Episode 128: Hilary Putnam on Linguistic Meaning

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 128 is something like, what's the relationship between language and the world? And we read three articles by Hilary Putnam. The Meaning of Meaning Is Semantics possible And it ain't necessarily so. Those are from the 60s and 70s. You can join the discussion, get the text and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin, or it's Twin Earth equivalent.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:41 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:44 Matt: And this is Matt Teichman, necessarily identical to myself in Chicago, Illinois.

0:48 Mark: Ground rules for our discussion include, number one, try not to assume that our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy. That will be very difficult because Putnam certainly does not go by that rule himself with all his references. Number two, don't make arguments that hinge on something other than what we've agreed to read. Don't say you'd know what I was talking about if only you'd read Putnam's later book, let's Nuke Twin Earth.

1:09 Matt: I was wondering what that was going to be.

1:10 Wes: Twin Earth Squirrels are easy.

1:13 Mark: That's good. Yes, I like that. Yes, Number three will be rigorous and exact. And all that we say, unless doing otherwise, would be potentially more entertaining. So this is a continuation, more or less of our episode, the last one that Matt was on two episodes ago, on Saul Kripke. These articles cover much of the same ground that the two early ones, it ain't necessarily so, was from a 1962 symposium. And then is semantics possible? Is from 1970. So Matt, you are saying Matt is the one who suggested these, that those were prime articles influencing Kripke to write his book. Right.

1:48 Matt: And then Meaning of Meaning is written later, you know, in response to Naming and Necessity, which was originally delivered as a series of lectures In, I think, 72, but then it came out later in his book in 1980.

1:57 Mark: Yep. And the meaning of meaning, what year

1:59 Wes: is that article 75.

2:01 Mark: So we should characterize. The point of agreement is strong, that he, like Kripke, is not in favor of the Description Theory of meaning. He thinks that what determines what a sentence means is not just a matter of what is in your head. So what's the main point of disagreeing with Kripke?

2:17 Matt: I think of him as basically agreeing with most of what Kripke says. And yeah, maybe actually all of what Kripke says in Naming and Necessity and adding a bunch of stuff which Kripke wouldn't necessarily also agree with, although it's not totally clear.

2:28 Mark: So Putnam is known as having certain affinities to the pragmatist tradition. Has some dialogue going with Richard Rorty, definitely influenced by Quine. So Quine was the kind of the missing piece, if you want to listen to that old episode that we didn't bring up last time. But he kind of strikes a middle ground. So we'd introduce Kripke as somebody who revived metaphysics somehow by saying it's okay to talk about necessity in this strong way. It's okay to talk about something that would be true in all possible situations. Well, even though Putnam is agreeing with a lot of the letter of what Kripke's saying, where he's going to come down about metaphysics, about truth, about important things like that, is different and is hard to characterize. Although one of the differences is that whether something counts as part of a category or not depends on why you want to know.

3:18 Wes: You're focusing on this metaphysics part. I really only carefully read the meaning of meaning, which is a theory of meaning.

3:27 Mark: Well, it's in the meaning of meaning part, right.

3:29 Matt: So one way I like to think of, in what sense was Kripke bringing metaphysics back? So you can maybe think of some stuff before Kripke, like stuff by carnap, I guess, most famously as trying to reduce the question of what's necessarily true to the question of what's true by definition. So people who listen to our Kripke episode might remember that Kripke tried to insist, no, there's a difference actually between something that's necessarily true and something that's true by definition. So by pulling those two things apart, he showed that you can't just reduce metaphysics to logic or philosophy of language. It's its own thing. In case it sounded a little bit weird, why, you'd think that he brought metaphysics back just by this weird stuff about the nature of names and stuff

4:05 Wes: that sort of follows from saying that our theory of reference, which is really what I see Kripke as giving and not so much a theory of meaning. And this is where Putnam is going to sort of supplement him nicely, use his theory of reference to give us a theory of meaning. But yeah, this idea that. So the historical question has been the relationship between reference and meaning, Right? So for Mill, the meaning of a name just was the referent, and that had Lots of weird consequences. Like, for instance, identity statements couldn't be informative because if we say Hesperus is phosphorus, that just.

Just ends up being the reference. A equals A being equal to each other, and we don't understand why it's meaningful. There are other problems as well. So Russell came along with definite descriptions and Frege with senses to say that there are also these things called senses or descriptions. And in the case of definite descriptions, they help us refer. We refer by using definite descriptions. And that's the thing that Kripke denied. Right? We don't refer according to the meanings of things to the reference is sort of rigidly designated using descriptions in one given in our actual world.

But then we don't need descriptions to pick out the identical individual and counterfactual worlds. We just sort of stipulate that we've referred to this stuff in our world and whatever it is in the other world that is the same thing or has the same underlying structure, in the case of the sciences, is that thing. So now with Putnam, we're going to get a theory of meaning that accepts this theory of reference, but actually tells us how meaning is going to be related to reference.

5:39 Mark: You want to start us at the beginning of the meaning of meaning essay.

5:42 Wes: So he gives us an idea, right, of the traditional theory of meaning, which is that knowing the meaning of a term is a matter of being in a certain psychological state. I grasp that meaning. And then the meaning of the term is the intension, and that determines the extension. So the intension is sort of. It's whatever is the correlate of our concept term. Right? So the psychological state is the grasping is the having of the concept and the intension. So for Frege, right, it was these abstract entities and for many, many philosophers after him. So, for instance, the meaning of a sentence was a thought or a proposition, whereas the referent of a sentence was a truth value.

6:20 Matt: So did we mention that we mean intension with an S?

6:23 Wes: Yes, sorry. So intension with an S. Yeah. So these are sort of technical terms in this discussion. So an intension is you can think of as. It's the criterion by which you identify what's called the extension, which is the set of all objects corresponding to a given concept. So if I'm using the predicate red, the extension is just all the things that are red.

6:45 Mark: Right. So it's not clear to me you're saying the intension is a function function that picks out the extension. I just want to argue that that might be a particular philosopher's account of what the intension is. But since the whole. It's a positive claim here to say one that Putnam is picking out to argue against, that the intension determines the extension, then the definition of intension can't be. It's the thing that helps you pick out the extension.

7:09 Wes: He's going to hold on to the idea that intension determines extension.

7:13 Mark: No, but I guess we'll get into that.

7:17 Wes: He's going to reject the idea that a certain psychological state determines. He's going to reject one, but keep two.

7:24 Mark: I'm still feeling like people are not going to get these basic technical terms. So the example that he gives here, that's given often to pull these things apart is creature with heart and creature with kidneys. So those obviously mean different things. They have a different intension. Intention is just really meaningful. Intention is the thing that he ultimately thinks we need to understand what that is, that when we think about meaning, he just says, historically these two things were pulled apart.

7:48 Wes: Here we actually do need to be careful because meaning will end up being for him a combination of extension and something else. So, yes, at this stage, intension we do equate with meaning. But that's the thing he's going to reject.

8:00 Dylan: Yeah, but at this point, when he's setting things up, when he's describing the two faults of the previous theory, that, as you mentioned, Wes, that meaning is a matter of being in a certain psychological state or knowing the meaning of something is being a matter of being a certain psychological state, and that the meaning of the term determines its extension. He's saying that meaning here is in the sense of intension. And that's sort of where he's starting with.

8:24 Mark: Can I just finish the example? So these two things, however you want to say it, they obviously mean something different. Creature with heart and creature with kidneys. Yet as a matter of scientific fact, we've discovered, at least for the purposes of this. I don't know if it's actually true that they pick out all the same creatures. So you're saying creature with a heart and creature with kidneys, they have the same extension. They range over the same factually set of animals. Although you could, you know, maybe there's a possible world in which somebody has one and somebody doesn't have the other, but yet the intension is obviously different. That's all I want to say.

8:53 Wes: Right. And then when we talk about this psychological state, that's a relationship between a particular human being and the intension, the psychological state, the concept we have is a grasping of the intension. And so that's where Frege comes in this idea that Intensions have to be. And traditionally philosophers talk about this as propositions. Those have to be sort of abstract, Platonic entities that are not simply in your head. Right. Or otherwise. You can't make sense of a theory of truth. You guys understand what I'm saying?

9:23 Mark: I do. He ultimately thought that that was not as important a point as Frege thought. It's important for the history of mathematics and meaning to talk about what the metaphysical status of these things are. But he emphasizes almost immediately that it's still a psychological matter, grasping an intension. It's an individual psychological act when you grasp an intension. So we can still ask, what is it that connects the thing that is in your head to the extension, to the referent?

9:49 Wes: In the end, we're going to get rid of intension in the sense of some sort of Platonic abstract object. That'll be gone and we'll be left with concepts and extensions. But his idea here is, in the beginning, is that if intentions pick out extensions, then the psychological state, contra Frege, the psychological state itself picks out an extension. Do we want to explain that? How he gets there?

10:13 Mark: Yeah, read some quotes. Because I didn't get him making this strong distinction or caring about this strong distinction between the psychological state and the intension.

10:22 Dylan: In fact, I thought that part of the point of this section, psychological state methodological solipsism was to say that essentially there is no distinction between a notion of a psychological state and a form. And that ultimately that the distinction that Frege is making isn't really a distinction that you end up having the same relationship between the meaning of something, whether it's a form or psychological state, it doesn't matter.

10:48 Wes: So the idea is that when you grasp an intension, you're relating a term to that intension. Knowing the meaning of something isn't just, hey, I've grasped this intension. It's actually a psychological state of relating some term and knowing that that term means this. So for instance, knowing that this intension 1 is the meaning of term A is a different psychological state than knowing that intension 2 is the meaning of term A.

11:15 Mark: Sure. So you're in a different psychological state if you know that Superman did whatever, then if you know that Clark Kent did whatever. So it's a different psychological state associated with the Fregean sense or the intension or whatever you want to call it, even though they have the same referent. So I just. I don't want to complicate things.

11:30 Wes: No, those are different terms. So it's.

11:32 Dylan: He used the example of jealousy. Right.

11:34 Wes: That's a little side argument. That doesn't really have anything to do with this.

11:39 Mark: So read us some quotes. Wes, you have very strong opinions.

11:42 Wes: I'm just trying to go through the actual argument with some level of specificity.

11:47 Matt: We want to go Back to page 137. That seems like a good. So, for knowing the meaning of a isn't just grasping the intension of a, whatever that may come to, it is also knowing that the intension that one has grasped is the intension of a. Thus, someone who knows the meaning of wheel presumably grasps the intension of its German synonym, rad. But if he doesn't know that the intension in question is the intension of rad, he isn't said to know the meaning of rad.

12:08 Wes: So if A and B are different terms, then knowing the meaning of A is a different state from knowing the meaning of B, whether the meanings of A and B be themselves the same or different. So I could have term A wheel and term B rod. I can have the same intentions as in the meanings of A and B, but be in this different psychological state.

12:30 Mark: Yeah, okay. That's helpful for pulling apart the psychological state versus the intension.

12:34 Wes: But his ultimate point, right, is just going to be that if the intension determines the extension, then so does the psychological state.

12:41 Dylan: So what's a good quote here on 139? At the sort of end of the section, he says we claim that it's possible for two speakers to be in exactly the same psychological state in the narrow sense, even though the extension of the term A in the idiolect of the one is different from the extension of the term A in the idiolect of the other extension is not determined by psychological state.

13:01 Matt: Yeah, well, let's go back to Wes's original example, the predicate red. So the extension of the predicate red is the set of all red things in the world and the intension. So everybody's going to have their own specific take on what an intension is and their own way of trying to define it. But quasi intuitively, pre theoretically, perhaps you might think of the intension as the principle underlying all red things, or like whatever it is that determines what falls under the set of red things or the concept behind all red things. Something kind of like that.

I think we kind of have intuitions that identifying something as red isn't just a matter of identifying it as a member of this set. It's like understanding what it is to be red. And whatever that part is, the understanding what it is to be red part, we're going to sort of nickname that intension and then try to figure out what it is and then try to pull apart from some other things that are in the same vicinity.

13:50 Wes: Yeah. The whole point of this section here is that he gives us a traditional theory of meaning with these two elements, and he's going to claim that, contra Frege, these two elements actually do imply that psychological state determines extension. But then he's going to argue, using his twin Earth analogy, that in fact, no, the psychological state doesn't determine the intension, and therefore the traditional theory of meaning is flawed. So that's the whole structure of this and why this is important.

14:18 Matt: Yeah. And the contemporary jargon for this, in case anybody's. I mean, sometimes it's actually helpful, despite of it's being jargon, just to, like, abbreviate some of these positions. So the idea that the. What you're referring to when you speak is based on some stuff that's some private stuff happening in your head is nicknamed semantic internalism and Putnam's view. The idea that what you're referring to when you speak isn't just determined by some stuff happening privately in your head is sometimes referred to as semantic externalism. So that's what this line we just read from page 139, extension, is not determined by psychological state.

That's saying that what you refer to when you say Matt or Wes or Tiger isn't just a matter of, well, you think this certain thing in your head and the thing you're thinking in your head. That settles the question. What were you referring to? There's more that settles that question.

15:04 Wes: Right. And we can see how this sort of follows from Kripke's rejection of the idea that we pick out references by using definite descriptions. In fact, we don't pick out reference using definite descriptions. So the idea that these ideas in our head are how we refer sort of falls apart.

