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Semantic Externalism
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The Meaning of Meaning (1975)
Putnam, Hilary. (1975). The Meaning of "Meaning". University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy: vol 7 pg 131-193 -
Philosophy and Our Mental Life (1975)
Putnam, Hilary. Philosophy and Our Mental Life pp 128-137 -
Why There Isn't A Ready-Made Word (1982)
Putnam, Hilary. “Why There Isn't a Ready-Made World.” Synthese, vol. 51, no. 2, 1982, pp. 141–167. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20115741. -
Summary
Putnam focused around being a realist with his believe in realism. His believe in realism was that ordinarily any assertions what so ever were objectively true or false rather than outright. Being a realist, he had a very strict critique on himself including being heavy handed with his self-reflective views. -
Summary 2
He started introducing the theory of meaning which went along the lines that meaning is dependent on what on the assertions. With that being said that makes truth also relative since meaning and truth can be quite close to one another. In short that since meaning is all dependent on the assertions then in conjunction the amount of value of truth will also be dependent to the exact same extent. -
Summary 3
Putnam claimed that metaphysical realism to be blinded from the aspect that you can describe the same reality multiple different ways. One of the other ways that Putnam greatly influenced philosophy was his introduction of the functionalism doctrine. This revolved around the concept that the mind can not be classified by what it’s made of but, how it’s organized in conjunction with its different functions. -
Summary 4
Being forced to abandon his theory of functionalism for a different theory that was similar in some part called semantic externalism. Functionalism went more towards an internal composition rather than external. Since mental states are affected by semantic content, they are unable to be classified using the regular syntactic terminology.