Hilary Putnam: Is Semantics Possible?

Before writing the tenets of Semantic Externalism, Hilary Putnam had put forward the question Is Semantics Possible? in 1970. When he had framed this question there were three people who had started working on this. These Philosophers were- Jerry Fodor, Jerold katz and Putnam himself. But by the course of time they all took different direction with the same question. Putnam had written two successive articles on this question, one is ‘ the meaning and reference’ in 1973 and the other is ‘ the meaning of meaning’ in 1975. In those two successive articles he had thrown light on Semantic Externalism. The conclusions of analytic and synthetic distinction is later termed as Semantic Externalism. Putnam’s view is that this analytic synthetic distinction …show more content…
For Putnam Jerold has just provided new clothes to traditional theory. Later he has developed upon the idea of Quine’s Pessimism about Semantics which underpin the Kinds of Core facts in Semantics. And then answering the question Is Semantics Possible?

The Meaning of Common Nouns-
Putnam is examining the difficulties that came across the theory of meaning and took some of the problems in connection with general names. General names are of many kinds. For example- Bachelor ( having inherent meaning of unmarried man). Some general words are derived by transformations from verbal forms, example: hunter- one who hunts. General names are associated with natural kinds- that is with classes of things that we regard as explanatory importance, classes whose normal distinguishing characteristics are held together or explained by deeplying mechanism. Some common nouns like- Gold, Lemon, Tiger, Acid etc are general names.
Putnam began his paper by posing some criticisms on semantic theories these are-
a) traditional theories of meaning radically falsify the properties of such words.
b) Logicians like Carnap do little more than formalize these properties of words.
c) Semantic theories produced by Jerold Katz and other philosophers share all defects of the traditional …show more content…
For all these properties , the statement lemon, tiger have the property have F, is an analytic truth. The possession of these is necessary and sufficient condition for being a lemon or being a gold. To have natural understanding of term property, it is just false to say that something belongs to a natural kind is just to ascribe to it a conjunction of properties. But it is false because lemons have characteristic properties like- yellow colour, tart taste, a certain kind of peel etc. The most difficulty natural kind term have is abnormal members. Green lemon is still a lemon- even if, owing to some abnormality it never turns yellow. Similarly with tiger, gold etc. Thus only normal lemons are yellow, tart