Book contents
2 - A problem about reference
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Why is it surprising that the Brain in a Vat hypothesis turns out to be incoherent? The reason is that we are inclined to think that what goes on inside our heads must determine what we mean and what our words refer to. But it is not hard to see that this is wrong. Ordinary indexical words, such as I, this, here, now, are a counterexample of a trivial sort. I may be in the same mental state as Henry when I think ‘I am late to work’ (imagine, if you like, that Henry and I are identical twins) and yet the token of the word ‘I’ that occurs in my thought refers to me and the token of the word ‘I’ that occurs in Henry's thought refers to Henry. I may be in the same mental state when I think ‘I am late to work’ on Tuesday and when I think ‘I am late to work’ on Wednesday; but the time to which my tensed verb ‘am’ refers is different in the two cases. The case of natural kind terms is a more subtle example of the same point.
Suppose, to spell out the case mentioned in the previous chapter, that there are English speakers on Twin Earth (by a kind of miraculous accident they just evolved resembling us and speaking a language which is, apart from a difference I am about to mention, identical with English as it was a couple of hundred years ago). I will assume these people do not yet have a knowledge of Daltonian or post-Daltonian chemistry.
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- Reason, Truth and History , pp. 22 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1981
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