Reply to two Comments

In 1976, when I delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, I often spent time with Peter Strawson, and one day at lunch he made a remark I have never been able to forget. He said, "Surely half the pleasure of life is sardonic comment on the passing show".  This blog is devoted to comments, not all of them sardonic, on the passing philosophical show.

Hilary Putnam

Reply to a Comment by Sanjit Chakraborty

 You write, "Like you, I also agree that an expert has the comprehensive grasp of meaning (better understanding of the extension of the term) whereas an ordinary person has a partial grasp of meaning (e.g., of the term water)." But that isn't "like me". I deny that an expert has a more comprehensive grasp of the meaning of  water.

Yet I do not deny that an expert (when the science is sufficiently mature) "has a better understanding of the extension of the term".

  The purpose of the post you commented on was to explain why agreeing with you about the latter does not require me to agree with  you about the former. The reason is that understanding the extension of a term is not, in the case of natural kinds, linguistic knowledge at all. It is chemical, or metallurgical, or physical knowledge, but not linguistic knowledge, although the successful division of linguistic labor depends on some individuals possessing it, and other speakers being properly linked to them.

Reply to a Comment by Nathaniel Baird

You write, “I recall you saying in response to Wright that both BIVs (assuming they are referring to computer processes, or whatever) and non-BIVs (when they are speaking about what BIVs refer to) are talking about the same thing, but using different descriptions. 
And so would you say that there is a fundamental problem in attempting to talk strictly about the "extensions," rather than the descriptions?”

   My answer is that we can talk about gold and not only about descriptions of gold because we are causally linked to gold in ways that facilitate both perception and cognition. You continue, “Do we avoid skepticism by showing that the skeptic must be assuming he/she can be referring to these extensions? What sense does it make to talk about what-we-refer-to-out-in-the-world?”

And my answer is (1) that if “avoiding skepticism” means giving the skeptic an answer that the skeptic herself must accept, then that is something one shouldn’t try to do. Hume was right about that one. But if it means showing  that the skeptic doesn’t have an argument the non-skeptic must accept, then I believe that can and should be done. (Hume missed that one.) My Brain in A Vat [BIV] argument was part of doing that. And as for “What sense does it make to talk about what-we-refer-to-out-in-the-world?” the answer, I repeat, is that we can talk about gold and not only about descriptions of gold because we are causally linked to gold in ways that facilitate both perception and cognition. And I defend this claim simply by defending scientific realism. (See “On Not Writing Off Scientific Realism” in Philosophy in an Age of Science.)

,

Meaning and the experts

(answer to question in previous post)

In 1976, when I delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, I often spent time with Peter Strawson, and one day at lunch he made a remark I have never been able to forget. He said, "Surely half the pleasure of life is sardonic comment on the passing show".  This blog is devoted to comments, not all of them sardonic, on the passing philosophical show.

Hilary Putnam

Although the semantic externalism I defended in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” is relevant to speaker’s meaning as well, the explicandum of that essay was meaning in a language. I know that there are those (Noam Chomsky and, at one period, Donald Davidson) who have denied the very existence of “languages”, but  I cannot take this language skepticism seriously. If the fact that the boundaries between languages are somewhat vague and, moreover, depend on social conventions, means that languages do not exist, then, by the same token, cities do not exist either[1], but I am not a city skeptic either. More seriously, if social entities do not exist then there is no subject matter for any of the social sciences, and it is sheer chutzpah on the part of even a great linguist or philosopher of language to claim such a thing.

Not only do I believe that there are such things as languages, I believe that there are things that speakers of a language are expected to know (both in the sense of tacit “know-that” and in the sense of “know-how”) qua competent speakers of that language. “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” enumerated a number of those things. For example, competent speakers of English are expected to know that tigers are stereotypically–not necessarily actually—striped. But, and this is where “externalism” comes in, knowing, all those things is not necessarily speaking English‑it could be speaking Twinglish, the language called “English” on Twin Earth! Meaning has another dimension, apart from the dimension of speakers’ tacit knowledge. Words like “water” and “gold” have their reference fixed partly by the actual nature of what are taken by speakers to be paradigm cases and partly by the division of linguistic labor, which allows a subset of the speakers, the relevant experts, authority over such questions as whether a liquid is really water or a metal is really gold.  But the knowledge of the experts is not knowledge it is linguistically obligatory for a speaker to have. That is why I resist saying that the experts have a better grasp of the meaning of “water” or “gold”. Nevertheless, the extension is a component of the meaning of those words, but not in the sense that speakers or even experts have to possess a description of the meaning that would single out the right liquid or substance or whatever on an arbitrary planet. (Before the development of modern chemistry, the experts might very well be using false theories, whose falsity doesn’t matter in the Earth environment but would become disastrous on Twin Earth). What speakers have to be causally linked to is the correct extension, not the correct description  of the extension. And extensions, as opposed to descriptions of extensions, aren’t things we grasp with our minds; they are out there in the world.

