Abstract
In the “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” Hilary Putnam claims that
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It is possible for two speakers to be in exactly the same psychological state (in the narrow sense), even though the extension of the termA in the idiolect of the one is different from the extension of the termA in the idiolect of the other.
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Extension is not determined by psychological state. (Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”: p. 222)
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Notes
See “Individualism and the Mental”, p. 75 for Burge’s distinction between ‘attribute’ and ‘ascribe’ .
We shall see in what follows that matters are more complicated. 3 has a de re reading in which substitutivity goes through.
I say ‘partial function’ because there are uses ofpropositional attitudinal sentences in which the content expressed depends on features not contained in the sentence used.
Semantic content is not identical to linguistic meaning, but rather with truth conditions.
There are two ways in which the de re/de dicto distinction is construed: it can be taken to be a distinction between attributions or between different sorts of beliefs. The latter is the historical tradition in philosophy, stemming from Aristotle. See Burge, “Belief De Re” p. 339, fn. 2 for historical references.
It might bethought that de dicto beliefs are more fundamental than de re beliefs, since in each case it is thought that if a believer is related to an object, he is so related under some description. See Burge, “Belief De Re” for an argument against this view and for the primacy of de re belief.
In what follows I shall leave aside a number of issues that complicate the discussion of proper names, including Kripke’s Paderewski-Paderewski and Pierre examples (Kripke, 1971) and there being names in idiolects which are the name of more than one person. I do not think that in any of these cases we have to take proper names to have a demonstrative element in their semantic structure.
Many of the arguments that Burge uses against Putnam to show that natural kind terms do not have an indexical element in their semantic structure can be used against Burge’s thesis that proper names have a demonstrative element in their semantic structure (Burge, “Other Bodies”: pp. 103–107).
These sentence are difficult to interpret, since they are non-standard in the way in which Burge wishes to interpret them. I believe that the ordinary way to understand 11 is as meaning, “Jones is necessarily a member of the Jones family.” But on this reading, 11 is not related to 12, as Burge claims (ibid., p. 429).
We can now seethe importance of the discussion about indexicality. If some term occurring obliquely in a attitude ascription is an indexical used deictically, then the ascription ascribes a de re attitude. Consequently, if natural kind terms, as Putnam claims, and proper names, as Burge alleges, were indexicals, then there would be a primafacie case that attitude ascriptions in which they occurred obliquely would be ascriptions which would attribute de re attitudes. It would follow from this that what beliefs were involved, their individuation, would depend on the objects to which the de re attitudes related the subject.
The example here runs counter to the semantics of 25. In uttering 25 the semantic referent of ‘Aristotle’ for Boscar could not be Aristotle, since by hypothesis Aristotle does not exist on Twin-Earth. But what I am trying to show is Oscar and Boscar do not share the same de dicto beliefs. To show this I assume that their uses of 25 containing ‘Aristotle’ express the same beliefs.
The arguments here exactly parallel Burge’s arguments in “Other Bodies” (pp. 109–110).
The type identity of the two worlds differentiates my argument from Putnam’s and from Burge’s recounting of it. In their Twin-Earth arguments Earth and Twin-Earth are not type identical, since on Earth there is water and Twin-Earth a different compound, XYZ.
Of course Aristotle was not named ‘Aristotle’, but was named with the Greek name which has the same translational meaning as our ‘Aristotle’ . I shall disregard this point in what follows, since it unnecessarily complicates the story I wish to tell.
I leave out of the discussion the complicating feature that ‘Aristotle’ might be the name of more than one person in Oscar’s idiolect and in the idiolects of those from whom he learned the name.
Kripke associates this sort of theory with Frege and Russell (ibid., pp. 27–31).
Kripke calls this ‘a cluster theory’ and associates it with Searle and Strawson (ibid., pp. 31 & 61).
Kripke attributes this theory to Strawson (ibid., p. 90).
I do not assimilate Fregean sense with meaning. They are not the same (see Burge, “Sinning Against Frege”). I leave out of the discussion here Fregean sense, since it is open to wide interpretation what sense is supposed to be.
In Kripke’s account of the description theory, he has the antecedent of the conditional as ‘X has most of the Ø.’ (Kripke, Naming and Necessity: p. 65). The reason for the qualification is that the description theory that Kripke’s presents is the cluster theory. But this detail is not relevant here.
Brian Loar disputes this. He argues that we have only warrant to attribute to Oscar a range of de dicto ascriptions, but it does not follow that for each de dicto ascription we are warranted in attributing a corresponding psychological content. (Loar, “Social and Psychological Content”: pp. 99–110). I do not believe that Loar’s arguments cut against Burge. See (Burge, “Wherein is Language Social”: p. n. 13) for his reply to Loar’s criticisms.
Oscar would be warranted in using sentences parallel to 40–44 to ascribe to himself beliefs with the requisite changes made replacing ‘Oscar’ with ‘I’ and the third person pronouns with the corresponding first person pronoun to ascribe to himself. The reason for this is that if Oscar were to use the sentences, it would be the concept expressed by ‘arthritis’ in his idiolect that would be a constituent of the beliefs expressed by his use of the sentences.
To distinguish this case from one in which Oscar is named ‘Pipsqueak’ we can imagine that the person who introduces the name does introduce the name with the intention of naming Oscar and does not use the name again.
This is not the only way that someone can get a nickname. It is possible for one person to use ‘Pipsqueak’ as a nickname for Oscar. ‘Pipsqueak’ would, then, be Oscar’s nickname in that person’s idiolect.
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Davis, S. (1999). Externalism, Dedicto Beliefs, Proper Names and Reference Determination. In: Fisette, D. (eds) Consciousness and Intentionality: Models and Modalities of Attribution. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9193-5_14
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