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Having an interpretation

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What the music I love expresses to me, is not thought too indefinite to put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.

Abstract

I investigate what it means to have an interpretation of our language, how we manage to bestow a determinate interpretation to our utterances, and to which extent our interpretation of the world is determinate. All this is done in dialogue with van Fraassen’s insightful discussion of Putnam’s model-theoretic argument and of scientific structuralism.

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Notes

  1. The most important ones are van Fraassen (1997a, b).

  2. See also van Fraassen (1997a, p. 21; 1997b, p. 91).

  3. None of this prevents us to partially capture, by means of axioms, our interpretation of our language.

  4. The example concerns the distinction between the existence of a coordinate system for the Euclidean plane and our ability to coordinatize the plane.

  5. I realise that there are really a number of reference fixing questions. Space does not permit me to discuss them separately or even to distinguish between them here.

  6. In defence of Putnam, some commentators have said that Putnam should have said that the only notion of causality that we can make sense of is so overdetermined that it is powerless as a reference fixer, or that the model-theoretic argument can be formulated in such a way that the causal theory of reference cannot be invoked as a way out (Douven 1999). I have pointed out my reservations about Douven’s reconstruction in Horsten (2001 p. 130).

  7. There an in rebus structuralism is articulated according to which reference to natural numbers can be seen as multiple reference to concrete objects belonging to (concrete) notation systems.

  8. I do not mean to suggest that one day there was a gathering of scientists in which the extension of ‘copper’ was fixed in this way.

  9. I shall not discuss Worrall’s Kantian epistemological structuralism here.

  10. Ladyman appears to be somewhat troubled by this question. See Ladyman (2007, pp. 39–40).

  11. For a comparison between ontological structuralism and ante rem structuralism in the philosophy of mathematics, see Ladyman (2007).

References

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Igor Douven and to my colleagues in Bristol for helpful discussions. The research for this project was supported by an AHRC project on Foundations of Structuralism (AH/H001670/1).

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  1. University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Leon Horsten

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  1. Leon Horsten
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Horsten, L. Having an interpretation. Philos Stud 150, 449–459 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9548-6

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