Is putnam inconsistent and parochial?

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Is putnam inconsistent andparochial?James Beattie aa University of MelbournePublished online: 02 Jun 2006.

To cite this article: James Beattie (1993) Is putnam inconsistent andparochial?, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 71:3, 316-324, DOI:10.1080/00048409312345322

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Australasian Journal of Philosophy Vol. 71, No. 3; September 1993

IS PUTNAM INCONSISTENT AND PAROCHIAL?

James Beattie

I. Introduction

It lias been widely supposed that Putnam's [2] seminal paper, 'The meaning of "meaning"', presents a consistent and general theory of meaning: consistent in the obvious, logical sense; general in aspiring to say something about the semantics of all natural languages, and about the semantics of many words within any given language. The message of Twin Earth has seemed to be simple and compelling to many: 'Cut the pie any way you like, "meanings" just ain't in the head!' [2, p.227].

In this paper I want to cast doubt on the assumption that Putnam's often cited but not so often analysed paper establishes a coherent position on whether - - and how

- - meanings fail to be in people's heads. I also want to call into question the theory's adequacy as the basis for a general theory of meaning and reference. The joint import of these two assaults is, I hope, to loosen ever so slightly the strangle-hold that Putnam's views - - and others that are similar - - have had on certain research projects in the philosophy of mind and psychology in the past fifteen years or so. My aim, therefore, is not to establish that Putnam is simply wrong. Rather it is, first, to draw attention to an inconsistency within the position he advances in his [2]; and second, to arouse the suspicion that much more needs to be said about meaning

- - even of natural-kind terms - - than Putnam's theory is capable of saying. For those few who are unacquainted with it, the Twin Earth thought experiment

is rehearsed in section II. Section III sketches Putnam's hypothesis of the division of linguistic labour, and outlines the serious internal conflict his theory suffers from as a result of its introduction. Section IV argues that Putnam only offers us what I call a 'parochial' theory of meaning, and section V briefly considers some general implications flowing from the claims of section IV.

II. Twin Earth

Twin Earth is exactly like Earth in all but certain specified ways. In particular, on Twin Earth the liquid that Twin-Earthian English speakers refer to as 'water' is not H20, but a liquid whose complex chemical formula can be abbreviated as 'XYZ'. XYZ is indistinguishable from H20 at normal temperatures and pressures, and is found in all the oceans, lakes and seas, etc. on Twin Earth. Furthermore, there is no H20 to be found on Twin Earth, and no XYZ on Earth.

Imagine a time (say, 1750) prior to the development of chemical theory on both Earth and Twin Earth. Oscar 1 is a typical Earthian of the time, and Oscar 2 a typical Twin Earthian of the time, and neither of them kaows anything about the chemical structure of any of the substances on their respective planets. Suppose that Oscar 1

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317 Is Putnam Inconsistent and Parochial?

and Oscar 2 are exact physical duplicates in every respect (except, obviously, that where Oscar 1 has H20 molecules in his body, Oscar 2 has XYZ molecules). This means that ' . . . there is no belief [narrowly construed] 1 that Oscar 1 had about water that Oscar 2 did not have about "water"' [2, p.224]. Nevertheless, Putnam claims,

the extension of the term 'water ' was just as much H20 on Earth in 1750 as in 1950; and the extension of the term 'water ' was just as much XYZ on Twin Earth in 1750 as in 1950. Oscar 1 and Oscar 2 understood the term 'water ' differently in 1750, although they were

in the same [narrow] psychological s t a t e . . . Thus the extension of the term 'water ' (and, in fact, its 'meaning' in the intuitive pre-

analytical usage of that term) is not a function of the [narrow] psychological state of the speaker by itself. [2, p.224]

Putnam observes that we might respond to his problem in one of two ways: (1) we might give up the idea that psychological states determine intensions; or (2) we might give up the idea that intension determines extension. His preferred solution is to adopt option (1).

III. The Division of Linguistic Labour

The main conclusion urged by the Twin Earth thought experiment is that the meanings of many words in our language are fixed in part by the physical nature of the objects, processes, events, etc. to which those words refer: it 's because there's H20 on Earth but XYZ on Twin Earth that the meaning of Oscar l ' s utterances of 'water ' differs from the meaning of Oscar2's same-sounding utterances. And Putnam takes this phenomenon to extend to the great majority of all nouns (including terms for artefacts as well as natural kinds), and to many verbs, adjectives and other parts of speech [2, pp.242-245].

