Putnam's paradox

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 62, Issue 3, 1984, Pages 221-236

  Lewis, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84949690962     PISSN: 00048402     EISSN: 14716828     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00048408412340013     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Hilary Putnam, ‘Realism and Reason’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 50 (1977) pp. 483-498, reprinted in Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), henceforth ‘R&R’, cited with page numbers from Meaning and the Moral Sciences; ‘Models and Reality’, Journal of Symbolic Logic 45 (1980) pp. 464-482, henceforth ‘M&R’ and Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981), henceforth ‘RT&H’.
2. Compare the malicious joke: ‘Mr. Z claims to have found a counterexample to my theory. But he has misunderstood me, he has not interpreted my words as I intended. For I intended that there be no counterexamples.’
3. Peter Unger, ‘Why There Are No People’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1979), pp. 177-222; and ‘I Do Not Exist’, in G. F. Macdonald, ed., Perception and Identity (Macmillan, 1979).
4. I find it especially hard to make RT&H mesh with R&R and M&R, but I do think they are suppposed to mesh. The third full paragraph of RT&H, p. 7, indicates a connection. Also, RT&H was in draft before Putnam read Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking (see RT&H, p. xii); the latter was published in 1978, and might have been available in manuscript to a sympathetic colleague earlier than that; so RT&H is more nearly simultaneous with R&R and M&R than their publication dates would suggest.
5. For a discussion of the ‘relocated’ problem and its solution, see the final section of my ‘New Work for a Theory of Universals’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (1983), pp. 343-377.
6. More or less as in my ‘General Semantics’, Synthese 22 (1970), pp. 18-67.
7. I owe the point to H. W. Noonan, ‘Rigid Designation’, Analysis 39 (1979). pp. 174-182.
8. Hartry Field, ‘Theory Change and the Indeterminacy of Reference’, Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973), pp. 462-481.
9. The argument was anticipated (apart from mathematical detail having to do with the qualification ‘almost any world’) in M. H. A. Newman, “Mr. Russell's ‘Causal Theory of Perception'”, Mind 37 (1928), pp. 137-148. Newman's argument is discussed in William Demopoulos and Michael Friedman, ‘The Concept of Structure in Early Twentieth Century Philosophy of Science’, in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (forthcoming).
10. Michael Devitt, ‘Realism and the Renegade Putnam: A Critical Study of Meaning and the Moral Sciences’, Nous 17 (1983), pp. 291-301.
11. Such cases are presented in Peter Unger, ‘The Causal Theory of Reference’, Philosophical Studies 43 (1983), pp. 1-45.
12. Even Saul Kripke grudgingly admits this: see footnote 38 to ‘Naming and Necessity’ in D. Davidson and G. Harman, eds., Semantics of Natural Language (Reidel, 1972). However, he doubts that a non-circular theory of either sort exists.
13. G. H. Merrill, ‘The Model-Theoretic Argument Against Realism’, Philosophy of Science 47 (1980), pp, 69-81. For further discussion of Merrill's solution, see the final section of my ‘New Work for a Theory of Universals’.
14. It is not clear how much indeterminacy might be expected to remain. For instance, what of Quine's famous example? His rabbit-stages, undetached rabbit-parts, and rabbit-fusion seem only a little, if any, less eligible than rabbits themselves.
15. As it might be, the theory of D. M. Armstrong, Universals and Scientific Realism (Cambridge University Press, 1978), discussed in my ‘New Work for a Theory of Universals’.
16. In remarks presented at the annual conference of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, Baltimore, 1982.
17. See the discussion of formulations of materialism in my ‘New Work for a Theory of Univerals’, in which I argue that inegalitarianism of classifications must be presupposed in stating materialism.
18. Robert Farrell, ‘Blanket Skolemism’, presented at the annual conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy, Sydney, 1980.
19. In this section I am indebted to Devitt's insistence that it is really very peculiar to take realism as an issue about semantic theory.
20. For a genuine model-theoretic argument that brains in a vat are not deceived, see Paul Horwich, ‘How to Choose Between Empirically Equivalent Theories’, Journal of Philosophy 74 (1982), pp. 61-77.
21. I have in mind the theory of Michael Devitt, Designation (Columbia University Press, 1981). But I don't endorse even Devitt's theory; recall that I'm inclined to prefer causal descriptivism.