Hilary Putnam on Meaning & Externalism (2011)

[@Donteatacowman]

I don't know why KZbin recommended this to me. I feel bad for the guy whenever the crowd doesn't laugh. You're awarding the guy! Be nice to him!

[@czarquetzal8344]

Noam Chomsky himself admitted that semantics should be the province of philosophy not of linguistics, and I agree.

[@Self-Duality]

I miss this great man!

[@cihant5438]

Chomsky was his fellow student??

[@SeanAnthony-j7f]

Yes he got a lot of great students. See his Wikipedia page

[@Sunmarkobjects]

Professor X!

[@arlieferguson3990]

Didn’t we know meaning isn’t just inside someone’s head since Wittgenstein II? Meaning is use. Well then what is actually new here? Perhaps its that he worked out the implications?

[@hss12661]

Wittgenstein said "don't look to the meaning, look to the use", not "meaning is use", although you're correct that he insisted that there be a "linguistic division of labor" (a later Putnamian term). However Putnam insists that there's more to meaning involved than certain physical phenomena (use). The context, social and physical, is also important. So it's about how one should study language-use.

[@arlieferguson7442]

@@hss12661 But don’t you think Wittgenstein, who emphasized usage as the way to approach meaning was also aware of the context that produces it? I’m just thinking of all the examples involving a social context: building sites, math students, trains, chess, etc.

[@hss12661]

@@arlieferguson7442 Yes, definitely. However Wittgenstein's externalism wasn't informed by Putnam's Twin-Earth thought experiment or the later Davidson's triangulation arguments which involve a more complete form of externalism, emphasizing the importance of not only the social, but also the physical/causal context (ex. Putnam's critique of magical theories of reference in Reason, Truth and History) This more advanced externalism is for a significant part about reference (Quine and his heirs thought that a semantics should be mainly concerned with reference and not with "intensions"/"meanings") and the mind-world relation (therefore subjective-objective, not subjective-intersubjective, in Davidson's terms). A similar outlook, I believe, is nowadays developed by Millikan's teleosemantics which are heavily informed by Darwinian biology. Another "brand" of semantic externalism which is more comprehensive than Wittgensteinian social-pragmatism is endorsed by John McDowell who, unlike Davidson (although McDowell heavily draws on his works), is relying on the notion of experience or noninferential justification or, in Kantian terms, intuition to provide an account of meaning. This is of course complemented with radical mental content externalism. Other notable philosophers who've made contributions to externalism developing it in this direction include ex. Tyler Burge, Saul Kripke. The Wittgensteinian-Heideggerean strand of thought is however still alive in Robert Brandom's inferentialism. He, I believe, nevertheless succeeds in naturalizing meaning (as opposed to merely socializing it), like the aforementioned philosophers, by employing a functionalist approach to the appearance/reality distinction, but he is mainly concerned with the social significance of meaning and not about, for example, it's evolutionary origin. This is, of course, not an exhaustive classification. Most philosophers nowadays, it seems, endorse some kind of externalism and they're often simply different, but mutually compatible, approaches. For example Ulf Hlobil tried to reconcile Millikan's evolutionary approach with Brandom's normative approach ("teleoinferentialism").

[@Impaled_Onion-thatsmine]

Yeah a trancdental system synthetic of idealisms targeted at a person they don't like it; imagination psychology.

[@ezras7997]

He’s very loud, isn’t he?

[@SeanAnthony-j7f]

He's on the mic

[@IKnowNeonLights]

I don't understand nothing whatsoever, and I prefer it that way. Is this a defence or an attack on semantics? If it is a defence, by saying that different people have different interpretations through interactions with the same subject! Ok! If it is an attack by saying that the interactions although different will not change the subject! Ok! Gold (I mean twater) might not be in the head, but most certainly is on the testicules, giving the right collective meaning for both earth and twin earth inhabitants. What is in the head (a human being) also! Is what is not, simultaneously with what is, making us think. Making it very easy to be understood as an external, especially and always if one thinks of themselves as an individual, as an external to everything else, a closed system of their own, as what is not.