The problem, remember, is to specify the pre-chemistry meaning of "water," that (according to my transitivity argument) is still shared by our word and the Twin Earthlings' word.  Putnam's solution is to say that "water" contains an indexical element, so that it means something like “whatever real stuff-kind shares the nature of this and that there,” where the speaker is pointing at a sample of water (= H2O) to define the term ostensively (p. 290).  Actually his official view (p. 294) is that "water" means “stuff that bears...[the same-nature relation] to the water around here,” but that definition is obviously circular.  For purposes of this handout I'll stick to the ostensive definition model.

    (I said that is Putnam's solution to the problem of pre-chemistry meaning.  But you may shrewdly have noticed that he actually denies that (fn 2); he would rather preserve the idea that meaning determines reference than admit that linguistic meaning is "in the head."  I propose to ignore this.  (1) I am entirely unconvinced by his 'quaxel' argument in fn 2; (2) my transitivity argument for shared meaning between Earth and Twin Earth is almost frighteningly compelling; and (3) Putnam's own "indexical" model predicts shared meaning, (just as he himself says) on the model of "I.")

    Here again are my three objections to the indexicality proposal.   First, there is no linguistic evidence known to me that natural-kind terms contain any indexical element.  "Water" bears neither syntactic nor semantic marks of indexicality.

    Second, indexicals are devices of direct reference.  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 is what you use to turn on the lights."  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.

    Third, the "that" might, on any given occasion, be demonstrating something that is thought by the speaker to be water but is not, as in the gin example.  If one's use of "water" happened to have been grounded in such an error, the indexicality view predicts that the word would mean gin rather than water.

    And here is a fourth objection:  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.  (Though Putnam might get somewhere by appealing to "deferred ostension," as when we point to a picture of a unicorn, or an effluvium thought to be phlogiston.)

    As I said in class, I think the problem of the pre-chemistry meaning is nasty and remains unsolved.