15:24 Matt: Yeah. And I think the connection there is that it's intuitive perhaps to think that you can just sort of come up with any definite description you want. That's one of the cool things with definite descriptions is you fashion them privately in your head and then automatically sort of figure out what satisfies them. So thinking that the reference of what you're talking about is determined by a definite description kind of goes along with thinking that it's determined by some private stuff that you're just doing in your head.

15:47 Wes: So the next section is to say why meanings aren't in the head, or in other words, why this particular psychological state doesn't determine an intension.

15:57 Dylan: Intention or extension.

15:59 Wes: Sorry, it's intension on page 139 it is the last consequence of the joint assumptions 1, 2, that we claim to be false. We claim that it's possible for two speakers to be in exactly the same psychological state in the narrow sense. Even though the extension of term A in the idiolect of one is different than the extension of term A in the idiolect of another. Extension is not determined by its psychological state. But that's sort of a consequence of so above in the paragraph above. The psychological state of the speaker determines the intension and hence the extension. So it's this three step thing. Psychological state determines intension and then intension determines extension. So really it's both. It's the idea that the psychological state determines intension and by way of intension determines extension.

16:46 Matt: He says we had to give at least one of those two assumptions which perhaps suggests that he is leaving open the possibility of keeping one of them. Which I think is what you were saying to Mark earlier, right?

16:55 Wes: Yeah. So intension will turn out to be determine extension. But psychological state determines neither intension nor extension. So I know it's probably confusing the hell out of listeners.

17:07 Mark: And what is the role of intension then in his final version? Because I focused on just the fact that in his final theory psychological state does not determine extension and there is no role for intension in that story at all.

17:19 Wes: Yeah. In the end intension doesn't. He will talk more broadly about meaning and meaning will sort of wrap up psychological state and extension and he stops talking about intension. We could see intension there as merely synonymous with meaning as long as we understand that it's not the psychological state or concepts alone that determine meaning or intension. In this weird way. It's extension plus these pairs of psychological state which becomes competence, what he calls linguistic competence plus extension, which is the whole rigid designator part of it. So I think we'll have to explain that later.

17:56 Mark: And how are you using concept in there?

17:58 Wes: Concepts I'm equating with having a psychological state. So which he will later on too. So this idea of having concepts, having a concept is grasping an intension concept.

18:08 Mark: There concepts are public, concepts are intentions. No, a concept is not an individual thing. There's no private language.

18:17 Wes: No, I think the way he talks through this is that the concept is the grasping of an intension. Having a concept is having a subjective state.

18:25 Mark: Yeah, that doesn't make any sense.

18:26 Wes: Why?

18:27 Mark: Well, because concepts by their nature are public entities. They are not private mental events. Having a concept, I mean the having is a private thing. But the whole notion was invented to be something like a Fregean sense or A mathematical truth or something. So you say the concept behind red, the meaning of red, it's not just what it connotes to me. The concept is a public thing.

18:50 Wes: We can call it what we like. Yeah. I honestly think the way he actually uses it in here is. But we don't have to confuse things. We just have to distinguish the psychological state, the grasping of an intension, from the intension.

19:02 Matt: I think I agree with Mark that the use of the notion of intension here is probably pretty close to Frege's notion of sense.

19:08 Wes: Well, except that he's going to reject the Platonic part. I mean, part of the point of he rejects Frege's argument. So Frege's argument against psychologism only works against the idea of mental particulars. So if we think of these mental entities in general, psychological states in general, then it doesn't matter whether we choose Platonic entity or psychological state in general as what we call our intension.

19:31 Matt: Yeah, that's a helpful clarification. Right. So it's sort of Frege's notion minus the third realm part, minus the Platonism. So the antipsychologism part of Frege, but not the Platonism part of Frege.

19:41 Wes: Yeah, antipsychologism with respect to mental particulars.

19:44 Mark: Yeah.

19:45 Matt: Yeah. If I may venture a potentially somewhat liberal interpretation of Putnam here, in answer to your earlier question about, like, well, what is it that determines extension? And this is maybe a little bit of a sneak preview of where the twin earth argument is going to go. I think he's going to say that it's something like demonstration, you might say, that determines extension. It's whatever the principles are that determine what you refer to. When you point at something, it's going to be something like that set of principles that determines what a natural kind

20:11 Wes: term refers to his sameness relation.

20:13 Matt: And the sameness relation. Absolutely right. So whatever it is determines what you're pointing at and then the sameness to whatever it is that you're pointing at.

20:19 Wes: But the weird thing here is that meaning will come to depend upon extension and reference and not the other way around. So it's a complete reversal where with Russell, we have the idea that we refer via meanings. Here, meaning absolutely depends already on reference. And in the same way we saw in Kripke, references get stipulated in this way you're talking about with ostension. Or it could be via a fixing description. Right. Kripke was open to that. I think Putnam is too. But once you've fixed it, you say it's this stuff, and in this world and Then everything else in another world that is this or shares its basic structure or however you want to put it.

20:59 Matt: Yeah, and we'll get to his stuff about stereotypes later. But I think the stereotype in Putnam is playing something a lot like the role that a reference fixing description plays in Kripke.

21:07 Mark: So I like the point that he made on page 136 here in describing the traditional view that he's arguing against. So what Matt called. What was the technical term for reference staying entirely in the head?

21:18 Matt: Semantic internalism.

21:20 Mark: Semantic internalism. So he characterizes when people talk about psychological states in the history of philosophy, particularly Descartes, but a lot of people following him, you make an assumption of methodological solipsism. So insofar as we're talking about a psychological state, we are not presupposing the existence of anything outside the person at all of other people of an objective world really being there. We're just talking about the contents of their consciousness, you could say. And so that's one of, I think, the immediate targets. That's one of the things that makes one think that my concepts must be something in my head.

So it must be the contents of my head that determine what in the world that I'm pointing. At least whether or not there's a real world there. At least what I'm representing to myself as pointing to something. Everything has to be buried in there. And Dylan brought up the jealousy thing.

22:08 Wes: Let's read that because it's really short. He says, for in its ordinary use, X is jealous of Y entails that Y exists and X is jealous of Y's regard for Z entails that both Y and Z exist as well as X. Of course, thus being jealous and being jealous of someone's regard for someone else are not psychological states permitted by the assumption of methodological solipsism. Did anyone else kind of positive argument and think it's strange?

22:31 Mark: I thought that was showing right off the bat that. I mean, there's a number of philosophers that we've read that just think this idea of methodical solipsism, if they had used that term to describe it, is just patently absurd that no, what consciousness does is just connect two things in the external world. And here's a great example.

22:47 Wes: But it doesn't. I mean, we have to analyze jealousy in the same way that we analyze belief. If I say John believes that Jane has regard for Jill, I don't say that the truth of that statement depends upon Jane actually having regard for Jill. That's in fact one of the problems that leads to this whole thing we're talking about. Jealousy isn't like the relation of being to the left of. It's a propositional attitude. And maybe Matt can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the actual correct analysis is if you say someone is jealous of someone, you're saying X is jealous because he believes that Y has regard for Z, not to treat jealous as if it were some external relationship.

23:27 Mark: So you're saying if it's A recognizes B, there's another psychological state, then it's really A has a belief that he is seeing B. It just seems the syntax of the word presupposes that B actually exists. If it's true.

23:42 Wes: We analyze the truth conditions of propositional attitudes differently than we analyze other propositions. So when I say I am jealous of A's regard for B, it must assume in common usage that I think A exists and I think B exists and I think there is jealousy. Or when I say that the microphone is to the left of the computer, I in those statements presuppose. Or in common usage, we presuppose the existence of the microphone, the existence of the computer. But when I say that John believes that the microphone is to the left of the computer, I don't presuppose those. The propositional attitude doesn't depend upon the truth of the particular proposition. John can believe it even though it's false.

24:21 Mark: So you're reducing all mental content to propositional attitudes. So if I'm jealous, the emphasis in there is that you have a belief. It seems there's at least two parts of that. If you're saying somebody's jealous of someone, then, yes, they have some beliefs about those people, but they also react to it in a certain way. And so if you want to argue that John has a certain belief, if you've got the statement John believes X and you want to look at that statement, is it true or false? Then you would look at things about John's behavior as to whether he in fact holds that you don't look at the truth of X, Whereas jealousy is an accomplishment term.

And you would not just say, well, do I think that he really has this belief that Jane exists? And blah, blah, blah. But I would also say that is he actually in the correct association? Like, if Jane doesn't exist at all and John is jealous of Jane, I don't know. Would we say he is legitimately jealous?

25:13 Wes: All that matters is that it could be. It doesn't have to be a figment of his imagination. But it could be, as with any propositional attitude. So jealousy includes affect and belief. I don't know what else it can be. And the affect part has no relation to the existence of things, and the belief part has a propositional attitude relationship to the existence of things. Anyway, I don't think any of his later argument depends on this.

25:37 Matt: Well, I think the argument here depends on him disagreeing with that take on the word jealous. Putnam needs jealous to be factive, to use another bit of contemporary jargon. So he wants it to be not like afraid. So you can be afraid of something that doesn't exist. You can be afraid of dragons even though they don't exist. Putnam is sort of assuming for this argument that jealous is different from afraid because the thing you're jealous of has to exist. That's just part of the sort of way the word jealous works well.

26:02 Dylan: And he's also saying that this is the way methodological solipsism has to understand jealousy in order for it to work. And his point at the end in the example that he's given is to say that only if we assume that psychological states in the narrow sense have a significant degree of causal closure. Is there any point in engaging in this reconstruction or in making the assumption of methodological solipsism? I took the whole point of this example to be that you restrict what you can be thinking about if you maintain methodological solipsism, and it doesn't get you to the way in which we actually mean to be speaking of meaning.

26:42 Wes: His argument doesn't require that jealousy be factive, like meanings aren't in our heads. I think he convincingly demonstrates. But that doesn't require that jealousy itself be factive. It doesn't require that you reject any of this stuff about methodological solipsism to say that meanings are not in the head.

26:59 Matt: Well, I think the way this argument is supposed to go is you're supposed to share his intuition that jealous is factive. And if you share that intuition, then you'll see that methodological solipsism, if it's a theory about mental states, will have to reject jealousy as a potential mental state. And we don't want to do that. I mean, jealousy is obviously a potential mental state and it's obviously factive. So thus we have to reject methodological solipsism.

27:19 Wes: Yes, right. But nothing in a later argument depends on a rejection of methodological solipsism. This is a little side adventure. Maybe you guys can show me how anything else depends on this.

27:30 Matt: I think it ties into It. Yeah, there's definitely a question about whether it depends on. Because basically semantic externalism, I think, fits nicely with rejecting methodological solipsism. Because if a meaning isn't just in the head. Well, okay, we can think about why this would be. But.

27:43 Wes: Yeah, well, the reason why I'm bringing this up because it's important for us to understand that he's not rejecting the idea that individual psychological states have anything to do with meaning because he's going to talk about speaker competence. He's going to talk about the fixing, the grasping of the stereotype. He's just going to say those can't be the sum and substance of meaning. He's making the same sort of distinction. Kripke is about reference.

28:05 Matt: Yeah, definitely.

28:06 Dylan: But he's also not rejecting them as being part of meaning, which I thought the whole idea of methodological solipsism was supposed to do was reject individual states.

28:18 Wes: No, he's not denying the existence of psychological states, I don't think.

28:23 Matt: I guess I would describe his position here as psychological states include both psychological states that are just private to individuals, but also some psychological states. The question of whether the person's in the state isn't just a matter of what they're doing privately in their head, but it's a matter of other stuff, too.

28:37 Wes: Well, meaning especially doesn't depend merely on a particular psychological state or merely on even speaker competence. It depends on how we define the extension. It depends on context. It depends on even syntactic categories and things like that that happens at the end of the road. And we should get into the twin Earth argument.

28:57 Unknown speaker: Yes.

28:57 Mark: All right, that's the star, the central point here. The flashy bit of the article starts on the bottom page. 139.

29:05 Matt: Yeah. No, the twin Earth is like the whole reason people read this and teach it in classes. Yeah.

29:09 Dylan: And the reason for it is to show that a psychological state doesn't determine extension. That's why he's going to bring it up.

29:16 Matt: Yeah.

29:17 Mark: The twin Earth thing is related to the possible worlds thing in Kripke. Why does he choose this? In other words, instead of talking about in all possible worlds or every possible world, he just says, imagine that there's another Earth. It's very much like our Earth. Everything like, except whatever thing you want to vary. So in this case, it's the liquid that they call water is not H2O, but a very different liquid whose chemical formula is very long and complicated, which I'll abbreviate as xyz. I shall suppose that XYZ is indistinguishable from water at normal temperatures and pressures.

In particular, it tastes like water and quenches thirst like water. And the oceans and lakes and seas of twin earth contain XYZ, not water that rains XYZ on twin earth and not water, etc. And then imagines that a spaceship from Earth could visit twin Earth and the people would assume that this stuff is water. And yet if they do a chemical analysis, they will discover that in fact it was not water, because water is H2O, it is XYZ. So that we thought that the word water as we use it and the word water as they use it meant the same thing, meant this stuff.

And so you could even call it phenomenal water. Right. The thing that plays the functional role is water here, and the thing that play the functional role is water there.

30:27 Wes: You have to go back to 1750, because at some point the people do know it's H2 or X, Y, Z. But yeah, you go back to the point where it's phenomenal water. It's just this clear stuff that has a certain taste and so on.

