In The Externalist Challenge
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چکیده
EXISTENCE PROOF FOR A VIABLE EXTERNALISM Externalism, as I am understanding the term, is a thesis about the nature of thoughts, as distinguished from language. For example, Kripke's suggestion that the referent of a public language proper name is determined by its history is not, just as such, an externalist thesis. On the other hand, Putnam, in "The Meaning of 'Meaning'," did seem pretty clearly to be talking about the nature of our thoughts of such things as water, beech trees and aluminum, perhaps as well as about language. And his essay is often taken as the original and also the paradigm defence of externalism. Putnam argued that a person's internal psychological state does not determine the referent or extension of that person's thought. Hence, if what a person means or intends were determined solely by that person's psychological state, what a person means or intends would not determine the referent or extension of his thought. Denying the consequent, Putnam concluded that what a person means or intends with a thought is determined by more than that person's internal psychological state. As he put it, "Meaning just ain't in the head!" If we explain the externalist idea in this crude way, however, it becomes hard to see how anyone could deny it. If the question were, merely, how are the referents or extensions of thoughts determined, it seems patently obvious that nothing inside someone's head could, by itself, determine that anything in particular existed outside the head. Referents and extensions are existent things and existent sets. What happens to exist or not exist, when and where, outside one's head is surely a contingent matter. How could what is inside a head determine that anything at all had to exist outside that head? But if not, how could it determine, all by itself, that its thoughts had referents and what these referents were? Something has been stated wrong. Externalism should not be so obviously true. One's first thought here may be that Putnam has denied the wrong premise. What seems obvious is that meanings, taken alone, without adding the world, do not determine extensions. But how has it been shown that what is in one's the head does not determine what one means? Let us take a second look. What exactly did Putnam's arguments show? What he seems actually to have argued is that what is in the head, when combined …
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