about Philosophy or Neurology is worth nothing, except to show too many Physicists are arrogant pricks who think that just because they’re clever (which I’m not disputing), they can therefore immediately grasp everything about the ‘soft’ disciplines.
Another case in point would be Turing (also mentioned in the article, his stature in Mathematics/Computational Theory not in doubt) “Can machines think?”/the Turing test. Contributed nothing to Philosophy/the ground was already covered back to the Ancient Greek’s Pygmalion, Descartes, even Gulliver’s Travels, amongst many.
I note Elon Musk’s first degree/early part of his career was in Physics.
LH: you were joking?
Following JWB ‘s investigation, I find that WP on J. A. Wheeler lists Putnam as one of his graduate students. The source cited is again the article subject of Hat’s post. I don’t know how to check if this reference was added recently, but the whole thing reeks of hyping, if not pure Sokal.
The article is journalese to the power 2, and I share AntC’s frustration with the it: having been enticed into ploughing through the puffy prose, you keep asking “where’s the meat?”.
It would be good to have some corroboration on the meetings with Einstein and Bohr.
peterputnam.org has scans of some of his papers and other materials, including a 1991 article by Ann Waldron, with a similar sentiment to Gefter’s.
if this reference was added recently
Yep, up to last month the Wheeler article didn’t mention Putnam. The same contributor ‘Jarrod Baniqued’ (who’d not previously shown any interest in the topic) also at the same time added those references to the Fuller wp article.
Full disclosure: Fuller’s ‘Other Articles’ list did previously include On the Origin of Order in Behavior, General Systems, Vol. XI, pp. 99–112 (1966) MHRI, Univ. of Michigan (co-authored with Peter Putnam); and the 1967 “(On Peter Putnam’s work.)”.
MHRI = Mental Health Research Institute[**]. Was ‘General Systems’ peer reviewed? At 1966 it might just be a rehash of their joint presentation, given 1964. Does have 11 cites on Google scholar, of which several are from Wheeler or Fuller.
[**] That’s my finding; Google AI Overview seems to think otherwise — hallucinating?
Thanks for linking to a fascinating read, Steve. It’s a very nice piece of writing, aimed at non-specialist readers (like me), who actually enjoy the ornaments and digressions of essayistic prose. There’s something archetypal about Putnam’s story that goes beyond irritable questioning of “was he, or was he not a genius?” Genius or not, he certainly had some insights into social injustice that were ahead of his time.
As to Fuller, the wiki article on him describes him as “an American physicist, author, social reformer, and former [college] president.” He appears from that article to have stopped working as a physicist, in terms of how he spent his time and what he published on, at least 55 years ago, barely a decade after finishing his Ph.D. Whatever you think of his subsequent efforts as a social reformer etc. it does not appear to me that his background in physics (except perhaps insofar as it might be a rough proxy for general cleverness) was particularly relevant to them.
So it’s your position that if material hasn’t been published it’s ipso facto unimportant and not worth paying attention to?
By no means. I wanted to find out if there was actually anything I could read about Putnam’s ideas beyond the very vague account in the article.
I’m not at all ill-disposed in principle to the idea that consciousness might be intimately linked to interactions with the conscious entity’s enviroment, but there is a very frustrating lack of detail in the article. Unlike with Hat and Y, the subject does not leave me cold.
I was not impugning the integrity of the journalist; and her article achieves what she intended by it.
I must admit that I am leery of the Mute Milton concept in science or philosophy, though it certainly makes for good articles. I don’t think science or philosophy really work that way. I don’t deny that it’s possible.
DM’s point re people who did know more about his work perhaps not wanting to preempt his own (never forthcoming) publications is a good one. I agree, doubly sad if so.
Physics cannot be blamed for Elon Musk*. My son the physicist shows no signs of being prone to megalomaniac moral and intellectual vacuity. I have even met physicists I would buy a used car from.
* Except in the sense that if there were no Universe, there would probably be no Elon Musk.
I wanted to find out if there was actually anything I could read about Putnam’s ideas beyond the very vague account in the article
Thanks, Y!
The intro to peterputnam.org goes
The title of one paper caught my eye:
https://www.peterputnam.org/interpretation-of-syntax-1966
There are four pages on “the problem of meaning.” I will be grateful if a Hatter cleverer than I can explicate them for me. I was not able to relate them to my inadequate concept of “syntax.” Or my inadequate concept of “meaning.”