30:37 Matt: Fool's water, you might say.

30:38 Mark: So what's the. Is it just because we can travel from one to the other that you think is the advantage of using twin Earth as opposed to in another possible world?

30:45 Wes: Well, if he used a counterfactual, I think it might have gotten confusing. Because you can't say, what if water were XYZ? Right. Water necessarily is H2O from our frame of reference. By erecting these two coexisting worlds, we get an easier way of talking about this.

31:02 Mark: Yeah, it's something that's actual, purportedly actual according to the story. Whereas in a counterfactual, a lot of Kripke's point is that you can stipulate, oh, I'm saying that water over there is blah, blah, blah. And then the trick becomes, is there some logical reason why you could prevent someone from stipulating? Oh, well, I'm just saying that in that possible world, water is xyz. Well, no, no, you're not allowed to do that because you saying the word water always refers to what water is here.

31:30 Wes: Right. What you are allowed to do is you can say, suppose there were a world in which there were an exact epistemic counterpart of water, and it was xyz. And he does reformulate it a little bit in that way later on. But I think it's clear to start with this.

31:44 Matt: Yeah. So can I ask whether you guys shared his big intuition? You're supposed to hear this thought experiment. Think about this planet where there's this stuff that's physically indistinguishable from water. And everybody talks about it in exactly the same way we talk about water. And yet the chemical composition is different. The reaction you're supposed to have to that thought experiment is, oh, yeah, in this imaginary other planet. Water wouldn't mean the same thing in those people's language. In twin English, it wouldn't mean the same thing as it means in English.

Because in English, water refers to H2O, the stuff here on Earth. You're supposed to have that intuition really strongly. If you do have that intuition really strongly, then the conclusion he wants, namely that it's not just your psychological state that determines what you're meaning by a given term, but something else, some fact about the world.

32:29 Wes: The extension.

32:30 Matt: Yeah, the extension.

32:31 Wes: Because we could just say, okay, well, they mean the same things, but they're still a different extension. So we'd have to give up two of his little principles, 1 and 2. In the beginning, we could go the route of giving up two, but he wants to go the route of giving up one.

32:44 Matt: Yeah.

32:45 Wes: So what are the weird consequences we would get if we said, well, they mean the same thing? He describes some of these at some point, I just forget exactly where.

32:53 Mark: Remind us what two and one are.

32:54 Wes: Principle one, and these are the underpinnings of the traditional theory of meaning. Number one is that grasping an intension is the having of a particular psychological state. And number two is that intension determines extension. And he said the implications of one and two together are that a particularly psychological state determines intension and therefore extension. And he's going to show us that his particular psychological state doesn't determine extension with this example. Or he's going to show us we have to reject either one or two. That's really the thing here.

33:27 Mark: Yep, yep.

33:28 Wes: So why do we have to. Why is he going to reject two? Why is he just going to reject the number one, the psychological state part? And I think there are good reasons for that. I just forget.

33:38 Dylan: Have we stated clearly why this example shows that the extension is not a function of the psychological state?

33:45 Wes: Well, it's going to show either that or we're going to have to say, hey, they mean the same things, but they have different extensions.

33:51 Dylan: Yes. Especially in the 1750 example, as you mentioned. So that prior to knowing that water is H2O in actual Earth and XYZ in twin Earth, prior to that, the psychological state in both Earths is the same, but their extensions Are different.

34:11 Wes: Like, I'm still grasping with, yeah, why not say, hey, twin Earthers mean exactly the same thing by water as us? They're referring to totally different stuff. That does sound counterintuitive, but, yeah, go ahead.

34:22 Matt: I think you're supposed to intuitively recoil from that. So what would that commit you to if you said that they meant the same thing? Well, it seems like it would commit you to. Let's say I ask a twin Earther to pass me some water and they pass me some xyz. I mean, it seems like we have a strong intuition there that I didn't get what I was asking for there. But if they meant the same thing, the twin Earther did comply with my request.

34:40 Dylan: Yeah, but you would have gotten the same thing, and you would have felt perfectly fine with that.

34:44 Matt: Yeah. So he might have tricked me right, into thinking that he was giving me what I asked for. But let's say I found out later.

34:49 Mark: Right.

34:49 Matt: If somebody analyzed the chemical composition, I would feel like I didn't get the thing I asked for. I didn't get what I wanted.

34:55 Dylan: Well, but the reason I don't recoil from it, the distinction is because I think the point is really driven home by considering the condition in 1750, before the discovery in either Earth that there was a substratum of chemical composition that would make the distinction. So basically, before, there is a distinction made between the extensions of either case. You have very clearly the same mental state, and you would say they were the same thing. It's only upon discovery of more information that you realize that their extensions are different. And this, to me, was one of the important points here, is that you preserve the identity of the thing that you are talking about, that it's real, but you allow for revisions to be made, mistakes to be made, and stuff like that.

35:49 Matt: Yeah. So it's really important, his argument that the 1750 person, they might not know about chemistry and whatever, but they still think that there is some essence or some nature that water has or other. They don't know what it is exactly, but there's some nature or other that it has.

36:05 Dylan: They mean something by it.

36:07 Matt: So there's still the possibility of then tricking that person. If they went to a twin Earther and a twin Earther gave them some xyz, they might not understand why the XYZ wasn't water, but there's like, the possibility of them not getting what they want when they ask for water because they still sort of assume there's some essence or other to water. And if they were later to learn that they were given something that didn't have that essence, then they would realize that they were tricked.

36:30 Dylan: Yes, but that's the whole point of it, right? They would go and they would get water, and they would understand it to be water, and they would have been given water by the people on the twin earth, and they would be perfectly fine with that. And then when the twin earth dalton gives the actual earth dalton some twin earth water, and he happens to just be analyzing it accidentally because he didn't have his own earth's water, then he finds out it doesn't have oxygen and hydrogen and finds out something else altogether. They're different substances. Doesn't even have to find out that they're xyz.

37:05 Unknown speaker: Right.

37:06 Dylan: Just find out that the two waters are different from one another.

37:08 Matt: Yes. The main thing that he needs for this example is that you could trick this person.

37:11 Dylan: Well, but I don't understand your emphasis on the word trick, because that's what I think is really nice about the example is it doesn't have to involve anybody being tricked. Now, I guess you could move to 1850 and say, you know, there's some dastardly person on twin earth who's passing off XYZ as H2O to unsuspecting, uneducated people who don't know that water is H2O and they're getting this other thing that seems like water, but is actually XYZ in some kind of financial scam. Right?

37:44 Matt: Yeah.

37:45 Wes: I think you guys totally agree about all this, by the way.

37:47 Mark: Okay, well, I like the fact, Matt, that you're bringing in this tricking example, which is not something that Putnam brings up, but you're bringing up sort of the pragmatic aspect of why would you care? The way that he's described it, actually, it's just as nourishing. It's not. Just because I'm from the wrong earth, it doesn't mean that I'm drinking the wrong kind of water. So it'll give me cancer or something. So there is no trick. There's no downside. So you wouldn't be pissed off and say, I didn't get what I wanted. You would say, this is just a different kind of water.

Maybe you would say, but it fulfilled my purposes just fine. So it kind of. Whether you consider the twin earth water water or not depends on why you care. And later he uses the example of what about water versus water that's not quite chemically pure? If you're asking for a drink, you just want something that is pure enough so that it's safe to drink. Whereas if you're doing a particular science experiment that will explode if it's not distilled water, then, you know, distilled water is the only thing that is truly water. And this is a place where he sees himself as differing from Kripke, even, although I'm not completely sure, just laying it out that way, why that would be the case.

38:49 Matt: I think, though, on Putnam's view, you still care at some level about the distinction between pure water and normal water. It's just that you may not have the expertise to actually sort through, you know, what is pure water and what isn't. You leave that to other people. But this difference is still relevant to you. You still kind of assume it in some way.

39:04 Wes: It's relevant to people's scientific purposes, even if it's not relevant to their drinking

39:07 Dylan: purposes, but it's not even relevant just for people's scientific purposes.

39:11 Unknown speaker: Right.

39:11 Dylan: You want to be the case that when two things are different and demonstrated as different. You understand what you mean by that?

39:18 Wes: Yeah. Isn't that broadly scientific?

39:19 Dylan: Well, I guess it's broadly scientific, but I thought that when you were invoking scientific there, you didn't mean just thinking about the distinctions between things. I thought that you meant that in the sense of that only experts would care about it.

39:31 Mark: Well, so the Eskimo tribe that has 50 different words for snow or whatever comes to mind.

39:36 Matt: That, by the way, that's apocryphal.

39:39 Mark: But imagine if it was not, since it's useful for philosophy, that if you're, you know, that's snow, like, well, you're displaying an ignorance of snow. You know, if you just think all that is just snow and differentiate, you're not. I can see five kinds just right here. It seems not just a matter of, you know, scientific curiosity or something, that we should need to have as fine conceptual distinctions as possible.

40:02 Dylan: It's like the beech and the elm tree.

40:04 Mark: Yeah.

40:05 Wes: Yeah. I wanted to bring this up because I think the point of this example is to argue for why we must reject number one and not reject number two.

40:13 Mark: Let's read the stuff about elms.

40:14 Dylan: I was just going to suggest that. I think, as I'm listening, this is all even more confusing than it was when I was reading it.

40:21 Matt: Classic Putnam.

40:22 Dylan: Well, I think he's really easy to read, but it requires a lot of attention. So it's probably worth slowly reading through an example just because I think it'll be hard to understand. So go ahead.

40:33 Wes: Okay. Was I reading Too quickly. Suppose you're like me and cannot tell an elm from a beech tree. We still say that the extension of elm in my idiolect is the same as the extension of elm in anyone else's, viz, the set of all elm trees, and that the set of all beech trees is the extension of beech in both of our idiolects. Thus, elm in my idiolect has a different extension from beech in your idiolect. As it should. So now we're replacing these twin earths with our two different idiolects. Is it really credible that this difference in extension is brought about by some difference in our concepts? My concept of an elm tree is exactly the same as my concept of a beech tree. I blush to confess. This shows that the identification of meaning in the sense of intension with concept cannot be correct. By the way. By the way, this is one example wherein he's distinguishing intension and concept.

41:26 Mark: Yes. And where concept does mean something individually. Yep. Okay, gotcha.

41:30 Wes: If someone heroically attempts to maintain that the difference between the extension of elm and the extension of beech in my idiolect is explained by a difference in my psychological state, then we can always refute him by constructing a twin earth example. Just let the words elm and beech be switched, and so on and so forth. So who wants to explain this?

41:50 Matt: Yeah, so when he says we still say that the extension of elm in my idiolect is the same as the extension of elm in anyone else's. That is a really weird 1970s analytic philosopher way of saying that just because I have this notion of what an elm is and you have your notion of what an elm is and they don't line up, that doesn't change the fact of the matter of what really are elms. These really are the elms. So this talk about, like this is the extension of elm. That's sort of a funny way to say these are the elms. Really? For reals?

42:16 Wes: Yeah, this is the rigid designation thing. So. Yeah.

42:19 Matt: Yeah. So, you know, little blips and weirdnesses in what I think an elm is versus what you think an elm is and what I think a beech is versus what you think a beech. And look, I'm such an ignoramus, I even think that the same thing doesn't change the fact these really are the elms. These really are the beaches. There's an objective fact of the matter about that. Little imperfections in our understanding of stuff shouldn't threaten that.

42:39 Wes: Yeah. As Kripke pointed out, I could even have a totally flawed way of Fixing. Right. I could have a completely erroneous idea of something's description and still fix it that way and then discover that that description was completely wrong and still have fixed it from the beginning. Right. Still have fixed that extension.

42:58 Mark: Yeah.

42:59 Matt: And you need to have, because you need to have been wrong about that thing. You had the one theory about it, now you have a new theory about it. Like what? The same thing.

43:06 Mark: Give an example of that. Because what that sounded like is, I think that elm trees are what are in fact, beech trees. So, in fact, I'm using the word elm to refer to beech trees. But Kripke and Putnam are seemingly going to say, no, no, no, I'm still using the word elm to refer to elm trees. It's just that everything I think about them is false.

43:24 Matt: Yeah. So I'm walking along the woods, I stumble across examples of elms, and I try to arrive at a theory of what an elm is. I'm like a budding scientist, let's say. And these five elms that I look at all have, I don't know, red leaves because it's fall. And I draw the erroneous conclusion that all elms have red leaves. But actually, no, these other five elms over here don't have red leaves. So I'm wrong.

43:48 Mark: Okay, but you're picking them out correctly as elms based on the wrong thing.

43:51 Matt: Okay, but I was picking them out correctly as elms. Exactly. So when I later stumble across those other five elm trees and, oh, my God, I was wrong, they didn't have red leaves. I gotta revise my theory now. Okay. An elm tree is, I don't know actually anything about elm trees.

44:04 Wes: Whatever.

44:04 Matt: An elm tree is a thing with this kind of bark. Now I have a new theory of elm trees. It's important that that theory of what an elm tree is wasn't what was defining what counted as an elm tree. We had to have an independent way of identifying elm trees so that the thing I have the theory of in both cases that I'm revising is a theory of the same thing.

