Abstract
In “Putnam’s Doctrine of Natural Kind Terms and Frege’s Doctrine of Sense, Reference and Extension: Can They Cohere?” David Wiggins proposes placing Putnam’s suggestions about natural kind terms into a Fregean framework of sense and reference, adjusting both Putnam and Frege in interesting ways in the process.1 A consideration of these adjustments suggests to me, in turn, a way of defending an aspect of the kind of view about natural kind terms that Putnam and Wiggins are at one in rejecting. Let me make it clear that I am not defending the kind of view they reject: only one aspect of it, but a central one, having to do with the place of epistemic constraints on mastery of expressions in a language. If the relevant aspect of that view can be defended, it makes an important difference to the question of what conception of sense we can award ourselves if we agree, as we surely should, with those like Wiggins who argue that natural kind terms have sense.
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Notes
Wiggins, D. ’Putnam’s Doctrine of Natural Kind Terms and Frege’s Doctrine of Sense, Reference and Extension: Can They Cohere?’ in (ed) A.W. Moore, Meaning and Reference, Oxford, 1993.
Putnam, H., The Meaning of “Meaning”’ inMind, Language and Reality, Cambridge, 1975
Kripke, S.,Naming and Necessity, Harvard, 1980.
Grayling, A.C., ’Internal Structure and Essence’,Analysis, 1982.
Kripke, ibid., p. 156.
Since all living things apparently derive from primeval slime, some node on the evolutionary tree will have to be selected as the place where, say,man ’s origin lies. Where is that? When one is selected, presumably on genetic grounds, the question already encountered becomes pressing: does this reflect our classificatory decisions, or the real nature of things? How do we tell which? And so forth.
Tim Crane, ’All the Difference in the World’,Philosophical Quarterly 41 (1991)
What prevents this from being the logically extreme consequence of holding sense and idea apart as Frege does?
It is worth wondering in passing whether or not on the Putnam-Kripke view of natural kind terms, it should be held that from the vantage point of an ideal epistemic agent (say, God), necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of any natural kind term can be given. Presumably so; which would make our account of natural and non-natural kind terms univocal, the apparent difference between them being merely a function of the ignorance suffered by finite epistemic agents. This view indeed conforms neatly with the principle in traditional syllogistic that the difference between natural and non-natural kinds is that the former fall under an indefinite number of predicables (perhaps too many for us to know) and the latter under just one. Alex Orenstein suggested to me a different way of effecting the assimilation of the two kinds of kind-terms: since God made all the natural kinds, they are non-natural (artefact) kinds anyway, and this underwrites the univocality of the account to be given of both.
This too raises a question: why not say directly that a conception is a body of information about the object? Perhaps Wiggins chooses the less committal formulation to insure against convergence with description theories of names.Michael Woods suggested this point to me in discussion. 11 Dummett,Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd ed. (1981), Ch. 7, passim.Dummett, p. 233. Dummett brings out for example the difference between common nouns and adjectives as to ingredient criteria of application and identity.
This aspect of grasp of sense may contain materials for dealing with the problems which, Wiggins acknowledges, infect deixis. (Wiggins, p. 62)
See my “Publicity, Stability, and ’Knowing the Meaning’”, in A.C. Grayling and Petr Kotatko (eds.),Meaning, Oxford, forthcoming.
I am grateful to those at Howard Robinson’s summer vacation meeting group in Oxford, especially Alex Orenstein, Michael Woods, Howard Robinson, Anita Avramides, Michael Lockwood, John Foster, and Michael Martin, for their comments.Birkbeck College, University of London Malet Street
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Grayling, A.C. (1995). Concept-Reference and Kinds. In: Biro, J., Kotatko, P. (eds) Frege: Sense and Reference One Hundred Years Later. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 65. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0411-1_6
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