the problem of meaning
First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.
Epictetus
How do I know what I mean until I see what I say?
E.M. Forster
The Belgian painter René Magritte once created a highly realistic picture of a pipe, below which he famously wrote, ‘This is not a pipe.’ One would not want to disagree with a great artist as to the meaning of his own work, but we do not always extend the same courtesy to amateurs. When my neighbour proudly shows off his latest watercolour of a cat, only politeness stops me from pointing out that it looks more like a horse. But even a cat drawn so ineptly that it looks like a horse is supposed to remain a picture of a cat. Pictures must be pictures of the things they are supposed to represent, otherwise each and every one would be perfect in being a picture of something, even if just of a mess. According to convention, I might fail to paint a lifelike cat, but I cannot fail to create a cat at all, no matter how bizarre the result of my efforts may be. However, we would be suspicious if my neighbour’s ‘cat’ looked like a brilliantly rendered horse by a skilled anatomist. It would be more likely that he had intended to paint a horse all along, no matter how much he protested that he could not quite capture the sheen of the cat’s fur. He would seem to be mistaken about not only the results on the canvas, but also the contents of his own thoughts that led to such results.
This kind of error is not limited to artistic endeavour, but also applies to any form of expression – even to simple spoken reports of our experiences. According to some philosophers, we could all be in the position of the deluded artist at times, since our own opinion of what we mean can be mistaken. Not only can we mean to say one thing, then, by accident, say another, but we can also mean to mean one thing and, by accident, mean another. For example, in The Arabian Nights, Sinbad the Sailor escapes from a giant bird of prey known as the ‘roc’. According to the thirteenth-century explorer Marco Polo, the roc lived on the island of Madagascar. He described the creature as an eagle with a wingspan thirty paces long and so powerful that it could carry off an elephant in its talons. When Kublai Khan heard the tale, he is said to have dispatched envoys to the King of Madagascar, from whom they procured a roc feather. Modern zoologists would dispute that it was any such thing, for there were never any eagles of that size living on the island – or anywhere else. The source of the legend may be another Madagascan native, the now-extinct Elephant Bird which, though vegetarian and flightless, weighed half a ton and stood three metres tall. If so, when Marco Polo or Kublai Khan spoke of the ‘roc’, they were actually referring to the Elephant Bird. And it is no use going beyond the words and appealing to their thoughts either, since their thoughts are equally limited to referring to their experiences and the progenitors of those experiences. They are simply not capable of referring to things they have had no connection with. In the words of the elder statesman of American philosophy, Hilary Putnam, ‘Meanings just ain’t in the head.’1
Hilary Putnam was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1926. His parents moved to France when he was six months old, where his father, Samuel Putnam, edited a literary magazine, and produced a translation of all the extant works of Rabelais. The family returned to the United States when Hilary was seven years old. In 1936, ‘Sam’ Putnam became a communist when, as he put it, ‘I saw world-famous writers starving on the streets of New York,’ but ten years later he quit the Communist Party in total disillusionment.2 In the 1960s, Hilary Putnam campaigned for civil rights and against America’s involvement in Vietnam, for a time flirting with Marxism-Leninism after joining the Progressive Labour Party. This incurred moves by the Harvard University authorities to censure him for disruptive political activity. Putnam headed off punishment by mobilizing friends and supporters for his cause, but he later admitted that his membership of the PLP had been a mistake.
Putnam is known for holding views on a wide range of philosophical subjects, and also for changing his mind several times during his career. It has been said that this is due to his overarching concern to avoid being boring, but his own explanation was as follows: ‘We philosophers are frequently torn between opposing considerations, but we very infrequently show it in print. What we do is let ourselves be torn in private until we “plonk” for one alternative or other; then the published paper only shows what we plonked for, and not the being torn.’ However, Putnam has never changed his mind on his most celebrated contribution, the philosophical theory of ‘semantic externalism’. This is the view that the content or meaning of a term is given by its history rather than by what it presents to its thinker. It is determined by what gave rise to it in the mind of the thinker through his interaction with the world, and not by his or her sidereal beliefs and intentions about it. We do not really give meaning to our language; rather, its meaning is given to us. Externalism holds that the important factors in an act of meaning are thus external to the individual, rather than internal.
