The Pragmatism Reader

From Peirce through the Present

Robert B. Talisse, Scott F. Aikin, Robert Talisse, Scott Aikin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400838684
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Pragmatism in Philosophy

A wide-ranging anthology of key pragmatist writings The Pragmatism Reader is the essential anthology of this important philosophical movement. Each selection featured here is a key writing by a leading pragmatist thinker, and represents a distinctively pragmatist approach to a core philosophical problem. The collection includes work by pragmatism's founders, Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as seminal writings by mid-twentieth-century pragmatists such as Sidney Hook, C. I. Lewis, Nelson Goodman, Rudolf Carnap, Wilfrid Sellars, and W.V.O. Quine. This reader also includes the most important work in contemporary pragmatism by philosophers like Susan Haack, Cornel West, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Cheryl Misak, and Robert Brandom. Each selection is a stand-alone piece—not an excerpt or book chapter—and each is presented fully unabridged. The Pragmatism Reader challenges the notion that pragmatism fell into a midcentury decline and was dormant until the advent of "neopragmatism" in the 1980s. This comprehensive anthology reveals a rich and highly influential tradition running unbroken through twentieth-century philosophy and continuing today. It shows how American pragmatist philosophers have contributed to leading philosophical debates about truth, meaning, knowledge, experience, belief, existence, justification, and freedom.

• Covers pragmatist philosophy from its origins to today
• Features key writings by the leading pragmatist thinkers
• Demonstrates the continuity and enduring influence of pragmatism
• Challenges prevailing notions about pragmatism
• Includes only stand-alone pieces, completely unabridged
• Reflects the full range of pragmatist themes, arguments, concerns, and commitments

Putnam offers the now famous Twin Earth thought experiment in order to defend the thesis that the meaning of a term is at least in part settled by what exists in the world.

HILARY PUTNAM

Meaning and Reference

Unclear as it is, the traditional doctrine that the notion “meaning” possesses the extension/intension ambiguity has certain typical consequences. The doctrine that the meaning of a term is a concept carried the implication that meanings are mental entities. Frege, however, rebelled against this “psychologism.” Feeling that meanings are public property—that the same meaning can be “grasped” by more than one person and by persons at different times—he identified concepts (and hence “intensions” or meanings) with abstract entities rather than mental entities. However, “grasping” these abstract entities was still an individual psychological act. None of these philosophers doubted that understanding a word (knowing its intension) was just a matter of being in a certain psychological state (somewhat in the way in which knowing how to factor numbers in one’s head is just a matter of being in a certain very complex psychological state).

Secondly, the timeworn example of the two terms ‘creature with a kidney’ and ‘creature with a heart’ does show that two terms can have the same extension and yet differ in intension. But it was taken to be obvious that the reverse is impossible: two terms cannot differ in extension and have the same intension. Interestingly, no argument for this impossibility was ever offered. Probably it reflects the tradition of the ancient and medieval philosophers, who assumed that the concept corresponding to a term was just a conjunction of predicates, and hence that the concept corresponding to a term must always provide a necessary and sufficient condition for falling into the extension of the term. For philosophers like Carnap, who accepted the verifiability theory of meaning, the concept corresponding to a term provided (in the ideal case, where the term had “complete meaning”) a criterion for belonging to the extension (not just in the sense of “necessary and sufficient condition,” but in the strong sense of way of recognizing whether a given thing falls into the extension or not). So theory of meaning came to rest on two unchallenged assumptions:

(1) That knowing the meaning of a term is just a matter of being in a certain psychological state (in the sense of “psychological state,” in which states of memory and belief are “psychological states”; no one thought that knowing the meaning of a word was a continuous state of consciousness, of course).

(2) That the meaning of a term determines its extension (in the sense that sameness of intension entails sameness of extension).

I shall argue that these two assumptions are not jointly satisfied by any notion, let alone any notion of meaning. The traditional concept of meaning is a concept which rests on a false theory.

Are Meanings in the Head?

