Usage is right
Usage wins
All language is folk language
All language is slang

Language and Meaning

Philosophy of language has been quite an active field for the past half century or more, and understandably there is considerable overlap between it and philosophy of mind. It is hard to talk about words, sentences, and their meanings without running up against questions about concepts, and how they are created and manipulated in the mind. Likewise, it is hard to inquire too deeply into how the mind works without running into questions about how it manipulates symbols and how the symbols it manipulates may affect its working in turn.

It is my opinion, however, that philosophy of language went off into the weeds for a while. There was a great collective effort to "naturalize" the notions of reference, intentionality, and a bunch of others, which effectively means an effort to explain them in reductive materialist terms. This effort strikes me as doomed, because it is a flail in the direction of admitting that there is something mysterious about semantics, while trying to ignore the elephant in the room, namely consciousness.

Putnam's Twin Earth

There is a lot that nobody understands about language, and the associated concept of meaning. In his widely cited paper, "The Meaning of "Meaning"", (1975) Hillary Putnam argues against the sort of internalist, (some might say solipsistic) characterization of meaning that I would argue for. Putnam's most memorable example concerns a hypothetical Twin Earth. Twin Earth is just like our Earth, perhaps even including a twin me and a twin you, with one exception: on Twin Earth, the substance that they call "water", while drinkable, odorless, transparent, and in all other "superficial" ways identical to our water, is really not made of H₂O. It is instead made of some other chemical compound, that Putnam abbreviates as XYZ. The question that presents itself immediately, of course, is whether or not XYZ is really water.

Putnam flatly claims that it is not. Any term, like water, is said to have an extension: the actual set of objects or stuff in the physical universe that the term "picks out". If water is H₂O, then the extension of the term water is the set of all quantities of H₂O, anywhere in the universe that they occur, and nothing else. Anyone who uses the term water in such a way that it has a different extension is simply wrong, or is essentially speaking a different language than English as it is spoken on Earth. Putnam's main point is, as he put it, that meaning ain't all in the head. My twin and I may be in identical mental states as we use the term water, but we mean different things by virtue of the fact that our respective uses of the term water have different extensions. For Putnam, the meaning of a term depends crucially on its extension. Moreover, Putnam seems to regard extension as a rather unambiguous, unproblematic concept. Once you know what something is, apparently, picking out its extension is relatively straightforward.

Putnam also says that before about 1750, no one knew that water was H₂O, even though it really was. If it turned out that some, but not all, "water" on Earth was really XYZ, it would thus turn out that people who had referred to quantities of XYZ as water (the pre-1750 people) were wrong all along. Putnam claims that their use of the term would be retroactively invalidated by future scientific discoveries, even though they lived and died in a community of speakers and readers who used the term with unanimous and unambiguous (to them) agreement as to its meaning. I find this claim downright bizarre.

Usage is right. Usage wins. All language is folk language. All language is slang.

Water, I believe, is a cluster concept - a collage of properties, memories, associations, nuances, connotations, descriptions, expectations, and "scripts" or algorithms for dealing with particular types of watery situations. All of the elements of this collage tend to be correlated in our world, so we draw a line around them with a purple crayon and slap a label on them, water, and go about our lives. We don't have to consider the relative importance of the different elements of the collage (in terms of being defining characteristics of the collage) until some philosopher comes up with a contrived thought experiment, and asks us to consider the collage if one of its elements were removed or changed. In Putnam's thought experiment, the element that is swapped out is the fact of water's microphysical constitution, a fact that most of us learned in high school but which has little impact on our day-to-day lives. I suspect that many of our concepts are loose aggregates in this way, and that because their separate components or properties tend to be correlated in our experience, we assume that the entire cluster is much more tightly integrated than it necessarily is.

