Abstract
“Cut the pie any way you like, “meanings” just ain’t in the head.” With those jaunty words, Hilary Putnam may have launched nearly as many philosophical ships as Helen of Troy. Quite divergent theses can be arranged upon the frame of a gnomic aphorism and in this essay, I will suggest a new reading of Putnam’s dictum that emphasizes factors he never considered, although they spring from the same investigations of how scientific terms behave over time that originally inspired Putnam.
Cut the pie any way you like, “meanings” just ain’t in the head.
Hilary Putnam (Putnam 1975b)
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(Putnam 1975) represents an important earlier working of these basic themes.
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i.e., the doctrine that strong mappings of ζ and φ type are well defined. In truth, Scott Soames represents a clearer exponent of “fierce propositionalism” than Kripke himself, whose own opinions of “propositions” are rather guarded.
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The implementation of existential instantiation happens to require a duplicated line (11/12) within this specific formalism, (based upon (Bergmann et al. 2004)) but the repetition can be avoided by other sorts of the “flagging rule”.
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After Paul Ziff .
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The manner in which “weight” shifts its significance even across these familiar adjustments in context provides grounds for doubting that contextually localized ζ maps can be successfully integrated into wider forms of “extension.” I discuss such issues at greater length in Wandering significance (Wilson 2006).
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In Wittgenstein’s sense.
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“Situations” in roughly John Perry and Jon Barwise’s sense.
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I should mention that Jeffrey King is an advocate of structured propositions, but these items will induce strong propositional maps in the sense criticized here.
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As stressed in the appendix below, the invocation of generic representatives should be regarded as a natural aspect of these “familiar semantic values.” Insofar as I can determine, such elements rarely surface within Stanley and King’s discussion of such issues, despite the fact that King once wrote up a nice context-based treatment of the generic ingredients employed in the natural deduction example of Section 4.2 (King 1991).
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Often in a generic element fashion.
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As a case in point, we might consider Cauchy’s famous error in confusing regular convergence with uniform convergence. Pace Frege , I doubt that the mistake can be explained through a simple invocation of quantifier order: we can trust that Cauchy recognized the difference between “Everybody loves somebody” and “Somebody is loved by everyone.” However, deeper pressures upon the generic elements that one employs in investigating a general equation within mathematics have a greater potential to explain the confusion of ordering.
References
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Kripke, Saul. 1982. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Putnam, Hilary. 1975a. It ain’t necessarily so. Journal of Philosophy 59: 658–671. Reprinted in Mathematics, matter and method: Philosophical papers, vol. 1, 237–249. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Putnam, Hilary. 1975b. The meaning of ‘meaning’. In Language, mind and knowledge: Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science, ed. Keith Gunderson, vol. 7, 131–193. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reprinted in Mind, Language and reality: Philosophical papers, vol. 2, 215–271. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Sperber, Dan, and Diedre Wilson. 1986. Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stanley, Jason. 2000. Context and logical form. Linguistics and Philosophy 23: 391–434.
Stanley, Jason, and Jeffrey C. King. 2005. Semantics, pragmatics, and the role of semantic content. In Semantics versus pragmatics, ed. Z.G. Szabó, 111–164. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, George. 1984. Pronouns and pronomial descriptions – A new semantical category. Philosophical Studies 45: 1–30.
Wilson, Mark. 2006. Wandering significance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jeff King, Anil Gupta, Juliet Floyd and George Wilson for discussions on the topics of this essay. Some of these themes date to the very pleasant discussions Bill Demopoulos and I used to have when we both lived in Chicago long ago.
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Wilson, M. (2012). Long Ago, in a Context Far Away. In: Frappier, M., Brown, D., DiSalle, R. (eds) Analysis and Interpretation in the Exact Sciences. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 78. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2582-9_4
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