[To be clear, my concepts of “syntax” and “meaning” really are inadequate. But I was not immediately persuaded that this paper would help me to remedy this lack. I presume that it needs to be interpreted in the context of the entire grand design. Presumably an abstract model of brain neurophysiology is the key to all mythologies.]
“a transparency” – that was unexpected! I didn’t know what they are called in English, and didn’t expect what I would’ve otherwise taken as an abstract noun.
@drasvi: I’m not sure if my own children know that sense of concrete-count-noun “transparency,” as the information-dissemination technology it relates to is now pretty much obsolete although it was quite common in my own school days. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/overhead_transparency#English
@drasvi: Another, less common word for the same thing is viewgraph.
LH: you were joking?
Yes, if presenting an absurd supposition as a plausible one can be classified as a joke.
Thanks for linking to a fascinating read, Steve. It’s a very nice piece of writing, aimed at non-specialist readers (like me), who actually enjoy the ornaments and digressions of essayistic prose. There’s something archetypal about Putnam’s story that goes beyond irritable questioning of “was he, or was he not a genius?” Genius or not, he certainly had some insights into social injustice that were ahead of his time.
Thank you. I’m glad somebody enjoyed it.
Another, less common word for the same thing is viewgraph.
Originally a brand name, “Vu-Graph”, says the OED. “Vugraph” is now the name of software for displaying bridge games in progress or archived. Wikipedia claims transparencies are also called viewfoils or foils, which I might have heard once or twice.
“Transparency” does have the expected abstract meaning (as well as being used as “A burlesque translation of the German title of address Durchlaucht” (OED), which I don’t remember seeing).
In my English, a “transparency” is a clear plastic sheet the size of writing paper that’s placed by hand on an overhead projector. The content is written or drawn by hand with a marker, or photocopied. A “slide” is a much smaller print of a photograph loaded into a slide projector. However, others used the terms to mean the opposite, or both. PowerPoint calls its images slides, though they typically look just like the things I call transparencies.
(There were also “opaque projectors”, which projected images of opaque things, such as pages from a book, onto a screen. They were a lot less common after elementary school.)
the information-dissemination technology it relates to is now pretty much obsolete although it was quite common in my own school days.
My usage is what I was taught in elementary school… but could the obsoleteness of the technology mean anything for pedantry about the terminology?
Count me among those who really enjoyed the article, though I’m as skeptical as some of the other commenters about the actual value of Putnam’s accomplishments. Still a pretty engrossing life story, though.
I just skimmed through Putnam’s 1967 essay “Comments on Homosexuality,” and it’s a mix of awfully silly—Freud heavily applied to his familiar social context—and attempts at a religious argument with something like a clinical grounding. In a weird way it reminded me of Rozanov’s “People of the Moonlight,” though Rozanov had fewer clinical examples to work with and so goes deeper into them in search of metaphysical “truths,” while Putnam glides from scientific certainty—well beyond overconfidence*—into metaphysical and religious pretensions. That said, he’s frequently (like Rozanov) a writer of quite beautiful prose, and I enjoyed reading it for what it was.
* Rozanov can seem overconfident too, but the fact that his footnotes, full of caveats and exceptions and ramblings, are often longer than the statements they link to at least gives a kind of formal release from that overconfidence, like he knows when he’s on shaky ground. Putnam just keeps barging on through without stopping for breath.
In a weird way it reminded me of Rozanov’s “People of the Moonlight,” though Rozanov had fewer clinical examples to work with and so goes deeper into them in search of metaphysical “truths,” while Putnam glides from scientific certainty—well beyond overconfidence*—into metaphysical and religious pretensions. That said, he’s frequently (like Rozanov) a writer of quite beautiful prose, and I enjoyed reading it for what it was.
What an interesting and unexpected comparison — thanks for that!
@de(09.25)
—
Measurements or any “facts” have a “meaning” independent of their surface expression (e.g., as numbers read from a dial).
The “meaning” has an emotional impact.
The “meaning” is arrived at by creating an abstract version (“translation”) of the surface expression.
Physicists use this process for elaborating physics, but it can be extended.
Putnam has his own extension (a functional model of the nervous system) which is documented separately.
The aspects of the “translation” he is considering are those that can be interpreted as “contradictions”, which arise particularly from “conflicts”. In particular he is concerned with the eventual (“long-range”) resolution of these contradictions.
