Abstract
The thrust of this lecture will be negative: I shall argue that a certain way of thinking about meaning and about the nature of the mind is fundamentally misguided. It is always less exciting to hear someone criticize attempted solutions to a problem than to hear someone announce that he has found the solution. But I think we can learn something about the nature of meaning and, perhaps, something — even if it is somewhat nihilistic — about the nature of psychology by seeing why certain ideas about meaning and its place in the mind don’t work.
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Notes
Language and Thought (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1975).
See, for example, Chomsky’s Reflections on Language Chapter 1 ( New York: Pantheon, 1975 ).
Chomsky speaks of “a subsystem (for language) which has a specific integrated character and which is in effect the genetic program for a specific organ” in the discussion with Piaget, Pappert and others printed in: Language and Learning, ed. Massimo Piattelli (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). See also the reference in n. 2.
See Chapter 5 of my Mind, Language and Reality (Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, 1975).
Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, Language 35 (1955): 26–58.
Problems of Knowledge and Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 1971).
See Chapter 21 of the book cited in n. 4.
Of course, the brain’s “anguage,” if it exists, is not literally written. See my “What is Innate and Why,” Chapter 14 of the Piattelli volume cited in n. 3.
In “Meaning Holism,” forthcoming in: The Philosophy of W. V. Quine in the Library of Living Philosophers (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois).
“Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (originally published in the Philosophical Review in January 1951), reprinted in Quine’s From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961); “Carnap on Logical Truth,”originally published in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (LaSalle: Open Court, 1963), reprinted in Quine’s Ways of Paradox (2nd edition, Harvard, 1976); Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1960).
See, for example, his Psychological Explanation( New York: Random House, 1968 ).
Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981); the papers in Realism and Reason (vol. 3 of my Philosophical Papers, Cambridge University Press, 1983).
See The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1983).
See Chapter 13 of the book cited in n. 4.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition, enlarged (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970).
See Chapter 8 of my Realism and Reason.
See Fodor’s “Cognitive Science and the Twin-Earth Problem,” The Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 23 (April 1982): 98–118.
Chapter 12 of my Mind, Language and Reality.
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Putnam, H. (1986). Meaning and Our Mental Life. In: Ullmann-Margalit, E. (eds) The Kaleidoscope of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 94. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5496-0_3
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