WATER.
…I. The liquid of which seas, lakes, and rivers are composed, and which
falls as rain and issues from springs.When
pure, it is transparent, colourless (except as seen in large quantity,
when it has a blue tint), tasteless, and inodorous.
--
…the
fact that an English speaker in 1750 might have called XYZ ‘water,’ whereas
he or his successors would not have called XYZ water in 1800 or 1850 does
not mean that the ‘meaning’ of ‘water’ changed for the average speaker
in the interval.In 1750 or in 1850
or in 1950 one might have pointed to, say, the liquid in
--Hilary Putnam[1]
1.Over
thirty years ago, we all learned from Kripke and Putnam that the extension
of a natural-kind term such as “water” is determined by the relevant natural
kind—in “water”’s case, the chemical kind, H2O.And,
if less obviously, so is that term’s intension determined by that kind:
“Water” designates H2O in every possible world in which water
exists.(Hence, necessarily, if water
exists, water = H2O.)
Putnamian
natural-kind externalists refer us to the planet Twin Earth, a molecular
duplicate of Earth except for the waterish stuff there being a different
chemical substance, XYZ.The externalists
hold that the word “water” as used on Twin Earth does not designate what
our word “water” does.H2O
and XYZ are simply different substances.The
sentence “Water is usually liquid” is true in English iff H2O
is usually liquid, while the same(-spelled) sentence is true in Twin English
iff XYZ is usually liquid, a quite different state of affairs.And
our word “water” and the Twin English word “water” generate different functions
from possible worlds to extensions.
Moreover,
consider a single possible world containing both H2O and XYZ:
Our “water” applies at that world just to the H2O and not to
the XYZ, while Twin “water” applies to the XYZ but not to the H2O,
so the two words can hardly have the same meaning.
2.But
what does the English word “water” mean?It
is important to see that H2O is not the answer, even
though “water” rigidly designates H2O and H2O is
the word’s intension (in the sense that “water” specifies a function that
spits out H2O at every world).For
many English speakers know the word’s meaning perfectly well even though
they have never heard of H2O and have no chemical concepts at
all.And as Putnam seems to concede
in the passage quoted above, “water” meant what it means in English long
before Watt and Lavoisier, and we do not suppose that the word’s meaning
changed with their discoveries.So
we cannot say that the meaning of “water” is its intension.
So,
a puzzle:“Water” must mean something
different as between Earth and Twin Earth, because the same-spelled words
designate different natural kinds in those speech communities.The
natural kind H2O is the intension of the (Earth) English word.Yet
that intension is not the English word’s meaning.So
the fact that the words name different natural kinds does not after all
show that “water” means something different as between Earth and Twin Earth—but
it was our only reason for believing in such a difference in the first
place.
Now,
Putnam said in the second epigraph to this paper that “water” did not change
its meaning between 1750 and 1850.But
we cannot maintain both that meaning determines reference and that linguistic
meaning is “in the head,” for the Twin-Earth example shows that what is
in the head does not determine reference.We
must choose, and for his part Putnam would rather preserve the Fregean
idea that meaning determines reference than hold on to the commonsensical
notion that meaning is in the head (op. cit., p. 704).He
argues as before that English “water” and Twin-English “water” differ in
meaning.It follows that they always
did differ in meaning, from the day they were both coined.
Our
reasons for rejecting the first option—to say that ‘water’ has the same
meaning on Earth and on Twin Earth…??…may be illustrated thus:Suppose
‘water’ has the same meaning on Earth and on Twin Earth.Now,
let the word ‘water’ become phonemically different on Twin Earth—say, it
becomes ‘quaxel’.Presumably, this
is not a change in meaning per se, on any view.So
‘water’ and ‘quaxel’ have the same meaning (although they refer to different
liquids).But this is highly counterintuitive.Why
not say, then, that ‘elm’ in my idiolect has the same meaning as ‘beech’
in your idiolect, although they refer to different trees?(p.
710n)
3.I
do not accept the “quaxel” argument.[2]It
comes close to begging the question.Of
course we grant the referential difference, and the stipulated merely phonemic
difference.But everything else on
Twin Earth is the same as here, as regards anything anyone has ever thought
was pertinent to meaning: everyday verification condition, inferential
role, “use” of various sorts.Putnam
has in effect just asserted that referential difference entails meaning
difference no matter what.[3]
In
fact, turning Putnam on his head and simultaneously borrowing his own idea
as expressed in the second epigraph, there is an argument to show that
“water” on Twin Earth does mean what our “water” means.
