Page 545 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

language have been heavily influenced by his stance on some major philosophical issues. Originally, he subscribed to what he himself has come to derogate as 'metaphysical realism,' the view which entails com- mitment to (a) the thesis that the world is deter- minately constituted and mind-independent, and (b) the thesis that there is one ultimate 'true' story of the world on which science is striving to converge.
One of the principal targets of attack has been the idea that meaning determines reference. More specifi- cally, Putnam has argued that meaning is not a func- tion of, or reducible to, psychological states and processes. Using the notorious fantasy of 'Twin Earth,' he imagines two worlds exactly alike but for the fact that one has water and the other an identical- seeming fluid of very different fundamental consti- tution. He further imagines two individuals (one for each planet) who are physical and psychological replicas. One speaks English, the other a language syntactically and phonetically identical with English. Each individual describes their experience of the respective fluids in the same way, uttering sentences of the form 'This is water.' But the term 'water' cannot have the same meaning in each case because it has a different reference from planet to planet. As Putnam wittily puts it, 'Either meaning ain't in the head, or meaning doesn't determine reference.' So the meaning of sentences is not to be characterized by procedures of verification but by states of the world. However, assigning truth-conditions to sentences does not uniquely determine what they refer to. Putnam is con- cerned to pin down how reference is secured, and this requires a shift from the level of sentences to that of terms (e.g., noun expressions). So the question becomes: how is the meaning of terms to be fixed? According to one analysis, ordinary proper names, e.g., 'Sappho,' 'Napoleon,' are abbreviations for 'clus- ters' of descriptions. Terms for kinds of things, e.g., 'gold,' are similarly accounted for.
Drawing on the work of Saul Kripke, Putnam classifies both sorts of terms as rigid designators, i.e., they pick out the same things in 'all possible worlds.' So, for instance, the term 'Napoleon' picks out the individual necessarily in a way in which the term 'The
Victor of Austerlitz' does not (Napoleon might never have entered upon a military career). For Putnam, what determines reference is a combination of deixis together with the structure of the world. Thus 'gold' rigidly picks out the metal whose nature is investigated by science. On the other hand, reference can be fixed by appeal to descriptions of a certain sort, e.g., for gold by 'yellow, malleable metal which does not dis- solve in acid.' The appeal, therefore, is to stereotypes which are collections of ideas (inaccurate or imprecise) associated with the terms. Ultimately, for Putnam, meaning is interactional or social, a feature frequently ignored in most mentalistic accounts.
2. Developments
Putnam has come to reject his earlier realist assump- tions, and has modified his views on language. His conclusion is that the theory of reference and the theory of language understanding are not as inti- mately related as many have thought. Plausibly enough, he argues that one can learn a language with- out having any sophisticated notion of truth, i.e., one does not need to know that there is a correspondence between words and reality. Rather, he has come to agree with Michael Dummett that understanding a sentence is not equivalent to knowing its truth-con- ditions, since it is then difficult to make sense of what that knowledge amounts to.
See also: Natural Kinds; Reference; Sense; Sortal Terms.
Bibliography
Putnam H 1978 Meaning and the Moral Sciences. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London
Putnam H 1981 Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge Uni- versity Press, Cambridge
Putnam H 1983 Realism and Reason, vol. 3. Cambridge Uni- versity Press, Cambridge
Putnam H 1987 The Many Faces of Realism. Open Court, La Salle, IL
Putnam H 1990 Realism with a Human Face. Harvard Uni- versity Press, Cambridge, MA
Putnam H 1992 Renewing Philosophy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Willard Van Orman Quine was born in 1908 in Akron, Ohio, and spent his academic career in the Philosophy Department at Harvard University. His earliest pub-
lished work was in mathematical logic but he also produced many books and articles of the greatest importance for postwar American epistemology and
Quine, Willard Van Orman C. J. Hookway
Quine, Willard Van Orman
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