Recent studies have found that two state-level measures of social capital, average levels of civic participation and trust, are associated with improvements in individual health status. In this study we employ these measures, together with the Putnam index of state social capital, to examine several key aspects of the relationship between state social capital and individual health. We find that...

In 2001, I published a paper which, among other things, criticized the mathematics involved in one version of Hilary Putnam’s notorious model-theoretic argument against realism. Recently, Luca Bellotti has taken issue with several of the arguments in that paper. Here, I want to respond to Bellotti’s objections and to take the opportunity to make a few, somewhat more general remarks concerning t...

In a recent discussion piece, Juliet Floyd and Hilary Putnam present a new analysis of Wittgenstein’s “notorious paragraph” on Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem. Textually, they claim that Wittgenstein’s remarks have been widely misunderstood, and they argue that Wittgenstein had a better understanding of Gödel’s theorem than he has often been credited with. Substantively, they find in Wittg...

While evaluating a version of the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument that’s stronger than standard ones found in the literature, weak conditions for the dispensability of statements that quantify over mathematical entities — weaker than paraphrase — are argued for. These conditions are contoured to apply once a distinction between publicly held science and private belief is drawn. Dispensab...

Over the last 20 years or so, Hilary Putnam has developed a series of arguments which use basic theorems of model theory to undermine semantic realism. Here, I discuss two generalizations of these arguments. The first employs some new forms of model theory to generate substantially stronger conclusions than Putnam’s original arguments generated. The second illustrates a method for replacing the...