1.In
1750 on either planet, there was nothing to make a difference in meaning
between English “water” and Twin English “water” but the chemical distinctness
of the substances referred to.
2.In
1750 on each planet, the chemical natures and hence the chemical distinctness
were entirely unknown, and had no effect on linguistic competence or linguistic
practice.
3.If
X has no effect on linguistic competence or linguistic practice, then X
cannot make a meaning difference.
\
4.In 1750 on either planet, there
was no difference in meaning between English “water” and Twin English “water.”[1,2,3]
5.The
meaning of English “water” did not change between 1750 and the present.
6.The
meaning of Twin English “water” did not change between 1750 and the present.
\
7.There is no present difference
in meaning between English “water” and Twin English “water.”[4,5,6,
transitivity]
4.These
considerations could be taken to show that Putnam’s externalism was wrong
from the beginning.That suspicion
is supported by the intuitions of many uninitiates:Circa
1973, some professional philosophers were at first quite unconvinced that
XYZ is not water; they held that XYZ and H2O are just two different
kinds of water, even as (Putnam himself admits) jadeite and nephrite are
two different kinds of jade.That
intuition soon dwindled to tiny-minority status, though it has not disappeared.[4]Perhaps,
as Rob Cummins would say, those who voiced it were just not invited to
any more conferences—and the preëminence of the externalist intuition
is a sociological artifact of Putnam’s (then) scientism backed by his charisma
and professional stature.
In
further support of that suggestion, there is the reaction of neophyte undergraduates
to being taught Putnam.In my experience
at least, they put up considerable resistance.I
can get them to admit that there is a sense in which XYZ is not
water; but few go any further with Putnam.So
it may be that Putnam’s externalism is just mistaken, and the English word
(as opposed to the philosophers’ word) does mean roughly what the OED
says it does.
But
remember Putnam’s previous negative case.[5]Dictionary
definitions such as the OED’s do not give meanings, in the sense
of the entries’ being correct in virtue of meaning.For
the features mentioned in them are not analytically implied by the term
defined.[6]Let
us look back at the OED’s definition of “water” (first epigraph
to this paper):“The
liquid of which seas, lakes, and rivers are composed…”: It is an entirely
contingent fact that there are seas, lakes, and rivers; water could exist
perfectly well without them.“…[A]nd
which falls as rain and issues from springs”: Likewise.“When
pure, it is transparent, colourless (except as seen in large quantity,
when it has a blue tint), tasteless, and inodorous…”: These properties
depend on the contingent structure of human sensory systems; had we a different
sort of taste buds, for example, water might taste in some way to us.Nothing
whatever in the OED entry is analytically implied by “water.”
Likewise,
remember examples such as “cat”:If
anything were analytically true of cats, it would be that they are animals.But
as Putnam pointed out,[7]
it is not analytic that cats are animals; they could have turned out to
be robots originally planted on Earth by Martians.
And
here for your delectation are some of the OED’s definitions for
other natural-kind terms highlighted by Putnam:
TIGER.
…1. A large carnivorous feline quadruped, Felis tigris, one of the two
largest living felines, a catlike maneless animal, in colour tawny yellow
with blackish transverse stripes and white belly; widely distributed in
Asia, and proverbial for its ferocity and cunning….
GOLD.
…
elm.
…1. The name of well-known trees belonging to the genus Ulmus, esp.,
in England, the Common or Small-leaved Elm (Ulmus campestris), a
tree having rough, doubly serrated leaves, flowers nearly sessile, the
fruit oblong, deeply cloven and glabrous; in Scotland, the Witch or Wych
elm (Ulmus Montana) or the Cork-barked Elm (Ulmus suberosa);
in U.S. the White Elm (Ulmus americana)….
beech.
…
aluminium.
…[I]. A metal, white, sonorous, ductile, and malleable, very light, not
oxidized in the air, used for instruments, ornaments, and as an alloy.In
Chem. it has the symbol Al., is tetratomic, has alumina as
its oxide, and the alums as its chief salts.
molybdenum.
… A metallic element (symbol Mo) occurring in combination, as in molybdenite,
wulfenite, etc….
Unicorn.
…
lemon.