How many things could turn out to be different about water before you really felt that you could no longer call it "water"? Do you know how heavy water is? What if it were a hair heavier than you thought or a hair lighter? What if it had some magnetic properties you had somehow managed to avoid hearing about until right now? What if you just read that in certain fields, generated in high-energy physics laboratories, water turned orange and viscous? These things might surprise you, but they would hang like Christmas tree ornaments on the core concept "water". Other, more abstract concepts are more tightly integrated in our minds. I would argue, for instance, that there are no superficial properties of the concept "three". There is not a thing you know about the mathematical concept of three that you could change without inarguably wrecking the whole thing. If you change a whisker on three, it just can't possibly be three anymore. Water might glow in the dark, but only in the southern hemisphere and possibly still be water, but a number that is exactly like three but not prime just isn't three.

So how about it? Does the collage still warrant the name water if the microphysical constitution element is swapped out, even if all the other elements stay the same, or is that particular element so important that once it is removed, the rest of the collage no longer deserves the name water? I don't know, and neither does Hillary Putnam. The question is a sociological one, not a philosophical one. We could send a colony to Twin Earth, give them full knowledge of the chemical difference between Earth water (H₂O) and Twin Earth water (XYZ), and let them go for a generation or two, and check back to see if they call both water or if they have come up with another term for the XYZ kind of water. Maybe they all use the term water for both kinds of stuff, but every now and then an annoying pedant among them corrects people, the way some people tend to compulsively point out split infinitives. Whichever way they go, there's your answer.

Maybe what is important about water is just Putnam's "superficial properties", and that microphysical constitution just isn't that important in determining what is water and what is not. Because we on Earth have only ever been exposed to water as H₂O, we have not had to consider the possibility, but perhaps we have a "big tent" concept of water. Maybe water is multiply realizable, like the term building. Buildings, after all, get to be buildings by virtue of their structure and use, but can actually be constructed out of a great many things. Maybe both H₂O and XYZ get to be called water in everyday conversation on our Earth colony on Twin Earth, but the scientific journals use some long Latin names or the chemical formulae in those rare occasions when they need to differentiate between the two.

On the other hand, we have strong intuitions that what something is made of, even if we can't see it and have no direct evidence of it without sophisticated equipment, has a lot of authority in deciding what it really is. So maybe XYZ isn't water after all, and the microphysical constitution element of the collage trumps all the others. Either way, that is for the community of speakers to decide, not me, not you, and not Hillary Putnam.

What properties of something, which elements of the collage, get to be the ones that determine what that something "really is"? What determines extension? We cleave our concepts along lines that are important to us. Microphysical constitution is important to us, so it gets a relatively high ranking. We have found it useful or satisfying in some way to let this criterion determine the extension of water. We have been told a very plausible physical story about the world around us, one involving atoms and molecules, and we believe it (for good reason). So when we make distinctions among the things in our world, we tend to give credence to distinctions rooted in this story.

Saul Kripke, in Naming And Necessity, notes that at some point scientists figured out that whales are not fish, and that is really the right way to talk about it: they did not change the standard usage of the words "whale" and "fish"; they corrected the standard usage. Moreover, most reasonable people at the time would quickly acknowledge this, upon being told of the biological details involved. This is because, as Kripke says, an interest in natural kinds was built into the original enterprise of classification. When people coin and use terms, they tend to like to think that they are thereby distinguishing fundamental types. Distinctions made in terms of our current best story about what it means to be a fundamental type are ones we like to make and formalize in our language. Right now, for most of us, that story is the one about microphysics.

But it is not the only imaginable story. What if there were a prescientific tribe of people somewhere that had two words for water. Water referred to the water from the river, that brought life and was good and blessed by the gods, but shwater referred to the evil water from the spring that was cursed. No explaining that water was chemically identical to shwater would make them change. Microphysical constitution is just an unimportant property to them compared to the essential goodness or evil of the water/shwater. The goodness or evil determines what the substance "really is". Perhaps they are not prescientific, and they understand about H₂O, but still hold their religious beliefs, with full acceptance that there is no empirical basis for them. They have chosen a different property, a different element of the collage to define the essential nature of water/shwater.