In the history of philosophy, thinkers have been less concerned with explaining how our meanings might go astray, than with how they are usually able not to. It is our apparently miraculous ability to talk sense that has been regarded as problematic. In the seventeenth century, the French philosopher René Descartes gave us the ‘dualist’ picture of the mind and body occupying two separate and self-contained worlds, each able to exist without the other. This left us the task of explaining how the two interact. Our internal faculties of reason and perception are able to give us intelligible and reliable knowledge of the outside world, but we might not have been so lucky. Unfortunate individuals might be born with quite different faculties that cannot furnish them with knowledge. This could be because either they cannot detect certain features of the world – just as the naked eye cannot detect ultraviolet light – or because they are equipped to detect features that do not happen to exist in their environment, as with the light-starved vestigial eyes of subterranean organisms. Knowledge is attainable only where our faculties share a particular affinity with the objects of their attention. The question for philosophers was how to account for the happy coincidence of human faculties matching their environment so well.
An immensely influential solution known as ‘transcendental idealism’ was propounded in the eighteenth century by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. While a Darwinian explanation for the efficacy of our faculties screams out to any modern reader, Kant – who pre-dated evolutionary theory by a century – argued that the perfect fit between our faculties and their objects is due to the latter being created by the former. He distinguished between the appearances of things, or ‘phenomena’, and things as they are in-themselves, or ‘noumena’. Noumena were unknowable, he thought, coming within our apprehension only indirectly through one appearance or another. The character of these appearances is determined by the faculties of the mind that processes them for the delectation of the observer. For example, the colour of a rose is not something inherent to the rose as it is in-itself. Rather, it is a function of its interaction with our visual faculties. A creature with different faculties – such as a bumblebee – would see a quite different hue. Even space and time were, to Kant, not features of the world, but ways in which the human mind orders its experiences.
Kant was partly right: we now know that data from the senses are processed in various ways by the brain, and that this processing can take place differently in different organisms. However, we also believe that each kind of creature’s faculties are due to the pressures of natural selection. The Darwinian picture, in which a creature’s faculties are moulded by its environment, leads to a different model of acquiring meaning. If our faculties give form to the world then we project meaning onto our surroundings, but if the world gives form to our faculties then meaning would be projected onto our thoughts from without. Over the course of evolution, it is our faculties that have been shaped by the objects of their attention rather than vice versa. Semantic externalism is part of the naturalistic backlash against Kant’s idea, and Putnam and his followers seek an explanation of meaning that is more in tune with modern science.
Putnam asks us to imagine that Earth has a twin planet identical to our own world in every respect, except that there is no water. Fortunately for Twin Earth’s inhabitants, there is a colourless, odourless liquid that flows in rivers and quenches their thirst that they too have named ‘water’, but it is not H2O.3 Instead, it has a different chemical make-up – ‘XYZ’. Although a visitor from Earth would not notice the difference without subjecting XYZ to laboratory analysis, and would find a glass of cold XYZ just as refreshing as the water back home, any reference to the substance as ‘water’ would be mistaken. The meaning of the term ‘water’ was fixed by the visitor’s experience of H2O on Earth, while, to a Twin-Earther, ‘water’ refers to XYZ. It seems that the two individuals could have identical mental states when thinking about water and twin-water respectively, yet the content of their thoughts would not be the same. Even before 1750 – when the science did not exist to differentiate XYZ from H2O – someone on Twin Earth who declared that ‘water is refreshing’ would have been expressing a different belief to his identical counterpart on Earth who said the same thing at the same time. His belief, despite its intrinsic character, could not possibly be about water, since water is H2O and he has never seen, tasted or heard about this compound.
Putnam’s fellow countryman Tyler Burge responded that, in fact, the scenario did not go far enough, and that not only language but also thought and the mind in general should be characterized externally. Burge was born in 1946 in Atlanta to a liberal family who brought him up with a passion for the civil rights movement in a time and place where it was not exactly fashionable. He came to his métier late. Angered by the prolongation of the Vietnam War, he first worked on the congressional campaigns of Andrew Young, the first black congressman from Georgia, who eventually became Carter’s Ambassador to the UN. Burge was then offered a job by Young in Washington, but turned it down in order to study philosophy. Tall and serene, Burge told me that he had no regrets, believing that he has ‘made the world better through teaching – less broadly than the political process, but more personally’.
According to Putnam, the meaning of a term is determined by something outside the mind. To Burge, what is actually in the mind is determined by something outside it. He argues that since mental states and acts are individuated partly in terms of their contents, then two individuals with different contents must also have different mental states. Burge suggested a social version of Putnam’s thought experiment. ‘Al’ suffers from arthritis and one day complains that it has spread to his thigh.4 His belief cannot be true, as arthritis affects the joints but not the bones. However, doctors on Twin Earth long ago decided to apply the term ‘arthritis’ to an inflammation of both joints and the bones. Al’s counterpart Twin-Al expresses the same belief as our own Al, with whom he shares an identical neural state, but his belief is a true one – even though his exposure to the term ‘arthritis’ has been no different from Earth-Al’s. (We are to assume that neither has been specifically told that bones are affected or unaffected by the condition.) What kind of thoughts each Al has is not only determined by what is inside their heads, but also by the linguistic communities that form their social environment.