…1. An ovate fruit with a pale yellow rind, and an acid juice.Largely
used for making a beverage and for flavouring.The
juice yields citric acid; the rind yields oil or essence of lemons,
used in cookery and perfumery….
red.
…1. Having, or characterized by, the colour which appears at the lower
or least refracted end of the visible spectrum, and is familiar in nature
as that of blood, fire, various flowers (as the poppy and rose) and ripe
fruits (whence the frequent similes red as blood, fire,
a
rose, cherry, etc.)….[This
entry goes on for seven and a half more huge OED pages.Read
them and find out for sure what “red” means.]
Thus,
Quine was right in his famous quip about dictionaries and encyclopedias.The
OED itself may be part dictionary, but it is mostly encyclopedia.Hardly
anything—if anything—in an entry for a natural-kind term is analytically
implied by that term.
By
the same token, David Lewis’ method of platitudes will not work.[8]“Water”
cannot mean substance that satisfies most of the commonsense beliefs
about water, because there are countless possible worlds in which water
satisfies few if any of the platitudes.(Also,
some natural-kind terms have no associated platitudes whatever.There
are no commonsense beliefs about praseodymium, or about upupa epops,
the Eurasian hoopoe.Of course those
may be considered theoretical terms, and then Lewis would say that they
are implicitly defined by their containing theories, but even if so, ordinary
speakers do not know the theoretical definitions.)
What,
then, is the pre-chemistry meaning of “water”?This
paper’s main contention is that that is a very tough question, and should
receive much more attention than it has from philosophers of language.
5.
An obvious cue comes from David Kaplan, who (during the same period and
not altogether coincidentally) pointed out that we have two types of linguistic
meaning, which correspond rather nicely to his technical notions of “character”
and “content.”[9]Content
is a proposition individuated by truth-condition, a function from possible
worlds to truth-values.Character
is a function from contexts of utterance to contents.Kaplan
invokes character to accommodate deixis, especially indexical pronouns.For
example, the character of the sentence “I need sleep now” incorporates
the rules that “I” refers to the speaker and that
“now” refers to the time of utterance,[10]so
that in a particular context the sentence expresses the proposition, that
that very person (who spoke) needs sleep at that time.
Kaplan
argues that character is a more appropriate bearer of the title of “meaning”
than is content.An English speaker
who comes into a room and sees a token of the sentence “I have not slept
since Thursday” written on a piece of paper obviously knows what the sentence
means, even if s/he does not know what singular proposition has been expressed
in the context.So perhaps “water”’s
meaning is its character.
On
this model, the leading candidate would be something indexical, something
like “whatever real stuff-kind shares the nature of that there,”
where the speaker is pointing at a sample of water (= H2O) to
define the term ostensively (p. 702).And
Putnam endorses that suggestion.Actually
he offers several alternate indexical formulations:“Water”
means, “stuff that bears...[the same-nature relation] to the water around
here” (p. 710, italics supplied), but that definition is obviously
circular.Also, “the same stuff as
we call ‘water’”—but that would falsely make the kind term metalinguistic.For
purposes of initial discussion I shall stick to the ostensive definition
model.
There
are daunting objections to that proposal.First,
indexicals are devices of direct reference and commit speakers to the existence
of their referents.If I point at
the stuff in the glass and say “that,” I thereby refer to that particular
sample of water, and make it part of the content of what I am saying, just
as when I point at a light switch and say, “That one turns on the porch
light.”But it is absurd to think
that when anyone uses the word “water,” they are even tacitly referring
to any particular sample of water.And
since different people’s uses of the word would be grounded in different
ostendings, “water” would have a different meaning for each of us.(This
is not to deny that Kripkean reference-fixers for “water” contain
just such indexical elements; of course they do.But,
notoriously, to fix reference is not to fix sense.)
A
move of Sellars’[11]
will solve that problem.It is to
replace the singular reference to a sample by deferred reference via an
ostended exemplar.When I
point at the stuff in the glass, I refer, not to it, but the kind of which
it is a characteristic instance.It
is as if in response to your asking what color my new car is, I were to
point at a recent copy of Philosophical Issues and say “That color.”
In so speaking, I do not refer to the particular sample I am pointing at,
but only to the color considered as a type; the sample does not enter into
the truth-condition of what I have said.
