WiP - Ziliang Ma / A meta-externalist solution to Putnam’s dilemma
WiP - Ziliang Ma / A meta-externalist solution to Putnam’s dilemma
October 7, our Works-in-Progress series continues with a presentation from Ma, on the grounding of meaning.
Putnam’s dilemma poses a fundamental threat to standard metasemantics. The first horn of the dilemma is that, given the permutation argument for radical referential indeterminacy, any constraint on reference is just more theory and leaves reference as indeterminate as before. The second horn is that any attempt to escape the just-more-theory maneuver lacks explanatory power. Recent literature on the foundations of metasemantics suggests that a distinction can be drawn between internalism and externalism at the meta-metasemantic level. I argue that to solve Putnam’s dilemma, meta-externalism is the only option available. A classic example of meta-externalism is Lewisian reference magnetism, whose appeal to primitive naturalness lacks explanatory power and carries heavy ontological and epistemic cost. I defend a much less costly alternative. It treats reference determination as a social fact produced by an invisible hand process—a fact that supervenes on individual intentional actions yet differs in type from them. This meta-externalist account affords us both referential determinacy and explanatory power.