
Hilary Putnam: Minds, brains, machines - diodorus
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/hilary-putnam-footnotes-to-plato/
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uryga
> 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 :)

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Buldak
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.

~~~
viluon
> 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.

~~~
uryga
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 :)

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woodandsteel
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.