44:22 Wes: Here's another example. I had someone commenting on my piece on Sandel about the way our concept of personhood changes if we decide that fetuses are persons. And this guy's idea was that, well, it's not the same concept of personhood anymore. If fetuses are persons, then I just have a new concept. So I can't say that I was misapplying the old concept when I incorporate some new extension, say fetuses into the Concept, then I just have a new concept which is obviously not the case. In other words, you can make these discoveries that new particulars fall under a concept and that doesn't just mean that you're suddenly just using a different concept.

45:06 Mark: Yeah.

45:06 Dylan: What about examples that are a little bit more like the XYZ H2O case? I'm thinking of the effect of genetics on biology and that you had classifications that were based upon morphologies that end up, when you do genetic analysis, that things are morphologically very, very similar and construed as being the same, you know, same species or same animal type.

45:33 Wes: Well, it's like the cats are robots type of thing, right?

45:35 Dylan: Sure.

45:36 Wes: If I discover that cats are robots, it doesn't mean that they weren't cats. That's right, they're still cats. That's the whole idea. It's just that cats turned out not to be what we thought they were. Yeah.

45:46 Dylan: The only virtue of my example is that it actually exists in the world.

45:51 Matt: And morphologically the same means they have the same shaped body.

45:54 Dylan: Yes.

45:55 Matt: That was the old school way of trying to figure out whether two animals are the same species. We're like, look, oh, this one has wings. This one also has wings. I guess they're related. Oh, this one has like this many legs. This one also has this many legs. I guess they're related prior to the modern day genetic understanding.

46:08 Wes: Yeah.

46:08 Dylan: Or like that mushrooms are plants.

46:11 Matt: Yeah.

46:11 Dylan: I mean you end up with a whole new category of organism in that case.

46:16 Matt: Yeah. So the genome thing is interesting because he thinks that the genome of an organism actually is the essence of the organism. This is one of the, you know, more ambitious aspects of Putnam's View here. Basically, when 2,500 years ago, Aristotle was going around looking at elephants and taking notes on them, he was engaged in this act of semantic deference, this leaving things to the experts. He was sort of deferring things to a future generation in which it would later be discovered that, ah, yes, elephants share a genome. You know, he had to work with the idea that ah, they have some essence in common and someday we'll discover what that is.

It seems to me probably that these similar looking elephants share a nature. I don't know what that nature is yet, but I'm going to maybe investigate them more and try to find it out. So it's an interesting feature of Putnam's View that genetics, ah, you know, DNA is the magic answer to this question. What is the essence of, of an organism?

47:03 Wes: I don't think biologists agree in the way they define species. Right. Because there can be more genetic variation within a species than between, especially with subspecies. So it's actually more determined by reproductive habits whether these organisms can reproduce with each other and actually do. Because in some cases they can, but they don't. They keep separate populations and other factors like that.

47:24 Matt: Yeah. There's an interesting raging debate, I think, in philosophy of biology as to what determines whether two animals are members of the same species. And some people go the sort of DNA route, some people go the reproductive isolation route, some people go back to the ancients and advocate a similarity. It's just like there's a notion of brute similarity that applies to certain animals. And that's the only thing that we have to go on when we're trying to figure out whether they belong to the same species. There's actually a really interesting paper by Jason Rines on this.

47:50 Wes: Interesting.

47:51 Mark: I like that. Matt was getting into what the overall philosophy of science point of this is. So I was trying to recall which article. I think it's. Is semantics possible? But we're kind of getting into the part of meaning, of meaning where he is bringing in elements from that in terms of what makes something a lemon and what makes something a member of a certain species. And I think one of the things he's concerned about is just what you were pointing at, Wes, with your personhood example, is as we discover more things in science, the question is, do our definitions, does the meaning of a term change?

And you might want to separate out and say, no, no, I meant the same thing. Maybe, you know, you're even taking a Kripke Putnam hard line and say, I don't even completely know what I meant. Yeah, it's. What I mean is an X. And so in that sense, it doesn't change. It's always referring to the same thing in the physical world. And there's just facts about this that change. So you could sort of get changes in theory, but the words stay the same. Because Putnam thinks that's rooted ultimately in some notion of this distinction between the analytic and the synthetic, that the definitions of words are analytic and the facts about them are synthetic.

And so that's the kind of thing. So the synthetic ones are the things that would change over time with the new scientific discoveries. But the meanings of the words, the analytic stuff, by definition, that's what analytic is. It doesn't change. And I think one of his overall points is that actually you can't make that sharp distinction between theory and the meanings of the words involved. And I Know, some of the examples he uses are from quantum mechanics that you could say, I mean, the same thing by space and time or whatever that I did before.

It's just that we've learned new things about space and time. But I think he's trying to argue that, no, you can't make a sharp distinction between those things. And so in that sense, I think that maybe he agrees with your interlocutor, Wes, that you actually somehow discovered that personhood included fetuses. And I'm not sure how that would actually work. It seems not a matter of empirical discovery.

49:52 Wes: Right. We're just stipulating that scientists could definitively discover evidence that fetuses were persons.

49:58 Matt: Yeah, they have a person meter and they hold it up to fetuses and it lights up whenever it's fetus.

50:03 Wes: There's a bar in France and. Go ahead.

50:06 Mark: Yeah, that was one of the things that Kripke was explicitly against, that you have a layman's version of a term and then you have the expert's version of term, and those actually mean different things. But it seems the matter is a little more complicated for Putnam and on the face of it agrees with Kripke because of this semantic division of labor that even when the layman is referring to like a species, it doesn't have to be just what that layman means. Just like me referring to elm. I don't know anything more than Putnam knows about elms, but yet I've given that labor over to the experts to determine my reference.

50:38 Wes: Let me put this in a different way. So meaning is going to turn out to be this hybrid, which I think involves concepts and psychological states and things like that, or something to do with the speaker competence and again, the fixing behavior and the stereotype. So it's a hybrid of that and extension. So we know that with reference. Right. You know, if we thought that water was XYZ and then we later on find out it's H2O or find out

51:04 Mark: that what we thought was water is actually 15 different things.

51:08 Wes: Yeah.

51:08 Mark: There is no real deep structure to water at all.

51:11 Wes: That's actually a harder case. But I think if we find out new things about water, that doesn't mean that references change somehow. The idea with the fetus is it's not that the concept of personhood isn't to some extent altered. It's just that meaning also consists of the extension. And the extension was the same all along whether or not we knew about it. So this is the weird thing about Putnam's theory. It's A hybrid of the mill. Mill's idea was that the meaning was just a referent. And Putnam is kind of bringing that back, except he's combining it with the other aspect.

But our concept of personhood, we don't just have an entirely new concept that's totally unrelated to the old ones as we find out new things. So we can misapply concepts. Right. We can think that a little girl can look at a zebra and say horse. And it doesn't mean that she's not using the concept horse, that she's using this other concept that includes zebras and horses. It means she's misapplying the concept horse.

52:03 Matt: Yeah. And I think the role that this deference to experts, part of the story is playing is it's answering this question. Wait a minute, Mr. Putnam, if you're insisting that the extension of ELM objectively is really, you know, this regardless of what different people think about elms, what is that fact you're talking about? And so I think the semantic deference story is meant to sort of answer that. It's like, well, it's whatever the experts are, you know, whatever the leading scientific theory is getting at when it investigates what elms are. That's the fact of what the extension of the term ELM is. Not anything about what individual people might think about elms.

52:38 Mark: So to shift to a different point about the twin earths example, he puts that in terms of indexicality, which is one of those nice philosophy terms that I love. Indexicals are usually things like me and this. Just anything that, you know, you understand what the word I, capital I means. But obviously it's going to change. It's a relative term in that it's relative to the person who says it. Putnam is saying that even terms that are not obviously indexical, like this, and I have an implicit indexical element.

53:12 Wes: Well, one thing to say about indexicality, just, it's a classic case of intension not determining extension because you and I have the same content to our eyes. But it's context that determines what their extension is going to be. And this is important because in a way, that's Kripke's whole theory of references, that context is an important factor in what things refer to. That's the sort of the causal theory of truth.

53:35 Matt: I'm glad we're getting onto this. Yeah, there's an important affinity between words like I and this and now and tomorrow and names on cripizu. But then also these natural kind predicates, these common nouns.

53:46 Mark: Well, but it's Interesting that Wes, you would put it in terms of the different viewers of I are all using the same intension. Because that doesn't seem right to me that what I mean by I transparently, it's not like I just woke up from a coma and I don't know who I'm referring to, but what I mean by I, the intension of I, it's not just that it refers to me, but the actual intentional content is me, this person.

54:11 Wes: So I thought he pretty clearly said that it has the same intension and the psychological state is just the grasping of an intension.

54:18 Mark: All right, well, indexicality and rigidity. Where were you thinking?

54:21 Wes: What page is that?

54:22 Mark: I was in 146. This whole bringing up intension in the first place, since I think intension is not something that is his starring role in his final theory here. That in some ways it's a critique of the.

54:32 Wes: I'm just bringing up because that's the way I summarized it in my notes. Did he not say it in the text? I thought he did say it in the text.

54:39 Mark: All right. It just. That threw me off for like a half hour of the first half of our discussion. So I'm trying not to repeat that here.

54:46 Matt: The thing with indexicals is they have these funny properties that normal words that aren't context sensitive in the same way don't have. And they necessitated a whole sort of redoing of the whole framework of the theory of meaning in the late 60s and early 70s. And it became necessary to introduce a third thing different from both intension and extension, which David Kaplan calls character. So rather than just two things that you might mean by meaning. So like the name Matt perhaps has an extension, namely this guy right here and an intension, like the concept of mat or something. There's a third thing, this thing called character. So now we make three distinctions. We make distinction between the character of an expression, the content of an expression, and the extension of the expression.

55:33 Wes: Where does he. He gets the character on what page is that?

55:36 Matt: I don't remember if he actually talks about this.

55:38 Mark: Yeah, I don't recall this language being used, but I think that works very well to. Rather than intension, which doesn't clarifying anything.

55:45 Wes: I must have read about it in background reading. Okay.

55:48 Matt: When he alludes to indexicals, he's kind of assuming that framework which was kind of in the process of being established. Like Kaplan was sort of shopping his view around the conference circuit at the time that this paper came out and it was becoming sort of the standard take on indexicals.

56:04 Wes: So basically, character is just rules for determining context, right? Yeah.

56:08 Matt: So character is rules for determining content, and then maybe content is rules for determining extension.

56:13 Wes: Oh, I thought context or I thought character was the whole context thing.

56:16 Mark: So for I, it's the character is knowing what the word I means. The content is knowing that it refers to you in particular when you're saying it.

56:24 Matt: The character of the word I is roughly the person speaking.

56:28 Wes: Yeah.

56:29 Matt: And then the content of the word I when I'm at say it right now is roughly mat, whatever the content of mat is. And then the extension of I is the human being sitting here right now.

56:43 Wes: So on page 151, the reason why I brought up the whole intension thing is for these words. No one has ever suggested the traditional theory that intension determines extension. The same word I has two different extensions and two different idiolex, but it does not follow the concept that I have of myself. So now he's switching the concept and psychological state is any way different.

57:03 Matt: Is this bottom 151.

57:04 Wes: Sorry, it's 151 to 152.

57:06 Matt: Oh, I see. I got it. Okay.

57:07 Wes: Yeah. So think of a doppelganger in another world who has the same concept of himself and is using I in that exact same way, but of course is referring to someone else.

57:18 Mark: All right, so this is 152. Our theory can be summarized as saying that words like water have an unnoticed indexical component. Water is stuff that bears a certain similarity relation to water around here. Water at another time or in another place, or even in another possible world, has to bear the relationship same L to our water in order to be water. Thus the theory that words have intentions, which are something like concepts associated with the words by speakers. And intension determines extension. This theory cannot be true of natural kind words like water for the same reason it cannot be true of obviously indexical words like I.

57:52 Dylan: Isn't he just clarifying a particular part of context for these natural kind words?

57:59 Wes: He's kind of giving us a different take on rigid designation, right?

58:03 Dylan: Yeah. And part of that includes articulating the way context is factoring into rigid designation.

58:12 Wes: Exactly. So, yeah, we don't pick things out with these descriptions that give us the necessary and sufficient conditions of the things we did engage in that Kripke fixing thing. So we could use descriptions or we could use ostension, but that's not because they're synonymous or the definition of the thing or something like that, or that they're by themselves with a meaning. So it's kind of like Pointing. And the context is this possible world. The actual world is the context. And that's why when you vary to other possible worlds, it's still this stuff that's the standard.

58:43 Matt: Yeah. So names and indexical expressions like I are very close. They both rigidly designate. So when I say I'm hungry right now, then the word I rigidly designates mat. In all possible worlds. The only difference between names and indexicals is that this reference fixing thing is happening anew all the time with words like I, whereas it basically just happens once with a name. But otherwise they're very similar in the way they behave when you're talking about these hypothetical alternate circumstances, these modal situations, these counterfactuals.

59:13 Wes: Well, another way of putting this is the context is this paradigmatic case. Right. So water is the stuff that's similar or the same as this stuff right here.

59:23 Matt: Exactly.

59:24 Wes: That gets you at the sense in which it's like indexicals.

59:26 Mark: So let's see what he does with that in the next section where he brings up gold. It seems like this isn't going to give us much advance over his talk about water before 1750, when people didn't know it was H2O and comparing it with, oh, if they ran into XYZ back then, they wouldn't have been able to have any way to tell the difference. But nonetheless, the people here were referring to H2O and the people on twin earth were referring to XYZ. So he talks about gold. You know that there was an operational definition of gold, you might say 100 years ago, before we understand what the atomic number and stuff does it have the properties that we think gold is supposed to have.

