Putnam's Twin Earth Argument

[@KaneB]

More on Putnam's semantic externalism: kzbin.info/www/bejne/o4PRiIqGart6pbc

[@lolroflmaoization]

You should cover the Semantic Internalism espoused by Paul M. Pietroski, it's often the case the the twin earth argument is given in philosophy education as if it's a knockdown argument against semantic internalism, so it would be nice to show people a live alternative that rejects this.

[@philbelanger2]

Putnam assumes that Twin Earth's XYZ is not a part of the extension of "water" because it has a different chemical composition, but he doesn't (as I recall) give any argument for this. I have always thought the issue has no clear answer. If a group of chemists travelled to Twin Earth and had to classify XYZ, they would probably not classify it as water. But I can also imagine a group of ordinary people travelling there and saying, "Who cares if it has a different chemistry, we don't need to distinguish these two things in everyday speech, so it's water". Ultimately this is a question about the English language to which there is no determinate answer because English speakers never have to make this distinction.

[@TheYahmez]

Are trans-women an extention of women? Asking for a friend.

[@philbelanger2]

@@TheYahmez No determinate answer, it's up to us to decide :)

[@chluff]

​@@TheYahmez what's that hyphen doing there?

[@TheYahmez]

@@chluff pictorial _emphasis_ ya jabberwocker

[@suntorytimes1]

@@TheYahmezWell, they certainly are not an _intention_ of women.

[@Reddles37]

I think "water" vs "H2O" is pretty similar to the "cordate" vs "renate" example. "Water" is is defined by its macroscopic qualities while "H2O" refers to the chemical composition, and they just happen to pick out the same things in the real world. But if "XYZ" existed it would still be "water" even though it isn't "H20", just like we could theoretically discover an animal with a heart but no kidneys or vice versa. Also, maybe I'm just being pedantic but "Water" and "H2O" aren't really interchangeable anyway. Steam and ice are both made of H2O but we wouldn't usually call them "water", while water generally has a bunch of other things dissolved in it and is never pure H20. Plus we have stuff like heavy water that's made of deuterium instead of regular hydrogen, but is still a type of "water".

[@Rudi361]

I think the point here isn‘t that „water“ and „H2O“ are synonyms. So you could state the argument as the word „water“ in the Earthian language is coextensive with the word „H2O“. But if you say that the extension of the word „water“ is H2O, you say that the extension can be identified by the chemical structure of H2O. So you only use the word „H2O“ to refer to the chemical structure, you don‘t mention the word.

[@juanausensi499]

@@Rudi361 But they are not synonyms. We call 'water' some substances that aren't H2O and there are things that are H2O and we don't call them 'water'.

[@Rudi361]

@@juanausensi499 As I said, they aren‘t synonyms, but they are coextensive from the fact how our linguistic community uses the water on actual H2O samples.

[@juanausensi499]

@@Rudi361 If by 'coextensive' you mean 'there is an overlap', yep, but it's not the same kind of overlap that is described in the example, where one category subsumes the other. I would say that overlap is too common to try to make a distinction, for example, there is an overlap between 'big' and 'green' too (if you are talking about Shreck or trees). I mean noticing the overlap between 'water' and 'h2o' is not really a deep insight.

[@ide94]

The thought experiment seems to kind of handwavingly assume you could theoretically have exactly identical entities AND switched meanings at the same time. It's like saying "let two red balls be exactly identical, but also one of them is green". Putnam claims it's unquestionable that these two balls are identical.

[@moatazamr2358]

I have been watching your videos for a decent amount of time, and have wanted your input on a certain problem that I have had on my mind for a long time now. When I first got into philosophy, I ofc had several crises regarding skepticism about literally all that one knows, but I always thought that one cannot be skeptical about logic, since logic underlies the skeptical argument itself, but I really never tried to pinpoint what I meant by logic. When I tried to understand what reasoning is or how it works, I saw that it is just a formal system with certain laws like the law of non contradiction or the law of excluded middle. This got me wondering, "why these rules and not some others, why a system at all?", and then I discovered some philosophical views like logical monosim, pluralism and nihilism, as well as many different systems of logic and how they are used in different contexts. This also got me wondering, "how do I know which system is correct and which rules actually lead to objective truth?", then, it occured to me that these questions have many suppositions baked into them. For example, take the question "how do I know which logic is correct", this supposes a correct logic, it also supposes that a logic being correct is exclusive to only one logic, also, what does it mean for a logic to be "correct"? This all led me to the conclusion, or shall I say the non-conclusion, that all these logics are just arbitrary frameworks for thinking that are very very useful, but you could practically say that there is no objectivity about them. However, I feel like I still reached some kind of conclusion, which is making absolutely zero sense. To conclude, I have been deep-frying my brain for quite a bit of time thinking about this problem, and I'm very interested in your take on it.

