Work · Analytic Philosophy
The Meaning of “Meaning”
Twin Earth: meanings just ain't in the head.
Introduction
A long essay first published in 1975 in volume 7 of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science and reprinted the same year in the second volume of Putnam’s Philosophical Papers. On Twin Earth everything is as on Earth, except that the liquid called “water” is not H₂O but a different substance, XYZ: a speaker and her twin may be in the same mental state, yet their word “water” refers to different stuff. So meaning depends on the environment, not only on what is in the speaker’s head. Putnam adds the “division of linguistic labour”: many of us cannot tell an elm from a beech, yet our words refer correctly because experts can. The essay is a founding text of semantic externalism.
Connections
Criticizes
- On Sense and Reference1892 · Gottlob Frege
Taken up in
- Reason, Truth and History1981 · Hilary Putnam
More works by Hilary Putnam
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