Lore has it that the Eskimos have 100 words for snow (the actual number seems to vary a lot depending on where you read this old chestnut). Let us imagine that one of their 100 words is spelled and pronounced exactly like our word "snow". This is like the situation with the prescientific people calling both XYZ and H₂O "water", only with us playing the part of the prescientific people, riding roughshod over what to others (the Eskimos in this case) are important distinctions. We aren't right and the Eskimos aren't right. We all just make the distinctions that are important for us to make, and we don't waste time coining a lot of extra terms to allow us to split hairs we don't have to split. A term is only as precise - can be only as precise - as is necessary to make the discriminations of interest to the community of users of the term. Any discussion of what the term "really" means beyond this is purely philosophical argument of the most sterile kind.

It makes no sense to speak of the meaning of a term unless you know who is doing the meaning and why. What does the user of the term know or believe about the term? What about the term is important to the user and the user's audience? What is the user trying to accomplish by using the term right now? What are the preconditions that would have to hold in order for the user and the audience to be satisfied that the term was being used with only a tolerable amount of ambiguity? Note in particular that these preconditions might differ considerably from those that you might insist upon before you thought the term was being used unambiguously.

People are sloppy with their terminology. Depending on context and audience, they use terms with varying degrees of precision. Some contexts call for more precision, and so people coin new terms. Technical fields are full of specialized jargon for this reason. Sometimes they even use a familiar term in a more restricted sense than most people do sitting around the dinner table. There is something about the phenomenon of language, though, that beguiles some people into thinking that all language could and should be made infinitely precise. There are urgent and interesting things about language and minds, but on the way to considering those things it seems that few make it past the rocks, lured by the siren call of theories of Platonic infinite precision. Very few people outside of philosophy of language circles have ever considered the possibility of Putnam's Twin Earth, with its XYZ. Perhaps the fact that there is no ready answer for whether or not XYZ counts as water points out some kind of ambiguity at the heart of our concept or definition of water. This sort of ambiguity lurks everywhere. Clever people can tie themselves into knots, finding ambiguity just about anywhere they look hard enough. No one seems to have a problem with this except philosophers, a fact that does not speak well of philosophers.

Extension

Extension seems like a reassuringly concrete idea. The extension of the concept of water is a set of actual molecules out there in the actual world. But extension is not so clear cut. Putnam allows that determining extension requires an equivalence relation. We can not specify all the occurrences of water on Earth without having a way of saying "all the stuff that is equivalent to this stuff here in this glass". This equivalence relation, or the criteria we use to decide if something is water or not in various real or imaginary scenarios, is sometimes called water's intension by philosophers. A term's intension is the set of selection criteria we apply to determine if something is or is not part of that term's extension.

In the case of water, the equivalence relation that we apply to derive water's extension is "having identical microphysical constitution". I would go further than Putnam and claim that extension is itself something of an abstraction: we can never, in practice, enumerate all the molecules of water in the universe, so we can never actually pick out the extension of the concept of water. We are always at a certain remove from anything's extension; all we really have at our immediate disposal is intension. All we can really do is talk about the general kinds of things we would consider water. What we really are talking about when we use the term the extension of the concept of water is a bunch of tests we can apply to different situations, ways of applying some equivalence relation.

Extension is the stuff in the universe that a term "picks out". Of course, terms do no such thing. With apologies to the National Rifle Association, terms don't pick things out, people do. And what exactly is this process of picking out? If I use the term "the Horse Head Nebula", do I thereby instantly pick out something many light years away, and if so, does this process of picking out violate relativity theory by traveling faster than light? If everyone on one half of the earth refers to the sun, and at the same moment everyone on the other side refers to Pluto, could the imbalance in the picking out cause a detectable wobble in the earth's orbit? Of course not. "Picking out" is not an actual physical process that happens in the real world. So if this "picking out" is not a process of physical causation, what on earth is it? It is nothing. Nothing, that is, except some (admittedly mysterious) stuff happening in my mind. If you hear me use the term "water" (more physical causation, involving vocal chords vibrating, waves of pressure moving through countless air molecules, pushing on an ear drum, etc.) then I induce some stuff to happen in your mind. Some of this mental stuff may include certain "raw feels", expectations, equivalence relations and tests, and who knows what all else. But it is mental stuff, in the mind only. By itself, a term does not do anything, and in particular it does not "pick out" anything. The only real questions about semantics concern what minds do under the influence of terms, both internally and externally generated.