But
what about empty natural-kind terms, like “unicorn” and “phlogiston”?No
one has ever demonstrated a sample of any nonexistent kind, nor have there
ever been such samples “around here.”If
we assume that empty kind terms have the same type of meaning that referring
ones do, the indexicality view fails.However,
Putnam might reply in Sellarsian style by appealing to deferred ostension,
as when we point to a picture of a unicorn, or an effluvium thought to
be phlogiston.The reference to an
unexemplified kind might succeed even if the alleged exemplar is unreal
and the kind nonexistent.
But
further objections loom.
(1)
Ordinary uses of “water” are not usually accompanied by demonstrations
of any kind, much less of a sample of water.(Though
this does not touch the “around here” formulation.)
(2)
Even when a use of “water” is accompanied by a demonstration, the “this”
or “that there” might, on any given occasion, be demonstrating something
that is thought by the speaker to be water but is not, as in Putnam’s own
“gin” example.[12]If
one’s use of “water” on that occasion happened to have been grounded in
such an error, the indexicality view predicts that the word would mean
gin rather than water.(That does
not touch the “around here” formulation either.)
(3)
Tyler Burge (op. cit., pp. 103-05) points out that the proposal suffers
from being false.If “water” were
indexical, an Earthling who visited Twin Earth, demonstrated some XYZ and
said “There is some water” would be speaking truly, for XYZ is the stuff-kind
that shares the nature of “that there,” and is also the waterish stuff
“around here,” i.e., on Twin Earth.[13]
There
is a further indexicality option, though I have never seen it defended
as such:Instead of indicating a local
sample or otherwise referring to the environment, let the indexical home
on the speaker and/or the speaker’s original linguistic community.E.g.,
perhaps “water” means “the waterish stuff found in my neighborhood
of origin,” or (again) “the same stuff as we call ‘water’.”Such
proposals avoid all three of our objections, because no sample is demonstrated
and those particular indexicals do not shift their references when we get
to Twin Earth.
But
such a move has a permanent liability.(4)
I had earlier complained against the second of the latter proposals that
it makes the kind term metalinguistic; indeed, it makes “water” mean something
about the word “water” itself, which seems intolerable.The
first proposal contains a different sort of substantive characterization,
“waterish stuff.”If “waterish” means
all or even some of the features cited in the OED entry discussed
in the preceding section, then it should not appear as part of the meaning
of “water,” because none of those features is analytically implied by the
term.
The
problem generalizes.If “water” is
pegged indexically to me or to my community, it must be so pegged by way
of some relational predicate.The
predicate will be a substantive one, and inevitably not one that is analytically
implied by “water.”(This also afflicts
the earlier “around here” version.)
And
finally: (5) I know of no linguistic evidence that natural-kind terms contain
any indexical element.“Water” bears
neither syntactic nor semantic marks of indexicality.(a)
As we have seen, “water” bears no discernible semantic relation to any
demonstrative or personal pronoun.(b)
Nor is there the slightest evidence of syntactic lexical decomposition,
such as pronominalization into the term itself (cp. “Bluto vomited, but
he cleaned it up promptly”).(c) Unlike
“flat” or “tall,” “water” is not a comparative adjective; there is no issue
of contextual standards of strictness.(And
needless to say it does not take comparatives.)(d)
I can think of no context in which an Earthling and a Twin Earthling visitor
to Earth could respectively assert and deny the same (otherwise nonindexical
and unequivocal) sentence containing “water” without one of them being
in error—“Even in the Jornada del Muerto there is some water,” “People
drink water every day,” etc., in contrast to “It’s raining here,” “This
field is flat.”
To
borrow Putnam’s own famous colloquialism:[14]
Cut the pie any way you like, the meaning of “water” just ain’t indexical.
Yet
substantive predicates, and something like “waterish” in particular, may
still figure in the meaning of “water” even though “water” is not indexical
and those predicates are not analytically implied.That
is the basis of our next attempt to specify the meaning of “water.”
