With mind-brain identity theories no longer dominant in philosophy ofmind in the late 1950s, scientific materialists turned to functionalism, the viewthat the identity of any mental state depends on its function in the cognitivesystem of which it is a part. The philosopher Hilary Putnam was one of the primaryarchitects of functionalism and was the first to propose computationalfunctionalism, which views the human mind as a computer or an information processor.But, in the early 1970s, Putnam began to have doubts about functionalism, and in hismasterwork Representation and Reality (MIT Press, 1988), he advanced four powerfularguments against his own doctrine of computational functionalism. In G?del, Putnam, and Functionalism, Jeff Buechner systematically examines Putnam's arguments againstfunctionalism and contends that they are unsuccessful. Putnam's first argument usesG?del's incompleteness theorem to refute the view that there is a computationaldescription of human reasoning and rationality; his second, the "trivialityargument," demonstrates that any computational description can be attributed toany physical system; his third, the multirealization argument, shows that there areinfinitely many computational realizations of an arbitrary intentional state; hisfourth argument buttresses this assertion by showing that there cannot be localcomputational reductions because there is no computable partitioning of the infinityof computational realizations of an arbitrary intentional state into a singlepackage or small set of packages (equivalence classes). Buechner analyzes thesearguments and the important inferential connections among them--for example, the useof both the G?del and triviality arguments in the argument against localcomputational reductions--and argues that none of Putnam's four arguments succeedsin refuting functionalism. G?del, Putnam, and Functionalism will inspire reneweddiscussion of Putnam's influential book and will confirm Representation and Realityas a major work by a major philosopher.Jeff Buechner is Director of the BioethicsInstitute and Lecturer in Philosophy at Rutgers University-Newark.