In elaborating on the results of the Twin Earth thought experiment, Putnam intro-

duces the hypothesis of the division of linguistic labour [2, p.227] as a central ele- ment of his theory. Call this the 'DOLL' hypothesis for short. In essence, DOLL proposes that not everyone who uses a particular word must also acquire the method of recognising whether or not something falls within the extension of that word. Rather, she can rely on a special subclass of the speakers of her language to do this job, while still quite correctly using the word in question:

The features that are generally thought to be present in connection with a general name - - necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the extension, ways of recognizing if something is in the extension ( 'criteria'), etc. - - are all present in the linguistic community considered as a collective body; but that collective

Putnam is usually credited with having coined the distinction between 'wide' and 'narrow' psychological states [2, p.220], but he often fails to observe the distinction, which sometimes leads to confusion.

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James Beattie 318

body divides the 'labor' of knowing and employing these various parts of the 'meaning' of [e.g.] 'gold'. [2, p.228]

Thus,

[w]henever a term is subject to the division of linguistic labor, the 'average' speaker who acquires it does not acquire anything that fixes its extension. In particular, his individual psychological state certainly does not fix its extension; it is only the sociolinguistic state of the collective linguistic body to which the speaker belongs thatfixes the extension. [2, p.229; last emphasis added]

I'll now argue that the introduction of the DOLL hypothesis creates a strong internal tension in Putnam's position. In particular, it turns out that the 'way of recognising' possessed by the relevant 'experts' for some particular term 'W' is not adequate to secure the reference of their own tokenings of 'W ' - - where 'W ' is any term (e.g., 'water') that is susceptible to a Twin Earth style thought experiment. And given that DOLL claims that my ability to use 'W ' to refer successfully to Ws depends on the experts' ability to recognise and refer to Ws, the 'sociolinguistic state of the collective linguistic body' fails to fix the extensions of any such words in the language. First, a terminological note. I'll spell the Twin Earthian word for XYZ 'twater' to avoid confusion with the same-sounding Earthian word 'water ' , and I ' l l use 'water*' to refer to members of the class that contains all and only instances of H20, XYZ, and any other substance that's as similar to H20 in its observable properties as XYZ.

Consider the 'sociolinguistic state of the collective linguistic body' as it existed in 1750. Assume, first, that there were 'experts' at this time whose judgements fixed the extensions of terms such as 'water' and 'twater' for their respective linguistic groups. Such experts had no methods available to them for recognising any differences between H20 and XYZ; this is a principal presupposition of the thought experiment. So, the sociolinguistic state of the collective linguistic body on Earth in 1750 fixes the extension of 'water' as being water*, and the collective linguistic body on Twin Earth fixes the extension of 'twater' as being water* as well. But this is just the wrong result, according to Putnam's thought experiment: 'water' and 'twater' have different extensions, the former referring to H20 , the latter to XYZ. Thus, the DOLL hypothesis seems to pull in quite the opposite direction from the intuitions primed by Twin Earth.

Putnam seems to have anticipated this criticism. He goes on to claim that there were no experts on Earth or Twin Earth in 1750, so we must look for a division of labour elsewhere. To this end, he claims, the case of water and twater 'can be construed as involving division of labor across time' [2, p.229]. Presumably, what he intends here is to take something like the 'ultimate' or 'settled' deliverances of the collective linguistic body as fixing the extension of a given term - - in this case, the iudgements the experts arrive at after the chemical revolution of the late eighteenth century. The fact that these judgements are not made until 1850 doesn't undermine the suggestion that 'water' already referred to H20 in 1750, and 'twater' to XYZ:

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the experts' separation in time from 18th century users of these terms is no more significant than their separation in space from their contemporaries who use these terms.

But this strategy won' t work. For, consider the planet Quin Earth, which scientists will discover in 2050. Quin Earth is as much like Earth as Twin Earth except that, rather than finding XYZ there, they find good old H20 - - or rather, something that all their current theory and methods of chemical analysis tell them is the same kind of stuff as H20. So, 20th century scientists judge Quin Earth to be a perfect Doppelganger of Earth in every respect - - just as 18th century folk would have judged Twin Earth to be a perfect Doppe lganger of Earth in every respect. However, unbeknownst to the scientists modern chemical theory is seriously defec-

tive, and according to the correct chemical theory (what we might call) quin-H20 is in fact quite a different substance from H20. Now, imagine that the universe reach- es heat death before anyone comes up with the correct chemical theory. In this case, throughout the entire history of the universe, no-one within the collective linguistic body ever acquires the resources to distinguish between H20 and quin-H20. Yet surely Putnam is committed to claiming that the term used by Quin Earthians to refer to quin-H20 has a different meaning and extension from the word we use to refer to H20? This follows directly from the similarity of structure between his Twin Earth scenario and mine.

