Hilary Putnam: Minds, brains, machines | Hacker News Reader

Hilary Putnam: Minds, brains, machines

the-tls.co.uk

27 pointsdiodorus5 comments

> When Oscar uses the word “water” he is talking about water, whereas when Twin Oscar uses the word “water” he is talking about twin water. As a result, what you mean depends in part, but crucially, on the world around you.

(edit: i'm sure the "Criticism" section of the wikipedia article abt Twin Earth does a better job explaining this, but anyway...)

i never understood this perspective. let's assume the Oscars don't know anything about water's chemical composition, and H2O and XYZ have the same properties (which i think the experiment does). then magically swap the Oscars; neither of them would realize it, nor would anyone around them. and there's no magical oracle who would be able to say that e.g. Twin Oscar's thoughts about "water" are now all nonsensical because he's thinking about Twin Water and not the Normal Water he's actually experiencing -- actually, i'd say they'd make as much sense as they did before the swap. because "meanings" are in the head, they're not magically bound to the real world, at best correlated.

though if i'm misreading Putnam, please let me know! i'd be happy to stop being vaguely annoyed every time i see his stuff mentioned :)

I understand "meaning" here to signify reference, as in, "What is the object that Oscar and his twin refer to when they talk about 'water'?" The twins are psychologically identical, but it turns out that they refer to different objects by virtue of their environments. So meaning can't just be a matter of psychology.

I guess you might think that "meaning" is best understood as something other than reference. But that seems to be a starting point for Putnam.

> So meaning can't just be a matter of psychology.

I disagree.

When the two Oscars talk about "water," they refer to the same object -- an abstract notion of a blueish liquid essential to the existence of life as we (they) know it. They can point to physical objects and tell you that they match their idea of water ("this is water"), but this idea has no relation to the underlying physical and chemical properties of the substance.

The idea was born out of limited human cognition, its meaning cannot transcend that limitation.

i disagree with that idea too, but i think GP is describing Putnam's position, not necessarily their own. so it's Putnam we're disagreeing with :)

This is a good article about Putnam. I would just add that his philosophy is part of a much larger trend in philosophy that includes pragmatism, post-Wittgensteinian analytic philosophy, and existential-phenomenology as in Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, all with overall views rather similar to Putnam's.

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