Abstract
1. Hilary Putnam has been apt to emphasize all the differences between the deictic doctrine that he advocates for the understanding of our understanding of natural kind substantives and the accounts of the meanings of these expressions that would have had to be offered by his predecessors in the philosophy of meaning. Delighting in iconoclasm, he has sought at various times to include within the ambit of his entertaining criticisms of his predecessors such figures as Aristotle, the Scholastics, Locke, Mill, Frege, linguistic philosophers, analytical philosophers, philosophers of linguistics, indeed practically everyone.1 Frege would not have enjoyed the idea that he might be thought to belong in such a list.
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Notes
See, for instance, the recent exposition that he gives inRepresentations and Reality ,Cambridge, Mass. (M.I.T.), 1988.
Eventually, this paper was published inLanguage, Belief and Metaphysics, Munitz and Kiefer (eds.), SUNY Press, Albany 1970, and inMetaphilosophy, 3,1970, pp. 187–201.
G.E. M. Anscombe,Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Hutchinson 1959, pp. 41, 42, 44
Michael Dummett “Truth”Proc. Ar. Soc. 1958–9, pp. 141–3
David Wiggins, “Identity Statements”, in R.R. Butler (ed.)Analytical Philosophy II, Oxford, Blackwell, 1965.
For “direction of fit”, see J.L. Austin, “How to talk: some simple ways” (reprinted in Collected Papers, Oxford,).
M.J. Woods, as cited in mySameness and Substance, (Oxford, Blackwell, 1990).
In discussion, Hilary Putnam pointed out to me that at this point in his development of the doctrine he had been reporting a discussion with Rogers Albritton in which they had been envisaging circumstances under which it was found that all extant pencils had a certain microstructure. Here I ask: Butall pencils, however manufactured and for whatever specialized purpose? This would be magic. Or (more likely) there would have to have been a practical joke somewhere in this tall story.
These problems are more tractable than the problems they superficially resemble and that were thrown up by the resemblance (or no-universals) theory of universals defended by Russell and H.H. Price. They are more tractable because heredeixis can be supported by context and by verbal explanations that are unconstrained by special requirements of ontological parsimony. See the explanations envisaged below, especially §13.
“Truth”,Proc. Ar. Soc. XXIV, Suppl. vol., 121.
For a closer approximation to the hydrosemantics or the natural meanings that the exiled Duke must really have had in mind atAs You Like It, II.i.12; cp. Paul Valery’s celebration (however ill calculated to evoke Austin’s approval) of theSource Perrier.
Indeed it still continues, to judge by the aims and ambitions that are prescribed by most of the participants in the group effort to solve forx -if necessary by brute force ~ in the equation: (knowledge) = (belief + x). In easel painting, pointillisme was a short-lived experiment. In philosophy, it bids fair to continue for ever.Not anticipating that Kripke would be charged with violating some supposed distinction between metaphysics and the philosophy of language (another case of the distinction Quine and Putnam subverted) and falsely supposing that, after Kripke’s excellent observations on the differences between the statuses of necessity, analyticity anda priority, all these things would inevitably be thought through to the end, I rashly elected inSameness and Substance (Blackwell 1980) to call certain truths and necessities that were neither analytically nor formally nor combinatorially guaranteed, but which rested on what things (objects or kind) both individuatively are and cannot help but be (that is, on the individuation of objects under certain concepts of the sort Putnam had described),conceptual truths. I little thought that my “conceptual” would be read as an evasive synonym of “analytic” or that I would be seen as seeking to save some of the most implausible theses of linguistic philosophy. Why should a concept such asman, horse, tree, be something that arises on the language side of a barrier that keeps the world from flowing into the word? It is expressly denied inSameness and Substance that language can be protected by such an exclusion zone. H See John McDowell, “On the sense and reference of a proper name”,Mind, 86 (1977) pp. 59–85; David Wiggins, “Frege’s Problem of the Morning Star and the Evening Star” in M. Schirn (ed).Studies on Frege, II,Logic and Philosophy of Language, Stuttgart Bad Canstatt, Fromann-Holzboog 1976.What, then, does it turn on whether concept Ci is or is not the same as concept C2? The question is difficult, but the difficulty is not one that we bring down on ourselves by exercising an escapable option to speak of concepts. Concepts are not philosophical artifacts. They are general things we are already committed to thinking about when we quantify (as we frequently do) over what predicates stand for. Once we see this, we shall not rush to offer any perfectly general answer, along the lines of Axiom V of Frege’s Grundgesetze, or some modalization of this. Who asks nowadays for a unitary criterion of identity for substances or continuants? For some important contributions to the proper (that is, the piecemeal) treatment of the problem, see Hilary Putnam, ‘On properties’,Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, Cambridge, 1975.
For the semantics of the copula and other aspects of the difficulties that Frege encountered with the concepthorse, see David Wiggins, “The Sense and Reference of Predicates: a Plea for the Copula”,Philosophical Quarterly, 1984.
See Gareth Evans,The Varieties of Reference, ed. John McDowell, Oxford, 1982, Chapter One.
See “The Meaning of “Meaning”” inPhilosophical Papers, vol. 2, Cambridge, 1975.See “Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et Ideis” (Gerhardt IV) p. 422;Discourse on Metaphysics (§24-5);New Essays, pp. 254–6.
But only in a sense of ’adequate’ that must (I hold) be purged of certain Leibnizian preoccupations, e.g., the idea that, at the limit, as human knowledge approximates to God’s knowledge,a posteriori knowledge will be able to be replaced bya priori demonstration. More generally, and against the idea that extension-involvingness itself only reflects a state in the development of scientific understanding, seeSameness and Substance, pp. 210–213.
An earlier version of this paper was given in French at the Institut d’Historie et Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, in Paris 1989. It is published inRevue de theologie et des philosophie 1992/3. An English version was first published in Adrian Moore (ed.), Meaning and Reference (Oxford University Press, 1993); also inReading Putnam, Clark and Hale (eds.), Blackwell, 1993.
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Wiggins, D. (1995). Putnam’s Doctrine of Natural Kind Words and Frege’s Doctrines of Sense, Reference and Extension: Can they Cohere?. In: Biro, J., Kotatko, P. (eds) Frege: Sense and Reference One Hundred Years Later. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 65. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0411-1_5
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