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Single Idea 2335

[filed under theme 19. Language / A. Nature of Meaning / 7. Meaning Holism / b. Language holism ]

Full Idea

If I say "Hawks fly", I do not intend my hearer to deduce that a hawk with a broken wing will fly. What we expect depends on the whole network of belief. Language describes experience as a network, not sentence by sentence.

Gist of Idea

Understanding a sentence involves background knowledge and can't be done in isolation

Source

Hilary Putnam (Representation and Reality [1988], §1 p.09)

Book Ref

Putnam,Hilary: 'Representation and Reality' [MIT 1992], p.9

A Reaction

The shortcut through this is 'exactly what did you mean when you said "Hawks fly"?'. That is, get me closer to your proposition.

The 22 ideas from 'Representation and Reality'

2334 Meaning holism tried to show that you can't get fixed meanings built out of observation terms [Putnam]
2335 Understanding a sentence involves background knowledge and can't be done in isolation [Putnam]
2336 Holism seems to make fixed definition more or less impossible [Putnam]
2338 Reference (say to 'elms') is a social phenomenon which we can leave to experts [Putnam]
2339 Aristotle implies that we have the complete concepts of a language in our heads, but we don't [Putnam]
2343 Reference may be different while mental representation is the same [Putnam]
2340 We should separate how the reference of 'gold' is fixed from its conceptual content [Putnam]
2341 Like names, natural kind terms have their meaning fixed by extension and reference [Putnam]
2342 "Water" is a natural kind term, but "H2O" is a description [Putnam]
2344 If we are going to eliminate folk psychology, we must also eliminate folk logic [Putnam]
2345 Semantic notions do not occur in Tarski's definitions, but assessing their correctness involves translation [Putnam]
2346 Meaning and translation (which are needed to define truth) both presuppose the notion of reference [Putnam]
2347 Asserting the truth of an indexical statement is not the same as uttering the statement [Putnam]
2348 Is there just one computational state for each specific belief? [Putnam]
2349 Realists believe truth is correspondence, independent of humans, is bivalent, and is unique [Putnam]
2351 Aristotle says an object (e.g. a lamp) has identity if its parts stay together when it is moved [Putnam]
2352 The job of the philosopher is to distinguish facts about the world from conventions [Putnam]
2354 "Meaning is use" is not a definition of meaning [Putnam]
2331 Functionalism says robots and people are the same at one level of abstraction [Putnam]
2332 Functionalism can't explain reference and truth, which are needed for logic [Putnam]
2074 Can we give a scientific, computational account of folk psychology? [Putnam]
2071 If concepts have external meaning, computational states won't explain psychology [Putnam]