There is no reason we could not have a concept of water that had a different intension than the one that Hillary Putnam thinks we ought to have, and perhaps this intension, these tests we apply to the outside world, would allow XYZ to be as much part of the extension of water as H₂O is. As long as this hypothesized intension of water still picked out water on our world and excluded all of the other stuff we find in our world in everyday situations, the burden of proof is on anyone who claims that it is somehow wrong, and that an intension that concerns molecular structure is somehow right.

How do we know about water's microphysical constitution, anyway? Most of us simply read it in a book or were told it in school and accept it. Some of us ran tests with instruments. Originally, sometime after 1750, someone ran such tests, and inferred the microphysical constitution of water from the results of those tests. But the results themselves, the raw data, are functional properties of water, facts about how water behaves in different circumstances. These sorts of properties are no different in kind from the results of the "tests" I run when I smell water, dip my hand in it, taste it, etc. The fact that in one case the instrumentation involved was built by people, and in the other case the instrumentation consists of devices I was born with (tongue, fingers, eyes, etc.) does not make any difference in terms of the type of property of water we are talking about. For the Twin Earth thought experiment to go through, there must be at least some "superficial properties" of H₂O and XYZ that differ. Otherwise, how would any scientist ever have told the difference? At some point, if you feed H₂O into a mass spectrometer you get one result, and if you feed XYZ in, you get a different result. Different raw data equals different "superficial properties", just as much as if H₂O and XYZ tasted different. The microphysical constitution, then, that Putnam regards as the absolute determinant of true wateriness, is a story that we inferred from various different superficial properties.

Now I happen to like that story. It is remarkably powerful and parsimonious in its ability to link all kinds of phenomena in the world, and has helped us invent microwave ovens and rocket ships and all sorts of other things. But it is not the only imaginable story. The particular story most of us have settled on has proven useful to us for reasons of the cognitive power it affords us, for the ways in which it helps us organize our mental economy. But as a rock-solid, absolute basis for our concepts, it is not handed down by God. Whenever we have a collage of data (superficial properties), we infer a story to bind it all together. The story is the purple crayon we use to demark the collage. It is this story that we cling to as the determinant of meaning, the crucial defining characteristic of each of our concepts. It determines the equivalence relation, the intension, that in turn determines our tests for inclusion in or exclusion from the extension. This story, and thus meaning itself, is in the head.

There is some stuff out there in the world (water), and our interactions with it have lead us to attribute some "superficial" properties to it. We also have a story in our minds, an explanatory framework that we have found to be very useful (our current physical theories about atoms and molecules and such). Some of this stuff's superficial properties have lead us to infer that it fits comfortably into a particular place within this explanatory framework. I believe that this phrasing of the situation with water is appropriate because it is accurate and maximally conservative, in that it makes few unsupported assumptions. But when the situation is put this way, it should be clear that it makes no sense at all to speak of something that shares all of water's "superficial" properties but isn't really H₂O. For it not to be H₂O, it must differ in some superficial properties.

I suppose someone could still insist, for the sake of the argument, on hypothesizing a substance that behaved exactly like H₂O as far as current science was able to determine, but which really was not H₂O. I could take the standard cop-out that people sometimes take with thought experiments and demand details. I guarantee that no one could possibly specify such a situation at any satisfying level of granularity. But the standard cop-out would lose a larger and more important point. It is in principle, literally nonsensical to speak of something that behaved exactly like H₂O, and wasn't really H₂O. As I and others have pointed out, science doesn't really claim, at heart, to tell us what is really going on out there in the world. It only specifies a bare schema, a circularly defined pattern of functional dynamics, but it is silent about what is doing all that functional interacting. To act exactly like an electron is to be an electron. There is no such thing, by definition, in principle, as something that acts exactly like an electron in our particle accelerators but really isn't an electron. By the same token, given our current level of detection methods, there is no way something could behave exactly like H₂O but somehow not be H₂O.

