Are Meanings in the Head?

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Karen Ortiz        

Philosophy 409

Second Paper

November 18, 2004

Are Meanings in the Head?

The doctrine that the meaning of a term is a concept carried the implication that meanings are mental entities.  Frege, however, says that meanings are public property—that the same meaning can be “grasped” by more than one person and by persons at different times—he identified concepts with abstract entities rather than mental entities; however, “grasping” these ‘abstract entities’ was still an individual psychological act.  Secondly, the timeworm example of ‘creature with a kidney’ and ‘creature with a heart’ shows that two terms can have the same extension and different intension, but two terms can’t have different extension and that same intension.  So the theory of meaning came down to two unchallenged assumptions: 1) knowing the meaning of a term is just a matter of being in a certain psychological state, and 2) that the meaning of a term determines its extension.  In Putnam’s Meaning and Reference, he argues that these two assumptions are not jointly satisfied by any notion, let alone any notion of meaning and claims that the traditional concept of meaning rests on a false theory (288-289).  

For Putnam’s argument that meanings are not merely in the head, he uses the “twin earth” example, which is as follows:  there is a planet out there that we will call Twin Earth, and in almost every situation, Earth and Twin Earth are exactly alike.  Even though the people on Twin Earth speak English as well as do the people on Earth, there are a few slight differences in dialects.  One of the main differences between the two planets is the word water.  Water, on Earth, represents H2O, but on Twin Earth, it represents some other liquid, namely XYZ.  Both “waters” look alike, smell the same, and are as abundant as each other, and therefore indistinguishable from one another except for their chemical make-up.  If anyone from Earth went to visit Twin Earth and saw their ‘water,’ they would assume it had the same definition as “water” on Earth.  The only way this visitor would know that Twin Earth’s ‘water’ was different from Earth’s “water” would be when he found out it was XYZ and not H2O.  And when the visitor returns home, he will most likely tell people that on Twin Earth, the term “water” means XYZ, not H2O.  The same would be true if someone from Twin Earth visited Earth (289).

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Now, Putnam argues, if we go back to an earlier time, say 1750, and conduct the above experiment when science was not as advanced on either planet as it is say in 1950, then neither planet knew the chemical make-ups of their “waters,” yet they still knew what the term “water” was for their corresponding planets even though they understood what the terms meant differently in 1750 than in 1950 and even though they were still in the same psychological state.  Therefore, according to Putnam, the extension of the term “water” is not a function of the psychological state of the speaker ...

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