The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.
Hilary PutnamI think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!
Hilary PutnamWhile there is such a thing as correctness in ethics, in interpretation, in mathematics, the way to understand that is not by trying to model it on the ways in which we get things right in physics.
Hilary Putnam