If this argument is correct, it shows that Putnam's DOLL hypothesis is incompat- ible with the results of the Twin Earth thought experiment. In fact, it appears that Putnam has intertwined two rival theories about the fixing of a term's extension: the DOLL theory and (what I ' l l call) the structural theory. On the one hand, the structural theory fixes the extension of 'water ' as whatever bears a particular sort of sameness relation to a contextually indicated instance of a liquid. The existence of this sameness relation determines the extension regardless of whether there's anyone within the linguistic community - - past, present or future - - who can articulate the correct theoretical basis of that relation, or reliably identify substances which stand in that relation. On the other hand, the DOLL theory fixes the extension of 'water ' on the basis of certain experts' theories about what the appropriate sameness relation is, and their judgements about just which tokens of liquids in the world stand in that relation to the contextually indicated liquid. Clearly, if we allow for the mere possibility that the experts are wrong in their theories or judgements, then the structural theory delivers quite different results from the DOLL theory.

Certainly, the DOLL and structural theories are united in their goal of removing the determination of extensions from the competence of the individual (non-expert) language user. So either of these approaches, if successful, should defeat the variety of psychologism Putnam is set against [2, pp.218-219]? But my argument makes it clear that they cannot achieve this ambition by cooperative effort.

2 We should note that there's a variety of psychologism (we might call it 'social psychologism') that's consistent with the DOLL theory. According to this view, reference-fixing only has to take place in someone's head - - not necessarily the head of the ordinary language user - - for psychologism to be true. What's important is that there are no extra-social relations essential to fixing reference; and this is certainly the case with DOLL, given that reference gets fixed inside the heads of the experts, and is thence borrowed by ordinary users. (I owe this point to Graham Nerlich.)

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James Beattie 320

Whether i t 's the structural theory or DOLL that Putnam ultimately advocates in 'The meaning of "meaning" ' is hard to judge, although it must be said that his rhetoric most often favours the former [see especially 2, pp.235-238]. I don't pro- pose to pursue questions of exegesis any further here, fascinating though they may be in the light of later turns in Putnam's thinking. I raise this inconsistency in his 1975 position partly out Of historical interest, given the enormous influence his paper has had on recent semantics and philosophy of mind, but mainly out of philosophical concern: it seems to me that the difficulties of accommodating some of the social features of language within a causal theory of reference - - while retaining a realist, physicalist perspective - - have been underestimated in much recent philosophy of language and mind.

I ' l l now briefly consider two attempts to resolve the tension within Putnam's position. First, could the inconsistency be avoided if we construed DOLL as advo- cating that reference be fixed counterfactually - - in accordance with what the experts (if there were any) would say - - rather than requiring actual experts? 3 This might give us a slightly more sophisticated version of DOLL; but it doesn't promise any clear resolution to Putnam's inconsistency problem. Moreover, even as a modi- fication of DOLL it isn't an unqualified improvement. For example, it faces the same epistemological objections as a purely structural version of Putnam's theory would face, namely, that no one would ever seem to have grounds for claiming that they knew the meaning of words whose reference was fixed in this counterfactual way. For example, so long as there are no actual experts about the reference of (say) 'water ' , no one has good grounds for conjecturing what such experts would have said had they existed; to do so would be to presume some expertise on the ref= erence of 'water ' , in which case our theory would have admitted an actual (rather than a merely counterfactual) expert, thereby slipping back into the original version of DOLL. This doesn't constitute a logically conclusive objection to the counterfactual proposal, but it does force us to be clear about whether we want our theory of reference to allow for the possibility that we sometimes (often?) know the meanings of words in our own language.

Second, it might be argued that Putnam could shore up his position simply by dropping the recognition requirement of DOLL, and relying instead on a division of linguistic labour implemented purely by causal relations between speakers and the referents of the terms in question. This strategy has been attributed to Devitt and Sterelny [1]. 4 But it faces problems. For one thing, it seems to fall foul of Quine's well-known problem of indeterminacy (on the assumption of a purely extensional notion of causation): should we take a grounding utterance of 'water ' as 'a singular term naming a recurring universal' [4, p.52], waterhood; or as a term referring to 'brief temporal segments' of water [4, p.51]; or perhaps as a term referring to whatever has the same phenomenal, fimctional, or structural properties as the indicated substance? 5

3 This suggestion was made by an anonymous referee for this Journal. 4 Another anonymous referee for this Journal attributed this approach to Devitt and Sterelny. 5 Devitt and Sterelny discuss a closely related problem to this, which they call 'the qua-problem'

[1, pp.63-65; 72-75].