The main point here is that the story about molecules and such, the explanatory framework, is entirely in our heads (although there is a strong likelihood that there are things out there whose dynamics map to this framework). We can not say what anything "really is" beyond where it fits into our explanatory frameworks based on its observed "superficial" properties, which is to say, based on certain sensory experiences we have had. Speculation to the contrary is the kind of pursuit that gives philosophy a bad name.

Sometimes people say that in our world, water "turned out to be" H₂O, but there are possible worlds in which it could have "turned out" differently. This phrasing is misleading in that it draws a sharp distinction between a "superficial" acquaintance with the concept of water on one hand, and what water "turned out to be" on the other. Water has not turned out to be anything. We could still find out all kinds of things about water that would surprise us. I could be in the Matrix with a cable jacked into the back of my neck, in a "real" world in which physics is completely different, and in which there is nothing remotely resembling water. Perhaps in prescientific times, peoples' conception of water underwent revisions along the way, before people figured out about atoms and molecules.

I have a model of reality in my mind. My memories and sensory experiences are somehow more or less integrated into this model, and the model gives me some predictive and/or explanatory powers as I move about in my world. A prescientific person, say William Shakespeare, had a different model, but he had experiences and memories similar to mine, and he fit his experiences and memories into his model. In both our cases, "water" is defined, at least in part, relationally - in terms of where it fits in the reality-model relative to lots of the model's other elements. But my concept of water has certain associations within my reality-model that Shakespeare's does not have, associations that further constrain the concept. There are fewer possible universes that contain stuff I would agree was water than there are for Shakespeare.

I prefer my model of reality to Shakespeare's. I like the neatness, the power, the integrity, etc. of the scientific picture of the world. But in terms of what is going on when we refer, water has not "turned out to be" anything. Shakespeare and I have different reality models, with different constraints upon the universe. Based on our different models, our concepts of water have different satisfaction criteria.

I emphasize that this is not oops-my-brains-just-fell-out relativism. I like science. I believe in science. Atoms are real. Shakespeare was ignorant. But it is a strange form of scientific hubris to build Shakespeare's ignorance into a theory of reference, or to reify the distinction between "prescientific" notions of water, Hesperus, or anything else on the one hand and the way things "turned out to be", or the way they "really are", on the other, and to imagine that this alleged distinction tells us anything interesting about meaning. Just because a cathedral is made of stones, it does not follow that my concept of a cathedral is made of my concept of stones, and just because water is made of H₂O, it does not follow that my concept of water is made of my concept of H₂O.

So what is going on in our minds when we use the term "water"? That is the $64,000 question. A very interesting question, yes, but a question about what is going on in here, in the mind, and not a question about any notion of "meaning" beyond that. I have characterized the concept of water as a cluster, a collage, but I have said that it involves equivalence relations or tests we apply to situations, and that it is delimited by a story that we infer from experience. Obviously this all needs a lot of clarification. Do I even have one single thing in my mind that I can call my concept of water? Does it, strictly speaking, have a fixed identity that persists over time? If so, how much of it can you change before you must call it a different concept altogether? Do concepts subsume other concepts? What part do qualia, the what-its-likeness of water's wetness, its (lack of) taste, etc., play in all of this? There is a lot of stuff going on in our heads and it will take considerable work to sort it all out.

One thing we can speak of with confidence, however, is the relationship between all this mysterious stuff happening in our heads and the outside world. Many, if not most, philosophers of language are naive realists about meaning. They write as if there were an invisible golden cord that binds our concepts to their extensions in the outside world, as if by using the term "water" I am somehow connected instantly with all the actual water in the universe. This, in fact, is the intuition that lies at the heart of any talk of extension at all. This intuition is false. Reference is not a golden cord that connects our minds to the world. The relationship between the outside world and the concepts in our minds is exclusively one of physical causation.