There is an obvious rejoinder to the Twin Earth thought experiment. We could stubbornly insist that the term ‘water’ refers to both H2O and XYZ, along with any other substance that might exhibit liquidity, transparency, tastelessness, odourlessness and so on. If it seems intuitively correct to describe XYZ and H2O as two different kinds of water, then Putnam and Burge face a staring match with their opponents. As with all such contests, it is only by appealing to what the other side already believes that one can convince them. By holding descriptive qualities (such as wetness and transparency) paramount, we preserve our intuition that the content of our beliefs is determined by the intrinsic character of those thoughts, regardless of the particular processes that brought them about. However, this is at the cost of another of our intuitions: that when we talk about substances, we intend to refer to the essence that lies behind their appearances, and that when we unearth this essence we can discover what we were talking about all along. When chemists discovered that water was composed of a compound of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, we naturally decided that this was the ‘truth’ about water and that it trumped other descriptions. What makes something water is the fact of its having a certain internal structure, rather than our descriptive beliefs about it. If the use of an identical description was enough to make something water, then we would not really be talking about the mind-independent world outside us, but would be making an arbitrary stipulation. Besides, as Burge points out, externalism applies not just to concepts like ‘water’ and ‘arthritis’, but also to ‘colour’ concepts – so the internalist cannot make use of the term ‘transparent’ in the description he associates with ‘water’.
Perhaps stipulation is not so bad. We can insist that ‘water’ does not in fact refer to H2O specifically, but that it covers any colourless, tasteless, odourless liquid that fills rivers and oceans and falls from the sky – in which case XYZ and H2O are different varieties of water. But this is not the way we want to think about natural substances. Putnam writes:
What the nature of something is (not in the metaphysician’s sense of ‘the nature’, but in the scientist’s or the artisan’s) can determine the reference of a term even before that nature is discovered. What chrysos (gold) was in Ancient Greece was not simply determined by the properties Ancient Greeks believed gold to have. If the beliefs Ancient Greeks had about chrysos defined what it is to be gold (or ‘chrysos’) at that time, then it would have made no sense for an ancient Greek to ask himself, ‘Is there perhaps a way of telling that something isn’t really gold, even when it appears by all the standard tests to be gold?’ Remember that this is precisely the question Archimedes did put to himself, with a celebrated result!5
If changes in our beliefs did not force changes in the meaning of our concepts, then we would be unable to revise our primitive beliefs about water and gold. After all, not all water is H2O – ‘heavy’ water is D2O, where deuterium atoms replace the hydrogen.
In another of Putnam’s examples, if I were unable to distinguish elms from beech trees I would be mistaken when I referred to a particular beech as an elm, even though it fulfils the descriptions that I apply to elm trees. And if a botanist were to correct me, it would be wrong to dismiss his expert opinion. The price of having our beliefs connect to the world in a way that enables them to be meaningful is that we sometimes have to accept that one or other cherished intuition or long-held preconception of gold, water or morality is mistaken. In order to have a sense of reality, we must defer the truth of our views to how they fare in the outside world. This same sense of reality also demands that we cannot have the final word on what our views actually mean.
While descriptive beliefs are not enough to turn fools’ gold into the twenty-four-carat species, one would think them sufficient to determine that an object is a chair or a table. For human inventions, we might be tempted to accept human stipulation. However, the late Donald Davidson told a story that shows how this would be a mistake. Davidson was born in 1917 in Springfield, Massachusetts, and moved from city to city with his family as his engineer father looked for work. His formal education did not begin until the age of nine, when the Davidsons settled in Staten Island. He made up for this by studying English, comparative literature and classics at Harvard before combining a philosophy course with business studies and writing radio scripts for the crime serial Big Town, starring Edward G. Robinson. He died aged eighty-six in 2003, never having published a book. His influence on twentieth-century philosophy stems from a number of brief papers penned in the 1960s and 1970s, one of which introduced the story of the Swampman, which is among the more far-fetched thought experiments in a discipline notorious for far-fetched thought experiments. He wrote:
Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp; I am standing nearby. My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by coincidence (and out of different molecules) the tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, the Swampman, moves exactly as I did; according to its nature it departs the swamp, encounters and seems to recognize my friends, and appears to return their greetings in English. It moves into my house and seems to write articles on radical interpretation. No one can tell the difference…But there is a difference. My replica can’t recognize my friends; it can’t recognize anything, since it never cognized anything in the first place. It can’t know my friends’ names (though of course it seems to), it can’t remember my house, for example, since the sound ‘house’ it makes was not learned in a context that would give it the right meaning – or any meaning at all. Indeed, I don’t see how my replica can be said to mean anything by the sounds it makes, nor to have any thoughts.6
This might sound a rather cruel way of talking about the unfortunate Swampman. If a scientist transmutes lead into gold with an atom-smasher, as is now possible, the end product is gold – it is not ‘really’ lead in some way. So, on the same basis, we can ask why the Swampman should not be a real man. The point is that there is more to meaning than form, no matter how closely that form resembles meaningful language. The utterances of Swampman can be compared to an image carved into sandstone by the wind, or a message spelled out by chance in the bodies of marching ants. Perhaps somewhere in the world there is a rock that has been so fashioned by wind and water over the millennia that it looks just like an armchair. But despite its descriptive attributes it would not be a chair – not even an uncomfortable one. What is required is the right kind of history. In Swampman’s case, this means the learning experiences that gave Davidson his concepts, and the meetings that introduced him to his friends. If Swampman is an exact replica of the philosopher, we may allow that he has pseudo-memories of these events and a consciousness of his own, but though he may have pains and itches, he cannot have the kind of directed states of consciousness that meaningfulness requires.