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But Devitt and Sterelny do not actually advocate a purely causal theory of natural-kind terms anyway. They are aware of some of the problems created by dropping the recognition requirement entirely from the grounding of such terms; indeed, Sterelny claims that 'the grounder must be able to discriminate members of the kind with reasonable reliability' [1, p.74]. Instead, they seek a purely causal theory only in relation to certain very basic terms (e.g., demonstratives), from which they hope to explain the grounding of less basic terms via a descriptive-causal theory [1, p.75]. But they give us no idea of how such basic terms are supposed to escape the indeterminacy already mentioned, not to mention Devitt and Sterelny's very similar 'qua-

problem'; nor do they make clear just how the description-recognition component of the meanings of, for example, natural-kind terms could emerge from such a causal basis. They have not provided us with a decisive resolution of the tension I 've drawn attention to in Putnam's position.

IV. Putnam's Parochialism

I want to turn now to another aspect of Putnam's theory, assuming, for argument's sake, that there's a resolution to the conflict explored in the last section. The claim I ' l l focus on here arises in the following passage:

The reason we don't use 'cat ' as synonymous with a description is surely that we know enough about cats to know that they do have a hidden structure, and it is good scientific methodology to use the name to refer rigidly to the things that possess that hidden structure, and not to whatever happens to satisfy some description. [2, p.244]

There are several important points that emerge from this passage. What 's most important for my present purposes is Putnam's suggestion that we know that things in the natural world have 'hidden structures' and, moreover, that we know such structures are relevant to the semantics of our everyday terms - - in addition to being implicated in 'good scientific methodology'.

Let 's assume, controversially, I think, that Putnam is correct in claiming that the reference of many terms in present-day languages is grounded in sameness and difference of hidden structure. We might ask, then, just what sort of knowledge is involved in knowing that certain parts of the world have a hidden structure. For example, is this a fact about the world that scientists (or non-scientists) have discovered or conjectured at some more or less datable point in history? 6 If so, then there seems little justification for imposing a Putnam-like semantic theory upon any languages that were in use prior to that discovery: by hypothesis, people's use of referring expressions in those early days simply was not anchored by sameness and difference of hidden structure. But if we take the possibility of a 'pre-hidden structure'

Someone might argue that our knowledge of the existence of hidden structure is innate rather than learned. But whatever the merits of this suggestion it doesn't seem to be open to Putnam, for he has expressed scepticism about the existence of innate knowledge [3].

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James Beattie 322

society seriously, then Putnam's theory of meaning turns out to be parochial, for that theory is only equipped to characterise the referential framework of a restricted class of languages, namely, those that include some words whose reference turns on sameness of hidden structure.

Now, you might find it totally implausible to imagine that there was ever a time when people didn't make the assumption of hidden structure in relation to things in the world. But I want to explore the suggestion seriously for a while, to see if I can attach any weight to the claim that Putnam's theory of meaning is parochial. So, let's assume for the moment that there was indeed a time when there were no words whose reference was fixed by considerations of similarity or difference of hidden structure. Instead, let us imagine a time when the extensions of all relevant terms were fixed in accordance with what I'll call 'manifest' similarities and differences among referred-to objects. 7

Call the period during which languages functioned in this way the 'pre-structural' period, and call the theory that best characterises the basis on which the reference of words was fixed during this period the 'manifest ' theory of meaning. During the pre-structural period, then, individuals would quite legitimately have corrected their own usage of referring expressions to bring it into line with com- monly accepted standards governing judgements of manifest similarity and difference. Manifest similarity among referred-to objects might have included certain phenomenal properties, certain functional properties, objects' tendencies to (seem to) behave similarly under the influence of (seemingly) similar forces, and so on. So, if Twin Earth had happened to be discovered during this period rather than in 1750, it would have been perfectly correct for Earthians to use the word 'water' to refer indiscriminately to instances of XYZ and H20: what it meant to be water then was just to have enough of the right sort of manifest characteristics in common with the stuff they called 'water' to meet the accepted standards governing such similarity judgements.