We do not directly perceive matter. There is a long, twisty causal chain that links certain events that happen in the physical world with percepts and concepts in the mind. Or perhaps more suggestively, your concepts and percepts are constrained or influenced by these events. Again, until we understand the concepts in our heads better, the details of the influence of the external events upon them will remain murky. I say events rather than matter because as far as the causal influences on the mind are concerned, matter only manifests itself in the form of particular events - photons bouncing off objects, being refracted by a lens, striking rods and cones in the retina, kicking off a whole series of neural firings, etc. No two people are ever subject to the same series of such events. "Matter" and "the external world" are just a hypothesis we come up with to account for the largest number of these events in the greatest detail, subject to whatever as-yet improperly understood cognitive limitations there may be. Over the course of my life so far, I have had a huge number of sensory experiences. Some of these experiences have lead me to infer the existence of something called "Great Britain". My concept of Great Britain is a hypothesis I have formed, one that makes sense of a lot of particular sensory experiences (whatever "makes sense of" turns out to mean). It may well be an overwhelmingly plausible hypothesis, but a hypothesis it is nevertheless, formed under the physical causal influence of my senses.

So where does that leave us and our term "water" and our associated concept of water? We have 1) molecules of stuff somewhere out there in the world in our rivers and streams. These molecules, as we encounter them, cause physical events to occur, which cause still other events, etc. until some event(s) in this chain ultimately impinge in some way upon 2) some mysterious things happening in our heads; and finally we have 3) our observable linguistic behavior, which presumably is caused or influenced by 2). We have a long way to go before we understand 2) and the exact relationship between it and 1) and 3), but once we do understand these things, there will be nothing left to explain about language and meaning. It is sometimes said that meaning is merely mediated by causal connections between the outside world and our minds. I, however, would say that meaning just is those causal connections, plus some mysterious stuff happening entirely within the mind. Any talk of meaning beyond this has no explanatory or predictive power at all. There simply are no facts about the universe, either extrinsic, third-person "scientific" facts, or subjective phenomenal what-its-like-to-see-red-type facts, that are explained by assuming magic meaning rays connecting our thoughts to trees, cars, and the Milky Way galaxy.

Specifically, there is no reason to believe that our explanations of the things we find in the world will have any recourse to a grand shimmering Platonic Meaning Of Water that transcends all possible speakers across all possible worlds. We should not assume at the outset that it makes any sense at all to ask what the meaning of "water" is above and beyond all the collective stuff happening in the minds of users of the term, and their collective use of the term itself. If you ask me as an English speaker, as a member of my linguistic community, if XYZ counts as water, I may think for a moment or two then give you my opinion, which I made up just then. I may then give you arguments for my opinion, that you may or may not accept. My opinion may or may not be in accord with that of the majority of the rest of my linguistic community. It may or may not even be in accord with the dictionary definition of the term "water". But my answer is still just something I made up. Of course, that is what all language ever is - at some point, someone just makes stuff up, and other people adopt it in their speech. There is no grand truth about what any term means that is written in the stars, etched in to the very fabric of the cosmos, which it is our job to uncover. If, on the other hand, you ask me as a philosopher if XYZ really counts as water, I'm afraid I would have to ask you to rephrase the question, because as stated it is too loaded with presuppositions to admit a yes/no answer. These are not philosophical questions. They are psychological and sociological ones.

Philosophers of language have made a great deal of use of the notion of possible worlds. They write about expressions having one extension in this world, but a different extension in a different possible world. Lots of insights about possibility and necessity are thought to depend on what sentences are true, or what terms refer to, across ranges of possible worlds. Building consideration of all these infinite possible worlds into one's understanding of meaning or reference strikes me as clunky and extravagant. Worse, it glosses over the interesting issues inherent in the whole notion of possible worlds. If there is anything interesting about them, it is the question about the extent to which terms in our world apply at all to terms in some other world. We've already seen the debate about water, H₂O, and XYZ. It is interesting, in that reasonable people can disagree about whether or not XYZ deserves the name "water". Most philosophers of mind fail to acknowledge this. What about Albert Einstein? We know the entity to which that term refers in our world. But what about a world in which he had a different name? Would we, could we, still reasonably refer to the Albert Einstein of that world? What if he had been born a decade earlier or later? What if he had been the same man, but had simply never published any scientific papers at all? What if he had a different name, and was a blond Englishman, but was otherwise as similar as possible to our Einstein? What if, what if, what if? What is interesting about our musing over the term "Albert Einstein" as it ranges over all possible worlds is how we decide that something or someone in a given world deserves to be called Einstein and why (and in what contexts). Yet most philosophers of language brush aside these intriguing ambiguities and presume that we have no problem picking out the extension of a term in a given world, or deciding that the term has no extension in that world.