6.There
is a now well-known development of Kaplan’s “character” idea that dispenses
with indexicals: Frank Jackson’s and David Chalmers’ notion of “A-intension”
(
(Incidentally,
I came to this literature through Jackson’s work in philosophy of mind,[18]
and because of his retro and evil use of it in that area, followed by Chalmers’
even more pernicious version, I conceived a poisonous dislike of the whole
idea.But if we return to the present
purely linguistic problem, I find myself much more sympathetic.Indeed
I now see why
The
notion of “considering a world as actual” is not at all clear, and has
been shown to admit of several importantly different versions.[19]But
for present purposes let us say it is this: We
stipulate and hold fixed that on Twin Earth and any other relevant twin
planet and possible world, “water” is a natural-kind term and works semantically
much as it does here.That is, it
refers to a chemical substance that is the underlying scientific essence
of the familiar liquid in question, but its reference is fixed by superficial
descriptions such as are found in the OED (“the liquid of which
seas, lakes, and rivers are composed, and which falls as rain and issues
from springs”).Everything else about
English is held fixed also.
Then
we can generate
Notice
that this is “meaning” in a weaker sense than usual.It
does not generate the usual analyticities:It
is no longer analytic that water falls as rain and issues from springs,
etc.(At best it is analytic that
“whatever is actually water falls as rain and issues from springs.”)So
we have the idea of a weaker task in the explication of “water”:
Not to give a synonym, that preserves the term’s analytic connections,
but to point to only a lesser kind of “meaning”—though in a sense of the
“m”-word that is arguably more worthy.At
present it is roughly, once again, Kaplan’s idea of character; we just
specify the function from utterance contexts to intensions.(Though,
again, Jackson and Chalmers think this particular kind of character also
yields a synonym, once we insert the rigidifier “actual”: “whatever actually
‘plays the watery role’.”)
My
problem with all this is that I do not believe that English words have
A-intensions.To generate
an A-intension, one needs a transworld “role,” as in “plays the
watery role.”Such roles are supposed
to be constituted by reference-fixing descriptions, that are the same across
the relevant worlds.That requires
that an English word have a distinctive and stable set of reference-fixers.But
the latter pretty clearly does not obtain.Reference-fixers
are rarely enshrined in the public language;[20]
they are private to individual speakers at particular times.
Of
course, dictionary entries contain common stereotypical information about
water, and philosophers have had no trouble coming up with sets of stereotypical
reference-fixers such as the ones deployed in the OED.There
is a loose body of information about water that we 21st-century
Americans share with most of our fellow English speakers.That
seems to constitute a “watery role.”But
there being such a body of information is a highly contingent social and
environmental fact.One could introduce
the word “water” even if there were neither seas
nor lakes nor rivers nor rain nor springs, etc., by
reference to some other mode of acquaintance with water.In
fact, even the collective body of all the reference-fixers that have ever
been mentioned in the Putnam literature is expendable.There
would always be other reference-fixers for “water,” so long as there were
(real or imaginary) water around affecting us in some way—just by making
a trickling sound, or looking purple, or feeling slippery.And
“water” would still mean just what it does now, in real-world English,
even if its reference were fixed, in some context, by descriptions entirely
different from the usual ones.(N.b.,
In saying that, I am not begging the question by just insisting that “water”
means H2O; we already know that “water” does not mean H2O.)
Oddly
enough, it is not a linguistic fact that “water” satisfies the descriptions
that we find in dictionaries.As
we have seen, when it comes to natural-kind terms, dictionaries contain
mostly or entirely nonlinguistic, encyclopedic information.The
difference between what information turns up in real dictionaries and what
information does not is only the difference between information that is,
though entirely contingent, widely known among a particular dictionary’s
intended readership, and information that is not so widely known.(But
even that is not quite right.Dictionaries
often actively try to be encyclopedias, in supplying not just obviously
contingent information but technical nuggets such as chemical symbols.)
Upshot:If
“water” has no distinctive, stable set of reference-fixers, it has no associated
stereotypical “watery role.”If it
has no such role, it has no A-intension.(More
recently, Jackson and Chalmers have themselves backed off the idea that
A-intensions are public linguistic meanings or types of meaning
analogous to Kaplanian characters.[21]They
kick A-intensions upstairs and diffusely so, into individual minds
at particular times.I have different
sorts of objections to the resulting account, but that is outside the purview
of this paper.)
What
are our remaining options?We can
weaken our demands still further.
7.Putnam’s
own mature theory in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” expresses the meaning of
a natural-kind term in a “normal form”: <Syntactic markers, semantic
markers, stereotype, extension> (p. 191).This
manifests a still weaker conception of the task, because the normal form
does not afford analyticities of any sort at all, even though the stereotype
is “part of meaning” in the sense that if you do not know the stereotype,
then, to the same extent, you do not know the meaning.
