Reference Without Sense: An Examination of Putnam’s Semantic Theory

Abstract

In several writings¹ Hilary Putnam has stated his rejection of traditional semantic theories by means of the slogan “Meanings ain’t in the head”. The slogan is deceptive. Out of context, it could serve as a lemma for semanticians with very different backgrounds. Thus, a Fregean philosopher could endorse it as a statement of his antipsychologistic stance. Although Putnam acknowledges that Frege and Carnap identified meanings with abstract entities, not with mental ones, he thinks that the clash between psychologism and Platonism is “a tempest in a teapot, as far as meaningtheory is concerned”,² since understanding the meaning of a word, grasping the abstract entity which is its sense, would still be an individual psychological state. And so Frege would share with traditional semantics an assumption that Putnam is going to reject:

• (I) That knowing the meaning of a term is just a matter of being in a certain psychological state.

A first version of this paper was presented in a colloquium on the philosophy of Hilary Putnam, held in Madrid in March, 1985. Successive drafts were read and criticized by my colleagues and nevertheless friends, Francisco Valle Arroyo, José Luis G. Escribano and Jorge Rodriguez Marqueze, but I alone am responsible for the possible remaining errors.