And he's saying that even though back in the ancient world maybe they didn't have a way of telling real gold from fool's gold, still what they meant by gold was still exactly what scientists now mean by gold. They just didn't have the way of picking that out.

1:00:20 Wes: Is it that the meaning is the same? Is that what he's saying?

1:00:23 Dylan: He's saying the extension is the same. Yeah, he summarizes this at the bottom of 153. He's saying on the View I am advocating, when Archimedes asserted that something was gold, he was not just saying that it had the superficial characteristics of gold, he was saying that it had the same general hidden structure, the same essence, so to speak, as any normal piece of local gold. Archimedes would have said that our hypothetical piece of metal X, was gold, but he would have been wrong. But who's to say he would have been wrong? The answer obviously is we are.

1:00:56 Wes: Yeah. So I think that he's saying the extension is the thing that's the same. It's not the meaning that's going to be the same. Because meaning is not simply extension.

1:01:04 Dylan: That's why we can say that one was wrong and one was right.

1:01:09 Matt: Yeah, exactly. They have to be talking about the same stuff.

1:01:11 Dylan: This is the point where it becomes clear to me what he means by talking about the meaning of meaning. That Putnam is starting from something like saying, well, look, we clearly understand something about what things mean. And rather than trying to start from a point of how you would derive meaning with a list of characteristics, it's not quite phenomenological what he's doing, but he's giving an account of how you would end up talking about the same thing. And one of you being wrong and the other one being right. And that is like the fulcrum of where we get what we mean about meaning is that thing that stays the same.

And in a funny way, I like that he uses this word essence here. It's almost. If you read early philosophy, you know, Aristotle and Plato, especially Aristotle, they would be talking about, well, what is it the thing that is the same? When I talk about these two things that are the same, and what is it by virtue of which that they're different? But particularly sameness, when we talk about one thing being the same thing as another, what is it that they are by the virtue of which they're the same? Because that ends up being their essence? And it seems to me that's almost exactly the kind of thing that Putnam's talking about.

That's the part that he's preserving.

1:02:26 Matt: Yeah, I agree. This is another place where metaphysics is sort of getting rehabilitated because the ancient notion of essence was a little bit not that trendy at the time. This idea, especially from 20th century logic, that, well, there's just properties. Anything that properly defines a set is a property, and either things have it or they lack it. But the idea that certain properties tell you more about the true nature of the thing than others was very much on the outs. And Putnam, in a way, is bringing at least part of that picture back here.

I think this idea that there's like brute similarity between things, certain things are in the respects that are most relevant to them. They can be more similar to and less similar to each other. He's kind of pushing back against this. There's an article from around the same time by Nelson Goodman called Seven Strictures on Similarity, where Goodman argued that there's no such thing as two things just being similar. There's like only similarity, inner respect. So this whole kind of bringing back the Aristotle picture, I think is kind of resisting that a bit and thinking there is such a thing as similarity, period between two different things, because certain properties are deeper properties of things than others.

Certain properties are more important to the thing than others.

1:03:25 Mark: So as a guiding way of reading Putnam, I think of just what I've heard about him before doing this reading, which is that he's associated with pragmatism. But yet in an area like this one, he's arguing against straight up pragmatism, the interpretation of which right here is operationalism. In other words, you might say a pragmatist would say, well, if it works like gold, then for all practical purposes it's gold. And he's saying, no, no, the fact that eventually, given ideal epistemic conditions, in other words, given what science could eventually figure out, if science eventually figures out that fool's gold was not in fact gold, then he wants to say as a matter of reality, it doesn't matter if it functioned as gold in the past.

Those people were wrong that claimed that this fool's gold was in fact gold. So he's taking a realist position and he gives this kind of extended thing on 153, 154 of why someone might pursue operationalism and what's wrong with that, as somebody who wants to pursue the operationalist thing and say, well, okay, prior to this test coming out, they really were both gold. The reason you might want to buy that, as opposed to Putnam's position, is because you have just some irrealist intuitions. You have some suspicion, certain skepticism about truth.

And so then he wants to criticize that. So the middle of 154. The trouble is that for a strong anti realist, truth makes no sense except as an intra theoretic notion. The anti realist can use truth intra theoretically in the sense of a redundancy theory, but he does not have the notion of truth and reference available extra theoretically. But extension is tied to the notion of truth. The extension of a term is just what the term is true of. Rather than try to retain the notion of extension via an awkward operationalism, the anti realist should reject the notion of extension as he does the notion of truth in any extra theoretic sense.

Like Dewey, he can fall back. I just want to. This is one time he mentions what we covered last episode, like Dewey, for example, he can fall back on a notion of warranted assertibility instead of truth relativized to the scientific method. If he thinks there is a fixed scientific method or the best methods available at the time. If he agrees with Dewey that the scientific method itself evolves. All right, so can we unpack that a little bit or do you think this is just too much of a digression from his overall point?

1:05:41 Wes: Well, let's say the anti theorists can use the redundancy theory.

1:05:45 Mark: Anti realist.

1:05:46 Unknown speaker: Yep.

1:05:47 Wes: Is that Tarski? Is that Tarski in truth? Maybe Matt can tell us.

1:05:51 Matt: Yeah. So the redundancy theory of truth is the sentence Paris is the capital of France. X is true is synonymous with the sentence Paris is the capital of France.

1:06:00 Wes: Or in other words, it's true if and only if. So you put in quotations. Yeah, Paris is the capital of France is true if and only if and then Paris is the capital of France without quotations. Is that.

1:06:11 Mark: That's not Tarski. Tarski's is just like. What makes it redundant is that it's not make an if and only if statement. It's just saying the whole meaning of truth.

1:06:19 Matt: You're just saying the thing over again. You don't add anything new by saying blah, blah, blah is true.

1:06:23 Wes: Right, but that's how it's phrased with an entailment sign. Anyway, the detail of that doesn't. Doesn't matter. The point is that it's a minimalist definition of truth that makes no metaphysical assumptions. You can have any metaphysical theory you want or not.

1:06:37 Matt: Yeah, so some people have thought that you don't have to, you know, if you just say there is no such thing as truth, like the noun. There's just like sometimes we add is true after the stuff we say, and sometimes we don't add is true after the stuff we say. But we're just saying stuff. There's no like thing, quote, unquote, that is truth that we have to explain and have a theory of. There's just this verbal mannerism of saying is true every now and again.

1:06:58 Mark: But for an intra theoretic notion of truth, it means that truth. This is like our William James discussion back in the day, that the meaning of truth, according to James, is that it works according to some pattern of investigation. So is it true that my glass is here in front of me? Well, if I can pick up and grab the glass, then yes, it's true. And in fact, the definition of it being true is that it is susceptible to that kind of verification. And the kind of verification is relative to what kind of investigation you're doing that for some purposes you would require very strict repeated examination and confirmability by experiments. For other kinds, you would have much looser.

1:07:40 Wes: Well, I think it's like more of a correspondence theory. Right. Or am I wrong about that? It's something to do with the coherence of all the different.

1:07:47 Matt: Yeah, the coherence would be more like intra theoretic. So it'd be like, look at all the statements that we want to define as true statements. And so what is true just gets defined internally to this game of saying things are true and false, but it's not in virtue of the fact of them corresponding to something outside of this game we play.

1:08:05 Mark: Yes.

1:08:05 Matt: That they're true or false, which is

1:08:06 Wes: what he's calling extra theoretic. This idea of corresponding to something mind independent.

1:08:13 Matt: One thing that's really weird about this whole pragmatism in general is that it kind of became the opposite of itself. So the original version of pragmatism advocated by Charles Sanders Peirce was basically just realism. And then James, it's a little bit less clear exactly where he stands on this. But Peirce's version is just. I think it's the case that if you follow perfect, idealized scientific inquiry till the end of time, what that converges on is going to be true. He was just saying that's a feature of scientific inquiry and truth, but it's not the definition of truth. Once you get into James and Dewey, they kind of make that into the definition of truth. And then things go from being realism, which was what pragmatism originally was, depending on how exactly you spell it out. Anyway, sometimes it turns into kind of the opposite, which is a kind of relativism or anti realism.

1:08:57 Wes: Right.

1:08:58 Mark: Or verificationism, which he thinks is really the same thing. So he brings up Carnap pretty directly here in 155.

1:09:04 Matt: Yeah. And Putnam is. I mean, he's realist about some things and he's anti realist about other things. So I definitely agree with Mark here that about this kind of stuff about what's the extension of a term that he's a realist about. So in that sense he's more of a classical pragmatist or a Peircean pragmatist than a Dewey style pragmatist.

1:09:18 Wes: Yeah. So the anti realist would have to reject the notion of extension. He's claiming if you reject the notion of truth, you have to reject the notion of extension.

1:09:25 Mark: Yeah. 155. He says a second motive for adopting extreme operationalist account is a dislike of unverifiable hypotheses. So that's just what I was saying there, that if you define, well, not even just defining truth. Well, at first blush it may seem as if we were saying that X is gold was false in Archimedes time, although Archimedes could not in principle have known it was false. But this is not exactly the situation. The fact is there are a host of situations that we can describe using the very theory that tells us that X isn't gold, in which X would have behaved quite unlike the rest of the stuff Archimedes classified as gold.

Okay, so if you're a pragmatist of the strong sort, then if there's no in principle way to determine gold from fool's gold, then they're the same. And he's saying that, well, even for somebody back before we discovered the distinction between them, still there was a difference. And so there are counterfactual situations. There are things that these people, they might not have known what experiments to do, but there still were those experiments out there. You know, if they, well, let's just try heating up as much as we can and see what it does.

Then even the water and twin earth water were defined as at normal temperature and pressure. They behave the same. And if they're truly different things, then there is some physical way, whether known to the participants or not, that they can be told apart. So he's actually saying that the operationalist might want to jump to the conclusion that ah, gold is just the same as fool's gold if you don't have a way to tell between them. But no, strictly speaking, somebody who really cares about the behavior of things is not just their internal essence, but we call it an essence because it reveals itself in some possible behavior.

Otherwise there's no way we would distinguish the essences of things.

1:11:08 Dylan: Yeah, he has a nice way of saying exactly that. Mark just above where you were reading 155 after he mentions carnap, he has this kind of aside. He says it is beyond question that scientists use terms as if the associated criteria were not necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather approximately correct characterizations of some world of theory independent entities and that they talk as if the later theories in a mature science were in general better descriptions of the same entities that earlier theories referred to. In my opinion, the hypothesis that this is right is the only hypothesis that can account for the communicability of scientific results.

The closure of acceptable scientific theories under first order logic and many other features of the scientific method. He's not going to take up trying to prove that. But as an aside, you see some of the way in which he's a classical pragmatist, the way Matt was saying.

1:12:07 Mark: Yeah. So you can see the connection there between the semantic internalism that we talked about and this intra theoretic truth. If you think that I'm referring to gold, I must know what gold means, or at least if I don't, than the experts in my community do. So he's kind of even going a little farther to say, because according to Kripke, his account was that there's a causal chain between. Okay, well, the people that experienced this stuff called it all gold. And so I am just acting in their tradition. So even if I know less than the people who originally named it who were at the birthing ceremony, the fact is, between the bunch of us, we have the definition of gold in our head.

1:12:47 Dylan: And so no, there's no definition of gold. It just means that you refer to the same thing.

1:12:52 Wes: Even with Kripke, you could baptize it with the completely wrong description. So everyone could be under an optical illusion, for instance, and think that gold is green. It doesn't matter if the description is right as long as you've engaged in fixing.

1:13:06 Matt: Yeah, it's not that there's a continuous definition going back to the original people who baptized gold, it's just that successive generations borrowed the reference from the earlier generations and that chain goes back to the original people who baptized this stuff here, gold.

1:13:18 Mark: Okay, but you could still see this alternate view that he's sketching out that has many of the same semantic division of labor, a chain of referencers. But that could still have it wrong according to Kripke and Putnam, because they're thinking that, okay, well, between the bunch of us, we know the meaning of this, and so we'll just define it as being gold if it matches what, what we've called gold in the past. Right. In other words, calling this stuff gold over this time amounts to a theory according to this new position he's critiquing. And so you could then just consult the theory to see whether it's gold or not. And he wants the actual externalist part of this is to say it doesn't even matter what the sum total of your culture's theory about it is. There's always more that potentially could be figured out that will falsify that.

1:14:05 Wes: So I thought that was the same as Kripke. I didn't see the difference there.

1:14:09 Matt: Yeah, I Think it's pretty much the same. But the big difference is that Kripke doesn't have any view about what the essence of any kind is. But Putnam has this story that, for example, the essence of an organism is its DNA. The essence of gold is the atomic number, et cetera, et cetera. Kripke has the idea that these things have essences, but he doesn't say what the essence is. He just thinks that there's something or other that's the essence of these things and that's what makes the necessary statements about those things true, their essences. But I'm not going to tell you what the essence is.