This
is not bad, though given my argument in section 3 above, we would
have to toss out “extension.”But
as before, I deny that natural-kind terms have fixed stereotypes as parts
of their meanings, for the same reason that they do not have A-intensions.
8.As
an even further weakening, we might consider giving up the assumption of
shared public meanings for natural-kind terms, bizarre as that sounds.We
might suppose that such terms refer directly, without senses that go beyond
their simple designating function, just as pronouns and (in
Like
Putnam’s normal-form position, this theory is largely supported by our
OED entries; at least, those entries seem to contain nothing but
contingent reference-fixers, just as do dictionary entries for proper names
of historical figures.And “water”
is grammatically singular.
But
the Proper Names theory faces formidable objections.First,
as noted above, it implies that pre-chemistry speakers simply did not know
the word’s meaning, which is pretty bad.[23]
Second,
the Names view suffers from the same liabilities as do Millian or Direct
Reference theories of proper names: chiefly, oversubstitutivity (there
being, allegedly, no sense whatever in which coreferring names do not everywhere
substitute salva veritate), Frege’s Puzzle, the fact of empty names, and
the truth of negative existentials.These
are horrible problems, and DR proponents tend to turn a blind eye to their
horribleness, though I think the least implausible solutions have been
offered by Soames in Beyond Rigidity (op. cit.).
Those
problems can be avoided by switching to a Kinder, Gentler, attenuated version
of DR, defended by me.[24]That
version reintroduces private conceptual/computational roles for names,
which are a kind of meaning over and above the referent.But
since they are private to individuals at particular times, they inherit
the original Names view’s denial that natural-kind terms have shared public
meanings.
As
noted above, Jackson and Chalmers have suggested bringing A-intensions
back into the mind; “water” will have different
A-intensions for
different people at different times.But
this is less defensible than my computational-role account. For
one thing, I question whether, for every English speaker and every time,
there is at that time in that speaker a determinate A-intension
for “water.”In fact, it seems obvious
that there is not.If a person is
probed (“What stuff do you mean by ‘water’???Quick, now”), that person
will be able to cough up a description,[25]
but that does not show that the description existed uniquely as such in
her/his mind prior to the probe.
Also,
it is repugnant at best to give up publicity.A
word’s meaning in a natural language is a meaning shared by at least a
number of speakers of that language.
Third:The
late Paul Ziff used to maintain that proper names are not lexemes of particular
natural languages.I agree.True,
“Lycan” is a pre-spelling version of the common Swedish word “lyckan,”
and “William” is the specifically English form of a name that occurs in
other languages as “Guillaume,” “Guglielmo,” etc.But
my name is “William Lycan” anywhere in the world, and it is to be
used untranslated by a speaker of any other language.A
German cannot translate the English sentence “William Lycan loves Mary
Lycan” as “Wilhelm Glück liebt Maria Glück.”
The
same is far from true of natural-kind terms.Of
course “water” translates into “das Wasser,” “l’eau,” “vatten” (Swedish),
“wai” (Maori), etc.And “Maria hat
gern water zu trinken” is simply ungrammatical in German, or any other
existing language.[26]
Finally,
fourth, the Names view loses the distinction between same-kind terms that
are synonymous and those that are not.“Coffee,”
“java” and “joe” are synonymous in American English, but “coffee” is not
synonymous with the botanical genus term “coffea” (as in “coffea canephora,”
“coffea liberica,” etc.); that kind identity had to be discovered empirically. “Gorse”
and “furze” are synonymous, but neither means the same as their Linnean
binominal “ulex europaeus.”[27]
9.One
further suggestion has been made to me in conversation by each of several
colleagues: ineffability.The idea
is that “water” does have a meaning over and above its reference to H2O—it
might be thought of as an abstract Fregean sense—but we have no way of
expressing or describing that meaning.No
law of logic says that if an English word has a meaning, that meaning can
be expressed or even described in other words of English.
The
first half of the latter point is importantly right.There
is no reason why any one English expression should have another, distinct
English expression as a synonym.(This
matters, I have argued elsewhere, in certain disputes over free will and
over the mind-body problem.[28]) But
I balk at “or even described.”We
have seen the one attempt—Putnam’s normal form—to describe “water”’s meaning
without offering any sort of synonym.I
have argued that that particular attempt failed.But
I see no general reason why, if the word has a meaning, its meaning could
not be described at all.