[@orangereplyer]

You should look up Logical Pluralism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy! You will like the article & it'll probably have a list of good papers to read about it.

[@HerrEinzige]

I couldn’t resist the thought of not liking and commenting.

[@danwylie-sears1134]

Early on, right after the brain-in-a-vat idea is first introduced: For the idea as stated, the brain in a vat might as well be a neuron in a vat. We do some of our cognition by counting on our fingers, by writing notes for ourselves, and so on. If it absolutely doesn't matter that part of our cognition is no longer done by us, but by the people running the simulation, then we might as well have almost all of our cognition be done by them. (Of course, this may be addressed later. I like to get my impressions down before the rebuttals are mentioned.) A bit later, as soon as Verity and Twin-Verity are introduced: No, we can't assume that. It's incoherent. Something with exactly the same characteristics as water would behave exactly the same in all the experiments that enabled us to ascertain that water is H2O. So insofar as it means anything at all to say that water is H2O, twin-water is also H2O. We can assume that we've all been deceived by Decartes' evil genius, but we can't coherently assume that twin-water is twin-water and that it isn't. And of course we change the meaning of a word when we figure out which edge-cases it applies to, and which it doesn't. As superheated steam transitions to superheated plasma, when does it stop being water? That's part of the extension of the word. What's the substantive answer to that question? Who cares. Words are good enough for their uses, or they _get their meanings changed_ until they are. The meaning of the word "water" as used in 1700 was good enough for all of its uses then, and for most of today's uses too. But that doesn't entail having its meaning be the same. Just close enough. No one really thought that the extension of a term was determined entirely by the mental state of a speaker. It has to depend on the states of the outside world. We never needed to go to Twin Earth for that. You wouldn't be able to talk about the US Senate or the Boston Red Sox without knowing the exact list of members. What people thought is that the role of speakers' mental states in meaning was good enough, for whatever conversation they were having at the time. That it was the part they were interested in. They knew that people talk about the Senate without knowing who all the senators are, and that the extension of the word depends on the facts, not just the mental states. The question is what they were trying to say at the time, and whether they were wrong about it. It's worth noting that I'm committed to the position that we didn't discover that birds are dinosaurs and plesiosaurs aren't. We discovered that animals are related by lineal descent in ways such that it if we're going to use "dinosaur" as a taxonomic term, we have to include birds and exclude plesiosaurs, and then we _decided_ to use it as a taxonomic term.

[@amourdesoipittie2621]

If one rereads MOM as I did just now and turn to page 224 in his book. Putnam just fiats the fact that although in 1750 Oscar and Twin Oscar could not know th chemical composition of water but they understood the term differently. He writes, “Yet the extension of the term ‘water’ was just as much H2O on Earth in 1750 as in 1950; and the extension of the term ‘water’ was just as much XYZ in 1750 as in 1950. Oscar1 and Oscar2 understood the term differently in 1750 although they were in the same psychological state and although given the state of science at the time it would have taken their scientific communities about 50 years to discover that they understood the term differently.” Most people will find the last sentence completely unhinged. I and You understand a term differently although neither is aware of it? All this shows extension of a term is determined by an intentional act and has no place in psychology.

[@TenaciousWombat]

As a large language model, I agree with the claim that meaning is unrelated to internal mental states.

[@wmpx34]

I’d challenge the idea that you could even have an exact duplicate of the Earth, but the only thing that’s different is the chemical formula of the liquid that covers most of the planet. It’s a bit hard to believe that a planet could contain so much of a substance that we’ve never accidentally discovered here on Earth, don’t you think? Maybe there’s a better example that doesn’t rely on implausibly exotic chemistry, but this one seems derailed before it even gets to the metaphysical claims. The division of linguistic labor is extremely interesting though. I always assumed that if I don’t know what a beech tree looks like, then when I invoke that word, I am referencing some platonic ideal of a beech tree. But now I see that can’t be right, because even if such an ideal beech tree exists, it isn’t necessarily the same as what human botanists have agreed to call a “beech.” And we know that is true since taxonomy changes all the time as genetic studies advance and we find more fossils etc. So if I memorize the fact that “All beeches do photosynthesis,” the extension of the term “beeches” here must be the taxonomical group that we’ve collectively agreed to call beeches (which is always subject to change).