The philosopher Ruth Millikan adds that neither would the being have a ‘liver’, ‘heart’, ‘eyes’ or ‘brain’, for these categories, along with ‘idea’, ‘belief’ and ‘intention’, are ultimately defined by their functions – by reference to evolutionary history, rather than to their present constitution or disposition. She writes:
Were this not so, there could not be malformed hearts or nonfunctioning hearts nor could there be confused ideas or empty ideas or false beliefs, etc. Ideas, beliefs, and intentions are not such because of what they do or could do. They are such because of what they are, given the context of their history, supposed to do and of how they are supposed to do it.7
To call the Swampman’s heart healthy or malformed, or his beliefs true or false, would be just as inappropriate as correcting the spelling and grammar of the marching ants.
This raises the question as to how much of our own mental life lacks the proper history to qualify as meaningful. Since Descartes, self-knowledge has been thought of as a free gift. We supposedly stand in a privileged relation to ourselves, able to understand the contents of our own mind better than anyone else can, for it is something we can hardly be mistaken about. But if externalism is correct then we can be very mistaken, as self-knowledge cannot be attained through introspection alone. The meaning of our own thoughts is not given to us by their character taken in isolation, but partly in their relations to our environment, and the environment might surprise us. For example, introspection told Marco Polo that he was talking about the ‘roc’, but his history and environment tell us that he was not. This is not to say that he did not know how to describe his thoughts, which he could say were about a giant eagle that ate elephants, but there was more to them than this. The environment in which our thoughts acquire their meaning is the natural world and, as Millikan points out, this is not a place that is typically mindful of our intentions. ‘The vast majority of individual animals die before reproducing. It would be very surprising if the biological purposes of human thought were invariably achieved.’8
Externalism promises that philosophical problems are more than just disputes over words or arbitrary definitions, because definitions can be settled through advances in science – such as when botanists discovered that the lily was in a different phylum from orchids, despite their superficial resemblance. However, this opportunity for knowledge is also a demand for experience. Imagine that someone boasts an array of strongly held moral beliefs, all of which are united by the distaste aroused in him if any one of these beliefs is contravened. The ‘Yuk Factor’ is his moral Geiger counter, as he takes revulsion to be the correct and appropriate reaction to anything contrary to the will of God. But he needs more than this indication, even though Leon Kass, the head of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, regards the Yuk Factor as ‘the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it’.9 In the moral sphere we may be in the position of the chemists of 1750 – able to refer to water but incapable of distinguishing it from other compounds such as XYZ. We may be uninformed of morality’s essence, be it God’s will or the evolutionary basis of social mores. If someone is actually referring to God’s will when they describe, say, abortion as ‘evil’, then they cannot really mean what they say unless they have in fact been touched by the Almighty. If they have never experienced the will of God, either directly or vicariously, then they cannot be capable of referring to Him. On the other hand, should someone oppose their view of abortion, perhaps on the grounds that the essence of morality is not the will of God but personal taste, then such an opponent would be making the same mistake as someone who insisted that the oceans on Putnam’s Twin Earth were composed of ‘another kind of water’.
If our beliefs are connected with the external world, then they are never wholly within the province of one’s mind. We do not possess final authority over the meaning of our concepts because that prerogative rests with the causal history of their formation. Were it otherwise, we would be living in a semantic fantasy world in which each individual was always right on his or her own terms. Such terms would be worth nothing.