“Water”
does not mean H2O.But
“water” does not mean anything else either. Our
conclusion seems to be that “water” is meaningless.[29]
Footnotes
No,
for much the same reason Putnam’s “quaxel” argument failed.The
difference in truth-value shows that the terms differ in intension.But
we have already seen that “water”’s meaning (whatever it may be) is not
its intension.
Incidentally,
even if “water’s” meaning does differ as between Earth and Twin Earth,
Burge has given us no pointers to either of those meanings.Indeed,
since they are not the differing intensions H2O and XYZ, and
since Burge himself has refuted the hypothesis that “water” is
indexical
(see below), he has made the matter even more mysterious.
For
the same reasons, I pass over the Wittgensteinian view that natural-kind
terms are “family resemblance” or “cluster” expressions, i.e., that to
be in the extension of “water” one need only have “enough” of the stereotypical
properties on a list.What I take
Putnam to have shown is that there could be water that did not have any
of the stereotypical properties.(More
on this below.)
Steve
Schiffer has protested to me in conversation that if “water” does mean
the same on Twin Earth as on Earth, “water” obviously must be indexical—same
meaning, different referent, after all.In
a minimal and uninformative sense of the term, he is right.But
the question is, what kind of deictic meaning is in play?The
“indexicality” is not that of a contained pronominal element, or so I have
just argued.(I admit that “water”
may pass one test of indexicality. Arguably,
direct-to-indirect-quotation fails:On
the interplanetary listening device I hear Twin Bluto say, “I need at least
two gallons of water”; but I cannot correctly report that by uttering,
“Twin Bluto said that he needed at least two gallons of water.”—I
am not entirely convinced of that judgment.)
There
is a further problem about A-intensions, both for public English
words and for mental A-intensions.It
seems perfectly possible that a term’s reference should get fixed by descriptions
that are one and all “near-misses” in Donnellan’s sense (“Reference and
Definite Descriptions,” Philosophical Review 75 (1966): 281-304),
as in his famous example of indicating a party guest by calling him “the
man drinking the martini” when in fact the guest’s martini glass contains
plain water with an olive in it.Suppose
there is a kind term T that refers to an underlying substance S, but none
of T’s reference-fixers is strictly correct.Nothing
plays the “T-ish role,” though S does things that approximate that role.But
it is supposed to be analytic that S is whatever actually plays the T-ish
role.It follows that the term T fails
to refer, which is contrary to hypothesis.
The
view is prefigured by Ruth Millikan’s Language, Thought, and Other Biological
Categories (MIT / Bradford Books, 1984), Ch. 9, if I understand her
complex terminology correctly: The “sense” of a kind term is just the substance
referred to, while various kinds of “intensions” used by individuals to
point to or get at that “sense” are mainly private to those individuals
at times (the exceptions being, uninterestingly, “language-bound” intensions
such as what “water” stands for or what is called “water”).On
the other hand, Millikan allows that a “full-bodied public intension of
a public term might…sensibly be calculated by averaging only over those
full-bodied intensions that are deemed to be most reliable by laymen, or
if laymen would ask experts, deemed reliable by experts or, when possible
traditionally handed down by experts” (p. 154); in particular, “names of
natural kinds…usually have very definite ‘meanings’ in the sense of having
quite definite full-bodied public intensions” (p. 155).On
the whole it seems that more than the one letter “k” distinguishes Millikan
from the Millian; but her proposal is too complicated for me to evaluate
here, especially since I do not know what sort of “averaging” she has in
mind.
Much
more recently Millikan has defended a purer version of the Names view,
in “Where Meaning Is, Since Not in the head,” talk presented at the University
of North Carolina, September, 2005.
Note
a further nasty consequence of the Names view:No
two empty natural-kind terms differ in any semantical way from each
other.If a kind term has no meaning
over and above its referent, and two kind terms lack referents entirely,
then there is no semantic difference whatever between them.“Unicorn,”
“testudo aubreii,” “aesophila grahami,” and “jub-jub bird” are semantically
identical, which seems to imply that they can be substituted anywhere salva
veritate at least.(Of course the
exactly parallel complaint can be made in the case of proper names, but
for names the consequence is not quite so obviously false.)
.