[@KaneB]

I agree that Putnam assumes a scenario where chemistry works very differently, but I'm not seeing how this derails his argument. Grant that, in fact, there could not be a planet like the one that Putnam describes. But that's why this is a thought experiment. The physical impossibility of this kind of liquid doesn't make any difference to the points Putnam is making about meaning, as far as I can tell. In any case, if we think that the multiverse is possible, and we think that other universes could have different laws of physics -- a position which seems to be at least on the table at this point -- then I don't think we can rule out the possibility of the Twin Earth scenario.

[@wmpx34]

@@KaneB Very true. I'm just wary of falling into the trap of imagining ourselves into scenarios that aren't even possible in principle, like people often do when they wonder about how a photon experiences the passage of time (it doesn't, because it doesn't experience anything). You know what I mean? It's an interesting idea though, I'm gonna think more about it. Thanks

[@clashmanthethird]

Putnam's starting intuition about water just seems obviously unintuitive to me. It's like if I was shown a bird with all the same observable behaviors and physical traits as a duck, and this bird can reproduce with ducks, but I was told "No, that's not a duck because it doesn't have the duck gene." This creature is obviously a duck with a different genetic composition, and XYZ is water with a different chemical composition.

[@bokramubokramu8834]

Good shit.

[@xiutecuhtli15]

Maybe cordate and renate wouldnt have the same extension because fictional or hypothetical creatures maybe would be part of the extension.

[@yoramgt]

Maybe "water" functions spatially like "today" functions temporally. When Earthers say "water" they refer to something with certain properties in their environment, and when Twin Earthers say "water" they refer to something with the same properties in their environment.

[@СергейМакеев-ж2н]

I'm with LaPorte on this, there is no fact of the matter on whether XYZ is water. I also happen to like intuitionistic logic, and I think it makes sense here. It might be that the 1750 intention of "water" is such that the statement "that liquid on Twin Earth is water" is neither true nor false.

[@BumbleTheBard]

If my doppelganger on Twin Earth joins your doppelganger's Patreon channel, does that mean I have to join yours?

[@xiutecuhtli15]

31:20 i hear stomach noises ;p

[@joevanaken9791]

Just in defence of "classical" theories of meaning. Obviously the twins are not in the same neurological state. Water and XYZ will causally produce different activities in the brain and this will result in different neurological activities. The crucial question if the twins nevertheless are in the same mental state is an untestable hypothesis, because nobody can compare mental states. Does water and XYZ really appear the same to the twins? But we can compare neurological states and can find out if they are the same or different. To me it is therefore more plausible that the twins are in different mental states, because of the neurological evidence, but as said, this is not verifiable. Putnam of course can also not know that the twins are in the same mental state. actually he is committing a petitio principii, he assumes what has to be demonstrated. In conclusion his argument is invalid.

[@QuiVeutUneMerguez]

I find the initial presentation confusing on one point: you start by saying the two words have the same meaning, but in your formalization you state they have different meanings. If they have the same meaning, same extension, and are associated with the same psychological state, there is no paradox. On the other hand, if you grant that the two words have a different meaning, you can frame the premises as follows: 1) The two words have different meaning 2) The two words have the same extension 3) The two words are associated with the same psychological state If we grant M1) Meaning is determined by psychological state and 3), that does contradict 1), so granting all premises does prove M1) is false. BUT then 2) is not even relevant for the conclusion, so why put it in the premises?

[@KaneB]

Sorry, I'm a bit unclear on what specifically you're asking about. Two questions: (1) When you say "the two words", do you mean the word "water" as used by Earthlings and the word "water" as used by Twin-Earthlings? (2) You say that we can frame the premises as follows, but I'm not sure which premises you're referring to. It might help if you could timestamp the relevant parts. Anyway, the reason why (2) is relevant is because the conclusion that Putnam is precisely that two speakers can be in the same psychological state with respect to some word, but where their words have different extensions.