1:14:37 Dylan: I wanted to ask a question. A lot of the examples we've been giving have involved essentially progressive revisions of concepts, or we've also mentioned the birthing of a concept. And I was wondering about the throwing away of concepts and what that means about the notion of reference here. So, besides all kinds of physical theories that have existed that get revised or clarified, you know, the whole story of the atom and things like that, there are plenty of theories that end up just being judged as wrong and just abandoned. You know, the caloric theory of heat is like, you know, a standard example. Or you might even pick other things that we now think of as a kind of crazy superstition or stupidity, like phrenology or notions of humors as being the way in which blood and other substances are transported through the body.

1:15:36 Matt: So phlogiston.

1:15:38 Dylan: Phlogiston, yeah. Okay. So any of these things. So in those cases, those accounts were abandoned as not providing the right theoretical account of the thing that was being examined. So in one way, the examples are in line with what Putnam's talking about. That there's something that you were talking about that exists, that persists along, that was the reference. And what you end up doing is you end up throwing away that concept rather than simply refining it. And I guess I'm just wondering aloud if there's something different or clarifying going on in those cases.

1:16:13 Matt: Yeah, I think it's really important that it's different. Those are like. So the water, the gold, the elms, tigers. These are like the normal cases, as it were, where you did succeed in referring to something. The first time around when you first stumbled across some tigers, pointed to them and said, I wonder what this is. You were actually successfully referring to something. Things get a lot weirder when we get into the stuff like phlogiston or the jadeite nephrite case where. Well, let's just go back to the phlogiston Case, the phlogiston case, I think I'm pointing at something that's contained in an object, this stuff, baptizing it, phlogiston, and then going on to investigate it and ask questions about it.

But actually what happened was I wasn't referring to anything. I made the mistake of thinking I was referring to something. When I pointed at an object and tried to point at the phlogiston, I just failed to point at anything I didn't refer.

1:16:59 Dylan: Isn't it more precisely that I associated an extension with phlogiston and then in the end I found a contradiction, that the thing that phlogiston, by its own definition, its extensive relation, was at odds with the phenomena that I was expecting it to be extensively related to.

1:17:23 Wes: Actually the phenomena fix the extension. Right. And then you have a theory of stuff you can't see, which turns out not to be the essence of what you picked out.

1:17:34 Dylan: Yeah. So basically that you end up coming at it from two different ways. You have, as you just said, Wes, that the phenomena fixes the extension. But then you sort of have to confirm your theory. You have an extrapolated extension that must be true based upon your theory. And they end up not overlapping or they don't overlap enough, or they have a contradiction between the extension that is in the phenomena that you are looking at. And so you end up throwing away the theory ham fistedly. The theory can't be revised in such a way as to keep it. You pick something else.

1:18:07 Mark: He makes a joke about phlogiston or quotes a physicist, something Smith, joking that oh, there is such a thing as phlogiston, it's valence electrons. And he ends up sort of rejecting that. It would be a judgment call on the part of the science of. Does this concept that you have before, is it close enough to something that actually ends up existing that you want to retain the term?

1:18:28 Matt: Yeah, exactly.

1:18:29 Mark: Or that, that you can say that there was a causal chain between what you're referring to by that and what the original people did by that.

1:18:37 Matt: Yeah. So was it like actually nothing that you were pointing at or were you pointing at something and then forming a mistaken belief about it? And in the phlogiston case, I think you would say that you failed to even point at anything. There wasn't anything there for you to have a theory about. You thought the extension of phlogiston was non empty. You thought there was something there. In fact, it turns out the extension of phlogiston is empty.

1:18:57 Mark: So what's the next part in meaning of meaning here?

1:19:00 Matt: You want to talk about pencils okay.

1:19:03 Wes: If you want to touch on that example, it's kind of a more radical.

1:19:07 Matt: Just one thing I think is really interesting about his use of the pencil as an example here is that he's the only one actually to look at an artifact in the context of the discussion that I can really think of. There's some more recent people who do. But usually people who write on this topic are looking at what were called natural kinds in the literature of the time. So stuff like elements found in nature and species found in nature, but not artifacts like pencils. So I think it's interesting that he doesn't say too much about what the nature of a pencil really is, except that they're not animals.

That's, you know, which I think we can all agree with. But he doesn't really say what the nature of a pencil is. But he sort of, in including that as an example here, allows that maybe pencil could be a natural kind even though it's an artifact, or it could be a natural kind, at least in this respect. It can share these features with natural kind terms like tiger and water.

1:19:50 Wes: The point of this is to show that it's not just natural kinds that are rigid designators. Right. It's virtually any noun.

1:19:57 Matt: Yeah, it's gonna be any common noun, I think, on this picture.

1:20:01 Dylan: Well, let's just say what he does. Does in this. What. What he's doing. We just have said he talks about

1:20:05 Wes: pencils and organisms, but saying it could be the case that pencils are really organisms.

1:20:12 Matt: Yeah, it's. It's a lot like Kripke's Fool's Cats example. What if it turned out that cats were robots? This is sort of the reverse. What if it turned out the pencils were secret, like alien life forms or something, Even though we thought they were thingies made in a factory?

1:20:24 Wes: Yeah. So instead of doing counterfactual on a natural kind, he's doing it on this artifact. So that's the way the reversal is important.

1:20:32 Matt: Yeah. And I think he just wants to make exactly the same point as Kripke. He wants to say that it's epistemically possible, as it were. That is to say, we can imagine, we can wonder whether pencils are organisms. That's a coherent thing to wonder. Even as we insist that it's metaphysically necessary that pencils are not animals.

1:20:50 Wes: I mean, it's metaphysically. If they end up being animals, it's metaphysically necessary they're animals. If they end up being organisms. I mean. Sorry. If they end up being. Not. It's metaphysically necessary. They're not.

1:21:02 Matt: Whatever is true of these things over here that we're pointing at right now, that's the metaphysically necessary thing.

1:21:06 Wes: But it's epistemically possible that they're one or the other, even though we know it's not really possible. Anything is possible. That's the point.

1:21:15 Dylan: To me, this is where that distinction between metaphysically and epistemically. Metaphysically necessary, which is the part that Kripke and Putnam want to really preserve while separating it from epistemic necessity happens. He's going at it directly, but it's sort of underlying the conundrum of meaning. Right. The way I understood Putnam as characterizing the problem is that you were sort of conflating or keeping together metaphysical necessity and the epistemic necessity all the time.

1:21:47 Wes: Yeah. Like Kripke, he's gonna reject this conflation of the a priori and the necessary. It's a posteriori whether it turns out to be an organism or not. But it's still metaphysically necessary.

1:22:01 Matt: Yeah. And metaphysically necessary sounds, I don't know, really, like grand or something hardcore. But it ultimately just boils down to the thing. It just boils down to the truth that everything is identical to itself. Kind of boring fact that everything is identical to itself. Which I think is one of the interesting features of Kripke's bringing back of metaphysical necessity. He gives us this example. Look, what is necessarily H2O? We have metaphysical necessity again, guys, but it's. Why do we have metaphysical necessity? Well, it's just because everything is identical to itself.

1:22:27 Wes: Yeah, interesting.

1:22:28 Matt: So this stuff can't be anything other than this stuff. So it has this weird combination of being kind of trivial, but then also kind of interesting because it's that possibility of us learning that this stuff is identical to this stuff that makes scientific inquiry work.

1:22:45 Dylan: Yeah. On the Same page on 162 at the end of the pencil discussion, he says when we use the word pencil, we intend to refer to whatever has the same nature as normal examples of the local pencils. In the natural world, pencil is just as indexical as water or gold. And this is the point that you made just a minute ago, Matt, that they end up being sort of generic kind of species type nouns. And then he goes on to characterize another guy, Katz, his theory about cats. Katz's theory about cats.

1:23:18 Matt: Okay, Jerrold Katz's theory of cats.

1:23:20 Dylan: And then. Yeah, but he has another nice section on top of 163 again, clarifying why it's important that rigid Designators are not descriptions that we don't need. We don't need a description theory. The reason we don't use cat as synonymous with the description is surely that we know enough about cats to know that they do have a hidden structure. It is good scientific methodology to use the name to refer rigidly to the things that possess that hidden structure and not to whatever happens to satisfy some description. Of course, if we knew the hidden structure, we would frame a description in terms of it, but we don't know it at this point. In this sense, the use of natural kind words reflects an important fact about our relation to the world. We know that there are kinds of things with common hidden structure, but we don't yet have the knowledge to describe all those hidden structures.

1:24:18 Matt: So this actually, I think is one moment where he really does diverge from Kripke because so let's say it turns out that blah, blah, blah, a feature of DNA is the essence of cats. Then on Putnam's view, you kind of actually could just boil cat down to a definite description. It would be like satisfies this definition that we discovered is really the essence of cats. Whereas on Kripke's view, it seems like you're always going to be in this deferring expertise to the future situation, at least until Kripke tells us more about what he thinks an essence is.

1:24:45 Dylan: I mean, my only quibble about that is, is if you picked DNA, it might satisfy the characteristic that all cats have a particular characteristic of DNA. But if that's all you meant by essence was what is the single one thing that they all have in common? But it doesn't seem like it would satisfy the other characteristic usually mean by essence, which is somehow it gives a complete description. Unless you assume that every feature of a cat is presented by its DNA, which that seems to be pretty easy to show that that's not true.

1:25:23 Matt: Yeah, I think what he's assuming about the notion of an essence here is an essence explains the features that you observe of the thing. Like if such and such feature that we haven't identified yet of cat DNA is the essence of cats, that's going to explain everything we observe about cats whenever we observe this feature and we ask, ah, why does the cat have this feature? Well, this fact about the DNA that's going to answer that question or whatever the essence turns out to be.

1:25:46 Mark: So I'm thinking relating this back to the it ain't necessarily so paper. It's if we find out that cats are in fact not animals but robots. So it Seems on Kripke's view, we have reason to believe that cats are animals. But if we actually discovered that they were robots, then they were never animals. We would not say in this world, if we discovered that cats are in fact robots or demons or whatever, we would not say, oh, we actually discovered there are no cats, there are just these robots. Because cat means it's an animal. However, you would not want to say that we've discovered that some robots are animals.

1:26:22 Wes: Well, yeah, that's true. Definitely true.

1:26:25 Matt: That's a nice. That's a nice synopsis. Yeah.

1:26:27 Wes: Yeah. So when we designated something cat, yeah, we thought it was an animal, but really we're just saying whatever this thing is, we're assuming it's a natural kind and that fixes the rigidly designates. And then they can turn out to be robots or anything you like.

1:26:41 Matt: The robot scenario is very much like the phlogiston. What actually happened with phlogiston? We pointed at these cats. We thought we were pointing at some animals but in fact we weren't pointing at. We were failing to point properly. And turns out that these things were actually robots.

1:26:54 Wes: We successfully pointed. We successfully fixed the referent.

1:26:58 Mark: It sounds like by comparing it to phlogiston. You're saying there's too much baggage in the word cat.

1:27:02 Wes: Right.

1:27:03 Mark: We don't want to say these robots just use the word cat to refer from here on out to a species of robot. Because cat just. Even though we used the word cat to fix the referent before. But maybe we need to get rid of that word because it has a definite description attached to it, whereas the thing itself did not.

1:27:23 Wes: You might want to change the word if that ever happens.

1:27:27 Matt: Right. So this analogy of phlogiston is exploring the. Someone else may feel that the correct thing to say is it turns out that there are and never were any cats. Arm of the option. But what he actually says in this bit is that it's sort of up for negotiation. Which are the two options we take.

1:27:42 Wes: I was just thinking of finishing up getting a sense of what his theory of meaning ends up being.164 with a section on meaning. That's one important place for that. Let us now see where we are with respect to the notion of meaning. We have now seen that the extension of a term is not fixed by concept that the individual speaker has in his head. And this is true both because extension is in general determined socially. So this is like the causal theory of reference. There's a division of linguistic labor as much as of real labor. And because Extension is in part determined indexically.

The extension of our terms depends on the actual nature of the particular things that serve as paradigms. And this actual nature is not, in general, fully known to the speaker. So, for instance, this sort of relates back to what we were just discussing. But we could point to tigers based on their stripes and then make that a paradigm of tiger. But it doesn't mean that there can't be tigers without stripes. That might not be the best way to put it. So traditional semantic theory leaves out only two contributions to the determination of extension, the contribution of society and the contribution of the real world.

Exclamation point. We saw at the outset that meaning cannot be identified with extension, yet it cannot be identified with intension either. If intension is something like an individual speaker concept, what are we to do? And then he talks about these two different alternatives, which amount to rejecting principle one or principle two. So one route we could take is we could give up the idea that meaning determines extension. That's number two. So this is where he kind of spells out why that's counterintuitive. If we follow this route, we might say that water has the same meaning on Earth and on twin Earth, but a different extension.

While this is the correct route to take for an absolutely indexical word like I, it seems to be incorrect for words that have been. We have been discuss. So this is what I was thinking of with elm and beech, where he uses this. So for elm and beech, if they're switched on twin earth, then we would not say that elm has the same meaning on Earth and twin earth, even if my doppelganger stereotype of beech, or Elm, as he calls it, is identical with my stereotype of Elm. Rather, we would say that elm and my doppelganger's idiolect mean speech. For the same reason, it seems preferable to take a different route and identify meaning with an ordered pair or possibly an ordered n tuple of entities, one of which is the extension.

So here's the really radical thing, right? And it's a way it brings it back to Mill, right? For whom the referent was the meaning. So instead, as you know, as for Russell, we use these descriptions to pick out the reference, or in other words, the meanings determine reference. Here reference is part of the meaning. The extension is just part of the meaning. So this is sort of the fruits mark you were talking about the practical part. This is like the fruits of Kripke's theory of reference in terms of getting us to a new theory of meaning,

1:30:30 Dylan: the N tuple theory of meaning.