There is a long causal chain between physical events that happen out there in the world somewhere, and the concepts we form in our minds. This causal chain may get very complex, but it is still just billiard balls knocking together. There is no other kind of connection between the stuff out there and our concepts in here. The problem with the term "extension" is that it strongly inclines us to believe that there is. It presumes a sort of spooky mystical connection between the collection of molecules that comprise the planet Venus, and our internal concepts of Venus, the evening star, and the morning star. In fact, there is no such connection.

Note that none of this makes any claims as to the similarity or difference between the mysterious stuff happening in my head and the stuff happening in yours or anybody else's. There may be a great deal of variation possible among the possible concepts of water in peoples' heads, as long as whatever the different concepts are, they allow for an appropriate correspondence or mapping between matter in the world (or the events by which matter impinges upon us) and our linguistic behavior.

Modes of Presentation

An example of the way in which it is often assumed that there is an invisible golden cord connecting our concepts to the world is the argument about modes of presentation. The idea is that Lois Lane knows that Superman can fly. Yet it would surprise her greatly to discover that Clark Kent can fly. But Clark Kent and Superman are one and the same person (that is, the term "Superman" and the term "Clark Kent" have the same extension), so in some sense the claim that Superman can fly and Clark Kent can fly should convey exactly the same information. They both make the same claim about the same individual. To resolve the apparent conflict, it is argued that any given claim must be understood under the proper mode of presentation. Superman and Clark Kent may in fact be the same collection of molecules, but facts about them are subject to their mode of presentation.

I find talk of modes of presentation very fishy. As far as I can tell, attributing any explanatory power to modes of presentation is just a way of covering for incomplete or incorrect information. Lois Lane knows that Superman can fly but would be surprised to find that Clark Kent can fly because she walks around with an erroneous model of reality in her head in which Superman and Clark Kent are two distinct individuals. She has drawn incorrect inferences about the world. She has, in fact, been deliberately and systematically deceived by the individual who is both Superman and Clark Kent.

Any problems in thinking about this situation stem directly from the intuition of the invisible golden cord that connects our thoughts and references with the outside world. It seems that the claim "Superman can fly" and the claim "Clark Kent can fly" should convey exactly the same information only because it seems that the terms "Superman" and "Clark Kent" should have the same meaning, because they both have the same extension, that is, they refer to the same individual. There's that golden cord - the idea that reference is exclusively or even primarily some kind of instantaneous mystical connection between something in our thoughts (or Lois Lane's thoughts) and the outside world.

I do not know exactly what reference is or how it works, but if it is to have a precise meaning at all in the sense of being philosophically interesting or useful, it must be defined as a relationship of some kind between thoughts. Lois Lane's term "Superman" refers to a Superman concept in Lois's mind. There is nothing problematic in saying that for Lois, the claim that Superman can fly and the claim and Clark Kent can fly convey very different information because for Lois, the concept "Superman" is simply a different concept than the concept "Clark Kent". She formed both concepts by drawing inferences from lots of perceptual experiences she had. The concepts then contribute to her expectations of the kinds of perceptual experiences she is going to have in the future.

The Contents of our Thoughts

An idea closely related to that of the invisible golden cord of reference and the shimmering Platonic Meaning is that of the content of our thoughts. Many writers use the term with confidence that it has meaning, then go on to spend a lot of effort trying to analyze it and figure out what the content of our thoughts is. The content of a thought is a lot like the extension of a word or concept. It is whatever the thought is "about". I find the term at best to be a strong pretheoretic nudge in a particular direction, and at worst grossly misleading.