Now, if Putnam were to respond to the charge of parochialism, he would need to maintain either that his theory of meaning would apply to the languages of pre- structural folk, or that the existence of such languages is simply impossible. I think I 've already made a plausible prima facie case for the possibility of their existence. So Putnam's only option would appear to be to insist that his theory does apply to pre-structural languages. But how might it so apply? It would seem he must maintain that pre-structural folk are in exactly the same position as those Earthians in 1750 who used the word 'water' to refer incorrectly to both H20 and XYZ: like their 1750 cousins, they are simply making a mistake about the meaning and extension of 'water'; but worse than that, the mistake is embodied in the very standards they use to judge sameness and difference of meaning.

This response has the virtue of consistency. However, it suffers several problems. Perhaps most importantly, it reflects a certain unresponsiveness to the actual structure of the languages it purports to apply to. Putnam's theory apparently has no way of accounting for important semantic differences between the languages of pre-

7 I borrow the term 'manifest' from Sellars [5], although my use of the term is only loosely inspired by his.

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structural folk and 18th century folk - - most notably the fact that, in relation to their respective utterances of the sound 'water ' , the former were meeting the criteria laid

down for the successful use of such referring expressions in their own language, whereas, prior to the relevant chemical discoveries, the latter were not. Arguably, a comprehensive theory of meaning and reference should be capable of accommodating and explaining such differences.

The failure of generality of Putnam's theory has not gone wholly unremarked. For example, Devitt and Sterelny [1, pp.75-79] cite Schwartz's arguments to the conclusion that the referential features of artefactual terms (e.g., 'pencil ' ) and socio- legal terms (e.g,, 'paediatrician') do not seem to succumb to an analysis in terms of sameness of hidden structure. But such failures of generality are not particularly

threatening to the core insight of Putnam's approach. On the one hand Schwartz's arguments allow that Putnam's theory has legitimate application to at least some

terms in every language; and on the other hand they offer no challenge to the applicability of Putnam's theory to natural-kind terms - - the terms that have been taken by everybody to be the central cases to which his theory applies. By contrast,

my thought experiment confronts Putnam on both these matters. Certainly, few today would want to argue that substances such as water actually

lack a hidden structure - - although some might say we have no a priori reason for favouring sameness of chemical structure over, say, sameness of quantum structure in determining the reference of everyday terms such as !water'. Nevertheless, my pre-structural fantasy makes it clear that a case has to be made for making the reference of terms such as 'water ' turn on any kind of hidden structure: even in our

structurally attuned times, it 's far from clear to me that the central meaning of our ordinary term 'water ' (as opposed, perhaps, to the term ' H 2 0 ' ) is anchored in structural rather than manifest properties.

V. Implications

We should briefly note some general implications for theories of reference. Even if

the reference of many tokens of 'water ' turns on considerations of manifest rather than structural properties, there seems to be no decisive reason why the grounding

and borrowing of such reference should not be mediated causally, as proposed by Devitt and Sterelny [1] and others - - assuming, of course, a resolution of the inconsistency facing Putnam-inspired causal theories (section III). But against this possibility we should be aware that, for many (perhaps most) tokens of 'water ' , there may be no fact o f the matter whether their reference turns on considerations of manifest rather than structural properties. Consider, for example, the mundane case of someone (Jane) who is very thirsty and says ' I 'm dying for a drink of water!' Now, it 's conceivable that the totality of relevant actual and counterfactual circumstances might simply under-determine whether Jane's token of 'water ' refers just to water

(because of the causal relation between her and a substance having the same structural properties as water), or whether in fact it refers to water* (in virtue of her causal relation to a substance having the same manifest properties as water, twater and perhaps other actual or counterfactual substances). If this is indeed possible,

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James Beattie 324

and if we never theless want to insist that an adequate theory of reference ought to

tell us just what J ane ' s token of 'wa te r ' refers to, then we may have grounds for

th inking a causal theory inadequate?

University of Melbourne Received February 1992

Revised February 1993

REFERENCES

1. M. Devitt and K. Sterelny, Language and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).

2. H. Putnam, 'The meaning of "meaning"' in Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) pp.215-271.

3. H. Putnam, 'The "innateness hypothesis" and explanatory models in linguistics' in Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) pp.107-116.

4. W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). 5. W.F. Sellars, 'Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man' in Science, Perception andReality

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963) pp.l-40.

An ancestor of this paper was read at the University of Melbourne in November, 1991, as a result of which it is considerably improved. I am indebted to John Fitzpatrick, Graham Nerlich and Graeme Marshall for comments on an earlier version, and to scattered conversations with Paul Bernier, Dan Dennett, Jerry Fodor, Brian McLaughlin, Steve Stich and Rob Wilson. Several anonymous referees for this Journal also provided valuable comments and suggestions.

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Is putnam inconsistent and parochial?