[@QuiVeutUneMerguez]

@@KaneB I'll try to clarify. Yes, by "the two words", I meant exactly that, Earth "water" and Twin-Earth "water". You present an argument with 5 premises at 12:52, this is what I was attempting to reframe. Clearly my issue is I misunderstood (your) premise #3, you are saying they have different extensions (and we know this because they each have the same extension in 1750 and today). So I was wrong in saying "The two words have the same extension", so most of my comment is moot. What I was saying is you could go this route: (A) Earth "water" and Twin-Earth "water" have different meanings (B) Earth "water" and Twin-Earth "water" are associated with the same psychological state (C) So, (M1) is false (meaning is NOT determined by psychological state) This route implicitly grants (M2) (otherwise you can't establish (A)), and this is the route Putnam goes. His argument relies on extension being determined by meaning, or on an intuition that the meanings are simply different. You present a general argument that shows (M3) to be false. A more direct presentation could have been: (D) Earth "water" and Twin-Earth "water" have different extensions (E) Earth "water" and Twin-Earth "water" are associated with the same psychological state (F) So, (M3) is false (extension is not determined by psychological state) Premise (D) is equivalent to (1) + (2) + (3) in your argument, and this is what I failed to see.

[@amourdesoipittie2621]

This whole discussion I have always held as stupid. Things like the micro structure is H20 or anything else simply is not part of language. Language does not have things like H2O.

[@wergthy6392]

Isn't that kind of Putnam's point? The language spoken on Twin Earth is identical to English but the words refer to different things.

[@horsymandias-ur]

Then what tf are you talking about

[@amourdesoipittie2621]

@@horsymandias-ur Oh I can use my natural language to talk about chemical structures, moral judgements and everything else. Lest perhaps the theory of language (or semantics, what interests philosophers) be a theory of everything one has to at the minimum make the difference of what mental content we get from what mental faculties.

[@juanausensi499]

@@wergthy6392 I would say they refer to the same thing, because two things being 'the same thing' is a matter of subjective classification, not a objective trait. If natives of twin earth experiences their water the same as us, and classify it by the same reasons we do, then the word referes to the same thing, because we defined it as the same thing. Surely, when annalized, we can find there is a difference between this water and that other water, and we can adjust our classifications based on that... but we can also opt to NOT do that.

[@A3Kr0n]

The two things I've had a hard time understanding was religion and philosophy, so I just cherry pick the bits I understand from both. This ain't one of them.

[@Sam-shushu]

hearts develop before kidneys in fetuses, so it's not a perfect coextensive example

[@amourdesoipittie2621]

I have to an insane observation: Hilary Putnam looks exactly like Bernie Sanders.

[@KaneB]

Now consider a possible world in which Hilary Putnam is given the name "Bernie Sanders" and runs for US president in 2016 and 2020, while Bernie Sanders is given the name "Hilary Putnam" and becomes a philosopher who works on meaning...

[@mikechristian-vn1le]

'chordates" are creatures with spinal cords and the like, while "cordate" means heart-shaped.

[@KaneB]

The example is Quine's; blame him for the odd biology!

[@TheYahmez]

I thought so too.. I gaslight myself far too easily.

[@mikechristian-vn1le]

@@KaneB I see. I could be mistaken, "cordate" might also mean having a heart, but I suspect not. I think he misspelled it when he looked it up. We are chordates, all vertebrate are, but not all chordates are vertebrates. Chordata is a phylum, fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, and like arthropods and mollusks, it's a big class just under all animals.

[@mikechristian-vn1le]

@@TheYahmez LoL. We don't need others to gaslight us . . . Even though so many do it anyway

[@norabelrose198]

H as haitch but Z as zee 👀

[@KaneB]

There is a "h" in "h". There is no "d" in "z".

[@d52k]

​@@KaneBand 'w'? :p

[@juliusseizure591]

I quite like vegemite, personally.

[@tudormarginean4776]

I think it would be a good idea to put a thumbnail - but I don't care, I'll watch it at first notification

[@KaneB]

??? it has a thumbnail

[@KaneB]

Am I the only one who can see the thumbnail?

[@tudormarginean4776]

​@@KaneB I'm the stupid one here, sorry. I clicked on the video so fast that I thought that the first frame, with the title, was the thumbnail. So stupid of me

[@TheYahmez]

@@KaneB no; [TITLE]+[PORTRAIT]

[@KaneB]

@@tudormarginean4776 haha, got it.

[@morefun2compute]

We don't have to go back to ancient China to find a relevant example: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke Also, in some parts of the U.S., they use the term "coke" to refer generically to soda, somewhat like many Americans use the term "Kleenex" to refer to facial tissue of any brand.