I may have a box. If I put a cake in the box, then the cake constitutes the contents of the box. I could have put the cake in a different box, in which case some other box would have had the same contents that this box now has. Or I could have put some old newspapers in the box, in which case the same box would have different contents. The box is blank, empty, until I put some contents into it. These are the sorts of images and relationships we drag into play as soon as we invoke the highly loaded term "content". I have thoughts, that is all. As far as I can tell, I have no separate "contents" of those thoughts.

Intentionality

Very closely related to the above topics is the notion of intentionality. Intentionality is the property of being about something else. It is sometimes informally defined as "aboutness". Beliefs, desires, and propositions all have intentionality, rocks and teacups do not. Intentionality is real, it exists as a feature of the universe. There are some things that really are, inherently, about other things. All such things, however, are exclusively in minds. In a purely objective, extrinsic, materialistic world, everything that happens does so strictly according the the laws of physical causation, like so many beer cans perched on fence posts hit with rocks. No matter how many beer cans you have, and no matter how they may be connected (with dental floss, perhaps) there is no inherent sense in which some set of them "come together" to be about another set of them. They just do what they do because they must, each of them blind to all of the others, with no identity of "the system as a whole" or any "subsystems". "Aboutness", intentionality, is a spooky, mysterious, in-the-mind-only kind of thing, like the redness of red. Like redness, it really exists, but in order to account for it properly we will have to overcome our unease at its spooky mysteriousness.

My strictly internalist construal of intentionality and meaning may seem counterintuitive or flat-out wrong. A naive realist about meaning might say, "Look, there's a lawn mower. Its really there, you can touch it. It isn't a hypothesis or an inference, and when I think about it or talk about it, I'm thinking and talking about it, period." When I call the lawn mower a concept I have formed from lots of sensory experiences, and when I say that my thoughts about the lawn mower are really thoughts about that concept, this sounds at best like a needlessly indirect and awkward way of characterizing the situation. Perhaps, but is there a good way to decide really and actually whose is the right way to think about reference? What empirical result could ever decide the issue? What rides on the outcome? What possible objective difference could it make who is right and who is wrong? If the answer is that there really is no difference, then right there we have a concession that there is no real, objective thing called "meaning" that exists between a concept or perception in my mind and a lawn mower. No meaning rays beam from my forehead to the lawn mower. It comes down to a choice of how we want to characterize the terms "meaning" and "intentionality", and (to my mind) a trade-off between a desire to respect our pre-theoretical intuitions and a desire to carve Nature at the joints, as the cliche says. We should feel free to define terms in such a way as to facilitate clear and fruitful analysis going forward.

Now I will continue, in my everyday life, to speak about things in the outside world. "About" is a perfectly good colloquial English word, and from a very early age we all use it as if it darn well is a connection between our minds and the outside world (I have thoughts, desires, etc. about stuff out there in the world), and even between some things in the outside world (like molecules of ink on paper) and other things in the outside world (like fire hydrants). I am just saying that the use of the term in this way does not reveal anything about how the universe works. If you are interested (as I am) in reference as something that is really there, at work in the universe and not just one of those may-be-seen-as kinds of things, and if you believe (as I do) that there is, in fact, some really-there aspect to reference, then you are forced to the admittedly clunky, indirect internalist characterization of intentionality and meaning. The externalist take on meaning will always be reducible to other stuff. To an externalist, meaning is really just a shorthand way of talking about an unwieldy amount of physical causation, plus some mental stuff. For my current purposes, it is the mental stuff that I would like to zero in on and figure out, and I do think that "reference" and "intentionality" and "meaning" entail some unique and interesting mental happenings, above and beyond the redness of red. Like seeing red, these mental phenomena are actual, fundamental facts of the universe, and are worth exploring. I believe that this is an important part of the puzzle of the mind, the part that will allow us to put what its like to see red together with what it means to think in the same big picture. Clinging to the naive realist position, with its invisible golden cords of meaning and magic intentionality rays, just serves to obscure what is really interesting about these phenomena, and to postpone serious inquiry into them.