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Meaning and Reference Hilary Putnam the Journal of Philosophy Meaning and Reference Hilary Putnam The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 70, No. 19, Seventieth Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division. (Nov. 8, 1973), pp. 699-711. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X%2819731108%2970%3A19%3C699%3AMAR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1 The Journal of Philosophy is currently published by Journal of Philosophy, Inc.. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/jphil.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Mon Oct 29 19:20:29 2007 REFERENCE 699 He wants to say that it's not a thing. As a matter of fact, it's malt Scotch, one of the things I particularly dislike. And it's the only thing I got for Chrisimas (not the bottle, the Scotch: it came in a different bottle). It is not a matter of wielding the OED or the Daily News here to establish anything momentous; I'm only asking why Chappell wants us to talk his way. He thinks that if we ask, What is the Scotch in that bottle identical with? we won't be able to answer ourselves, and so will give up thinking it's a thing. But the Scotch in that bottle is (the same as) the whiskey in that bottle, the liquid in that bottle, the stuff I'm about to give you because I can't stand it. (I don't see that the question, What is this copy of the JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY identical with? gets answers that are any better than those.) And he wants to say that it constitutes a thing, even when you mix it with soda. He is not content with the idea that the thing of which it is a part is Scotch and soda, or a glass of Scotch and soda; I don't know why. He wants to say that the Scotch in that Scotch and soda constitutes or composes something all its own, and so he adopts the device of prefixing 'heap of' or 'aggregate of' to words for stuffs, to guarantee that we'll always have (a count- noun phrase for?) a thing any stuff composes. And I don't see that: if we are so sure that there always will be a thing composed of any stuff we encounter, we might as well just prefix 'thing composed of' and be done with it. And, anyway, why should we be so sure? RUSSELL M. DANCY Cornell University MEANING AND REFERENCE * NCLEAR as it is, the traditional doctrine that the notion "meaning" possesses the extension/intension ambiguity has certain typical consequences. The doctrine that the meaning of a term is a concept carried the implication that mean- ings are mental entities. Frege, however, rebelled against this "psy- chologism." Feeling that meanings are public property-that the same meaning can be "grasped" by more than one person and "To be presented in an APA symposium on Reference, December 28, 1973. Commentators will be Charles Chastain and Keith S. Donnellan; for Donnellan's paper, see this JOURNAL,this issue, 711-712; Professor Chastain's comments are not available at this time. A very much expanded version of this paper will appear in volume 7 or 8 of Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (edited by Keith Gunderson), under the title "The Meaning of 'Meaning'." 700 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY by persons at different times-he identified concepts (and hence "intensions" or meanings) with abstract entities rather than mental entities. However, "grasping" these abstract entities was still an individual psychological act. None of these philosophers doubted that understanding a word (knowing its intension) was just a matter of being in a certain psychological state (somewhat in the way in which knowing how to factor numbers in one's head is just a mat- ter of being in a certain very complex psychological state). Secondly, the timeworn example of the two terms 'creature with a kidney' and 'creature with a heart' does show that two terms can have the same extension and yet differ in intension. But it was taken to be obvious that the reverse is impossible: two terms can- not differ in extension and have the same intension. Interestingly, no argument for this impossibility was ever offered. Probably it reflects the tradition of the ancient and medieval philosophers, who assumed that the concept corresponding to a term was just a con- junction of predicates, and hence that the concept corresponding to a term must always provide a necessary and sufficient condition for falling into the extension of the term. For philosophers like Carnap, who accepted the verifiability theory of meaning, the concept cor- responding to a term provided (in the ideal case, where the term had "complete meaning") a criterion for belonging to the extension (not just in the sense of "necessary and sufficient condi- tion," but in the strong sense of way of recognizing whether a given thing falls into the extension or not). So theory of meaning came to rest on two unchallenged assumptions: (1) That knowing the meaning of a term is just a matter of being in a certain psychological state (in the sense of "psychological state," in which states of memory and belief are "psychological states"; no one thought that knowing the meaning of a word was a continuous state of consciousness, of course). (2) That the meaning of a term determines its exiension (in the sense that sameness of intension entails sameness of extension). I shall argue that these two assumptions are not jointly satisfied by any notion, let alone any notion of meaning. The traditional con- cept of meaning is a concept which rests on a false theory. ARE MEANINGS IN THE HEAD? For the purpose of the following science-fiction examples, we shall suppose that somewhere there is a planet we shall call Twin Earth. Twin Earth is very much like Earth: in fact, people on Twin Earth even speak English. In fact, apart from the differences we shall specify in our science-fiction examples, the reader may suppose REFERENCE 701 that Twin Earth is exactly like Earth. He may even suppose that he has a Doppelganger-an identical copy-on Twin Earth, if he wishes, although my stories will not depend on this. Although some of the people on Twin Earth (say, those who call themselves "Americans" and those who call themselves "Canadi- ans" and those who call themselves "Englishmen," etc.) speak English, there are, not surprisingly, a few tiny dilferences between the dialects of English spoken on Twin Earth and standard English. One of the peculiarities of Twin Earth is that the liquid called "water" is not H20 but a different liquid whose chemical formula is very long and complicated. I shall abbreviate this chemical formula simply as XYZ. I shall suppose that XYZ is indistinguish- able from water at normal temperatures and pressures. Also, I shall suppose that the oceans and lakes and seas of Twin Earth contain XYZ and not water, that it rains XYZ on Twin Earth and not water, etc. If a space ship from Earth ever visits Twin Earth, then the supposition at first will be that 'water' has the same meaning on Earth and on Twin Earth. This supposition will be corrected when it is discovered that "water" on Twin Earth is XYZ, and the Earth- ian space ship will report somewhat as follows. "On Twin Earth the word 'water' means XYZ." Symmetrically, if a space ship from Twin Earth ever visits Earth, then the supposition at first will be that the word 'water' has the same meaning on Twin Earth and on Earth. This supposition will be corrected when it is discovered that "water" on Earth is H20, and the Twin Earthian space ship will report: "On Earth the word 'water' means H20." Note that there is no problem about the extension of the term 'water': the word simply has two different meanings (as we say); in the sense in which it is used on Twin Earth, the sense of water,,, what zue call "water" simply isn't water, while in the sense in which it is used on Earth, the sense of water,, what the Twin Earthians call "water" simple isn't water. The extension sf 'water' in the sense of water, is the set of all wholes consisting of H20 mole- cules, or something like that; the extension of water in the sense of water,, is the set of all wholes consisting of XYZ molecules, or something like that.
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