Wolfgang Schwarz

The Acquaintance Reply to Putnam's Model-Theoretic Argument

First, on behalf of type-B materialism a reply to yesterday's post. (Thanks to Sven Rosenkranz for pointing out something like this to me.)

What makes it the case that the red-quale is the referent of "the distinctive quality of my current red-experience"? Not causal or counterfactual relations. Not demonstrative baptising. Not other kinds of verbal and non-verbal behaviour. Right. But these attempts to naturalize semantic properties are doomed anyway. They presuppose that semantic properties are generally independent of how things appear to us, which they are not. In fact, how things appear to us is an essential component in many "modes of presentation" determining the reference of terms. E.g., the referent of "red" is what appears to us under normal conditions in the way red things appear to us. In a same manner, the referent of "the distinctive quality of my current red-experience" is what appears to me in this distinctive way. Which is the red-quale, which in turn is a property of brain states. But no amount of physical information will tell you how this property of brain states appears to me. Phenomenalism as a semantic doctrine may have been too extreme, but it was not entirely wrong.

Something like this is what I think type-B materialists should say. Note that the claim here is not that an essential condition on referents for many terms is that they satisfy whatever "appears to me in such-and-auch a way" expresses, where this is up to interpretation by naturalized semantics. Otherwise I would just come up with a physical condition and argue that it is the condition we meant all along by "appears to me in such-and-such a way" -- because it fits the patterns of use, or the causal chains or whatever. Then physical information could certainly reveal what satisfies that condition. So what other condition must something meet to count as the correct interpretation of "appears to me in such-and-such a way"? Hopefully not the condition of appearing to me to be the condition of appearing to me in such-and-such a way.

Presumably the idea is that at least some pieces of phenomenal vocabulary get their semantic properties directly by a kind of intimate association with experiential qualities, 'acquaintance', so to speak. It is not entirely clear to me how this is supposed to work, but that's probably because I'm still in the grip of naturalized semantics.

It thus seems that type-B materialists have an answer to Putnam's model-theoretic argument built into their theory: Global descriptivism is false not (or not only) because objective naturalness or causal chains constrain semantic values, but because some terms don't get their semantic values by desriptive role (or causal conditions) at all. Rather, they get them by acquaintance. That sounds reminiscient of Quine's network-with-fixed-edges point of view. I think it's wrong, but I need another argument why.