Words are expressed in a linear order [I believe he has not spoken to sufficient number of people, if he makes this claim]. However, “feeling” is extracted from a sequence of linear motor movements. The embedded “feeling” in words is that of the underlying motor movements. There is a lot of “feeling” not expressed in words, because we are not consciously aware of the “feeling”.
The impetus for expressing words is to communicate (or impose) one’s equilibrium state or the disturbances preventing equilibrium.
—
At this point he seems to lose the plot, and I am unable to extract anything coherent.
I feel like ‘transparency’ is the Sunday name, but I can’t think what the ordinary one would be if so.
The thing that shows you a page I know as a visualiser – physicists like to have one so people can see what they’re writing without having to write it awkwardly on a board.
Physicists? That’s not a characteristic I’ve ever observed.
@Jen: What about “acetate”? Though it seems at least as dominical as “transparency”.
I have less experience of physicists than Brett, but more than most people, and I too haven’t observed them writing on any kind of opaque projector. I admit I have no experience of physicists anywhere but the U.S.
The opaque projectors I was talking about would barely have had room for a hand, much less for writing.
https://images.app.goo.gl/YemNboqieV8BrKeS6
Norw. transparent /”tran.spa’raŋ/ when I was in school. Later foil became common as well, and my feeling is that this word was connected to (spread from) the oil industry. Either way, they were shown on an overhead /’over”hed/, which the teacher had to call for help to turn on and adjust.
The ones I know are a little bit like an overhead projector, only with a camera above rather than shiny light below. You can put something like a page of a book in and just show it off, without having to photocopy it onto the transparent stuff first, but you can also put a blank page in and write on it.
I’m sure it was the physicists who fought for the rooms with one. You can write maths on it easier than on a board, and then put in a new page instead of wiping it. (Although they did also fight for the rooms with the fancy boards that move up and down past each other.)
@Jen in Edinburgh: Today’s opaque projectors do look a lot like the old projectors we used for transparencies, because it costs next to nothing to mount a CCD camera where the mirrors would be in an overhead transparency projector. At the school where I had four of my seven years of elementary school, every classroom had a transparency projector, but there was only one opaque projector, which teachers could reserve for an hour or two at a time. It was a big bulky thing, similar to the ones shown in the linked images, except that the place to lay down the image to be projected was much larger. It had room to fit an open page of a heavy reference book there.
At a public lecture near the end of his life, the aging Paul Dirac was given the use of an overhead projector. Either because of unfamiliarity or because his faculties were waning, he proceeded to write with a marker directly on the glass, not on a transparency sheet. The flustered assistant wiped it as needed, perhaps not daring to correct him. That was probably awkward.
he proceeded to write with a marker directly on the glass, …
I was at a lecture in a large hall with a fancy concave screen coated in some highly-reflective finish — presumably concave so the image wouldn’t get distorted upon projection.
Likewise, the guest lecturer had been told he could write on the slides. He wrote with the marker direct on to the _screen_ — which turned out to have such a fancy finish ordinary solvent had no effect. This ‘flustered assistant’ peremptorily wheeled the screen out of the hall and replaced it with an ordinary flat screen, delivered with several foul looks. (And yes, that did distort.)
@Jen: Those visualizers do sound good for lecturing, but I’ve never seen one, though for all I know, the rooms where I took physics and math classes in the ’80s might have been equipped with them since then. (Those were in universities with separate buildings for physics and for various other departments, so departments didn’t fight over classrooms much. Maybe there was some fighting over rooms. My graduate adviser always wanted 137, just for the number.)
Never seen any of these things, just overhead projectors and, uh, PowerPoint projectors (Beamer in, as it turns out, German).
I remember both from school, and in the 90s and up to the early noughties they were still used for business presentations.
It’s called an epidiascope, as every Chinese child knows.
Wow, those building blocks are something.
But without this kind of thing, we would not have Backstroke of the West, the only really good Star Wars movie. The world would be the poorer.
The improbity fills the world!
The Epidiascopalian Church has good proselytizers, it seems.
overhead projector shadow puppetry is alive and thriving – Chinese Theatre Works for example.
@SR: clearly made for infant major-generals!
With a little internet sleuthing I can locate Putnam’s (1960) dissertation, Photon Scattering by the Statistical Atom, which the over-committed sleuth can probably read in the Princeton archives.
