Philosophy 565 October 21, 2008 Prof. Clare Batty

Putnam, “Meaning and Reference

1. Frege Again Sense and Nominatum for Singular Terms nominatum: the object that an expression refers to, picks out, designates. sense: what someone who understands the expression grasps; contains the mode of presentation of the nominatum.

2. Extension and Intension Example: ‘renate’ (creature with a kidney) and ‘cordate’ (creature with a heart). These have the same extension but different intensions. For general terms, extensions are the analogue of Fregean nominata. Intensions are the analogue of Fregean senses. The extension of ‘renate’ is the set of all creatures with a kidney. The extension of ‘cordate’ is the set of all creatures with a heart. So the extension of ‘renate’ = the extension of ‘cordate’. But what about their intensions? What are those?

Intensions are modal. They are functions which take possible worlds as their inputs.

The intension of ‘is a renate’ is a function, [r], that takes a possible world as its input and maps it onto a set of inhabitants (of that world) as its output. [r] World (Input) Set of individuals/Extensions (Output) *w1 {Jason the Prof, Jane the Squirrel, Joe the Monkey,. . . } w2 {Jason the Prof, Laura the Squirrel, Frank the Unicorn,. . . } w3 {Mark the Martian, Frank the Unicorn} …… ……

Intensions, then, are functions that map possible worlds onto extensions.

3. Putnam’s Target: Two Theses Claim 1: Knowing (grasping) the meaning of a term is a matter of being in the right psychological state. Claim 2: Meaning determines extension.

At first, it might look like out pretheoretic understanding of meaning (meaningpt ) is committed to these two claims. Putnam says that “these two assumptions are not jointly satisfied by any notion, let alone any notion of meaning.”

4. Argument Twin Earth Thought Experiment: Imagine that Earth has a distant, nearly-identical twin, Twin Earth. And Oscar, Earthling has a “twin” Toscar, the Twearthling. The only difference between Earth and Twearth is that, on Twearth, the stuff flowing in the lakes and streams, etc., is XYZ, not H2O. Assume that Oscar and Toscar are living in the late 1600’s. Intuitively, Oscar meanspt H2O when he uses the term ‘water’, and Toscar meanspt XYZ. But we can suppose that Oscar and Toscar are intrinsic duplicates. Their lives, judged from the inside, have been identical.

Conclusion 1: Meaningspt ain’t in the head. Or, to put the point more precisely, the meaningpt of a term, if it is supposed to fix extension, is not determined by a pychological state of the agent. Conclusion 2: Either what is “grasped” by the agent does not determine extension, or the grasping isn’t just a matter of being in a certain psychological state.

5. Putnam’s Position Putnam’s Socio-Linguistic Hypothesis: “We could hardly use such words as ‘elm’ and ‘aluminum’ if no one possessed a way of recognizing elm trees and aluminum metal; but not everyone to whom the distinction is important has to be able to make the distinction.” “Every one to whom gold is important for any reason has to acquire the word ‘gold’; but he does not have to acquire the method of recognizing whether something is or is not gold. He can rely on a special subclass of speakers.” Deferred reference and “social meaning”: It is only the sociolinguistic state of the collective linguistic body to which the speaker belongs that fixes the extension. Hidden indexicality: x is water if and only if x bears the sameL relation to the stuff we call ‘water’ in the actual world (the “watery stuff around here”). ‘Water’ is thus a rigid designator, the rigidity being explained by a hidden indexical that refers to the actual world. Intensions might determine reference, but they aren’t what is grasped by regular speakers when they understand a word.