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Article 1408 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,sci.philosophy.tech,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Putnam again
Message-ID: <5655@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 19 Nov 91 18:28:47 GMT
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 41

In article <1991Nov17.190935.5546@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@brauer.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

[in the dennett thread]

>theoretical adequacy.  It's well known that classical model-theoretic
>semantics is incapable of fully characterizing reference; hence it is
>incapable of sufficiently constraining any derived operational criteria
>that purport to implement what you call the ``AI notion of success of
>reference''.  (See e.g. an overview in Lakoff's ``Women, Fire, and
>Dangerous Things'', chapter 15.)

This is, of course, a ref to Putnam's argument.  I hope the Putnam
thread has not died.  I sent something explaining my " Putnam has _an_
answer to the "cats and cherries" argument", but that's the last I've
seen.

I've received e-mail on that posting and apologize for not
replying.  There's been trouble with the UK internet link,
and I didn't want to add to the backlog (or have my message
get lost).

I raised two issues:

1. If Putnam's argument is correct, how does he think we all end
   up using more or less the same language, with the same references?
   Or does he think we might be using widely differing reference
   relations? 

2. If it were possible for people to use very different reference
   relations without it being detectable, isn't it much more likely
   that they'd use relations where the difference could be detected
   in some cases but not in others.

Re 2 I received mail suggesting that people often do use different
reference relations.  I think it is the case that people often 
use different meanings for words, but this doesn't seem to happen
for words like dog, cat, mat, etc.  The differences there are
fairly minor, but why?  Why do we (almost?) never encounter someone
who uses "cat" to refer to cherry?

-- jeff


