Talk:Semantic externalism
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[edit] Ambiguity
"In the philosophy of language, semantic externalism is the view that the meaning of a term is determined, in whole or in part, by factors external to the speaker." This formulation invites the misunderstanding that a teacher's success in getting a student to grasp a term's meaning implies semantic externalism. The teacher, a part of the environment, causally determines that the meaning gets into the head of the student/speaker. Of course this causal determination doesn't imply semantic externalism. It's consistent with meaning's being in the head. So our Wikipedia entry should be formulated so that it avoids this ambiguity, shouldn't it?
The ambiguity would be avoided by formulating semantic externalism with reference to the distinction between intrinsic features as opposed to features that relate an individual to the environment (relational features). So internalism would say that the meaning of a term for an individual supervenes on his intrinsic, non-relational features. Then it would be clearer that internalism doesn't deny that the environment can causally affect whether the individual has that supervening feature. Grasping this point is a real problem for some students of semantic externalism. They may be fond of a certain theory T that specifies an environmental process that effects, or causally determines, the acquisition of meanings by speakers. They see internalism being spelled out without reference to T or anything like it, and they infer that internalism makes `the fatal error' of implying the falsehood of theories like T.
Another way of eliminating the ambiguity would be to distinguish between causal determination and constitutive determination. Friendship constitutively determines a good life. It is an element of a good life. That is different from saying that friendship causally determines a good life. That might be true even if friendship weren't part of a good life. (Maybe you have to go through a `friendship phase' before arriving at a good life.) Similarly, meaning could be constitutively determined by the environment, in which case meaning wouldn't be in the head and externalism would be vindicated. That's different though from meaning's being causally determined by the environment.
Rats (talk) 14:19, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Rewrite
I just rewrote this article from scratch. The content in the previous version was almost entirely a description of Twin Earth, which already has its own entry. It seems most of the work on the subject has been done at internalism and externalism, but there seemed to be a movement there towards giving the various internalism/externalism debates and positions their own pages, which seems sensible to me.
Ncsaint 02:08, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