1:30:32 Wes: That's right. And I think the other part of the N tuple is the concept part where people have to know things. He'll talk later on about linguistic competence. Speakers actually do have to know things. They have to know these stereotypes, for instance. So it's not like the psychological states of speakers in a society end up being irrelevant. So the ordered pairs will include extension, but it will also include sort of a new whatever corresponds to psychological state, which he's going to break down in a much more complex way. And saying psychological state or concept would be misleading because he's going to give what he calls these vectors of what it means to have acquired a word, and so on and so forth.

1:31:13 Mark: And so here's where he's going to bring back something like the description theory of meaning. Not that having a description determines what the extension is, but that to judge someone as competent linguistically, they have to have some properties in mind. You know, they have to know them about the stereotype. About the paradigm cases the paper is Semantics Possible is almost all about that. But he kind of sums it up in this paper as well. So do you know the meaning of the word tiger? Well, if you don't know that tiger in general have stripes and are animals and blah, blah, blah, then you would not be judged to understand that concept at all.

1:31:51 Wes: Yeah. So extension is part of meaning, but also. Yeah, individual competence is part of it as well. Yeah.

1:31:57 Matt: So you're sort of bringing back the psychological part here is. Yeah, but it's a heuristic we use to figure out whether something falls into the extension. But it's not like the definition of what counts as falling in the extension. That's the sort of distinction he wants to insist on.

1:32:11 Wes: Right, right.

1:32:11 Mark: And it's going to vary depending on your particular culture. So what counts you as competent to use the term elm? Well, he thinks that he's competent to use the term elm even though he can't distinguish an elm from a beech or, you know, he couldn't necessarily pick out an elm from a lineup. I'm not clear that that means he actually knows that word.

1:32:32 Matt: Yeah, he might actually, because the early remark where he sort of makes fun of his conflating the two would suggest that maybe he thinks his competence in that regard could use a little work.

1:32:41 Wes: Yeah, it's just he's not expected culturally to know the.

1:32:46 Mark: Yep.

1:32:46 Wes: Yeah.

1:32:47 Mark: And that's exactly the kind of thing that you could see as varying over time. He talks about an Indian tribe who make it obligatory to know the difference between an Element of each.

1:32:57 Wes: Right.

1:32:58 Mark: Somebody who did not recognize an elm would be said not to know what it is not to know the meaning of the word. Not to have the word.

1:33:04 Wes: Yeah. That's sort of relevant to his talk of what it means to have acquired the word tiger. Right. At the top of page 167 use passes muster. Which means he's not going to point at snow and say is this a tiger? Or something like that. His total way of being situated in the world and his linguistic community is such that the socially determined extension of the word tiger in his idiolect is the set of tigers. Clause 2 means that speakers on twin earth who have the same linguistic habits as we do count as having acquired the word tiger only if the extension of tiger in their idiolect is the set of tigers. So if they are XYZ tigers, then fool's tigers. No go. No go on that.

1:33:47 Matt: So would this be a good moment to bring up that it's a defeasible list? That bit I find especially interesting.

1:33:52 Mark: Yeah.

1:33:52 Matt: So what's the stereotype of tiger generally? You know, having stripes and being about yay big and like roaring in this really deep voiced way and being like the biggest cat and being fearsome and living in like West Bengal or something? Something like that is the stereotype. But it's not a list of jointly necessary and sufficient characteristics for being a tiger. It's not anything that's strict. It's this sort of loosey goosey in general kind of set of rules of

1:34:15 Wes: thumb that we can generally use to notalltigers.

1:34:18 Matt: Hashtag it is precisely notalltigers. That's precisely the idea. It's the same move when somebody says not all men. So they're not definitions in the sense that they're not determining what it is to be a tiger. But they're also not definitions in the sense of these characteristics aren't even going to apply to all tigers. They're going to be kind of more like rules of thumb.

1:34:34 Wes: And we have to have acquired that stereotype to have acquired the word.

1:34:38 Matt: Yeah, like to be able to figure out. It's all we have if we want to figure out what a tiger is.

1:34:42 Wes: That doesn't mean it's the definition or the necessary and sufficient conditions or even the meaning.

1:34:46 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:34:46 Mark: And he says so that stereotype could change over time, that if something happens there's a cataclysmic event and all the tigers lose their stripes. They wouldn't necessarily not be tigers anymore, it's just that the stereotype would change. Let's say that right now one out of every 200 doesn't have stripes. Probably that might be true, I don't know. And all the striped ones die off. So the ones that are left. I made his example sad. Okay, I shouldn't do that.

1:35:11 Wes: The bottom of 167, despite the fact that he seems to have brought back a sort of psychological element. So there's a psychology to this. But again, it's important not to identify the thing with the concept. So one reason for introducing this way of speaking is that the question, does he know the meaning of the word tiger? Is biased in favor of the theory that acquiring a word is coming to possess a thing, called its meaning. Identify this thing with a concept, and we are back at the theory that a sufficient condition for acquiring a word is associating it with the right concept. The very theory we spend all this time refuting. So henceforth we will acquire words rather than learn their meaning. That acquisition does have a psychological component, but the point is that we're not moving backwards into equating the meaning with a psychological grasp of a state in which we grasp something.

1:36:00 Matt: Yeah, it's like these stereotypes, I think are so, you know, we're not experts and we don't have access to the latest theories of tigers. So it's like these stereotypes, I think, are the next best thing. We're not experts. We don't have infinite time to study them in labs. Maybe we have to make on the fly judgments. So like the sort of silver medalist in the competition for available theories of tigers is this imperfect but good enough conception of what a tiger is. It's interesting, I think, that he doesn't really get into how wrong can a stereotype be and still be useful as this kind of heuristic. So, like, how many false beliefs about tigers could be part of this stereotype? And we still get the reference for this whole sort of premise to just work and not go haywire.

1:36:34 Wes: Yeah, Kripke gives more examples on that. Right. Kripke is very adamant about how you can fix a reference with a completely wrong description.

1:36:42 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:36:43 Matt: And presumably at some point, once we get enough craziness into the stereotype of a tiger, we're going to become really bad at identifying tigers. But this is precisely the issue you get into when you're interested in defeasible generalizations is like, they can be a little bit wrong, but like, how wrong do they get to be and still be workable?

1:37:01 Mark: So it's trying to find the places in here where he gets pragmatic So I had pointed out for folks, we didn't include it in our official list of readings. In this 1990 collection that I have called Realism with a Human Face, he actually has an essay called is water necessarily H2O? Which goes over some of the same ground and reflects on all these papers after the fact. And he's, I think, a little more clearly pragmatist in that, but it's in here somewhat too. So157,158, he's talking about lemons. What's sort of the core sense of a lemon? For example, I might say, did you see the lemon, meaning the plastic lemon?

The less deviant case is this. We discover tigers on Mars. That is, they look just like tigers, but they have silicon based chemistry instead of a carbon based chemistry. A remarkable example of parallel evolution are Martian tigers. Tigers. That depends on the context. In the case of this theory, as is the case of any theory that is orthogonal to the way people have thought about something previously, misunderstandings are certain to arise. One which has already risen is the following. A critic has maintained that the predominant sense of, say, lemon is the one in which anything with a sufficient number of the superficial characteristics of a lemon is a lemon.

The same critic has suggested that having the hidden structure, the genetic code of a lemon is necessary to being a lemon only when lemon is used as a term of science. Both these contentions seem to me to rest on a misunderstanding, or perhaps a pair of complementary misunderstandings. So now it seems like he's being realist here. Sorry, that's 157, jumping to the bottom of it. Okay, mistake of thinking that there's an important sense of lemon, perhaps the predominant one in which to have the superficial characteristics of a lemon is at least sufficient for being a lemon is more plausible if among the superficial characteristics one includes being cross fertile with lemons.

But the characteristic of being cross fertile with lemons presupposes the notion of being a lemon. Thus, even if one condition can obtain a sufficient condition in this way, to take this as inconsistent with the characterization offered here is question begging. I thought this is where he was getting saying that there are different possible ways you could pick out something, and it sort of depends on your purposes. This is the pragmatic element here, and it's only coming through, I think very superficially here, it seems that the overall thrust of this paper is still realistic.

He's arguing against these people that are taking the phenomenal route.

1:39:14 Dylan: In the middle of the paragraph that you, you skipped over down to the end of it. He says, at the same time, the sense in which to be a lemon something has to have the genetic code of a lemon is not the same as the technical sense. The technical sense, I take it, would be one in which lemon was synonymous with the description which specified the genetic code. But when we said to change the example that to be water something has to be H2O, we did not mean, as we made clear, that the speaker has to know this. It is only by confusing metaphysical necessity with epistemological necessity that one can conclude that if the metaphysically necessary truth condition for being water is being H2O, then water must be synonymous with H2O, in which case it is certainly a term of science.

So the whole lemon discussion, I think, was enunciating the mistake that you make by confusing metaphysical and epistemological necessity. It's pragmatic. Insofar as he's arguing that science maintains metaphysical necessity but allows for varying epistemological disjoins them, I shouldn't say he's arguing that. He says that's an implication. That's his view. He isn't spending the paper arguing that that's the characteristic of science. Well, it's sort of obvious that it is.

1:40:31 Mark: So let's maybe compare that example to one from. I'll just read you a quote. It's from the Realism with a Human Face. Is water necessarily H2O article, page 68 there. One of the big improvements as he's reflecting back on this is he was thinking at the time of the meaning of meaning. He was, along with Kripke, saying, what's important is the microstructure, right? That's what makes water H2O. But why do we care about the microstructure? Well, by this later point, Putnam is saying that the microstructure makes it obey the same scientific laws. So I was getting at this before that what makes gold and fool's gold different is not just that they have the microstructure, but that there is some eventual way that given the proper scientific techniques, we could figure it out.

He doesn't consider situations like this, but imagine if you had just not by any science, at any point in possible history could you determine the difference between gold A and gold B. But yet there was still some microstructural difference, such that one kind of gold has a soul in it and one kind of gold doesn't have a soul in it. But this is never going to show up with any test. It seems if you are a realist about souls, then you would have to say that we're just wrong in thinking that these are the same thing, but actually they're different.

It just seems for Putnam, come on, if there's any real difference, if there's a soul that is going to have to turn up by some eventual future science, otherwise there has to be a sign of it. Yeah.

1:41:54 Dylan: This reminds me of the discussion we had with Chalmers where Chalmers, in his resurrection of Carnap, we had this exchange about there being distinctions in entities that had no sign of them but nonetheless were actual real distinctions to be made. And he said, well, you are a verificationist, aren't you then? Yeah, because I was taking the position that, well, it seems like a distinction without a difference if you can't actually find any sign of that distinction. And he wanted to say that, well, of course it's a distinction.

1:42:31 Wes: Well, if you're a realist, you might be prone to believe that even if

1:42:35 Dylan: you would say it's a real distinction,

1:42:36 Wes: there are things that because of our cognitive limitations, we can't ever possibly know that those things are still there and real.

1:42:45 Dylan: That's what's always confused me. It's taken me a long time to figure out what the term realist means in philosophy, because when you say that, I understand that that's what is meant by the term realist, but it seems so counterintuitive about what you would mean by something being real.

1:43:03 Mark: The ultimate name of Putnam's position is called internal realism, and it's actually supposed to be different than this hardline metaphysical realism. It is. There's always a reference. We've read enough of his arguments against the operationalists to know that it can't just be according to my current scientific theory right now, are these the same thing? Like, even if you can't tell the difference between gold and fool's gold, the fact that there is a difference means you're just wrong. It's not that. It's that the person who didn't have this conceptual distinction was correct.

You could say his assertion was warranted. That's actually what the language that Dewey eventually used. He didn't even use truth anymore. He said warranted assertibility. So those people were warranted in saying fool's gold and gold were the same thing. That's not the position that Putnam is going to take. But still he thinks that there is some difference between straight up equivalence and there's some reference to a theory. And we didn't read enough to say anything about that. Let me give an example that he gives out of Here, this page 68 that I was going to read.

So he's just said the criterion of substance identity is that A and B are the same substance if and only if they obey the same scientific laws. I do not claim there's no vagueness at all in this condition of adequacy. The notion of same laws is, to be sure, somewhat vague. For example, consider an ordinary sample of iron. By the standards of high school chemistry, it is chemically pure, but it consists of different isotopes. These occur in fixed proportions, the same proportions in all naturally occurring samples. By the way, some philosophers who use isotopes as examples appear not to know this.

1:44:37 Matt: Yeah, and this is pretty much what I was trying to get at earlier when I was on Putnam's conception of essence. The essence is going to be whatever it is that explains all the observable facts about the thing. I think this law business is another way of saying that.

1:44:49 Mark: And he continued, any naturally occurring sample of iron which is sufficiently free of impurities will exhibit the same lawful behavior as any other, unless we go to a quantum mechanical level of accuracy. But if we use a cyclotron or some other fancy gadget from atomic physics to prepare a sample of iron which is monoisotopic, that sample will, if the tests are sensitive enough, behave slightly differently from a natural sample. Should we then say that a hunk of iron consisting of a single isotope and a hunk of natural iron consisting of the various isotopes in their normal proportions are two different substances or one, indeed two.

