[Ads-l] qoty possible

[Laurence Horn]

Some time ago (in the 1970s, to be more or less precise) Hilary Putnam
argued persuasively for what he calls the division of linguistic labor,
which among other things makes the point that the extension of natural kind
terms (like "tiger", "water", or "whale", or "gold") is determined by
"experts" in the relevant field within the linguistic
community--zoologists, chemists, botanists, whatever. And that the result
is more like an encyclopedia entry than a true definition of the kind
available for "one-criterion" words in which there are necessary and
sufficient conditions for category membership like "bachelor" or
"touchdown".  His idea is that we can have theories about what it takes for
something to be water or a whale, for example, and that these theories can
change over time without the "definition" changing. We can discover we were
wrong about water being an element, or a whale being a large fish, but we
can't discover that a touchdown really countis for 5 points or that
bachelors were really secretly married all along.  For natural kind terms,
as he puts it in the title of one of his papers, "meanings ain't in the
head"--to know that something is or isn't an X, or an instance of X, is not
to have the relevant concept. (Saul Kripke provides parallel arguments for
proper names not having true meanings.) It's plausible that biological
theories of "woman" (to the extent that this is a natural kind term) would
be a case in point.

LH

On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 6:38 PM Peter Reitan <pjreitan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Do biologists get to define words, or linguists?
> ________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Mark
> Mandel <markamandel at GMAIL.COM>
> Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2022 12:03:44 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Subject: Re: qoty possible
>
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Mark Mandel <markamandel at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: qoty possible
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Fair enough!
>
> MAM
>
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 12:55 PM Bill Mullins <amcombill at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Ketanji Brown Jackson Mar 22, 2022.
> >
> > When asked if she can provide a definition of the word "woman," she say's
> > she can't, "I'm not a biologist."
> >
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