This brings up a recollection of Putnam’s by his advisor John Wheeler, as told in an interview to his biographer Kenneth Ford, transcribed in another more accessible dissertation: Christensen’s (2009) John Archibald Wheeler: A Study of Mentoring in Modern Physics. Here it is (pp. 278-280), omitting double indentation.
“[I]t appears that only one of the fifty-one individuals received their Ph.D. under the supervision of John Wheeler did not move on to a successful career in either academics, research, or industry. As detailed in his interview with Ken Ford, the memory of that failure clearly troubled Wheeler:
At times, as I listened to the interview, Wheeler’s regret seemed palpable:
It is interesting to note that in Wheeler’s interviews with Ken Ford and in the autobiography Geons, John Wheeler wrote (and spoke) about Peter Putnam at greater length and with more emotion than any other of his students. It is obvious from Wheeler’s productivity as a physicist and from the discussion of Wheeler relationship with his mentors in Chapter 2, that physics was a passion in Wheeler’s life. From the discussion above, it is equally clear that Wheeler had a passion for teaching. By accounts, Peter Putnam appears to the sole exception to Wheeler’s success with placing his apprentices.”
That’s very interesting stuff — thanks for digging it up.
argh argh argh argh argh
Compare & contrast the advice I got when I started writing papers: you will by misunderstood – by someone, at some point, for some reason –, therefore it is your responsibility to leave as few opportunities for that as possible.
‘Transparency” does have the expected abstract meaning (as well as being used as “A burlesque translation of the German title of address‘
This word (I believe words don’t fully ‘belong’ to a single dialect or language*) also perplexes me in the known song about Che Guevara.
* a part of our arguments about English phrases ‘Russian language’ and ‘Semitic peoples’.
And also Jeff VanderMeer’s ‘brightness’.
Not a count noun, but still an unexpected [for me] semantical shift.
Which reminded me something, and now I think this ‘something’ can be the group of absract nouns as count nouns.
@DM: For an undergraduate thesis, I’d say Wheeler should have been reading drafts and going over them with Putnam to figure out what Putnam was saying, if anything, and guiding him in how to communicate it. (Not that my senior thesis adviser did anything analogous for me—my problem was mostly not the exposition but the banality of the content—but he didn’t think I was worth his time, and Wheeler clearly thought Putnam was worth his.)
When and in what language the practice of using same derivation for both abstract and concrete (‘a thing’) meanings arose?
Such words have penetrated Russian and when lexicalised in your idiolect (that’s when you don’t analyse tthe derivation) are as fine as any lexicalised sequence. E.g. ‘a singularity’.
But the first acquaitance is always a bit weird.
Jeff Vandermeer: I don’t know if it’s as odd in English as it is in Russian. In Russian brightness is either higgh or low, but even if the usual meaning was the quality of being bright, it would still be a quality of either perception or of light or of its emitter. A strange name for alien something an explorer finds within herself after a contact with alien something else without.
When and in what language the practice of using same derivation for both abstract and concrete (‘a thing’) meanings arose?
It happens in every language I know of.
(E.g. Kusaal zɔɔg “running/race”, buosʋg “asking/question”, daalim “masculinity/male genitalia.”)
The abstract/concrete distinction is a merely a grammarian’s useful approximation, not a fundamental fact about reality. And all human languages are deeply suffused with metaphor, to such an extent that it can come as quite a shock to realise that many a perfectly ordinary everyday locution makes no sense at all if interpreted literally.
not a fundamental fact about reality
?
As for me, beauty (the concept) and a beauty are harder to confuse than a cookie and the Moon:/
And no, what I told above has nothing to do with grammarians.
There’s a distinctive crazy feeling I have each time I first come across a noun designating a thing derived with a morpheme commonly used for abstract concepts and felt (by me, in childhood, not a gramarian) as a marker of abstraction. Many such words are borrowings in Russian. ‘A singularity’ is a good example.
Often same morpheme is used for both abstract and mass nouns. Krasotá is ‘beauty’, but: kakáya krasotá! (lit: what beauty!). Skúka ‘boredom’ is not used to refer to a boring text, but skukotá! is either colloquial intensified version of ‘boredom’ – or ‘boring stuff’.
And yes, sometimes there is a natural transition from a ‘mass’ to a ‘thing’. It won’t work for a beauty: a beatiful lady is not a lump of beatiful stuff.
No, but she’s beauty incarnate.