Naturally occurring samples may have tiny variations in the proportions with which the isotopes occur, and perhaps this will result in a slight difference in their lawful behavior. Are they samples of different substances? Well, it may depend on our interests. And in parentheses, this is the sort of talk Kripke hates. But the fact that there is some component of interest, relativity here and perhaps some drawing of arbitrary lines does not change the fact the degree of arbitrariness is infinitesimal compared to the arbitrariness in the almost the same matter at the time of origin criterion for the identity of tables.

So he's, you know, he gives us more detail. It just sounds like most of what we put forward here. He's entirely in agreement with Kripke and just adds a little more into his positive story. And I just think that if you delve deeper into implicitly what Kripke was getting at, we were saying that he's opening up room for metaphysical truth, that he can talk about necessity again, that Putnam ultimately is going to have a very different Agenda, summarizing it as he is sympathetic to pragmatism, I think works pretty damn well.

1:46:22 Matt: One way I think you could try to reconcile this more anti realist sounding strain from this later piece with the meaning of meaning is maybe by trying to say that the interest relativity figures into the act of pointing at something. And what you're pointing at depends on your interests, but then the facts that are true about the thing you pointed at, that's not interest relative.

1:46:41 Wes: Yeah, this is where again this whole. What I see is this sort of hybrid theory of meaning where we started out with this idea that a psychological state determines intension, which determines extension. And now we have meaning as sort of composed of extension plus whatever has become of that psychological state in terms of competence of language users. So that hybrid portion, it seems like that means that you're anchored in the world in one way through extension and rigid designation. You're also still tied to the psyche enough that you could take into account interest relativity, for instance.

1:47:23 Mark: Any other thoughts about what you got out of this as distinct from Kripke and why this was worth doing Something on a similar topic, there's a little

1:47:31 Wes: section, the Meaning of Meaning, where he gives his conclusion at the end of this paper.

1:47:34 Mark: Go ahead.

1:47:35 Wes: Yeah, it's on page 190. So we may now summarize what has been said in the form of a proposal concerning how we might reconstruct the notion of meaning. And at the bottom of 190, my proposal is that the normal form description of the meaning of a word should be a finite sequence or vector whose components should certainly include the following. It might be desirable to have other types of components as well. One, the syntactic markers that apply to the word, for example noun. Two, the semantic markers that apply to the word, e.g. animal, period of time.

We didn't really go over that. He talks about some of that stuff above. But three, a description of the additional features of the stereotype, if any, and then four, a description of the extension. So you get an example of water. Syntactic markers are mass noun concrete semantic markers are natural kind liquid stereotypes are colorless, transparent, tasteless. And then the extension you give by using the term H2O, he kind of goes on to say that we're not just saying that the meaning includes, I.e.

1:48:43 Mark: h2O.

1:48:44 Wes: Yeah, some sort of description of the extension. The meaning actually includes the extension. So again, going back to this sort of reincorporation of the Millian conception of meaning as just the referent, except it's referent plus it's like he should join

1:48:59 Mark: the Million Man March.

1:49:02 Matt: Sorry, that was pretty slick.

1:49:05 Wes: Absolutely terrible.

1:49:07 Dylan: Even notes at the end of the paragraph there, the objection, who are we to say what the extension of their term is, in fact has been discussed above. Note that this is fundamentally an objection to the notion of truth and that extension is a relative of truth and inherits the family problems.

1:49:25 Wes: Yeah, that's going back to his argument against the operationalists.

1:49:29 Dylan: Yeah. Where he wants to preserve a notion of truth.

1:49:33 Matt: So it's striking, I think, that actually this proposal is not that different from what some contemporary semanticists are taking up. In particular the idea of including the stereotype as part of the meaning of a predicate. So, for example, there's a theory by Galit Sassoon, I don't know if she's published it yet, but it's a very interesting account of the phenomenon whereby when you say, is there any beer? You're not talking about is there any beer in the universe, but is there any beer here in the apartment, in the fridge? There's this interesting work by Galit Sassoon that trying to account for that context sensitivity in the meaning of the word is there using stuff like stereotypes.

Using stereotypes sort of turned into schemas in cognitive science. But by having this stereotypical information associated with predicates, you can then draw on that to try to explain how the meaning of other expressions like every and any and is there shift from context to context.

1:50:21 Dylan: How far do you think Putnam wants to take the notion of the analogy of a vector in this? Does all he mean is something that's multi valued, you know, that has multiple components?

1:50:33 Matt: I think literally all he means is a tuple. It's just like an ordered. Not pair, but an ordered tuple of these four things, an ordered quadruple, because

1:50:42 Dylan: the term vector has a lot more baggage coming along with it than n tuple in the sense that a vector would be oriented in a basis state that you could see, you could transpose from different points of view. But there are characteristics that remain the same in it, and particularly like its length and stuff like that, that they're invariants with respect to it. Even though its individual components may change in size, the vector itself has characteristics that never change. And there's something about that image in that analogy that seems to have a lot to do with the way he's describing meaning and the notion of extension. It just seems like such a pregnant choice of term, but he doesn't go any further than that.

1:51:27 Matt: That's an interesting point. Yeah, yeah. Could he do all that crazy linear algebra stuff with this terminology of a vector. Could there be such a thing as a vector space? And could there be such a thing as a transformation of the space? That would be awesome if there was,

1:51:37 Dylan: even if there didn't end up being a algebra of it. But that he meant to include the other characteristics. Like, for instance, the fact that a vector is in a space would mean that somehow that there is a space or a basis set for how you mark out meaning.

1:51:54 Matt: And every meaning would be a linear combination of some of the basis meaning.

1:51:59 Dylan: Yes. And that all real meaning would have certain components of each of these components of it that all together form the space of meaning. And in some ways that's what he's doing here, Right. He's saying there's at least four dimensions of meaning. And by that I just mean in direct analogy with spatial dimensions.

1:52:17 Matt: Oh, that would be so cool if he cashed any of that out. But he's definitely too lazy to do that, I think.

1:52:21 Wes: Let's wrap it up. Okay. Dylan, you want to start? Since you're going to.

1:52:26 Dylan: I liked it. I found Putnam's a nice extension of Kripke. I thought that Matt's suggestion that we take these papers on as a follow on was a great one. I found that while it was challenging, sort of intricate in his argument, I thought that it was really very readable and enjoyed it. I think I enjoyed the other two papers, maybe because of their brevity. The Meaning of Meaning was definitely meatier, but maybe in that way a little more of a slog.

1:52:56 Mark: Well, it was nice that the last portion of it was all, like, responding to philosophers that we didn't read. And so we just decided to totally neglect that part.

1:53:05 Dylan: I agree.

1:53:06 Mark: Oh, it's 20 pages shorter than we thought. Awesome for our purposes.

1:53:12 Dylan: I also think we talked a bit about the pragmatism part, which wasn't explicit. And Mark was trying to pull it out of here. I think it, to me, is a good example of where you can go with essentially pragmatic notions of the way science works, but maintain the basic realism. That's one of the things I liked

1:53:31 Wes: a lot about it.

1:53:32 Mark: Sure. So I'll have to take this as a teaser that maybe after we do Rorty, or in the context of talking about Rorty, we can return to a little bit of Putnam's more why he's not a straight up realist. But I think we can see that he doesn't seem to want to make the same hay about necessity and about talking about Essences that we read into Kripke, that is commonly read into Kripke. So I think there is a different agenda here and I want to read more in this tradition.

1:54:00 Wes: Yeah, I found them pretty pleasurable to read like Kripke. Just the sort of pleasant but very precise style. Precise but affable. Somehow. The fundamental insight here, which is that it's not that meaning determines reference, but that meaning somehow presupposes reference, or that reference or the extension is part of meaning, is really fascinating. And of course he's using the idea that we stipulate the referent. Kripke's idea that we stipulate the referent for the purposes of counterfactuals. Well, now we stipulate the extension for the purpose of meaning, so. Really interesting.

1:54:40 Mark: Thank you, Matt.

1:54:42 Wes: Did Matt want to give a closing?

1:54:45 Matt: Sure, yeah. So this stuff of Putnam's is a little bit unusual for me personally in that I actually agree with it. So most of the stuff that Putnam is famous for arguing, actually I don't find his arguments persuasive at all. When I read basically all of Putnam's other stuff, I have this simultaneous double reaction of not buying the arguments at all on the one hand, but then also really admiring his sort of breadth, the breadth of all the different influences that he draws on. I really like the way he sort of stretches to get examples from math and physics, but then also like lesser known philosophers.

Especially kind of at the time that he was writing, I think it was really kind of ballsy to go out and be like, hey guys, you should be reading Derrida and Heidegger too. It's not. We shouldn't just all be reading from the same small circle of authors. He really tried to draw in the widest possible range of references and I think it definitely enriches his work about this argument specifically. This is, as I mentioned, one of the only arguments of Putnam's that I actually buy. And perhaps it has to do with the fact that he developed this view in collaboration with Kripke.

I'm not sure. One thing I think is really interesting about this whole argument from Kripke and Putnam is that there's this sort of process whereby like in English classes in grammar school we're taught like, well, there's this one thing, the noun, and it could be a person, place or thing. So mat's a noun, but dinosaur and rat are also nouns. And those are just the same kind of thing. We sort of grow up learning that. Then we take like intro logic and we're like, no, no, no, no, no. Rat and dinosaur are predicates. They're not the same. And a name mat is a name.

And names and predicates are very different. I don't know why those English teachers taught you that nouns were all the same. So I think what happens with this Kripke Putnam thing is that. That it's not that they're going back on what the logicians taught us about the difference between names and predicates, because there are important logical features of common nouns like rat and dinosaur that logic captures, but there are also maybe important analogies between names and these kinds of predicates. So maybe they're a little bit more like names than we thought.

Maybe we went a little bit too kind of overboard getting so excited with the distinction between a name and a predicate. And maybe we kind of have to complicate that a little bit and recognize that some predicates are a little bit namelike in certain ways. And I think it's actually still kind of an open question in the field exactly what we want to say about these common nouns and how exactly are they different from predicates. And there have been all kinds of really inventive theories to try to get at that difference. But, yeah, we still have yet to actually, I think, pin down the meaning of common nouns.

It's an interesting sort of movement back towards the English class picture of what nouns are, where there's this unity between words like mat and words like dinosaur. One thing I really appreciate from this whole literature is the opening up of that investigation.

1:57:13 Mark: All right, next time on the Partially Examined Life, we're going to talk about the rationality of religious faith. And the text we used is the final chapter of Paul Helm's 1999 Oxford Reader, Faith and Reason, which includes selections by Antony Flew, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, William Alston, Peter Van Inwagen, and others. Hey, we're supported by your donations. Please go to parcelexaminelife.com to make a contribution. Big donors since last time have included Bryce Nicol, John Givens, Francine Bunton, Moises Lopez, William Jones, Glenn Fuller, Robert Monroe, Brandon Walker, Jeffrey Hume, Stephen Norman, Steven Linder, Peter McLean, Sean Nickerson, Guy Shokrani, Alan Hester, Brian Gifford, Axel Kfam, Skavang, Laura Hosford, Randall Rose, and Megan Edwards.

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1:58:42 Unknown speaker: Hey listeners. Members, this is Nathan Hanks with news on the partially examined Life's Not School and Citizens Forum. PEL members have created new Not School groups that you should look into joining this December. There's the Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, Contingency Hegemony, Universality, Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, a collaborative book by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek. Also Seeing Things as they Are by John Searle, which you should definitely read since Searle is scheduled to come on PEL in a few months to talk about the book.

You'll also find in the Citizens Forum new group proposals. There's Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett and Homo Sacer by Giorgio Agamben. They're reading new chapters and looking for other members to join them. Lastly, we have forum topics which which you can weigh in on. Is there a moral dilemma for self driving cars or can a trash compactor want something? You can join these discussions with other members or create your own in the Citizens Forum. If you want to become a PEL member, just visit the site. You'll get bonus audio on a private Citizens feed and lots of other great stuff.

If you have ideas, questions or concerns about Not School, email me. That's nathanartiallyexaminedlife.com thank you for listening.

1:59:52 Mark: Hey, we've got a Facebook page you should go check out. You should follow us on Twitter. You should use our Amazon link to do your Amazon shopping so we'll get a cut of that. And of course we accept donations. And we just love you.

2:00:04 Unknown speaker: That's all.

2:00:04 Mark: We just want to hang with you. Good night everybody.

2:00:07 Wes: Good night.

2:00:07 Dylan: Good night.

2:00:08 Matt: Good night.

2:01:10 Unknown speaker: In the courtyard I believe you when you say you'll feel the best Collect and cast on through In a warm space between your eyes there's no pain in spilling droplets as you can sigh when the hair below your town stands itself on end and your brown furs to heaven till you sleep again in the courtyard I can see you though we lack collective dream and I can meet you. In a moment I'll be with you. I'll be tripping to see world with my head open wide in gaping moments when the lake FL in and uploads my medulla and I don't control relationships or work or sex or maintenance of home of my accounting or the way I want to go, Then I.

In the. In the boyard. I believe you when you say you feel the heaving. Well, I've been there too, In a warm space spraying outward careful wash of euphanasia pointing onward when you care. The mold is simple as and it's got no end. If you're born below the deck to take it yet again, you can flank until the pulse of what I'm feeling inside Waking head first open w in the bo.