Godel, Putnam, and Functionalism: A New Reading of Representation and Reality By Jeff Buechner
Publisher: The M..I..T Press 2008 | 360 Pages | ISBN: 0262026236 | PDF | 3 MB

"Jeff Buechner presents for the first time--in the form of a detailed critical appraisal--a long overdue tribute to Putnam's seminal work, Representation and Reality, where Putnam attempts to refute his former view that he founded, functionalism, the dominant view in philosophy of mind today. Buechner considers a number of new avenues of investigation into how the Goedel incompleteness theorems, the triviality arguments and the triad of Quinean indeterminacy, ontological relativity and radical meaning holism are used to refute computational functionalism. Godel, Putnam, and Functionalism: A new Reading of Representation and Reality is an important and welcome contribution to the literature on functionalism. It is a must read for anyone interested in the debate Hilary Putnam started on the role, if any, of theorems in mathematical logic and computer science in computational functionalism."--Alan Berger, Brandeis University, and Director of the Kripke Center at CUNY Graduate Center