Hilary Putnam

„In his John Locke lectures, Hilary Putnam argues „that certain human abilities – language speaking is the paradigm example – may not theoretically explicable in isolation“, apart from a full model of „human functional organization“, which „may well be unintelligible to humans when stated in any detail.“ The problem is that „we are not, realistically, going to get a detailed explanatory model of the natural kind „human being“ not because of „mere complexity“ but because „we are partially opaque to ourselves, in the sense of not having the ability to understand one another as we understand hydrogen atoms.“ This is a „constitutive fact“ about „human beings in the present period, though perhaps not in a few hundred years.“ (Chomsky 2000: 19).