All this is summed up in the “normal form description for ‘water’ on page 269 of my (1975) Mind, Language and Reality.  A brief history of how I came to all this is contained my Schock Prize Lecture, “The Development of Externalist Semantics.” Theoria 79.3 (2013), 192-203.

---

[1] In “Explaining Language Use,” Philosophical Topics, vol. 20. no. 1, the philosophy of hilary putnam (205-232) [collected in Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (Cambridge, 2000)], Chomsky wrote, “Such terms as London are used to talk about the actual world, but there neither are nor are believed to be things in the world with the properties of the intricate modes of reference that a city name encapsulates.” (See my Reply (379-385) in the same issue of Philosophical Topics.)

A Question About Experts’ Meaning

In 1976, when I delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, I often spent time with Peter Strawson, and one day at lunch he made a remark I have never been able to forget. He said, "Surely half the pleasure of life is sardonic comment on the passing show".  This blog is devoted to comments, not all of them sardonic, on the passing philosophical show.

Hilary Putnam

 A good friend, a graduate student who is interested in externalism, semantic holism, context sensitivity, etc., asked me an important question recently, having to do with the relation between experts and lay speakers in what I called “the division of linguistic labor” in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”.

The question was whether I would say that experts have a more comprehensive grasp of the meaning of terms like gold and water. I answered:

  I don't want to say that "An expert has a comprehensive grasp of the meaning whereas an ordinary person has a partial grasp of the meaning of a term like 'water' or 'elm tree'", but I see why you think I should. What I want to say, in brief, is that in the ordinary sense of "know the meaning of", experts and laypersons both "know the meaning of gold, and what that means is that they possess linguistic competence with respect to the word. They have the same stereotype, and the term refers to the same metal (has the same extension).[1] The expert has a better description of that extension than the layperson (although even the experts' criteria are generally only approximately correct), but that doesn't mean that the expert "has a more comprehensive grasp of the meaning of 'gold'", it means that s/he knows  more about gold. 

      But I do say that the extension of 'water' is one of the things that belongs in the "normal form description" of the meaning of water (and, similarly, the extension of 'gold' belongs in the normal form description of the meaning of 'gold') - so doesn't someone who knows more about the extension have, in that sense,  a more comprehensive grasp of the meaning of the word?

      That is the puzzle you raise for my view.

My answer to the puzzle will be in the next post.

I discussed a similar issue with Gareth Evans in 1976. (A correspondent recently asked whether we had ever talked about the division of linguistic labor.) My answer was:

 I did discuss this with Gareth when I was giving the Locke Lectures and our views did not agree. He maintained, in those precise words, that (in the division of linguistic labor) we defer to the meaning of the expert (his very words) and I insist that the expert does not have a different meaning (in the case of the word gold), he simply knows more about gold.

---

[1] See the “normal form” I proposed for representing the meaning of a natural kind word in the final pages of “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”.

Stop Press

In 1976, when I delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, I often spent time with Peter Strawson, and one day at lunch he made a remark I have never been able to forget. He said, "Surely half the pleasure of life is sardonic comment on the passing show".  This blog is devoted to comments, not all of them sardonic, on the passing philosophical show.

Hilary Putnam

Happily, what the Wiki entry on me says about my attitude towards metaphysical realism was updated within hours of today's previous post. The new PP, a little before a section titled "Neopragmatism and Wittgenstein", reads: 

Although he abandoned internal realism, Putnam still resists the idea that any given thing or system of things can only be described in exactly one complete and correct way. He thus accepts "conceptual relativity" - the view that it may be a matter of choice or convention, e.g., whether mereological sums exist, or whether space-time points are individuals or mere limits. In other words, having abandoned internal realism Putnam came to accept metaphysical realism in simply the broad sense of rejecting all forms of verificationism and all talk of our ‘making’ the world.

Grateful thanks to the updater!