Hilary Putnam has been at the center of contemporary debates about the nature of the mind and of its access to the world, about language and its relation to reality, and many other metaphysical and epistemological issues.
This volume contains the author's major essays from 1975 to 1982, which reveal a large shift in emphasis in the realist position developed in his earlier work. In these writings, he sees theories of truth and of meaning that derive from a firm notion of reference as inadequate.
First published in 1990, this is a reissue of Professor Hilary Putnam’s dissertation thesis, written in 1951, which concerns itself with The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences and the problems of the deductive justification for induction.