For the purpose of the following science-fiction examples, we shall suppose that somewhere there is a planet we shall call Twin Earth. Twin Earth is very much like Earth: in fact, people on Twin Earth even speak English. In fact, apart from the differences we shall specify in our science-fiction examples, the reader may suppose that Twin Earth is exactly like Earth. He may even suppose that he has a Doppelganger—an identical copy—on Twin Earth, if he wishes, although my stories will not depend on this.

Although some of the people on Twin Earth (say, those who call themselves “Americans” and those who call themselves “Canadians” and those who call themselves “Englishmen,” etc.) speak English, there are, not surprisingly, a few tiny differences between the dialects of English spoken on Twin Earth and standard English.

One of the peculiarities of Twin Earth is that the liquid called “water” is not H₂O but a different liquid whose chemical formula is very long and complicated. I shall abbreviate this chemical formula simply as XYZ. I shall suppose that XYZ is indistinguishable from water at normal temperatures and pressures. Also, I shall suppose that the oceans and lakes and seas of Twin Earth contain XYZ and not water, that it rains XYZ on Twin Earth and not water, etc.

If a space ship from Earth ever visits Twin Earth, then the supposition at first will be that ‘water’ has the same meaning on Earth and on Twin Earth. This supposition will be corrected when it is discovered that “water” on Twin Earth is XYZ, and the Earthian space ship will report somewhat as follows.

“On Twin Earth the word ‘water’ means XYZ.”

Symmetrically, if a space ship from Twin Earth ever visits Earth, then the supposition at first will be that the word ‘water’ has the same meaning on Twin Earth and on Earth. This supposition will be corrected when it is discovered that “water” on Earth is H₂O, and the Twin Earthian space ship will report:

“On Earth the word ‘water’ means H₂O.”

Note that there is no problem about the extension of the term ‘water’: the word simply has two different meanings (as we say); in the sense in which it is used on Twin Earth, the sense of water_TE, what we call “water” simply isn’t water, while in the sense in which it is used on Earth, the sense of water_E, what the Twin Earthians call “water” simple isn’t water. The extension of ‘water’ in the sense of water_E is the set of all wholes consisting of H₂O molecules, or something like that; the extension of water in the sense of water_TE is the set of all wholes consisting of XYZ molecules, or something like that.

Now let us roll the time back to about 1750. The typical Earthian speaker of English did not know that water consisted of hydrogen and oxygen, and the typical Twin-Earthian speaker of English did not know that “water” consisted of XYZ. Let Oscar₁ be such a typical Earthian English speaker, and let Oscar₂ be his counterpart on Twin Earth. You may suppose that there is no belief that Oscar₁ had about water that Oscar₂ did not have about “water.” If you like, you may even suppose that Oscar₁ and Oscar₂ were exact duplicates in appearance, feelings, thoughts, interior monologue, etc. 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 on Twin Earth in 1750 as in 1950. Oscar₁ and Oscar₂ understood the term ‘water’ 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 fifty years to discover that they understood the term ‘water’ differently. Thus the extension of the term ‘water’ (and, in fact, its “meaning” in the intuitive preanalytical usage of that term) is not a function of the psychological state of the speaker by itself.¹

But, it might be objected, why should we accept it that the term ‘water’ had the same extension in 1750 and in 1950 (on both Earths)? Suppose I point to a glass of water and say “this liquid is called water.” My “ostensive definition” of water has the following empirical presupposition: that the body of liquid I am pointing to bears a certain sameness relation (say, x is the same liquid as y, or x is the same _Las y) to most of the stuff I and other speakers in my linguistic community have on other occasions called “water.” If this presupposition is false because, say, I am—unknown to me—pointing to a glass of gin and not a glass of water, then I do not intend my ostensive definition to be accepted. Thus the ostensive definition conveys what might be called a “defeasible” necessary and sufficient condition: the necessary and sufficient condition for being water is bearing the relation same_L to the stuff in the glass; but this is the necessary and sufficient condition only if the empirical presupposition is satisfied. If it is not satisfied, then one of a series of, so to speak, “fallback” conditions becomes activated.

The key point is that the relation same_L is a theoretical relation: whether something is or is not the same liquid as this may take an indeterminate amount of scientific investigation to determine. Thus, 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 Lake Michigan as an example of “water.” What changed was that in 1750 we would have mistakenly thought that XYZ bore the relation same_L to the liquid in Lake Michigan, whereas in 1800 or 1850 we would have known that it did not.

