ABSTRACT
In 1967 Hilary Putnam published a paper of modest length titled "Psychological Predicates". This paper changed the debate in philosophy of mind in a fundamental way, by doing three remarkable things: First, it quickly brought about the decline and fall of type physicalism, in particular, the psychoneural identity theory. Second, it ushered in functionalism, which has since been a highly influential—arguably the dominant—position on the nature of mind. Third, it was instrumental in installing antireductionism as the orthodoxy on the nature of psychological properties. All this stemmed from a single idea: the multiple realizability of mental properties. Thinking of the workings of the mind in analogy with the operations of a computing machine is commonplace, both in the popular press and in serious philosophy and cognitive science. A computational view of mentality also shows that people must expect mental states to be multiply realized.
