Abstract

In my thesis I present a novel interpretation of Hilary Putnam's semantic externalism and draw out its implications for issues in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. My interpretation calls attention to the social aspect of language: meaning is essentially public and depends on the normative use of terms in the sociolinguistic community. I view Putnam's externalism in this light and not within the context of scientific essentialism or attempts to naturalize semantics. As such, I motivate and explain Putnam's thesis of the division of linguistic labor and argue against his appeals to the indexicality and rigidity of natural kind terms. ;I argue that once we establish the social nature of Putnam's externalism, we can understand his turn towards an internal realist view of truth. For if reference is constituted by experts in the community and not by the environment itself, and truth is defined in terms of reference , then truth is best viewed as a concept tied to our scientific practices, and cannot be made sense of in terms of some bald confrontation between language and reality. I reinterpret Putnam's arguments against metaphysical realism along these lines, and not from the Kantian perspective Putnam himself adopts. I urge that we focus on the norms of rationality that guide scientific inquiry. These norms require a distinction between appearance and reality, theory-change and meaning-change, but from within our ongoing scientific theorization and not from any illusory higher vantage point. ;Many externalists have sought to move from semantic externalism as a thesis in the philosophy of language to psychological externalism as a thesis in the philosophy of mind. In my last section, I warn that there are other considerations specific to intentional psychology that argue against this simple maneuver. For purposes of psychological explanation, we need a notion of content that captures what is in the head of an agent, while for purposes of social interaction and communication, we can rest content with externalistic content. I argue that this bifurcationism is the only view consistent with both social externalism and functionalism and hence it is a compelling position