Let us now modify our science-fiction story. I shall suppose that molybdenum pots and pans can’t be distinguished from aluminum pots and pans save by an expert. (This could be true for all I know, and, a fortiori, it could be true for all I know by virtue of “knowing the meaning” of the words aluminum and molybdenum.) We will now suppose that molybdenum is as common on Twin Earth as aluminum is on Earth, and that aluminum is as rare on Twin Earth as molybdenum is on Earth. In particular, we shall assume that “aluminum” pots and pans are made of molybdenum on Twin Earth. Finally, we shall assume that the words ‘aluminum’ and ‘molybdenum’ are switched on Twin Earth: ‘aluminum’ is the name of molybdenum, and ‘molybdenum’ is the name of aluminum. If a space ship from Earth visited Twin Earth, the visitors from Earth probably would not suspect that the “aluminum” pots and pans on Twin Earth were not made of aluminum, especially when the Twin Earthians said they were. But there is one important difference between the two cases. An Earthian metallurgist could tell very easily that “aluminum” was molybdenum, and a Twin Earthian metallurgist could tell equally easily that aluminum was “molybdenum.” (The shudder quotes in the preceding sentence indicate Twin Earthian usages.) Whereas in 1750 no one on either Earth or Twin Earth could have distinguished water from “water,” the confusion of aluminum with “aluminum” involves only a part of the linguistic communities involved.

This example makes the same point as the preceding example. If Oscar₁ and Oscar₂ are standard speakers of Earthian English and Twin Earthian English, respectively, and neither is chemically or metallurgically sophisticated, then there may be no difference at all in their psychological states when they use the word ‘aluminum’; nevertheless, we have to say that ‘aluminum’ has the extension aluminum in the idiolect of Oscar₁ and the extension molybdenum in the idiolect of Oscar_2· (Also we have to say that Oscar₁ and Oscar₂ mean different things by ‘aluminum’; that ‘aluminum’ has a different meaning on Earth than it does on Twin Earth, etc.) Again we see that the psychological state of the speaker does not determine the extension (or the “meaning,” speaking preanalytically) of the word.

Before discussing this example further, let me introduce a non-science-fiction example. Suppose you are like me and cannot tell an elm from a beech tree. We still say that the extension of ‘elm’ in my idiolect is the same as the extension of ‘elm’ in anyone else’s, viz., the set of all elm trees, and that the set of all beech trees is the extension of ‘beech’ in both of our idiolects. Thus ‘elm’ in my idiolect has a different extension from ‘beech’ in your idiolect (as it should). Is it really credible that this difference in extension is brought about by some difference in our concepts? My concept of an elm tree is exactly the same as my concept of a beech tree (I blush to confess). If someone heroically attempts to maintain that the difference between the extension of ‘elm’ and the extension of ‘beech’ in my idiolect is explained by a difference in my psychological state, then we can always refute him by constructing a “Twin Earth” example—just let the words ‘elm’ and ‘beech’ be switched on Twin Earth (the way ‘aluminum’ and “molybdenum’ were in the previous example). Moreover, suppose I have a doppelganger on Twin Earth who is molecule for molecule “identical” with me. If you are a dualist, then also suppose my Doppelganger thinks the same verbalized thoughts I do, has the same sense data, the same dispositions, etc. It is absurd to think his psychological state is one bit different from mine: yet he “means” beech when he says “elm,” and I “mean” elm when I say “elm.” Cut the pie any way you like, “meanings” just ain’t in the head!

A Sociolinguistic Hypothesis

The last two examples depend upon a fact about language that seems, surprisingly, never to have been pointed out: that there is division of linguistic labor. We could hardly use such words as ‘elm’ and ‘aluminum’ if no one possessed a way of recognizing elm trees and aluminum metal; but not everyone to whom the distinction is important has to be able to make the distinction. Let us shift the example; consider gold. Gold is important for many reasons: it is a precious metal; it is a monetary metal; it has symbolic value (it is important to mo...